Breeding Ground

BREEDING GROUND

Madelaine Montague

BREEDING GROUND By

Madelaine Montague

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BREEDING GROUND

Madelaine Montague

© copyright by Madelaine Montague, January 2007 Cover Art by Jenny Dixon, © copyright January 2007 New Concepts Publishing Lake Park, GA 31636 www.newconceptspublishing.com

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

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Chapter One He awakened slowly, reluctantly, uncertain at first what had sent ripples through his psyche to disturb his slumber. He had been drifting so long that awareness of his surroundings had slowly but surely eroded until only some event of magnitude, he knew, would have penetrated the deep, dreamless sleep that he’d sought. It was that realization that encouraged him to shake off the temptation to ignore the ripples, and he roused himself to see what it was. People, he thought, surprised, not pleased, but it was not merely ‘the people’, he discovered, those he had once walked among, called brother—come to despise. Others were among them, pale skinned, pale eyed. This tribe he had no familiarity with. He wavered, torn between curiosity about these others and the hate that had sent him into his slumberous state long, long ago, so long ago that the hate had become little more than apathy. Rising finally, he stretched, expanding his psyche outward, and then he walked among them, studying the others, watching them. They were digging, he discovered, for what he could not determine, but it answered the question. This had caused the ripple, the disturbance that had shaken him from his rest. His curiosity waned. He had no idea what they were about, but he had no real interest either. Then he saw her. Intrigued, he settled to watch her and he discovered that the longer he watched her, the more absorbed he was. This one was different. **** “Look out!” “Rock slide!” “Run!” The ominous sound of colliding, rolling, bouncing rocks rapidly built from a warning rumble to a deafening roar punctuated by the shouts that first drew her attention and the screams of fear and pain that quickly followed the first shouts. Gabrielle LaPlante lifted her head like an animal sensing danger at the first rumble, freezing as her gaze swept the dig site and finally focused on the threat. Her eyes widened as she saw the wave of dirt and rocks racing down the mountain side like a black tide, but everything inside of her seized, even her breath in her lungs. It was over almost before anyone had realized what was happening. Through the cloud of dust that rose from the foot of the mountain where the debris settled, Gabrielle saw a twisted human arm jutting skyward. Coated with dirt from the soil dislodged by the falling rocks, she stared at it for many moments before her brain finally registered that it actually was an arm, not a bizarre, twisted tree root that resembled a human arm. Released finally from the shock that had rooted her to the spot, she surged forward, launched into a run as the workers that had scattered halted and turned to race back. She was among the last to reach the downed worker, but it wouldn’t have mattered, she saw, if she’d been the first. The man hadn’t suffocated. A rock twice the

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size of his head had crushed his skull. As short as she was, the native South Americans that made up the bulk of the laborers for the dig were as short, or shorter, and she had no trouble seeing over the men that clustered in front of her. She was sorry that was the case. The image seemed to burn itself inside her mind. Nausea rolled over her. She stumbled back, turned, looked numbly around the dig site for several moments and fled to the tent that had been assigned to her as her temporary home away from home. A forensic anthropologist on loan from the Dade Museum of Human History to investigate the first, and only, skeletal remains found at the scene, which turned out to be the body of a two hundred year old Indian who’d died while hunting not an ancient settler of the area, she had never considered herself superstitious. She’d learned to appreciate and respect the customs and beliefs of various cultures and ancient civilizations, but she didn’t believe. She’d been uneasy ever since she’d arrived at the dig, however. She’d dismissed it. This was her first field operation and a certain amount of trepidation was to be understood, particularly considering the remote location. They were miles and miles from the nearest speck of civilization, and even that couldn’t be truly categorized as civilization, not in her book, anyway. The village was a throw back, virtually untouched by modern civilization. She’d regretted taking the assignment almost as soon as she’d agreed to it. She regretted it even more as they left the tiny airstrip and set off in ancient vehicles down narrow twisting roads, traveling deeper and deeper into thick, twisted jungle filled with more poisonous creeping, slithering reptiles and insects than any other part of the world. The trip alone had been enough of a jolt to her system to account for her jitteriness—paddling for miles and miles in canoes that sat barely above water level and watching snakes and crocodiles slither past. It had comforted her somewhat when she’d arrived to find the dig well in progress. The jungle had been cut back. The dig site was populated with a dozen scientists and students and about twice or three times that many native workers. A tent village had dotted the periphery of the site—but the tents were the best money could buy and filled with every modern convenience that could be lugged this deeply into the jungle. The conditions were still ungodly primitive, and she didn’t especially like the speculative gazes of the dark eyed natives—apparently fair women fascinated them. Not that she qualified as a ‘real blond’ in the real world. Her hair had darkened as she’d matured to a color closer to brown than blond, but she still had the blue eyes, pale skin, and freckles of a true blond and that seemed sufficient to the brown skinned pigmies that made up the bulk of the tent village to earn her more hungry male glances in the few weeks she’d been there than she’d had in her entire life before. Loathe to encourage them to believe she might welcome their sexual overtures— and she didn’t think she was imagining that they looked her over like a particularly choice piece of ass—she spent most of her time pretending they were invisible, which was another thing that made her uncomfortable. She’d been accused of being frank to the point of bluntness—which no one seemed to consider a virtue—but part of that frankness was the tendency to meet everyone eye to eye. She’d been taught that ‘shifty eyed’ was a trait that spelled untrustworthy. She wasn’t a liar, a cheat, or a fraud, and she was as good as, if no better than, anyone. It made her feel dishonest to avoid eye contact.

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Beyond the physical discomforts, though, beyond the uneasiness at having short, dark men staring at her as if she was Venus incarnate, beyond the very real dangers that lurked beneath every leaf, shrub, and tree limb, there was something about the ancient city they’d uncovered that was just plain otherworldly creepy. She’d tried to convince herself it was nothing more than the real threats she sensed around her that was playing havoc with her imagination, but the fine hairs on her body—those primal sensors of danger—prickled as if the dormant animal inside of her knew something her conscious mind couldn’t detect. The natives were uneasy, too. Her Spanish wasn’t all that great, but she didn’t need to understand the language to assess the behavior. They were superstitious, though. They believed the tales of ghosts they scared themselves with. She didn’t believe in ghosts, or spirits, or ancient gods that were going to be displeased about having their temples violated. She hadn’t before she’d arrived at the grave site of the ancient, unnamed city. Now, she was trying to convince herself she still didn’t. And yet the death toll was rising. More than a dozen workers had died since the dig had begun, eleven before her arrival, two since, and three of the original party of scientists and archeology students had come down with a mysterious ailment that had required them to be shipped back stateside. They’d unearthed great segments of what promised to be a huge city that predated anything found before by at least a thousand years. And they still hadn’t found the remains of a single occupant of that city. That was almost the creepiest part of it. They should have found something by now that would warrant her presence here. If they didn’t find something damned soon, she thought angrily, she was going to high tail it back to her museum! “What happened, Gaby? Who got hurt?” Sheila Lyndon demanded as Gabrielle neared the tent they shared. Gaby simply stared at her blankly for several moments. “Got dead today, you mean? I didn’t know his name.” She didn’t know any of the natives’ names. She wasn’t certain she would have recognized the guy. A wave of shock crossed Sheila’s features. “Somebody got killed?” “There’s a shock,” Gaby said tightly, snatching open the tent flap and diving inside. “Someone getting killed on this dig.” “Hey! Accidents happen,” Sheila said, following her inside as Gaby threaded her way around obstructions and flopped onto the cot assigned to her without even thinking about checking the bedding for crawlies first. Gaby looked at the younger woman in outraged disbelief. “That’s callous, even for you.” Sheila glared at her. “I didn’t mean it that way, and you know it!” Right, Gaby thought, but she didn’t say it. She wasn’t up to an argument at the moment. She realized she might has well have voiced her opinion, though, because Sheila read it in her expression. “Don’t tell me you’re starting to believe that voodoo crap the natives are always whining about?”

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Gaby felt her face reddening in spite of all she could do. Since there was no hiding her reaction, she glared at Shelia, trying to pass off embarrassment for anger. Not that she wasn’t angry! “This isn’t Africa,” she said tightly, “or even the Caribbean. They don’t believe in voodoo around here.” “Whatever witchcraft mumbo jumbo they call it.” Gaby gave Shelia a once over, taking in the young woman’s better than average figure. “What did you say you were majoring in?” Sheila’s eyes narrowed. “I happen to be in the upper ten percentile of my class!” she snapped. “Yeah, but was it your brain that got you there? That’s the question!” Sheila’s eyes glittered. “Well, nobody could be in any doubt that it was your brains that got you your position!” she snarled through clenched teeth. “Now I’m going to cry!” Gaby shot back at her. “I’ll bet my brains stay sharp a lot longer than your tits and ass!” “You’d lose,” Sheila snapped, her expression abruptly going from fury to complacency. “Daddy’s got plenty of money to keep everything right where it is. You should check it out Ms LaPlante. What are you, thirty five now? Forty? Honey, it’s already hanging low! There’s just so much they can do, you know? You should take out a loan on your car or something.” Gaby glared at the woman’s back as she spun on her heel and sashayed out of the tent again. Ok, so Sheila wasn’t exactly stupid! She had plenty of ammunition to fight dirty. Cold blooded, self-centered, materialistic and, to Gaby’s way of thinking, probably a sociopath, but she wasn’t the bimbo her bleached blond hair and wide doe eyes implied. She didn’t hate Sheila just because she’d been fortunate enough to be born within a wealthy family, nor because she was better than average in looks, had straight, white teeth, a great figure, was probably ten years younger, and knew how to use all those assets. She hated Sheila because she was a bitch. Actually, hate was probably a little strong. Ordinarily, she just felt contempt or irritation. The tent was supposed to be big enough to accommodate two people in reasonable comfort, but Sheila had hauled half of all she owned with her and it was next to impossible to move inside the tent. They were in serious trouble if they ever had to exit it quickly! “Bitch!” she muttered, resisting the urge to drag out a mirror and check her reflection. She didn’t need to to know she looked like hell. What would the mirror do besides depress the shit out of her? She was thirty five. There was nothing wrong with it, or with looking one’s age! In fact most people seemed to think she looked as if she was in her twenties … late twenties, granted, but still twenty something. The snide Ms thing irked the shit out of her, too. She’d chosen to be single, damn Miss Hot Twat! It wasn’t like she hadn’t had opportunities to get married. She’d had a couple. Sighing, she rubbed her eyes and shifted to lay down on the cot. Remembering abruptly that she hadn’t checked the cot for scorpions or spiders, she sprang up and examined the bedding carefully before she settled again.

