The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  “It’s been a long trip.”

  Smith limited his response to a disapproving sigh, then handed Adam a key from the rack behind his desk. After the fifth time Smith had been forced to call a locksmith to get Adam back into his room, he had insisted the key be left at the desk when Adam went on one of his expeditions.

  “Has anyone—”

  “God, no,” Smith said, anticipating the question. “No one’s cracked the door, not for so much as a dusting. Not after last time.”

  “Sorry about that.” Adam grimaced.

  “You did warn us,” Smith admitted. “Oh! Your mail.” He pulled out a stack of letters and passed them to Adam. A quick glance showed him that all of them were return-addressed to San Francisco, which told him clearly enough what they would contain—missives from his mother berating him for wasting his time in the jungle when he should be preparing to take over the family business. Adam mentally pictured himself walking into the boardroom of Robinson, Bates, and MacKenzie in his current state, and smiled. It would almost be worth the trip to see the look on his father’s officers’ faces.

  Smith called to him as he turned for the stairs.

  “Put your dinner clothes out and I’ll have them brushed for you.”

  “I’ll be decent,” Adam promised, then crossed to the steps, leaving a trail of flaking mud behind him.

  Ellie Mallory was feeling marvelous. She was wearing Constance’s dressing gown, a long affair of silk embroidered with gorgeous peacock feathers in a bright, rich aqua. She sat on the cushioned stool, feeling comfortably rested, and pulled the last pin from her hair, relaxing it gloriously with her fingers.

  She had not expected to find such a luxurious space in a remote colonial town that hardly qualified as a city, whatever the pretensions of its name. The hotel’s bath was beautiful, from the blue-and-white-tiled walls to the frosted glass that let in the light of the afternoon sun without risking any immodest peeks from the outside world. A shelf was packed with soft freshly laundered towels. A towel rack stood beside the tub, a piece of gleaming, polished chrome, so that she could wrap herself up as soon as she emerged from her soak. And then there was the tub itself: massive, claw-footed, and currently filling with steaming-hot water from a modern tap.

  She even found lavender-scented soap on the little table beside the sink. She had added some of the flakes to the tub, and they were currently covering its surface with fragrant bubbles.

  It was everything she hadn’t known she wanted when she had left her cabin on the steamer Salerno earlier that morning, making her way through Belize City’s admittedly relaxed customs building to the shore, where the owner of the hotel had been waiting to escort her. Accommodations on the boat had been comfortable enough, but fresh water had been in short supply, limiting washing to ablutions at a basin. It was all well and good. Her aunt and uncle didn’t have the luxury of a separate bathroom in their suite at Golden Square. But the fact that one was readily available at the hotel had made her aware of a griminess and exhaustion she hadn’t known she was feeling.

  It was just one of a series of delightful experiences she’d had since arriving. The warmth of the air, the way the breeze caressed her skin even through the linen of her traveling suit—the broad turquoise blue of the bay and the rich colors of the flowering vines draped over walls and fences—all of it was intoxicatingly lovely. Even the hotel itself—which would at best have been called ”modest” in London terms—had a number of charming features beyond its remarkable bathroom. The long wooden building fronted the street, separated from the light traffic by a shoulder-height fence. Beyond the fence lay a narrow strip of grass, palms, and flowering shrubs, lending a tropical air to the shaded patio that lay outside the doors to the ground-floor rooms. A similar patio bordered the rooms on the reverse side of the building, though these looked out over a small but luxuriously verdant garden. A broad veranda ran the full length of the upper floor of the building on both the rear and street-facing sides. Ellie’s room opened onto it with airy French doors. Stepping outside provided a view of the garden and the ramshackle houses beyond. Farther off, at the very edge of the horizon, Ellie could see the hazy green of the mountains, soft as a watercolor brushstroke against the blue of the sky. The sight had called to her, sirenlike, promising mystery and adventure.

  The tub gurgled, warning her that the water had gone as high as the overflow drain would allow. She stepped over and closed the tap, the sound of the last drops echoing softly off the tiled walls. She reached for the tie of her robe, readying herself to step in, then paused as a flicker of movement tickled the corner of her eye.

  She looked down at the water, frowning. The surface was covered in suds, wafting the light scent of lavender to her nose. As she watched, the bubbles rippled. Then a sleek black form cut swiftly through the foam, and a narrow black head lifted from the water. Yellow eyes gazed into her own, and quite in spite of herself, Ellie shrieked.

  Adam had been about to turn back to his room, frustrated by the Occupied sign outside the bathroom door, when the sound of a very female, very alarmed scream stopped him in his tracks. His response was instant and instinctual. Pulling his knife from its sheath, he steeled himself, raced toward the door, and broke it open.

  The woman inside whirled at the sound. Her slender form was covered only by a light silk bathrobe, her chestnut hair falling in loose tendrils around her shoulders. Pale gray eyes stared at him with an expression of mingled horror and surprise.

  In an awkward moment of epiphany, Adam realized what he must look like to her—a filth-covered stranger in tattered shirtsleeves and bare feet who had just broken through the door to the bathroom, wielding a twelve-inch machete.

