Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Twelve

The trousers belonged to óscar. Adam found them hanging on the clothesline behind the Linares family’s rooms, just where he’d expected them to be. He tossed them at Mrs. Eleanora Nitherscott-Watby.

Heading off into the bush with her was almost certainly a bad idea. Adam wasn’t sure he’d ever met someone who had ‘trouble’ stamped across her quite as boldly as Mrs. Nitherscott-Watby. Still, if getting tied up and forced to jump off a balcony hadn’t been enough to dissuade her from her purpose, Adam wasn’t sure what would. If he didn’t help her, she was going to go looking for someone else who would—and probably get herself killed.

Her map and the stone trinket she was carrying were also a damned sight more intriguing than staking out another land grant boundary.

The lowlife from the veranda was another complication. The thought of the red marks on the woman’s wrists still made Adam’s fists itch.

To say that Adam didn’t have much patience for the kind of guy who’d do that to a woman was something of an understatement. Adam had only refrained from beating the daylights out of that lizard-eyed creep because doing so would probably have landed the woman in even more trouble.

He told himself those were the only reasons he’d agreed to her crazy offer as he stepped up onto the overturned wheelbarrow by Diego’s shed.

“We can’t just steal somebody’s clothes,” the woman hissed at him.

“Diego’ll put it on my tab,” Adam assured her as he hopped easily onto the shed roof.

“But how will Mr. Linares know you were the one who took them?” she demanded.

“He’s known me for a while now. He’ll figure it out. You coming?”

Adam could tell she didn’t love his answer by the stubborn set of her mouth, but she kept whatever she was thinking to herself. Lifting up her skirts, she stepped onto the wheelbarrow, climbing from there to join him on the roof.

She slipped a bit on the tiles. Adam caught her. She fit against him nicely.

He set that thought firmly aside and jumped down to the far side of the fence.

“Hold on and I’ll—” he began.

He cut himself off as she pushed from the roof and landed neatly beside him, brushing off her skirt.

“Never mind,” he finished lamely as he adjusted the weight of his Winchester. “This way.”

Adam led her through a familiar maze of garden gates and alleys to the docks that lined the mouth of the river. He kept his eyes carefully peeled for her competition. There was no sign of the guy, who must still be looking for her somewhere else.

Adam didn’t plan on testing his luck in that department. He kept them to the shadows of his personal shortcuts until they emerged by the water.

The Mary Lee was tied up to the sea wall between a pair of larger fishing sloops. The steamboat looked small in comparison. Small was good. The Mary Lee had an exceptionally shallow draft, which meant that Adam could navigate further upriver before he had to disembark and continue on foot. The boat couldn’t carry much cargo, but that was okay. Adam mostly traveled with what he could carry on his back and acquired the rest of what he needed along the way.

The low, gray deck was begging for a new coat of paint, as were the waist height rails that bordered it. The boat had no cabin—only a canopy, tattered at the edges, which hung in front of the pipe for the steam engine. The coal box in the stern was nearly full, and a quick peek under a pair of loose boards on the deck revealed that nobody had raided Adam’s storage hold while the boat was docked.

Most importantly, his lucky rock was just where he’d left it on the shelf by the boiler. Adam gave the lumpy gray stone—which looked a bit like a squatting hedgehog—a ritual pat as he hopped on board.

“Are you quite certain it won’t sink?” the woman asked, eyeing the boat skeptically as she hovered on the bank.

Ellie, Adam decided silently—that was how he’d think of her. It was easier than Mrs. Nitherscott-Watby.

Or he could simply call her ‘Princess.’ She obviously loved that.

“The Mary Lee has seen a lot more of the bush than you have,” he replied as he extended his hand to where Ellie hovered on the bank.

She ignored it and hopped down onto the deck unassisted. The boards echoed hollowly under her sturdy boots.

Adam glanced at his lingering hand and then tucked it into his pocket.

“Welcome aboard,” he grumbled and set to work firing the engine.

Adam drove the Mary Lee a few miles down the coast from Belize Town before stopping for the night, tying the steamboat up against some of the mangroves that lined the water. He strung a pair of hammocks from the iron poles that supported the canopy, and then draped the frame with mosquito netting, pausing to swat at one of the bugs that whined past his ear.

The woman gave the arrangement a wary look with her hands poised on the hips of óscar’s canvas trousers. The pants seemed to fit her well enough with the ankles rolled up.

She refrained from protesting as she climbed into the hammock, looking only a little awkward as she did so. When Adam peeked at her a few minutes later, she was already asleep, the lines of her face relaxed into an unfamiliar openness.