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She was hot, drained, and upset about the man’s death, but aside from venting her frustrations on Sheila, she couldn’t seem to let go of the tension pent up inside of her. As she lay staring up at the ceiling of the tent, trying to block out the distant sounds of the accident site, she found herself reflecting on the reason she’d decided not to marry, not to even look. What was the point? The ‘accident’ and subsequent infection she’d had before she even reached puberty had eliminated any chance of ever having children. Theses days there was some hope for women like her, of course. Despite the scaring on her fallopian tubes, she could probably get help from a fertility specialist, but that took money, a lot of money. And there were no guarantees with something like that. She could spend years, and every dime she’d worked so hard to put up for her retirement years, and still have nothing to show for it but heartbreak. She was reasonably content with her life. Why turn her life inside out over something she didn’t need to go through to feel fulfilled? Besides, as Miss Bitch had pointed out, she was beyond the prime age for child bearing. Women could, and often did, have children well into their thirties, even into their forties, but every year after thirty the odds got better for disaster and worse for a happy conclusion. She might spend most of her time studiously ignoring her biological clock, but she didn’t go around with her head in the sand. Here and there, she picked up little tidbits of information that encouraged her to just keep ignoring the tick tock of the clock. Morbid, she thought, sitting up abruptly, dropping her legs over the side of the cot and covering her face with her hands. It was the deaths. She had spent most of her life either with her nose in a book, or surrounded by objects of antiquity. She had no close friends, no close family, having been reared in an orphanage. It was easy to cocoon herself from the passing years, unmarked by painful losses that would have made it impossible to ignore the fact that life was just passing her by. Why else was she thinking, now, that she was going to live her entire life and pass completely unremarked by anyone? Why else was she thinking about being old and alone? She was alone now! It had never bothered her before. Not really. Dropping her hands, she huffed out an irritated breath and left the tent. The dead man had been borne off by the other workers. The archeology team was the only people at the dig site now. The students who’d been brought along were half-heartedly digging in the new area that Dr. Sheffield was certain concealed the temple that should have been the center of the community. Had the workers left for good, she wondered? Or only left to carry out whatever burial ritual their people observed? Drs. Sheffield and Oldman were kneeling in the pit, studying something she couldn’t make out from the distance that separated them. Or maybe they were only studying Sheila? She was on her knees, as well, bent over as if she was studying whatever it was they’d found, but more likely just so she could give both the professors a gratuitous view of her ample bosom, which was hanging half out of the shirt she was wearing tied at her waist. Gaby didn’t especially want to be anywhere near Sheila at the moment, but she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts either. After a momentary hesitation, she

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decided to join the students and help with the digging. Shoveling and sifting and carting dirt was hard work. She needed something physical to work off her tension if she didn’t want her thoughts plaguing her tonight when she was supposed to be sleeping. **** He had drifted so long in the sea of apathy that he had felt more annoyed than anything else when they had first come. He considered that and finally decided annoyed was too strong a term—disturbed and unwilling to give up the sense of nothing he had surrounded himself with. Curiosity had stirred within him when they’d begun digging, unearthing the city that had been buried so long it lingered in no living memory, but it had not stirred him strongly enough to encourage him to do more than watch them whenever they came within his view. It had not stirred him enough to seek them out and study them. The others had awakened more curiosity. The aura of the pale skinned strangers was nothing like the ‘people’. They exuded energy, arrogance, excitement, purpose, and determination. They dressed strangely. They had brought strange things with them. They spoke a completely unfamiliar tongue, often in an excited babble that he found mildly annoying. Nevertheless, it drew his attention, prodded him to focus until the words ceased to be an annoying babble and began to make sense to him. But even when he began to understand what they saying, he still did not understand them. Why they labored day after day from sunrise to dusk with little trowels, and brushes, and sifters, and machines designed to pass sound through things to tell when they were hollow, he could not imagine. Why they grew so excited when they found broken bits of pottery or other equally useless trash, he could not fathom. But it amused him to watch their child-like excitement over these things. They seemed harmless enough. He was less pleased to have the ‘people’ in his city. They were not the ‘people’ he had known before. They were a pale shadow of those old ones and still contemptible to him, maybe more contemptible. They had changed, but he could not see that it had been for the better. The ‘people’ who’d come with the pale skinned others exuded excitement, too, but their enthusiasm was focused on the others, not the city that so thrilled the pale ones. And beneath that the stench of fear oozed from their pores because they felt his presence. He recognized it, and he found it caused an unpleasant ripple of memories to stir, and he would have withdrawn further from their presence—except for her. She stirred many, many things within him, drove the comforting apathy completely from his grasp and aroused—confusion, conflicting emotions, curiosity. She drew him from his comfortable shell of apathy before he had even quite grasped that he had left it behind and that it was not something he could easily regain if he found that she was not nearly as interesting as he had thought she would be. By the time he had realized that, though, it no longer mattered. She fascinated him. She was not quite like any other of her kind that he had ever known, either among the people or the others. Like a flower, she was complicated, an intricate puzzle that fascinated him more with each petal he plucked to examine her further. She was a study in contradictions, strong but delicate, wise but impetuous, hard and yet soft. Her façade appealed to him, pulled at him in a way that he could not entirely understand because when he studied her he could not detect a single feature or physical

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attribute that was extraordinary in any way. Her face was pretty, but not beautiful. Her body was pleasing—soft, and rounded, and womanly—but he had seen many women whose bodies were as pleasing or even more pleasingly shaped. He liked the pale skin. It reminded him of the soft glow of moonlight. He liked the pale hair for the same reason. The eyes were like a clear summer sky. But none of those traits were unique only to her. The others were all pale skinned, pale eyed, their hair darker or lighter than hers but still much the same—and those things were intriguing and appealing to him mostly because they were nothing like the people. His puzzlement over the strength of her appeal to him had finally drawn him closer, far closer than he had approached one of her kind in many, many years. But he had not regretted it, even though it had opened him to the world of pain he had sealed himself off from long ago. Because there he found her beauty, in her heart, her soul, her mind. It was so beautiful it took his breath away. And it aroused something within him that he had long forgotten … hunger. **** Leaving the tents behind, Gaby moved to the edge of the pit and carefully climbed down the first ladder. There were three. The city Dr. Sheffield had discovered was beneath ruins of an Incan village that had been discovered years earlier by Dr. Oldman. The original discovery had been somewhat disappointing. The village, it seemed, hadn’t been one of much consequence and had provided very little in the way of artifacts, mostly because more recent settlers had used whatever they’d found useful and disposed of everything else. The city beneath it had been found entirely by accident. Ordinarily, a good deal of research went into to tracking down the most likely location of cities mentioned in historical texts, found mentioned on other items of antiquity, or that had become a part of folklore. This city shouldn’t exist at all. No mention of anything like it had ever been discovered anywhere, and beyond that, it appeared to date back much further than any known civilization in this part of the world—further even than the Toltecs. Drs. Oldman’s and Sheffield’s reputations were on the line. The initial speculation on the date of the site had already sent ripples through the scientific community and brought back flack. No one believed the city could possibly date back as far as they’d speculated because it was an accepted theory that man had barely been walking upright at the time, little more than animals, and certainly not capable of building a city. It had been the possibility of finding skeletal remains that would bust that theory wide open that had generated enough excitement in her to entice her from her nice, comfy museum into … hell. Because the conditions could only be termed hellish. Having managed the last ladder, Gaby pushed the thoughts from her mind. At the moment, all she wanted was distraction from the latest accident. Her excitement had waned long since, along with her belief that they were going to find skeletal remains of any kind, much less … prehistoric Einsteins that existed at a time when man was

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supposed to be little more than an ape. The students glanced at her disinterestedly when she joined them. It shouldn’t have bothered her. They were hardly Indiana Jones types and way too young to interest her even if any of the bunch had been better than average looking, but she supposed she was still smarting from Sheila’s cutting remarks. Ignoring the skepticism she caught in several of the glances, she picked up a trowel, chose a spot and began to carefully scrape at the dirt. She might not, ordinarily, be a field scientist, but she knew what she was doing … the uppity shirt tailed snots! She’d only been working maybe twenty minutes and had just gotten deeply enough into her work to shrug off her irritation when the trowel she was wielding scraped against something that sent back the sound of stone. She sensed rather than saw several of the young men glance up at the sound. Setting the trowel aside, she grabbed up a brush and dusted at the stone so that she could see it better to determine whether she’d actually found something more than just a buried rock. The stone she’d unearthed was smooth, but rounded. It appeared to be worked stone. Frowning, she took up the trowel again and worked at the dirt surrounding the stone, trying to contain the spark of excitement that surged through her. It looked like a section of carving, but it was too small an area to be certain. It could still just be a rock, rounded by movement of water over it. Sweat had begun to roll down her forehead and sting her eyes by the time she’d removed the bulk of the dirt over a section approximately two foot square. Absently, she brushed at the moisture with the back of her forearm, dropped the trowel and picked up the brush again. A face began to emerge from the centuries of dirt that had settled over the stone carving. “Hey! I’ve found something!” she exclaimed, allowing the excitement she’d been holding at bay to quicken her heartbeat. “A part of a frieze, I think … maybe.” “Hold on! Let me have a look at it!” Dr. Sheffield called from somewhere behind her. Irritation flickered through her and she glanced around to see him hurrying toward her. Before she could spit, or object, she was surrounded by rubber-neckers blocking her light. Dr. Sheffield shoved his way through the students and shouldered her aside. “It’s a face. You might be right!” he said, excitement threading his voice. “What do you think, Richard?” The crowd parted for Dr. Richard Oldman, who winced as he settled on his knees beside his younger colleague and peered at the segment of stone. “Could be Toltec, Carl,” he muttered. “It’s hard to say at this point. But it certainly isn’t Incan. Look at the tool marks here.” Slowly but surely edged out of the way, Gaby stood behind them, craning her neck to see as they carefully worked at the dirt around the spot she’d cleared. “There’s a crevice here,” Mark, one of the students pronounced excitedly. “Regular … I think it might be a door.” Dr. Oldman chuckled good naturedly. “There wouldn’t be a door … not made of stone. It’s probably just a fissure, either from shifting of the structure or possibly where the stones were joined.”