  Maybe he could have planned that better.

  Please don’t faint, he thought desperately.

  “What the devil do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, her surprise quickly replaced by righteous indignation. The tone threw cold water on Adam’s brain, reminding him why he’d made the intrusion in the first place.

  “What was it?” he asked, moving into the room, knife ready.

  “What was what?” she retorted.

  “The thing you were screaming at,” he elaborated with forced patience.

  Her sense of outrage seemed to be rising exponentially. Ignoring his question, she pointed imperiously toward the door.

  “Get out.”

  “Listen, lady,” Adam drawled, preparing to offer her a quick lecture on worrying about the rules of propriety in an emergency situation. But a small splash from the tub, and the way she immediately jumped and turned toward the sound, told him where he would find what he was looking for.

  He moved forward swiftly on his bare feet, putting himself between the woman and the tub. He grabbed hold of her elbow, steering her toward the corner, the machete ready in his other hand as he studied the surface of the water. The woman would have had to fill the thing with soap bubbles, of course.

  “Let go of me,” she demanded, squirming in his grip.

  “Stop moving,” he ordered.

  Ellie felt her temper flare.

  Stop moving?

  Who the devil did he think he was? The man had broken down the door and come barreling into the room as if he owned it. To top it off, he looked as though he had recently crawled out of a swamp. Every inch of his body was covered with mud, save for a pair of sharply contrasting blue eyes. Who else but a lunatic would be wandering around the halls of a hotel looking like that?

  She felt a quick flash of outrage. Giving off one alarmed squeak at the sight of something unexpected splashing in her tub hardly justified being manhandled. Well, she knew how to take care of that.

  Gripping the man’s wrist, she executed one of Trevelyan Perry’s wushu maneuvers.

  Though she was admittedly a bit out of practice, Ellie was pleased with how easily the skill came back to her. She felt the intruder’s center of gravity shift. The tension on his hands forced him to release his grip on her arm. The
n she instinctively added the final touch—a sharp, quick blow to the small of his back.

  The stranger lurched forward, falling ungracefully into the tub.

  Ellie froze. She looked on in horror as he emerged, sputtering, from the water, his knife clattering against the ground. He immediately went still as well, his eyes glued to the bubble-obscured surface.

  It was as if time held its breath. Everything seemed to slow—the wash of the spilled water across the floor, the waves roiling the foam-covered surface of the bath. She felt the heavy, regular thud of her pulse in her throat, pounding in time to the slow drip of water against tile. She found herself wondering absently, and with horror, if she had just inadvertently killed a man.

  Then his arm flashed out, and he grasped hold of an oily black form, which he promptly tossed across the room.

  He thrust himself out of the tub, taking most of the rest of the water with him, and grabbed the nearest thing to hand—the chrome towel rack. Whirling it like a javelin in his grip, he thrust it at the black form, which was already recovering itself in the opposite corner. The bar of the rack pinned the creature’s neck, and it let out a hiss of rage, baring a pair of fangs that made Ellie’s stomach quiver.

  He peered down at the snake, and Ellie waited, barely able to breathe, to see what he would do next. Try to crush it? Order her to get help?

  Instead he smiled, then set the towel rack aside.

  She watched, horrified, as he bent over and picked the animal up, handling it with deft comfort.

  “Gave us quite a scare, didn’t you?” he said, talking, Ellie could see, to the snake and not to her. She began to think that her first impression had been correct: This man actually was completely insane. She took an edging step toward the door as he held the creature out toward her, sliding his hand along the whipping body to hold it straight.

  “Orange stripe. Not yellow. She’s a cat-eye, not a moccasin. Harmless. Aren’t you?” he said as the snake coiled around his arm, giving him another irritated hiss.

  He turned and carried it through the doorway. Ellie followed him hurriedly, wrapping Constance’s robe around her, though it was soaked from the tidal wave that had followed the man’s plunge into her bath. She watched as he moved to the end of the hall and stepped through the door onto the patio. Once there, he tossed the snake into a stand of lush palms and flowering hibiscus. An elderly couple walking past stopped and stared. The old woman’s grip whitened on her husband’s arm.

  He wiped his hands on his trousers and strolled back inside.

  Now that the better portion of the muck that had covered him was washed away, Ellie could see that his face was rather startlingly well put together.

  “They like the heat,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” she stammered, brushing aside the thought that underneath two days of stubble, his chiseled jaw rather resembled that of a statue of Apollo she had admired at the British Museum.

  He didn’t answer. Instead he stared at her, his sudden stillness making her wonder for a moment whether he hadn’t gotten himself a poisonous bite after all.

  Then again, she was standing in the hallway in nothing more than Constance’s blue silk bathrobe. A wet silk bathrobe, which was clinging rather tightly to her body.

  She crossed her arms over her chest protectively, and he seemed to snap out of it.

  “Cat-eye snakes. They like the warm water. You should check the tub before you fill it.”

  “I think I would have noticed—”

  “And while you’re filling it,” he continued. “It’s rare to find the dangerous ones here in the city, but it’s not unheard-of. And you do not want to cross paths with a moccasin. It’s lucky I was here.”

