From Glowing Embers

Smoke Screen

  She shouldn't have come. Not to New Zealand, not to Waimauri, and most especially not to this place.

  Paige Duvall leaned against the sleek, straight trunk of a tree—a tree like none she'd ever leaned on before—and asked herself once more just what she was doing hiking in a country where her only companion was fear—fear and sucking, spitting mud pools that threatened to strip the very flesh off her bones.

  She took a deep, calming breath and was rewarded by the acrid, nostril-taunting smell of sulphur. So much for the sweet rewards of fresh air, so much for the benefits of exploring Godzone. Godzone? No, somehow she had ventured into Hell, and the damnedest part of it was that she had been warned.

  She remembered the words of the old man at the Waimauri dairy yesterday. "So you're from the States. And you've come to see about the thermals." He had been understandably curious. "I should think the house there's a bit of a shambles."

  Paige had appreciated his talent for understatement. "A bit," she'd acknowledged, tongue in cheek. "But I'm managing." And she was, if you could count eating meals out of cans and huddling under four quilts because she couldn't figure out how to turn on the heat.

  Her answer hadn't dimmed the old man's curiosity. "Done any bushwalking?"

  "Not much. I've been too busy trying to keep warm and dry."

  The old man had laughed. "Ah yeah. It'll warm up in a month or two. You Yanks, your seasons are turned around." He had filled a bag with odds and ends, then set a bottle of cream-rich milk on top of the rest of her groceries. "You've been warned about wandering around in the thermals by yourself?"

  She hadn't been, but the dairyman's next words made up for the lack. "If all the people who died in the Waimauri thermals stood up at the same time and cheered, it'd look like a rugby match in Eden Park." He had pushed the bag across the narrow wooden counter. "Don't go in alone, miss."

  But today she had done exactly that.

  It wasn't that she hadn't believed the man. She knew little about the strange country she was now exploring, but she did know enough not to underestimate boiling geysers and steaming mud pools. She just hadn't intended to come this far. She had planned to skirt the edges, scan the scenery, then decide if she wanted to hire a guide to explore farther. Instead she had become caught up in her discoveries, promising herself that she would turn around at the next bend, the next ridge. Now she wasn't sure how to get back.

  Through a haze of drifting vapors, Paige could see the haloed sun overhead. She shaded her eyes and checked her watch. The watch was a recent gift from an unlikely source, the wife of the man she had planned to marry. Now the delicate gold band sparkled against her creamy olive skin, reminding her of promises kept and broken. On a more mundane level it also reminded her that if she didn't find her way out soon, she might be one of the dairyman's cheering skeletons.

  Just when had she strayed off the path—if she could call the misbegotten tangle of scorched grass garnished by the sharp, low branches of manuka shrub a path? For all she knew, she was still on it, and alive or dead the path was leading her inevitably to the netherworld.

  Lost in the Waimauri thermals, and these thermals weren't extravagant wool underwear from a yuppie mail-order catalog. They were an area of such bizarre geological formations that if someone discovered her in the midst of this foul-smelling mist and undulating, steaming earth, he would probably be brandishing a pitchfork. And at this point, she might be glad to see Lucifer himself.

  "Welcome to the scenic wonders of New Zealand," Paige said out loud, a grimace stretching her generous bottom lip.

  "Welcome? You must be the rare visitor who appreciates our local attractions."

  Startled, Paige looked up to see the outline of a man obscured by the steam rising from the shore of a rust-tinted pond to her right. For just a moment she wondered if she had called up the devil himself.

  She took a step forward, but as she watched, he walked toward her, materializing out of the mist, a disembodied wraith solidifying slowly into flesh and bones and man.

  "Would you like me to leave you alone?" he asked with the politely clipped New Zealand accent that she was just beginning to decipher with ease.

  Caught exactly at the convergence of relief, curiosity and fascination, Paige scrutinized him before she answered.