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Mark reddened, his face tightening with anger, but he didn’t argue with Oldman. Instead, he pursued the crack he’d found until he had managed to reveal a perfectly straight line about eighteen inches long. No one said anything when he’d uncovered it. After staring at it for several moments, Oldman and Sheffield got to their feet. “Get shovels and get this dirt removed here. Carefully, though. This may be part of a much larger structure.” Gaby watched them for a while, debating with herself. She didn’t know if she was more irritated that they’d taken over her find and shoved her out of the way, or if it was simply that she was tired of being on the outside looking in. She discovered it didn’t matter, though. As tempted as she was to do as she usually did and simply walk away, she stayed—watching mostly like the born spectator she was—but she at least meant to stick around and see what it was that she’d found and not learn of it second hand down the road when they were discussing it. The diggers struck stone only a few feet below the section she’d found, ruling out the possibility that the segment was a door … unless it had been designed for midgets. The sun had settled well below the tree tops by the time the men had cleared a section large enough for them to see that the rock wasn’t just bedrock. It was worked stone, revealing that the structure jutted outward some six feet before dropping away again. Pyramid like, Gaby wondered? The Aztecs had built those, though, and if it was a pyramid it might well blow Sheffield’s theory out the window … unless it transpired that the Aztecs weren’t actually the first to build pyramids in South America? Mark had doggedly pursued his door theory, she saw, scraping at the dirt and following the line he’d found until he’d discovered perpendicular lines at the top and bottom. Gaby watched him, or rather the relief he was slowly revealing despite the fact that his focus was obviously on tracking down the function of the piece to prove his theory. She wasn’t an expert. Her field was bones, but the style of the carving didn’t look like anything that had previously been attributed to any of the known architects of South American civilization. There were symbols around the outer edges of the block, forming a decorative border around the strange face, which she finally decided might not be intended as a face at all, but rather a mask. Deteriorated with age and weather, the symbols weren’t easy to identify, but it looked like all sorts of two headed, many legged beasts. It wasn’t until Mark had briskly brushed the dirt from the surface that she saw it wasn’t monstrous two headed beasts at all. The depictions were of men and women in various sexual positions. Ancient porn? Gaby wondered, feeling a jolt of shock. Setting his brush aside once he’d finished cleaning the piece, Mark began to move his hands over it, pushing along the sides and corners. It clicked in Gaby’s mind that he was trying to pull it loose. Surging toward him, she stepped on a piece of stone that had a hollow ring to it when her boots struck it. She barely had time to register the sound, certainly not enough to time to assimilate the implications of a hollow beneath her. Mark braced himself and shoved at one edge and almost instantaneously the ground beneath her opened. Gaby sucked in a sharp breath as she dropped. Her brain, like the shutter of a camera, registered a still impression of light and still-life people wearing frozen, startled

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expressions, and then darkness. Her heart leapt into her throat, choking off the ability to scream, and her stomach went weightless as she plummeted downward.

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Chapter Two The freefall was blessedly brief. Gaby’s mind had barely grasped the horrific possibilities when she collided solidly with a smooth, cold surface. She didn’t stop moving, however. She slid down and down, so quickly that it seemed she was sliding at a breath taking speed. It did take her breath. It closed off brain function for many, many dangerous moments before she could even command her body to struggle to stop the slide. For all the good it did. She clawed ineffectually at the slick surface, finding no purchase at all. Her screams, when she finally recalled the breath and inspiration to utter them, echoed back at her at a deafening volume that drowned out every other sound. She didn’t even realize the shaft was curved until the gently curving shaft took a sharp turn that slowed her descent. She’d just had time to register that when the surface beneath her disappeared altogether. She was airborne again for a split second before she slammed into a hard surface, skidded several feet, and stopped. She lay perfectly still once she’d finally stopped moving, trying to gather her wits to mentally inventory her body for injury. Pain finally registered, but it was nothing unbearable. Her palms stung from friction burns. Twinges registered from her chin, one arm, and one knee. She pushed herself up and looked around. Profound blackness so thick it seemed tangible surrounded her. A dim light in front of her was all she could see, but it took her several moments to realize that it was the weak light of a failing day above her, channeled downward by the curving shaft she’d slid down. Grunting, she pushed herself up on her hands and knees and crawled toward the light and the sound of voices. “Are you injured?” It was Dr. Sheffield’s voice, she realized. “I don’t think so,” she gasped, her voice still shaky and hoarse from fright. “No,” she added after a moment. “Just shaken up and scratches. Nothing broken.” Her ankle, she discovered when she tried to get up, hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, but she could put her weight on it. She’d twisted it, but not enough to break or sprain. “Can you climb back up?” She thought about her attempts to halt her fall. “I’ll try.” She did, for all she was worth, keenly conscious of the blackness behind her and the rapidly diminishing light from above. As soon as the shock had begun to subside, her skin had begun to prickle with uneasiness, especially the skin along her back and neck, as if she could feel eyes boring into her. She tried not to think about the possibility of snakes and spiders and scorpions in the pit with her, but her ears pricked for any furtive movements that could be interpreted as death on legs or the slither of a serpent. She managed to crawl up the nearly flat area of the shaft, but she could get no higher. Each time she tried, she slid down again until she was wet with sweat, her clothes

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clinging to her all over. “I can’t,” she acknowledged finally. “The surface is too smooth.” “I’ll look for rope!” someone above announced, though she could tell he wasn’t talking to her but rather someone up top. “Get some lights while you’re at it!” Oldman commanded, his voice raised as if whoever had gone for rope had already moved off. “Could somebody drop a light to me?” Gaby called up. “It’s really, really dark in here.” “Just hold on, Dr. LaPlante! We’ll get you out.” “What do you see?” That was Shelia—not hard to figure out even if she hadn’t been familiar with the voice. There were only two women on the dig. “I can’t see a fucking thing!” Gaby snarled. “Try to stay calm,” Dr. Sheffield said in a soothing voice, reminding her that she had an audience above that consisted of the entire dig team. She didn’t care. Ordinarily, she watched her language, but she’d grown up around rough, streetwise kids at the orphanage. Fostering was like a revolving door. Just about everybody made it out of the orphanage, but they almost always came back, usually more fucked up than before they’d left, angrier, more rebellious, sometimes quieter and more withdrawn, and sometimes sporting bandages and casts. Fuck had been everyone’s favorite word, probably mostly because it sent the dorm mothers into gobbling spasms of shocked outrage every time one of them uttered it. When she’d been very young, she’d envied the ones that got homes. She hadn’t been cute, though. She’d been fat, had flat, listless hair that was so fine it refused to lay down. And she’d had allergies, most of which she’d finally outgrown, but just enough health issues that nobody wanted to be bothered with her. Later, when she’d finally realized what the behavior of the others meant, she was just as glad to stay where she was. She was ignored for the most part, but that beat the hell out of trying to fight off nasty old men looking for sexual playthings, women looking for live-in baby sitters and domestic slaves, and foster parents who took out their frustrations on the children entrusted to their care by beating the living shit out of them whenever they were in a bad mood—or drunk, or high. She didn’t like dark, closed in spaces, though. She tried to tell herself that was why she felt the prickling all over her skin as if eyes were crawling over her. “Is it a large chamber?” That was Dr. Sheffield again. She couldn’t decide whether he thought talking to her would calm her down or if he was more fucking interested in what she’d found than her predicament. “A tomb, you think?” Sheila called down. She was going to plant her foot up that bitch’s ass when she got out, Gaby fumed inwardly. “If you want to know, send me a light down!” she yelled angrily. “Mark and Billy went to get some things. They’ll be back soon,” Carl Oldman told her. “We’ll have you out of there before you know it.” Gaby settled, not because she found his reassurance particularly comforting, but

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because her muscles were starting to ache from the tension of crouching in the narrow opening. The light was rapidly declining. She didn’t realize it at first because it was so bright compared to the thick blackness surrounding her, but as it dwindled she remembered that the sun had been well on its way to the horizon before she’d fallen in. It was twilight above her and before much more time passed it was going to be as black in the shaft as it was in the chamber behind her. Total darkness engulfed her before a bright spot of light appeared above. The light was moving and she realized they must be trying to set up light to see by. A scraping sound alerted her to movement. Her heart clenched painfully before she realized the sound was coming from above not behind her. “We’re lowering a light.” Timely. They could have said so before they scared the shit out of her! But maybe they didn’t realize just how frightening it was to find oneself in a deep, dark hole? She listened intently as the sound moved closer and closer and finally began to feel around for it. Relief flooded her when her hands at last closed around an object that she realized was a camp lantern. “Got it!” she announced, searching blindly for the switch. The light blinded her for a moment. Clamping the lantern between her thighs because she was afraid it would slide away and break, she struggled with the rope they’d used to lower it until she finally untied it. The rope was narrow. “You going to pull me up with this?” she asked doubtfully. “Just wait! I don’t think this one’s long enough.” “I’ve got the end,” she pointed out angrily. “But there isn’t enough left up here to tie it off.” Tie it off to what, she wondered, casting around in her mind to remember anything that had been close enough, and solid enough, to anchor the other end of the rope? Nothing came to mind and a sinking sensation settled in her stomach. Taking the lantern from between her thighs, she lifted it as she turned to survey the dark hole behind her. The light didn’t filter far, illuminating no more than a circle somewhere between five and six feet and not even that very well. She saw a pattern of stones on the floor that told her the floor had been lain tile-like but not much else. “I think this one will do it,” Mark called out just as something hit the side of the shaft above her head. Turning hopefully away from the dismal aspect behind her, Gaby peered up to see a length of rope slithering snake-like toward her. She lurched toward it, grabbing the end. “Can you tie it around your waist?” Gaby tugged at it. “Give it some slack.” Silence greeted that. “There isn’t any,” Mark said finally. “Goddamn it to hell,” Gaby muttered. “What was that?” “Nothing!” she said louder. “I’ve got enough to hold on to. Can you pull me up?” She didn’t get the chance to tell them she did have a firm grip on it yet. Whoever had the other end snatched it from her grip, burning her palm. “Not yet, damn it! I wasn’t ready!”