  “Lucky? Just who the devil do you think you are?” she demanded.

  “I think I’m the man who just saved you from a snakebite,” he said pointedly.

  Saved her? She felt her temper flare.

  “You broke down the door.”

  “You screamed,” he countered.

  “That wasn’t an invitation,” she snapped.

  “Were you planning on dealing with that yourself? Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t look like someone who’s had a lot of experience with snake wrangling.”

  “If I had needed help, I would have gone myself to acquire it,” Ellie shot back. “I certainly didn’t require some filth-covered madman to batter through the door!”

  “Sorry I wasn’t quite up to your standards of hygiene when I came to help you.”

  “This has nothing to do with hygiene!” she exclaimed.

  She stared at him with astonishment. Was he really that thickheaded?

  “Listen, princess,” he said, stepping toward her. “In this part of the world, you don’t wait for an invitation. In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re not in jolly old England anymore. Most of the local animal life here is harmless, but there are more than a few of them that will have you dead before you get a chance to think about it. You hear somebody scream, you err on the side of caution, whether or not it’s in the bathroom.”

  She felt her fury rise. Princess? Who the devil did he think he was, talking to her as if she were some kind of privileged ninny? She might not be able to recognize different species of snake off the top of her head, but she was hardly about to hop into the tub with the bloody thing when the oaf in front of her had decided to bash his way inside.

  “I didn’t need your help,” Ellie said tightly. “I was perfectly capable of handling that situation myself without being manhandled by a knife-wielding thug.”

  “Knife,” he repeated numbly, his hand going to the empty sheath at his waist. He pushed past Ellie into the bathroom and retrieved the huge blade from where it lay in a muddy puddle by the tub. He wiped it off on his sleeve, then returned it to its place at his side.

  “Are you quite done?” she demanded, exasperated.

  He turned to respond, then stopped, frowning. He stepped toward her.

  “What’s that around your neck?”

  Ellie’s hand flew to the place where the shape of the medallion pressed through the thin, soaked silk. Then she grasped hold of the madman’s pointing finger and twisted it. He let out a yelp as she forced him into another one of Perry’s holds, then pushed him out the bathroom door. She slammed it firmly in his face, throwing the bolt, which, since she’d relied on the latch before, was still intact. She wished for a moment she’d had the foresight to use it in the first place. She would have been interested to see him try to break through that. Though with that thick head of his, he might have succeeded.

  She half fell into the chair, her fingers brushing against the cold black stone under her robe. They trembled as she moved them. But it wasn’t her close call with the snake that had her knees weak. It was the idea of how near the stranger had come to seeing the secret she wore over her heart.

  4

  ELLIE FIXED A LAST pin into her hair and considered her reflection in the vanity mirror. It was going to have to do. She had scoured Constance’s wardrobe on board the Salerno and knew that while the daytime clothes she had sent along with Ellie were pleasantly practical, her evening wear was far prettier and less comfortable than what Ellie was used to. It was also significantly more revealing—the muted green dress she wore now was the most modest she could find, but the squared neckline was still much lower than she would have liked, and not just for reasons of habitual propriety.

  She had started wearing the black medallion her first day at sea, stringing a piece of spare ribbon through the hole at its apex. It hung low on her chest, concealed beneath the bosom of her shirts.

  After her encounter with Mr. Jacobs on Regent Street, she had found herself uncomfortable with the notion of leaving the artifact in her room. It wasn’t that she suspected her enemies were on the Salerno. Ellie was confident that Constance’s audacious plan had enabled her to give them the slip. Even if they guessed that she’d had the courage and determination to try to follow the map herself, they
had no way to know where it would lead her. She was also traveling under an assumed name. Jacobs would be looking for Eleanora Mallory, not Constance Tyrrell.

  However, there was still a chance that some member of the crew might stumble across it while servicing her cabin. It simply seemed like a sensible precaution to wear the object instead, and by now it was habit. There was something comforting about feeling its cool weight against her skin, a constant, tangible link to the place she sought.

  Perhaps its constant presence was responsible for her dreams.

  They had started shortly after she left London. Before, Ellie’s dreams had generally involved bizarre but relatively harmless phenomena, like finding herself swimming through a pool of eighteenth-century tax records, or holding a debate about the differences between the male and female brain with Admiral Nelson, Aunt Florence’s fat tabby.

  These were different.

  Some were wonderful. In one, Ellie had been in the desert, overseeing a team of fellahin as they excavated the entrance to a pharaoh’s tomb. In another she had lectured to a group of students, an even mix of men and women who scribbled notes assiduously as she spoke.

  But the others…

  She had dreamed of standing on a podium in front of the ruins of Whitehall. The prime minister had sat beside her, bound in chains. A crowd of women chanted before her, their fists in the air, screaming with the adrenaline of victory. There had been blood on their hands and skirts, but the most terrifying part of the vision had been what Ellie herself had felt in that moment.

  Power. Excitement.

  There had been a woman behind her holding an ax: a massive Viking of a female with arms like a dockworker. As Ellie soaked up the cheering voices of the mob, she had motioned to the bound man beside her, and the ax-wielding giantess had stepped forward.