Serpent: A Dane Maddock Adventure (Dane Maddock Adventures Book 13) by David Wood

Author:David Wood
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Adrenaline Press
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

22

Boyd was in pain. His back ached, his ankle throbbed, and his ass was sore from riding in the back of a pickup truck. For what must have been the fiftieth time, he cast a dirty look at the two men riding in the cab. Alejandro, one of his new Amaru allies, had explained that Boyd was simply too big to fit comfortably in the cab of the battered old Volkswagen. But once they were on the road, any semblance of compassion had vanished.

The man drove recklessly. Every bump they hit was pain in his back. Sharp turns flung him this way and that until he was forced to cling to the truck bed to keep from being thrown out. Laughter from inside the cab told him that his partners were well aware of his struggles.

“Damn these Amaru. Why do I have to deal with them?”

He knew the answer to that question. He had no choice. When they’d found him injured on the trail to the Temple of the Moon, they had intended to kill him. He had bargained for his life with the most valuable thing he had to offer—the path to Akakor.

He reached into his pocket and took out a folded sheet of paper. It was a printout of a photograph he had taken of Black Thorn’s map. It was a good thing he had taken the photo—the original had begun falling apart the first time he unrolled it.

He unfolded the page and smoothed it out. The folds were worn smooth from being folded and unfolded again and again. The paper was dirty from all the times he’d traced his finger over the many squiggly lines as if he could absorb their secrets.

He scowled at the pattern of wavy lines. What did they represent? Roads? Rivers? With so little information at his disposal, there was no way of telling.

“Where are you pointing me?” he muttered.

Day by day his frustration had mounted. When he had discovered the hidden cell where the so-called Blind Spaniard had lived his final days, driven mad by what he had found in the jungle, he was sure he was on the verge of success. Now he had the Black Thorn map. But that map alone wasn’t enough. According to the Amaru, London had cut the map off White Flower’s body. And then she had died, falling into a booby trap inside the chamber, taking the map with her.

“Dammit!” He hissed the curse between gritted teeth. “She ruined everything.”

Now that he was unable to combine the two maps, he had been forced to move to Plan B. It was not a plan in which he had much faith, but unless he could figure out this map, it was all he had to go on.

The truck hit a bump and Boyd went airborne. The paper flew out of his hands and he barely managed to snatch it before it flew away. He came down hard on the rusty truck bed. There was a loud thump and fresh pain tore along his spine.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.