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From the thud she heard at the top, she deduced that whoever it was had fallen on their ass. The rope reappeared. “This time say ‘ready’ when you’re ready,” Mark called down angrily. A hysterical urge to giggle closed over her. Gaby fought it. “Give me a minute,” she said a little unsteadily. “I have to set the lantern down somewhere.” Scooting out of the shaft, she set the lantern to one side … just in case. If she didn’t make it out, she didn’t want to land on the damned lantern on her way back down. Without glancing around, because she really didn’t want to see what was around her at the moment, she crawled back up the shaft as far as she could, feeling blindly for the end of the rope. Her fingers brushed it. She surged upward with an effort and caught a firm hold on it. Struggling, grunting with effort, she inched upward again, trying to get enough slack to wrap the rope around one hand and grab a hold above that. “I think I’ve got a good grip,” she gasped out finally, adding, “pull slowly,” as she turned and tried to brace her back against one side and her feet against the other. The shaft was just wide enough to make it impossible to get much leverage. Grunting with effort, trying to ignore the burn in her palms from gripping the rope and the strain against her shoulder and elbow joints, Gaby inched upward as they pulled. She’d managed to get just high enough to see the square above her when the rope abruptly went slack. The moment it did, she lost what little leverage she had with her feet against the sides. Uttering a sharp cry, she slid down the shaft and landed on her belly on the hard stone floor at the bottom. “Are you all right?” someone yelled. She didn’t recognize the voice—one of the students. “No, I’m not alright,” she muttered beneath her breath. Groaning, she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and crawled to the opening. “Not hurt! What happened?” “The rope broke. Guess it’s rotted.” “Well get another one!” she snapped. Silence greeted that demand. She could hear a low voiced conversation above her, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then someone, Mark she thought, muttered just loudly enough she could hear it, “There isn’t another one. I think the natives took the others.” Fear knotted in Gaby’s stomach, and anger. It didn’t seem to have occurred to anybody but her that the reason the Indians were so willing to work for the pittance they were paid was because they helped themselves to whatever supplies appealed to them whenever they pleased. It wasn’t unusual, at all, to go to get something and discover it had mysteriously vanished. The rope that had broken had probably rotted like everything else did in the damned jungle because of the heat and humidity. What the hell was she supposed to do now? “Dr. LaPlante?” “What?” she asked sullenly. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait for daylight to try again. Do you think you’ll be all right?” Did she have a fucking choice, she thought a little hysterically? She felt like screaming and cursing them for every low down thing she could think of. It might help her feelings, but it wasn’t likely to alter her situation. “Is there an alternative?” she

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demanded ungraciously. “I don’t think so.” “I guess I’ll have to be, then, won’t I?” “Why don’t you take the lantern and explore the area?” Dr. Oldman suggested, not unkindly. “I’ll make you feel more comfortable, I think, to assure yourself there’s nothing down there to worry about. We’ll be back in a few minutes and drop some things down to you to make you as comfortable as possible.” A ladder was the only thing she could think of that would make her more comfortable. But she knew the ladders, even stacked end to end wouldn’t work. They were straight. The shaft was curved. They didn’t wait for answer. She heard the shuffle above her and the retreat of sounds that left her completely alone. She went limp, resisting the urge to cry like a child abandoned in the dark. When she’d mastered the useless urge, she shimmied down the shaft and picked up the lantern. Lifting the light, she peered around, but she could see nothing but darkness beyond the range of the light. Giving up, she lowered the light and scanned the floor. Reassured when she saw nothing scurrying away, she moved cautiously across the stone floor, testing each two foot square with the toe of her boot before she placed her weight on it. It seemed doubtful there would be another trap within the chamber, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She was deep beneath the surface of the ground, but she could still feel air wafting through the shaft, chasing the mustiness from the stale air that had been trapped inside the temple, or whatever it was, for countless centuries. A pitiful amount of light filtered down through that shaft at the moment, only a less deep gloom from the light of the stars, but it was better than nothing … better than falling down another hole and breaking something. When she paused the third time and lifted the light to look around, she froze in awe. Just at the edge of the ring of light, she saw color, shape, the dim impression of an intricate mosaic. Forgetting the possible hazard of the floor, she held the light up and moved closer. The entire wall was covered in tiny, colored stones. As she moved closer, she lost the perspective to view the design, but she was far more interested in inspecting the stones at the moment. She saw, when she reached the wall and lifted a hand to inspect the surface with her palm and fingertips, that the stones were amazingly crafted, almost as regular as machine cut, or maybe formed tiles. The surface was as smooth as glass. They couldn’t be pottery tiles, she decided. The color was too vivid. Time would have dulled almost anything they could have thought of to use to color them, even if they’d fired the tiles. It had to be naturally colored stones, but it was still amazing that they’d processed them into neat, almost perfectly symmetrical squares, and flat, as if they’d been cut by machinery. The feat of producing the tiles alone seemed impossibly beyond the culture that would have made them. She moved back again after a moment, slowly, until the image began to take form. She could see then that the frieze was like the one on the stone she’d found. Naked couples, entwined in various sexual acts lined the wall as the light revealed image after image. It wasn’t stick-like figures, either. The stones limited the possibility of rounded, more natural looking figures, but these didn’t look primitive, boxy, angular, or disproportionate.

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Some of the positions seemed wildly improbable, but otherwise the picture seemed a determined rendering of nature in action rather than a simple effort to suggest the general idea. She came at last to a corner. Frowning, she tried to remember how many steps she’d taken, but discovered she’d been too preoccupied by the depiction to spare a thought to counting. Her stride was approximately a yard heel to toe, she decided, maybe closer to two feet. She decided to count by twos. She’d taken ten steps when she came abruptly to a darkened alcove. That wasn’t what halted her in her tracks, however. The figure seated on a great stone throne sent a painful shaft knifing through her chest, as if she’d just discovered a living being in the room with her. Carved from some dark stone that was a close enough approximation of brown skin tones to give her heart palpitations, the figure looked to be every bit of ten foot high, seated. She couldn’t see a lot more than the muscular legs and the impressive erection sprouting from his lap, however. The upper portion of the figure remained in darkness. The mammoth erection was a blatant clue of her whereabouts, even if she’d been inclined to dismiss the depictions on the frieze. She’d landed in the temple of some ancient fertility god. A noise behind her jerked her attention from the colossal cock. Whirling, she peered into the darkness. Something thudded against the stone floor. “Gaby?” Irritation went through her when she recognized Mark’s voice. It dawned on her abruptly that he was the asshole that had gotten her into this predicament to start with. He’d been shoving on the stone. It had to be some sort of trigger for the trap door she’d fallen through. And now he was getting all chummy? “Feel free to call me Dr. LaPlante!” she snapped, holding the light out and stalking toward the dim square of light she could see far into the distance as her sight adjusted. The room must be forty feet square, maybe more. No wonder she hadn’t been able to see anything from where she’d landed! Her rush proved imprudent. She slammed into an object sprouting from the floor and nearly chest high, almost losing her grip on the lantern. Uttering an inelegant grunt as her impact forced the air from her lungs, she fell back a step. “Hold on!” she called louder. It wasn’t a wall. By her reckoning the thing was roughly six feet wide and six to eight feet long, approximately three feet high, and flat on top. An altar? A shiver chased its way down her spine. Visions of live, human sacrifices danced in her head. Deciding to ignore the thing for the moment, she moved around it, focused on the square that indicated the opening of the shaft. She nearly fell over the bundle at the bottom. “I dropped a sleeping bag down. There’s another light, a canteen, and food wrapped inside. Did it make it all the way down?” She’d kicked something hard inside. It was a good thing she was wearing boots!

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“Yes.” “Anything else you want or need?” Aside from getting out? “I can’t think of anything,” she said after a moment’s thought. She wasn’t really hungry, despite the fact that she hadn’t eaten since the noon meal and it was already past the time, she was pretty sure, when they usually ate supper. She was thirsty, though. She’d been sweating like a pig while she’d struggled to get out, and panting with fear besides. Her throat and mouth felt like they’d been stuffed with cotton that had soaked up every drop of moisture. She would’ve liked more light, just in case, but they didn’t have a lot of artificial light and they had to conserve it. It was too hard to get batteries for the handheld lights or fuel for the generator that ran everything else so deep in the jungle. “I’ll be fine,” she said finally, hoping she would be and that they wouldn’t find her dead body the next morning. Or find her blubbering like an idiot. “I could stay here for a little while and keep you company if you’d like.” Surprise flickered through her. Guilty conscience, she wondered? “The mosquitoes will carry you off—or suck you dry. But thanks anyway. I think I’ll explore this room a little more now that I have more light.” “You need to be careful with batteries,” he cautioned. “If I have to sit in the dark, I’d like to know what, if anything, is in here with me before the lights go out,” she pointed out. “You sure you don’t want company for a while?” Gaby sighed. “Not unless you want to join me down here,” she muttered under her breath. She decided not to voice the comment loud enough for him to hear it, though. He might take it as a different sort of invitation. “It’s hard to talk like this, but thanks anyway.” She didn’t wait to see if she could hear him leave. Kneeling, she untied the bundle to examine the contents. As she’d hoped, he’d tossed in the small bag of personal items she’d brought with her that included a small jar of petroleum jelly, which she used for everything from chapped lips to scrapes and minor cuts. This was not the sort of place where one wanted to ignore even minor injuries. They were too prone to infection. Settling on top of the bag once she’d emptied it, she examined herself carefully and discovered her pants had torn at the knee on the trip down, which explained the stinging knee. When she’d cleaned the scraped areas—chin, knee, elbow, and palms-with a moist wipe, she carefully applied a thin later of petroleum jelly and then topped it with self-stick bandages to keep from smearing jelly everywhere. It soothed the minor discomfort at once, which brought her mind to another discomfort. She was going to have to squat. She didn’t want to and it had nothing to do with discomfort of desecrating a holy place, pagan or not. But she’d bust a bladder if she tried to hold it till she was rescued. Grabbing the lantern and her tissues, she moved down the wall to the corner, examined the floor and the walls and finally shucked her pants and backed into it. She began to get the prickling sensation of being watched the moment she took her pants off. She cast several glances toward the statute at the other end of the room, certain that must be what was giving her the feeling of being watched. She couldn’t see it of course. The lantern light didn’t reach even nearly that far.