  He was dark—dark hair, dark eyes, skin a rich hue that proclaimed his Maori blood. His eyebrows were a thick slash of black across a wide forehead broken by a shiny thatch of midnight hair that just skimmed his collar. His features were hawklike, lines and angles and sweeping planes, and his taut, lean body was composed of lines and angles, too. Lines and angles clothed in khaki chinos and a black pullover sweater distributed over a frame that towered inches over her own.

  "No, I don't want to be left alone," she said, shuddering at the thought. "What I want is a good, stiff drink."

  Without a smile he pulled a silver flask from the side of his belt and held it out to her. Paige swept her eyes up to his, cocking her head as if to ask permission. "Do I have to sell my soul for this?"

  He smiled a little, just a faint twist of his lips, but she took the flask, unscrewing the top with a graceful twirl. Two swigs later she realized it was tea. Hot and strong and laced with nothing more potent than sugar.

  "A good start," she said wryly, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand before she handed the flask back.

  "You're shivering."

  "I started shivering when I got off the plane in Auckland."

  He stretched out his hand and lifted the hem of her sweater, rubbing his fingers across the knit. "Cotton," he said, and the word sounded like the vilest profanity. "Cotton and silk. Small wonder you're freezing."

  "Worse than freezing, I'm lost."

  "Suppose you tell me what you're doing here in the first place. Didn't you see the signs?"

  She had seen the signs. Danger. No Trespassing. Proceed At Your Own Risk. She had ignored them. She had ignored subtler versions of signs like them all her life. This wasn't the first time she had found herself in Hell because of it.

  "This place belongs to me," she said.

  "Pardon?"

  "It's mine, or rather, my mother's." She gestured to the weird landscape surrounding them. "As far as you can see, and farther still. I knew Duvall Development owned a chunk of the world, but until this week, I didn't know we owned Hades, too."

  He frowned. "You're American."

  "Guilty as charged."

  "This is New Zealand."

  And she knew exactly what he meant. So why, if she was an American, had she wrapped her greedy little fingers around a chunk of Godzone? She imagined her deliverer was experiencing what she did every time she realized just exactly how much of the good old U.S. was owned by Arab sheiks.

  "My mother is a Kiwi," she said. "The land came to her recently at the death of a relative."

  "Jane Abbott."

  "That's right. And I'm here to evaluate it."

  "Gold in the mud pools? Uranium in the geysers?"

  "Land, Mr..." Her voice trailed off when she realized she didn't know his name. "I'm Paige Duvall," she said, holding out her hand.

  His hesitation was so slight that a less observant person might not have noticed it. "Adam Tomoana." He took her hand, wrapping it in his own.

  In the second before he withdrew she felt the rough texture of calluses and the strength that could crush her delicate bones to dust.

  "Were you bushwalking, Mr. Tomoana?" she asked, using the dairyman's phrase. It conjured images of a grown man leaping from shrub to shrub.

  "Trespassing."

  She was surprised at the bitterness in the word. "True, but it was lucky for me you were. Now you can point me out of here."

  "I'll take you back."

  She heard no pleasure in his voice, just a bitter resignation. It spoiled her pleasure at his rescue. "Thank you, but I got this far by myself, so if you'll show me which direction to go, I'll get myself out of here."

  One expr
essive eyebrow rose. "Oh? And you're certain your luck will hold again?"

  She was beginning to dislike him. "Luck had little to do with it, Mr. Tomoana. I was very careful."

  "Not careful enough to keep from getting lost."

  She shrugged.

  He turned and started through the mists. "Perhaps it wasn't luck. Perhaps your footsteps were guided," he said cynically.

  "Guided?" she called after him, interested despite herself.

  He stopped at precisely the point where he would have disappeared from her view and motioned her toward him. "Our dead ancestors," he said darkly.

  She frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  He said something in a language so fluid it seemed to slip through the pores of her skin and infuse warmth into her chilled body. He paused, and then with a short, frustrated exhalation of air, he repeated his words in English. "Yours and mine, Miss Duvall," he said shortly. "We're cousins."