That black trinket of hers hung around her neck, tucked into the front of her shirt. She had tied the ribbon back together as Adam steamed them south, slipping it over the messy bundle of her hair.

Stretched out in the hammock beside her, Adam took a little longer to find his own oblivion. He wasn’t used to sharing the Mary Lee with a woman. The canopy wasn’t all that big, leaving the other hammock close enough that if he’d reached out a hand, he might’ve given it a little push.

Or something else.

No pushing, he thought as turned down the lantern and rolled over to face the other way. No something elsing, either.

Dawn arrived sooner than Adam would’ve liked. He packed up the hammocks and mosquito netting, and set the well-tuned boiler to steaming again. Soon, the mangroves were gliding past once more—a sea of vibrant green that bordered waters of a pure cerulean blue.

Ellie sat on the bench in the bow, holding up her face to the bright golden sun. The light of it fell across the spray of freckles that dotted her nose.

“Here,” Adam said. He reached under his seat by the rudder, pulled out a battered khaki scout hat, and tossed it at her. “You’ll get a sunburn.”

She gave the hat a surreptitious sniff before popping it onto her head.

Adam couldn’t really blame her for that. It had probably been a good idea.

The wide brim cast a shadow over her face.

“What about you?” she demanded.

“I’m kinda past the point of sunburns,” Adam admitted, leaning back against the rail with his arm resting on the handle of the rudder.

A pair of pelicans rose from a rickety abandoned dock that emerged from the thick mangroves on the shore. The birds sailed over the Mary Lee’s wake, obviously hoping that the steam launch was a fishing boat likely to throw out some extra bait.

“Are we going to the mouth of the Sibun River, then?” Ellie asked.

“Yeah,” Adam confirmed, a bit surprised. “How’d you figure that out?”

She shot him an arch look.

“Based on the shape of the coast and the positioning of the marked cays, the Sibun is the most likely candidate for the waterway on the map that leads to the first landmark, the Black Pillar that Draws the Compass. That’s how I knew to come to British Honduras in the first place. I corroborated the mouth of the river and the position of the mission against the historical documentation.”

“Course you did,” Adam muttered as he adjusted their angle to avoid a sandbar. “Mind my asking how old these historical documentations were?”

Her mouth thinned a bit.

“I can assure you, I took the time to check my calculations against the current map Mr. Linares has mounted on the wall in the lounge.”

“That map’s not current,” Adam replied flatly.

“It was printed less than a decade ago,” she returned shortly.

“Things change fast around here.”

“Then where does one find the most up-to-date map?” she demanded.

“At the surveyor general’s office.” Adam flashed her a grin. “Or on my bedroom wall.”

That earned him a scowl.

“If you showed me that whole parchment of yours, I might know a shortcut,” he offered cheerfully.

“We shall start with the Sibun, Mr. Bates,” she sang out in reply as she turned away from him. “The rest will come in good time.”

The green-gold line of the mangroves drifted past. Below the Mary Lee, the pale sand was clearly visible through the crystalline waters, punctuated by little shells and stones. The woman let her hand fall over the rail of the bow, trailing her fingertips in the water in a way that sent a line of ripples back toward the stern.

Adam watched as a wide shadow flickered across the seabed, the drift of it slightly outpacing the chug of the Mary Lee. A moment later, an enormous, whiskered head broke through the surface of the water next to the woman’s hand. The gray expanse was punctuated by a pair of small, liquid black eyes.

Ellie let out a strangled squeak of alarm as she lurched back and promptly fell from the bench onto the deck.

“It ain’t going to bite,” Adam called back lazily. “It’s a sea cow. She’s just hoping you have food.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Ellie scrambled up to peer curiously over the side of the boat at the animal, which continued to swim alongside.

“Sailors used to think they were mermaids,” Adam continued. “Though that’d be one ugly mermaid.”

The woman didn’t seem to be listening to him.

“Manatee,” Ellie whispered wonderingly as she gazed down at the gracefully moving creature. It wheeled away from them, slipping off toward deeper waters.

Adam felt a smile tug at the corner of his lips as he roped off the tiller and crossed to the boiler to add another load of coal to the box. He set down the shovel and leaned against one of the supports for the canopy as he looked down at her.

“You can put your hands back in the water. I’ll let you know when to take them out,” he said.

“And when will that be?” she demanded as he dropped back onto his seat in the stern.

“When we get to the crocodiles,” Adam replied and flashed her a wicked grin.