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It made her wonder how and why she’d gotten the sensation of being watched before. She hadn’t known the thing was there at that time. And it wasn’t as if it was a live person. When she’d finished and put her panties back on, she decided against the pants. No one was coming down tonight, and it was too damned hot to wear them when she didn’t feel she needed the protection. Folding them instead, she returned to her sleeping bag. She hadn’t seen a sign of crawlies, but she didn’t like the idea of sitting flat on the floor, or sleeping on it, and laying awake all night so that she’d know if anything crawled on her. The flashlight Mark had sent down to her, she discovered with her first touch of pleasure, was a floodlight. Setting it up, she switched it on and got her first good look at her surroundings, because this light was powerful enough to chase the shadows all the way into the corners and even the shadows weren’t dark and deep—except around the alcove where the horny god sat. After staring at the altar—she knew that must be what it was—that was blocking a good bit of the light, she took the lantern and went to examine it more closely. It was a solid slab, she discovered when she’d waved the lantern over the top. She didn’t see any signs of dark stains that told of a gruesome usage for the thing. Setting the lantern down on top, she went back to gather the rest of her things. When she’d carefully examined each article to make certain nothing had crawled into it, she set them all on top of the altar, then walked around the thing in search of a foot hold to climb up. If it was an altar, she reasoned, it would have a way up. There were several steep stairs carved into the stone on one side, she discovered. Climbing up, she opened her ‘cosmetic’ pouch and pulled out the can of aerosol lubricant she’d brought on the advice of one of her co-workers at the museum. It wasn’t a lovely smell, but by the time she’d sprayed a narrow barrier all the way around the edges of the altar she felt secure in the knowledge that there wasn’t a crawling thing alive that could climb slick stone further slickened with oil. She could sleep. If she could just ignore the god staring down at her. She tried. Climbing up again, she arranged her sleeping bag and drank a little water. The packaged food they usually ate wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. She kept glancing toward the temple god while she ate, still feeling that peculiar sensation of being watched. The floodlight threw the upper portion of his body into bold relief. He was wearing a mask, but instead of blank orbs where the eye holes were in the mask, she could see winking green gems set into carved eyes. Why, she wondered, would any people from this region give their god green eyes? It defied reason when the aborigines were dark skinned and had dark eyes. The mask seemed off, for that matter. Instead of the bizarre faces primitives generally created, the mask was perfectly blank, and the face behind it looked human. The whole lower half of his face was exposed and the nose, mouth, jaw and chin looked like a normal human face. Actually, a better than average handsome human face, she decided. That was strange enough since primitives usually feared their gods and made

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them ‘terrible’ to behold. But the mask seemed to be decorated with peacock feathers. She doubted peacocks had been around that long. They weren’t even native to the continent. Maybe it was just the plumes of a similar bird, though? She wasn’t a wild life specialist. There were probably hundreds of animals that existed now, or had in the past, that she didn’t have any clue about. For that matter, it might not be ‘natural’ feathers. The mask—and she knew the stone mask was very likely a depiction of a mask actually used at some point—might have had eyes painted on it to represent their god’s omnipotence. Shaking her head, she finished her meal, drank a little more water and finally settled in the sleeping bag, staring up at the darkened ceiling above her. Everything about the temple seemed strange. Nothing inside it seemed to follow any of the ‘rules’. Of course they didn’t know that the temple was pyramid in shape since they hadn’t uncovered the whole thing, but the art wasn’t primitive. It looked more modern than Aztec. The god wasn’t clunky and primitive looking. It was all very, very bizarre, she thought feeling strangely tired, foggy headed, almost as if she’d been drinking liquor instead of water. She was just tired, she assured herself. She’d had a shock. It stood to reason after all that emotional upheaval that she’d be exhausted the moment she settled and it all caught up with her. She didn’t actually feel tired and sleepy, though. She felt … drugged.

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Chapter Three He sensed her fear, smelled it even above the musty, stale air of the chamber. It disturbed him that she was afraid, but not enough to make him regret drawing her to him. They were always afraid. He had come to accept that they always would be … of him because he was not as they were and they feared and hated anything that was different from them. They wanted the things that only he could give them, though. They fawned upon him and flattered him until they had convinced him to give it to them, but underneath the smiles and adulteration, beneath the earnest entreaties and promises of appreciation, they still feared him and they hated him. In any case, it was the fear that drew the best, or worst, from them and he had determined long ago that he would never allow himself to be moved by one of them to help again unless he found that they were truly worthy. It did not matter if she feared him. It did not matter if she hated him because he made her afraid. It only mattered that she prove to him that she was worthy of the gift he was inclined to give her. It only mattered if he knew that she would cherish it as it should be cherished. Now he would know if she was as beautiful as he believed she was, or if she had enthralled him, blinding him to ugliness she hid so deeply inside that even he could not see it until she brought it to the light. As she had. The thought rippled through his psyche in a disturbing, unpleasant current, bringing memories with it that he had thought he had buried long ago, memories he had thought had long ago lost their power to bring pain. He was at fault. He had finally had to accept that no one was more to blame than he was for the evil that was done. He had allowed her to blind him. Truth be told, he had wanted her to because he had not wanted to look beyond the beauty of her façade. He had become so enamored with the passion she stirred in him, he had allowed his desire for her to blind him, ignored the instincts that had tried to warn him that it was nothing but a thin façade, poorly disguised at best. And he had entrusted her with the one thing most precious in all the world to him and she had not valued it, had not protected it, had drawn down upon herself the violence that had taken it from him. It made him ill that he had even mourned her loss at all. It annoyed him that the moment he had emerged from the nothingness he had cultivated so long that the memories crept back to haunt him. But they did not have the power they had once had to wound. Time had dulled the ache and Gabrielle had given him something else to focus upon, something that breathed the energy of life and purpose into him. Dismissing the unpleasant memories after only a moment, he watched her and was pleased with her determination to hold her fear at bay, pleased that she mastered it

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and did not allow it to master her, waiting for the moment when she would at last look upon the form he had discarded long ago with the memories he had tried to discard. How would she perceive him? he wondered, feeling a burgeoning sense of anticipation that he did not even recognize for what it was, at first. Would that shell please her as it had seemed to please the others? Or would she find it too … alien to her? It seemed likely, he realized, annoyed at the disappointment that realization spawned within him. She had not liked the people, he realized, and he was once much as they were now. She had distrusted … with good reason. He had not liked the thoughts that flickered through their minds as they watched her either. He had almost been tempted to divert their minds in a wholly unpleasant way. But he had refrained … at least from anything overt. Mostly because he found the thought of entering their minds was far too distasteful, not because he was not tempted to punish them. Gabrielle was a different matter altogether. She drew him like a lodestone. She surprised him when she came at last to study the graven image of the man he once was. He sensed no revulsion in her, no distaste. Instead, he saw that she was curious, intrigued, found pleasure in gazing at the form. She always surprised him. And it was always in a way that pleased him. She’d been afraid long enough. He gave her peace, separation from the fear, because he didn’t want her to be afraid when he came to her. **** A twisting thread of blue light appeared near the ceiling. Gaby stared at the thin string of light in confusion. It must be from the floodlight, she decided, wondering why she hadn’t noticed the effect before now. The impulse struck her to sit up and see if it was a dust mote or something of that sort that caused the effect, but somehow she just wasn’t that interested. When she blinked and opened her eyes again, another thread had joined the first. Now, instead of merely dancing and wiggling, the two lights moved together, entwining sinuously. After watching the strange lights for several moments, she glanced around the ceiling to see if she could determine what was moving to cause the lights to seem to dance. She saw then that there were others, many others, and they were moving around her, rotating almost like a child’s mobile. She followed the movement as far as she could doing nothing more than turn her head and roll her eyes in their direction and then turned to see if the lights she’d first noticed had moved as the other lights had. The lights were longer now, broader. She stared at the bands of light as they drifted downward from the ceiling and began to move along the floor. As the lower tips touched the floor, the lights began to change color, change shape. Blurring, Gaby decided. She closed her eyes, lifting her hands with a great effort and rubbing them. Maybe there were no lights at all, she thought? Her eyes felt gritty with weariness. It could just be her eyes. Or maybe it was her brain? Some sort of spell, low sugar? Low blood pressure? The rhythmic pounding of her blood in her eardrums seemed to alter, ever so

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slightly at first, to a sound more like drums—not blood pulsing through her veins, but hands patting lightly against stretched hide—and then she heard a tinkling sort of noise join the first, rather like a tambourine, in counter to the drums, and a rattle, like seeds shaken inside a gourd. Voices, chanting low at first, joined the beat that was rising steadily, making her pulse quicken. Alarm should have filled her, consternation. Instead, warm currents stirred within her as her heart quickened with burgeoning excitement. A sense almost of breathless anticipation gripped her. Her skin began to prickle with alertness. When she finally opened her eyes again, she saw without either surprise or alarm that the lights were no longer merely lights. People moved around her. They glowed, that same, strange blue light dancing over their naked skin as they writhed together in a beautiful, erotic imitation of acts of lovemaking. The woman she found herself staring at turned to look at her. “Call him. Summon him. He will give you your heart’s desire.” Gaby stared. The woman’s lips hadn’t moved. Summon who, she wondered? Him. Anka. The god of fertility. Anka. Anka. Anka. Call him. He will come to you. Did she want him to come? she wondered as the dancers moved around her, encouraging her … demanding that she respond. The vague sense of excitement and anticipation became more pronounced as she watched them, listened to the chant. It became a sense of urgency. Heat seemed to well within her in waves that grew stronger and stronger. Her skin ached, burned … to be touched, she realized. Her breath, sawing in and out of her lungs became more labored until she was panting for breath, felt heated, dizzying waves washing through her mind. “Anka, Anka,” she whispered, realizing finally that he was what she needed, wanted desperately. Her mouth and lips were dry from her panting breaths. She moistened them with her tongue, tried to gather moisture into her dry mouth. “Anka come to me.” He was standing over her, staring down at her when she managed to pry her eyelids open a fraction. As she stared up at him, her eyes widening, every drop of moisture in her body seemed to gather within her woman’s channel. It wept with need. That nether throat closed with want, thirsted for his caress. He was … magnificent. Dark, golden brown skin stretched over a body of beautifully molded muscle. A leather loin cloth covered his groin and narrow hips. His body V’d outward above his narrow waist and hips to form a broad, well defined chest. Thin strips of leather formed gauntlets from wrist to elbow, accentuating the broad palms and long tapered fingers of his hands and the bulging muscles of his upper arms. Long, impossibly silky looking blue, black hair shifted and moved along his shoulders and chest with each ragged breath he pulled into his lungs almost like the hair was a live thing. The upper portion of his face was hidden beneath a mask, but the sensual curve of his lips made her belly tremble.

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Those lips curled as her gaze finally made its way to them, parting to reveal even, white teeth. Slowly, he sank to his knees until she could feel the weight of his buttocks settle on her upper thighs, could feel the nudge of his engorged cock beneath the loincloth against her mound. Pain and pleasure shot through her in a jolt when he rocked against her. This form pleases you, Moonflower? Confusion flickered through her. Form? And how could she understand him? And why would he call her Moonflower? He leaned toward her, grasping her upper arms lightly and then allowing his hands to skim downward along her arms as he straightened again. A shiver of pleasure skated through her as she felt the faintly rough texture of his skin against her. Surprised to feel anything at all, Gaby looked down at herself and received yet another surprise. She was bare. She’d been wearing her shirt, hadn’t she? She didn’t remember taking it off. He chuckled. I am Anka. With me anything is possible, little Moonflower. Gaby found herself smiling back, felt happiness joining the steaming desire within her. This is just a dream, she realized, a fantastic, erotic dream, but still a dream. He leaned toward her again. This time, though, he braced his palms against the stone on either side of her. She looked up into his eyes, mesmerized by the emerald glints in the thin band that surrounded the wide black pupils of his eyes. A harder wave of heat suffused her. Her nipples, already erect and engorged with blood, began to tingle and throb, sending hard currents of need arrowing through her body to her womb. She caught her breath, groaned as the sensations intensified, spread all over her body with the weight of a touch that wasn’t a touch, as if invisible hands were stroking her all over. Tension coiled in her body. She welcomed it, wanted it, and at the same time, disappointment flickered through her dazed, clouded mind. She wanted his touch. She wanted to feel his hands and mouth on her. She wanted to feel his engorged flesh filling her, stroking the weeping walls of her sex, delving deeply inside of her. He pushed the thoughts from her mind. She wasn’t certain how she knew that he had done it, but she did. She forgot it in the next moment, gasping as she felt his flesh pressing against the mouth of her sex, felt the aching emptiness filled almost to the point of pain, the stroke of his hard flesh along the yielding flesh of her channel. Dizziness swept through her with the intensity of the sensations pounding through her. “You please me, little Moonflower,” he breathed against her ear as he surged into her again, filling her with a trembling urgency that threatened to explode into rapture, “the delicate scent of your flesh, your taste, the softness of your body. The desire you feel for me … stirs a … yearning within me I have not felt in … many years.” “Anka,” Gaby breathed rapturously, struggling against the climax she could feel building toward release. It felt too good to stop. She wanted it to last forever. “What is your heart’s desire, Moonflower? Ask me and I will give it to you.” She couldn’t think. Her mind was a confusing whirl of disjointed thoughts, churning with heat, sparking with fiery, intense sensation. She sensed a demand for an answer, though. “You,” she gasped, realizing the moment she voice it aloud that that was what she wanted more than anything.

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The response startled him. She felt it in the sudden tension surrounding her. It was as if the very air crackled with electricity. She felt a gentle probing within her mind, sensed amusement gathering within him. “That would please me,” he murmured, almost meditively. “I will give you what you are afraid to ask for, believe you can not have.” The words had no sooner filtered into her mind than she felt fiery, almost painful heat flood her belly. Her body seized so hard it crushed the breath from her lungs and then jolt after jolt of rapture sizzled along every nerve ending until blackness welled up around her and swallowed her whole. Gaby’s first awareness was a sense of such supreme well being and happiness that bewilderment filtered through her sluggish mind as it slowly climbed to full awareness and she finally opened her eyes. Darkness surrounded her. Not a complete, profound darkness, but enough that her first thought was that she’d woken wide awake in the middle of the night. A pounding sound drifted to her, resurrecting flickers of memory that she couldn’t quite grasp. “Dr. LaPlante!” There was concern in the voice that struck Gaby as odd at first. Reluctantly yielding up the urge to curl up and enjoy the strange sense of completeness a little longer, Gaby pushed herself upright with an effort. Her eyes had adjusted to the dimness and she saw that she was wearing nothing but her panties and a shirt, lying on a stone platform instead of her cot. “Dr. LaPlante! Gaby! Are you all right?” Memory descended upon her in an avalanche of images. “Yes,” she called out, discovered her voice was hoarse, scratchy, barely audible and cleared her throat to try again. “I’m all right.” Except she had to pee. The thought reminded her of why she wasn’t wearing her pants. Relieved for some reason she couldn’t quite identify to discover she’d removed her pants herself, Gaby glanced around until she located them and moved to the edge of the altar near the steps that led up to it. The crotch of her panties, she discovered, embarrassed, was damp … more than damp, actually. The musky scent of sex tickled at her nostrils as she touched the space between her thighs. The outer lips of her sex tingled, sending a faint throb through her lower belly. My god, she thought in dismay! A wet dream? Frowning, probing her memory gently, she scooted to the edge of the platform until she could feel the cold stone of the first step beneath her toes. Her muscles protested the movements as she climbed stiffly down. Her inner thighs quivered. She’d dreamed … something … something bizarre, she remembered. Her skin prickled all over, the fine hairs on the back of her neck lifting. She glanced toward the darkened alcove where the god sat on his throne, but she found she couldn’t probe the deeper shadows that concealed him. Distracted by that discovery, she glanced toward the floodlight she’d left burning the night before. It was off. Guilt and dismay filled her. She’d left it on and the battery had gone dead. She didn’t know why she even bothered to check it. She supposed it was one of those mindless things one did when one didn’t want to believe, but when she’d pulled her pants on, she strode toward the light as she fastened up her pants. Squatting down, she peered at the thing in the gloom and finally reached for the switch, flicking it in the

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opposite direction. The light blinded her, startled her, and she sat backwards in the dust, twisting her face to one side to avoid the light. When had she turned it off, she wondered, jogging her mind for a memory that remained elusive? Shaking her head with the thought that she must have been far more upset than she’d realized to forget getting up to turn the thing off, she blindly sought the switch and turned it off again. It took many moments for her eyes to adjust to the dimness once more. She sat where she’d fallen, blinking, rubbing her eyes, testing her memory for flickering bits of information that teased at her but determinedly eluded her efforts to grasp them. “The men came back this morning. They’re working on a support we can use to wench you up.” Wench her up? Dismayed, feeling like a cow, Gaby pushed herself up right and got to her feet stiffly, brushing at the dust she’d collected on her pants when she sprawled out. “What about the rope?” she called up to Dr. Oldman when she reached the opening of the shaft. “Enrique found a piece of rope we missed last night,” he responded. There was just enough sarcasm in the statement to suggest the ‘found’ rope hadn’t been found where it was supposed to be. Not that she was going to quibble over it. At least someone had produced it and she could get out. The experience hadn’t been near as terrifying as she’d thought it would be, but she had no desire to spend another night in the temple. “I’m going to test the thing as soon as they have it rigged up … to make sure it will hold you when we pull you up,” Dr. Sheffield offered. Gaby’s lips twisted wryly. Right, she thought, in a pig’s eye. She could hear the excitement threading his voice. He was just anxious to get down and explore the chamber. She was surprised he hadn’t slithered down the shaft behind her the night before. No doubt he’d wanted to be sure there weren’t any dangerous traps in the chamber itself before risking his neck. She didn’t care. She just hoped they hurried. She had to pee and she didn’t want to be squatting in the corner when Dr. Sheffield arrived. She could just imagine his outrage if he discovered she’d pissed in his great find. To her relief, she heard sounds indicating Dr. Sheffield’s imminent arrival only a few minutes later. Moving back out of the way as his booted feet slid into view, she stood to one side as he extracted himself and got to his feet. He didn’t glance at her as he untied the rope that had been looped around each of his thighs to form a sling support. He merely dropped the rope, staring blank faced at the chamber. The rope was snatched upward again before Gaby could grab it. “Hey!” “Just a minute,” Mark called. “I’m coming down, too!” Gaby ground her teeth. Was the whole fucking team coming down, she wondered angrily, to ‘rescue’ her? They were. The moment Mark disentangled himself, he gave the rope a jerk and again it disappeared.

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“Fuck!” Gaby muttered under her breath before she thought better of it. She needn’t have worried. Neither Mark nor the professor gave any indication at all that they’d heard her. Dr. Sheffield had flicked on the floodlight and both men moved like zombies toward the frieze that covered the walls of the chamber. Gaby stared at them irritably for several moments before her gaze was drawn to the figure seated in the alcove. Without quite realizing it, she moved toward him, tilting her head back to stare into his glittering green gaze. Warmth flooded her as she stared up at him. With surprise and more than a little embarrassment, she realized it was desire stirring to life inside of her. Images flickered through her mind that built upon the burgeoning warmth. A shiver went through her as the images became so profound she could almost feel his skin brushing along hers, felt her belly clench as if she could feel his cock surging inside of her. “Anka,” she said on a breath of sound, unaware of the yearning in her voice. “What?” Jolted out of her absorption, Gaby glanced at Dr. Sheffield blankly, wondering when he’d come to stand next to her. “What?” “I thought you said something,” he said absently. “Anka?” Adjusting his glasses, he leaned forward slightly at the waist, as if trying to bring the image into focus. “Is that what he’s holding?” he asked doubtfully. “My god! I believe you’re right! This is … I don’t know what to make of this, to be honest.” Gaby glanced up at Anka’s eyes again, but the odd, almost electric current that had enveloped her before had vanished. “His name is Anka,” she said, rubbing at the ache between her eyes that hadn’t been there moments ago. The comment drew Dr. Sheffield’s attention to her again. He studied her thoughtfully. “You should go to your tent and try to get some rest. I know this has been an ordeal for you.” His concern would’ve been more touching if he’d seemed the least interested in helping her out of the chamber instead of coming down to explore and ignoring her as if she wasn’t even there, Gaby thought irritably. She didn’t argue with him, though, or address the implication that the experience had somehow ‘disturbed’ her mind. Turning away, she moved to the altar to gather up her belongings. She noticed when she climbed down again that Mark had followed her. He barely acknowledged her, however. He was focused on the altar. “What’s this?” Gaby noticed he’d touched the oily residue of the lubricant she’d sprayed on the stone. He was rubbing it between his fingertips. “Oil. I sprayed the stones down last night to make sure scorpions couldn’t crawl into my sleeping bag with me.” His eyes were bulging as he looked directly at her for the first time. “Oil?” She caught the disapproval in his tone. “It didn’t hurt the rocks,” she said dryly, turning and stalking to the shaft and securing her bundle in the rope. “You sprayed oil on the … in this …. You didn’t consider the possibility of damaging something irreplaceable?” Dr. Sheffield demanded, obviously outraged as he moved to examine the edges of the altar. Gaby turned to glare at the man as the workers began hauling her sleeping bag up in response to her tug on the rope. “I consider my health and well being of some importance,” she snapped.

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Instead of responding, he looked around as if searching the room. “I haven’t seen any scorpions in here.” “It’s dark in here,” Gaby responded testily. “Just because you haven’t seen any doesn’t mean there aren’t any.” “But the tomb was sealed,” Mark objected. “It isn’t a tomb,” Gaby shot back. “This is a temple to the fertility god, Anka, and this is the sacred breeding ground.” That statement caught the attention of everyone present. She glanced around at them, feeling more than a little defensive at their expressions. “How did you arrive at that?” Sheila demanded. Gaby gave her a look. “The frieze along the walls?” Sheila’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not stupid. Anyone can see the depictions suggest fertility rites. But how did you arrive at the conclusion that this was the chamber where the rituals were held? If this chamber is any indication, the temple must be massive and filled with dozens of chambers. And how did you get the idea he was called Anka? That’s Egyptian, isn’t it?” Frowning as it sank into her that she had no idea how she knew, Gaby searched for something to say. She’d dreamed it, she realized abruptly, feeling hot color begin to creep into her cheeks. Before she could embarrass herself further, Mark drew everyone’s attention. “Hey! I don’t think this is an altar at all! The slab of rock on top is just resting on the supports. I think this is a tomb!” She’d been sleeping on some dead person’s tomb, Gaby thought, horrified? Having sex on somebody’s tomb, her mind corrected. God! Was that worse than dancing on somebody’s grave?

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Chapter Four Amusement settled over Anka as he watched Gaby’s flight from the chamber. It was typical of the conundrum that was Gabrielle that, as intelligent as she was, she refused to accept anything that fell outside the order than she demanded of her universe. He frowned after a moment, though. As amusing as he found her disordered thoughts, he did not find his own turmoil nearly as pleasing. She was struggling very hard to dismiss everything that had passed between them. Let it go, he told himself. But he could not. It piqued him mightily that she was determined to thrust it all neatly into the back of her mind and dismiss it as something that had not happened at all. He did not have to search long or hard for the reason for his own turmoil. She had more than surprised him when he had come to her. She had stunned him. In all the time he had interacted with her kind, no one, not one had asked him for the gift she had demanded of him. They had begged for riches. They had asked for power. They had pleaded for fruitfulness. They had wanted all manner of ‘things’ and petitioned him for those gifts they thought would bring them happiness and fulfillment. And yet when he asked her to tell him her heart’s desire, offered to give her whatever that was, she had not asked for what he had expected. She had said ‘you’. The memory threw him into turmoil all over again. He did not know what to make of such a request. He did not even know how to respond, or if he should respond. He was more than merely intrigued by her now, though. She had awakened his hunter’s instincts. She had stirred to life an appetite for the things he’d long denied himself—the corporal pleasures of the flesh. **** Gaby managed to make it out of the chamber before the workers could gather the equipment Dr. Sheffield was bellowing for. When she left, Dr. Sheffield was trying to coax some of the workers down the shaft to help remove the slab. Ignoring the argument that was growing more heated by the moment, Gaby shifted the bundle under her arm and struggled out of the pit with it, no mean feat considering she had to climb three ladders to reach the level where the tents had been set up. She wanted to bathe, but she wasn’t certain all of the workers were occupied in the pit … or would stay down below. From the voices, it sounded to her like some of them would be walking off the job. Deciding after a moment to dismiss her uneasiness over it in favor of her current needs, she grabbed bathing supplies when she dropped off her bedding and headed to the ‘facilities’. Privacy wasn’t exactly insured. The john and the camp shower had been set up in a tent and canvas walls did nothing but block the view. With everyone at the dig site, though, Gaby had far more privacy than she could usually count on. Having relieved

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herself, she went into the bathing area, took off her clothes and, after taking a deep breath, plunged beneath the drizzling shower head. The temperature of the river water wasn’t particularly cold unless one happened to be particularly hot when one plunged into it. All that could be said for it was that it was a way to get clean with some privacy and some assurance that the water was actually clean and free of harmful bacteria and/or larger living organisms. She felt better when she’d bathed and changed. She didn’t know why she’d been creeped out by the discovery that she’d slept on a tomb. She wasn’t superstitious. Dead was dead and they couldn’t be offended by anything anyone did above their burial spot—not even something as disrespectful as fucking. She examined bones all the time. Most of them had been dead centuries, at the very least, but she’d examined skeletal remains for the police a few times when a body was found that had been buried long enough there was little left for them to go on to solve the case. She wasn’t repulsed by bones. Decaying tissue had an ick factor, depending on how old it was, but bones … no. She didn’t need to sleep, or to rest, but she didn’t particularly want to rejoin the party in the crypt at the moment and she didn’t feel like standing in the hot sun. Finding a place to settle beneath the shade of one of the open tents, she stared absently at the jungle, trying to sort through her thoughts. She knew she had to have dreamed the bizarre things that had been dropping into place in her memory since she woke, and yet it didn’t have the ‘feel’ of a dream. In the dream, she’d thought she was awake, shielded from what she was seeing by an odd sort of lassitude, but alert enough that she’d been looking for an explanation for the strange lights. A breathless sort of thrill rushed through her when she finally allowed herself to recall the sensations she’d experienced when Anka had made love—ok, fucked her. The sense of happiness and satisfaction she’d felt upon first waking, she knew, were because of that … wet dream, which was her first ever and brought on by what? Some sort of weird fascination with the statue? Was that why she couldn’t remember Anka actually doing anything? She remembered looking up at him. She remembered, in shivery detail, everything she’d felt—except she couldn’t remember him physically touching her beyond that first brush of his hands that had made her clothing vanish. And what was up with that, anyway? Why would she even dream in terms of magic? He had been wearing some kind of leather looking breechclout. She certainly didn’t remember him taking it off. So how could he have had sex with her? What was she thinking! The whole thing had been a dream! Why was she quibbling over the details? And why was it that remembering it was enough to make her feel all hot and bothered all over again? God! She was so pathetic! Granted, she could barely remember the last time she’d gotten laid, mostly because she’d tried like hell to forget it, but it wasn’t as if she went around hassling after men, fantasizing, looking desperately for somebody to scratch her itch. She rarely felt an

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itch. Mostly, she didn’t even think about having sex because she never saw anyone that interested her enough to put it in her mind. Last night sure as hell shouldn’t have put her ‘in the mood’! She stewed over that awhile and finally remembered she had been pretty fascinated with the fertility god’s dong. She didn’t remember feeling aroused, though. She’d just been … sort of awed and unnerved at the size of it. Why had she felt compelled to spout all that nonsense about the temple, anyway, she thought irritably? Now she was going to either have to explain that she’d had that weird dream, or just leave it hanging. Either way, she would sound like a hysterical female. She had not been hysterical! She’d been upset, unnerved, but she damned well thought she’d handled herself well under the circumstances. The worst thing she could do, she finally decided, was to slink off with her tail between her legs. She’d be better off to brazen it out and, somehow, just pass off the comments. Having made the decision, she got up resolutely and headed to the dig site. The workers, from what she could tell, seemed to have decided to stay, although it also appeared that they’d flatly refused to go inside the temple … or tomb, whatever it was. Several of them glanced at her as she made her way to the shaft, but they averted their gazes almost as quickly. Strange. She could understand the archeology team behaving like that toward her—they were convinced she was quivering on the edge of a breakdown only because she’d spent the night in the temple alone. But why the natives? She didn’t see why they would be uneasy about her state of mind. It was almost as if they knew something. Shrugging it off with an effort, she made her way to the shaft. Two workmen were stationed at the four legged timber brace they’d built above the hole to rescue her and help the others down. Like the others, they looked distinctly uneasy and they barely glanced at her. Instead, they merely nodded when she indicated she wanted to go down, and averted their gazes. Superstition, she told herself, although she couldn’t imagine what sort of misguided mythological ideas they might have about this place. No one had known it existed before Dr. Sheffield and Dr. Oldman had stumbled upon it. How could there be curses or anything of that nature connected to it that they might be concerned about? She arrived in the chamber in the midst of a discussion regarding the body they’d decided they would find in the altar cum crypt. She wasn’t convinced it was a crypt. Why would there be steps leading up to a crypt? On the other hand, she supposed it also defied logic that an altar would be so high. Unless the people that had once inhabited the city were giants? That thought directed her attention to Anka. It dawned on her after she’d stared at the statue of the god for several moments that the altar had probably been scaled to their giant of a god. Was there any way in hell, she wondered, that she’d experienced some sort of psychic event?

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She wasn’t inclined to believe in the supernatural any more than she believed in any other myths or magic, but she felt as if it hadn’t been a dream at all. Maybe it had been her subconscious mind interpreting the depictions on the wall around her? Whatever it was, she felt as if she knew what the chamber had been used for and how. She felt strongly that the dancers she’d seen in that half waking state had been performing a ritual dance to summon the god and that the altar was an altar, a place where the woman who was suffering infertility lay, summoning the god to help her. That was why the altar had been built as it was, so that the god, Anka, could come to her and answer her prayers. Maybe the slab on top was nothing more than the consecrated stone settled there? “It’s definitely hollow,” Mark said at just that moment, frowning at the screen on the sonogram he was using to examine the altar. That shot down her theory, of course. Maybe. “Assuming there is someone buried here, possibly preserved, we can’t take a chance on opening it until we have a container suitable for moving it. We just don’t have what we need on site right now. If it is mummified, it won’t last long in this kind of weather.” Dr. Sheffield nodded when Dr. Oldman had finished. “You’re right. We’ll send for a container. In the meanwhile, we can study the chamber itself and focus on unearthing the remainder of the temple. Sheila was right. Considering the size of this chamber, we’re looking at an enormous tomb.” Gaby felt like rolling her eyes. She could’ve figured out the temple was huge from looking at this one room and she wasn’t even an archeologist, or majoring in archeology! It was easily forty by forty feet and near the top of the temple. The footprint must be staggering! She stayed to watch, basically, while they measured, photographed, cataloged, studied, exclaimed, and theorized. This wasn’t exactly her field, but she still found it fascinating. She was relieved that she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the craftsmanship and artistry indicated a civilization more advanced than the Aztecs, the most modern of the ancient civilizations. It worried everyone, but it was a find unlike any before and they were determined to follow procedures carefully so that they wouldn’t have their ultimate theories about the place shot down in flames by the scientific community. The sense of being watched crept over her from time to time. Each time the hairs on the back of her neck prickled, she would glance again at the statue of Anka. Finally, deciding she was rapidly becoming obsessed, she left. She confined her visits after that to exploring the ruins slowly being uncovered. A week after her wild little adventure, the native workers uncovered a third outcropping, supporting the original theory that the building had been built in a very similar fashion to the pyramids of the Aztecs. Within weeks of the first discovery, Dr. Sheffield had rounded up twice the number of workers he’d originally hired and the great pyramid began to take shape as yet another level was revealed. The container Dr. Sheffield had ordered arrived at the site nearly five weeks later, flown in and lowered by helicopter. Gaby hadn’t realized that this was what she’d been waiting for. For weeks, she’d

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been debating whether or not to return home, chafing at having very little to do beyond assist the other scientists at their work. She would have left directly after the accident if not for the fact that she realized that there was a good chance that rumors would follow her forever afterward. No one had even questioned her about the remarks she’d made in the chamber when she’d disputed the theories of the other scientists, which made her feel as if, rightly or not, they were united in an opinion of her that wasn’t likely to enhance her career. Not that she thought that staying was likely to change that estimation of her, but she realized she needed a reason to go that wouldn’t have the appearance of fleeing. It would’ve been fortunate if the Museum had recalled her to her duties there, but they didn’t and Gaby wasn’t really surprised. In the first place, good fortune had never followed her. In the second, her assistant, she suspected, was making hay while the sun shone, making the most of the opportunity presented to him by Gaby’s absence to try to worm his way into her position. The container, though, that was the break she’d been waiting for. Dr. Sheffield and the others would set about removing the remains in the crypt to examine it and ship it off to the states where it could be studied under optimal preservation conditions. And she would accompany it, because that was what she’d been brought for to begin with. Or rather, she would accompany him. Because she knew who had been interred in the crypt. Anka, she realized, would finally be released. **** No one was more dismayed than Gaby when the helicopter, after releasing the guy wires supporting the container, moved to the landing area that had been cleared and leveled in anticipation of their arrival. Not that the helicopter itself was any reason for dismay. That had been part of the plan. They were to remain to airlift the remains out of the jungle once they had been recovered. The people the helicopter disgorged when the engine was cut were another matter. Gaby knew Dr. Sheffield had been involved in a good deal of wrangling over the find with the local government regarding his plan to remove it from the country for further studies, but he’d indicated that he’d gotten his way. The government official, minister of antiquities, and anthropologist who emerged were completely unexpected, and totally unwelcome, guests. They seemed to be laboring under the impression that they would be receiving the mummy Dr. Sheffield expected to discover, and any and all valuables discovered buried with him. Dr. Sheffield’s rage was only surpassed by Dr. Oldman’s. Though both men managed to contain their spleen admirably, it was a sullen group that made their way into the temple and along the corridor that had been discovered leading to the chamber and finally gathered there to watch the proceedings. Gaby followed up the rear, wondering if she would even have the opportunity to see the remains let alone study them. She hadn’t been inside the temple in weeks, not since the day after her accident, but she found she wasn’t at all surprised to discover that even the corridor leading to the chamber was as richly detailed with mosaic depictions of the history of the race that had built the pyramid as the chamber itself. The place was a marvel in and of itself. The only

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aspect more amazing than the artistry and craftsmanship of the structure and art was the fact that it looked virtually untouched by time. If it hadn’t been so breathtaking in detail and design she might have wondered if the entire thing was simply an elaborate hoax, but modern man, quite simply, was not capable of producing anything approaching the temple and no one with the money to build such an edifice would have been insane enough to invest it in such an elaborate hoax. When they arrived at last in the chamber, Gaby saw that a support framework had been constructed over and around the altar, or crypt—she was not going to accept that it was a crypt until she saw with her own eyes that it actually was one—to carefully remove the slab of stone that sealed it. No one was prepared for what they found when the slab was finally removed. They quickly discovered, though, that it did not merely rest on top as they’d originally supposed. The stone had been cemented to the base with some sort of mortar that was surprisingly resistant to time and they had had to wait while tools were brought in to chip it away and break the seal. Almost more stunning than finding that the slab was cemented to the base was the discovery once the seal had been broken that the crypt was a perfect vacuum. It sucked air in an audible whoosh when the seal was finally broken and the slab lifted. Gaby felt her skin prickle all over when she heard the sound, like a giant inhalation of breath. One glance at the other observers was enough to assure her that she was not alone. Everyone in the room exchanged uneasy glances. It still took an effort to refrain from surging forward as the stone slowly rose upward and then was walked sideways and lowered to the chamber floor. No one else resisted. The rest of the archeology team and the government representatives stampeded forward, jostling each other for a position that would allow them to look inside as Dr. Sheffield illuminated the interior. A collective gasp of awe rose from the group staring down into the cavity revealed. Draw by their reaction, Gaby moved forward and tried to peer over the shoulders blocking her view, but she saw fairly quickly that it was a waste of effort. Short of shoving someone out of the way, she could see very little beyond the glint of light on bright metal. It was still enough. Stunned as she was, she knew it could only be a sarcophagus. In South America? She was carried away again with the tide that withdrew, reluctantly, as Dr. Sheffield ordered everyone back so that a couple of the students would have room to work chains beneath the casket to lift it out. Gaby found as she was buffeted by the tide of people moving back that she was shivering. Shock, she wondered distantly? She lifted her head to look at the statue of Anka. It’s you, isn’t it? From out of no where a sense of loss settled over her. Her throat closed, making it painfully difficult to swallow. That was why the statue had been wrought in such life-like detail. The god, Anka, was no figment of fertile, primitive imagination. They’d deified a man.

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Chapter Five Had Anka been the god of all things to them, Gaby wondered dazedly? Was he responsible for the city, the temple, the amazingly advanced civilization they’d discovered? Where had he come from? Whatever Dr. Sheffield and Dr. Oldman said to the contrary, the influence of ancient African civilizations couldn’t be ignored. Even his name. Which no one but her, she realized, believed was actually his name. But the other things? The temple that was strongly reminiscent of the tombs of the ancient Egyptians—that, if they were right, pre-dated those tombs. The sarcophagus? Granted, she hadn’t actually seen it, but she’d seen enough to know it had been fashioned of gold. He was holding an Ankh. Even Dr. Sheffield had acknowledged that much. In the back of Gaby’s mind, though, the only thing of any importance at all was the fact that he was dead—long gone from her world. Why did that make her feel like crying when she’d never really believed he existed at all? Because she had believed, she realized. In spite of every effort to reason the dream away as nothing but pure imagination, she’d actually believed she’d felt his touch like a lover. Warmth quivered through her at the flicker of memory through her mind. Shaken at last from her self-absorption by a shoulder buffeting hers, Gaby realized she was still in the way of the workers trying to secure the coffin and raise it. After looking around the chamber a little dazedly, she moved away from the other observers and found a position near the doorway that led into the chamber. The edges of the doorway were ragged with broken rock from where the team had hammered down the stones that had sealed it, but she scarcely noticed the jagged stones digging in to her as she leaned against the frame for support. It came to her that she’d expected they would find Anka entombed here, even while she’d tried to deny it. Why? Did she actually know the things she thought she knew? Or was it just … trauma from her experience combined with a gradual mental breakdown from the harsh conditions she’d endured here for so many weeks? And if she did know, how did she know? She wasn’t psychic. She didn’t believe it was just a matter of having denied something she’d known all along about herself because it defied reason and she was a scientist. Maybe such things did actually exist, but not within her. She found herself hoping the government people would relieve them of the

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mummy. If they didn’t, she would have to examine the remains and she didn’t think she could be professionally detached about it. Her heart was in her throat when they at last secured the chains and began to slowly and carefully lift the sarcophagus from the crypt. Like everyone else, she suspected, she held her breath, but she doubted it was for the same reason. She stepped aside as the container was brought in and moved into position to receive the sarcophagus. By the time they’d shouldered past her and she could resume her previous position, the casket was clear of the vault, gleaming in the beams from the flood lights. She stared at it unblinkingly, holding her breath as they moved it over the container and began lowering it, as if by doing so she was somehow helping to prevent disaster. The men hadn’t even had the chance to remove the chains when everyone surged forward again to get their first good look at it. Awe lit the faces of every member of the archeology team, save that of Sheila, and the government representatives. On their faces, Gaby saw pure avarice. She was almost surprised they didn’t grab the beautifully wrought casket of gold encrusted with gems and toss the remains onto the floor. Without even being aware that she’d done so, Gaby moved closer for an unobstructed view as everyone reluctantly moved back so that Jimmy, the student designated to record the findings on film, could get some shots of the sarcophagus before it was sealed in the container. Tears blurred her eyes as she stared down at it. She wasn’t even aware of them until the image blurred and she had to blink to focus. The lid of the casket had been as faithfully wrought as the statue, she saw, wondering almost idly how the artists had created it. Had they made a mold of his body and used it to pour liquefied gold? Or were they just that skilled in working precious metals? She saw when she finally dragged her gaze away that Sheila was studying her face, not the golden coffin. For several moments they merely stared at one another. Sheila was the first to look away. **** Stepping from the plane in Miami, Gaby mused, was almost like stepping off a time machine, almost as jarring as it had been to step off the plane when she’d first arrived in South America. It would take a while, she realized, to reacquaint herself with civilization after the months she’d spent in the jungle. She felt strangely detached, not joyful as she’d thought she would feel, not even relieved to be back. When she’d deplaned, Gaby waited while the ground crew unloaded the container she’d accompanied back, feeling a bizarre sense of unreality, almost as if she’d escorted a head of state to his final resting place. A half a dozen representatives of the South American country where Anka had been discovered deplaned before her. Most of the museum staff was present to witness, and even some local politicians. Photographers converged on them, held back by an inadequate line of security that was made up of two airport security officers and two Dade county police officers. Finding herself under such heavy scrutiny was unnerving to say the least. Publicity wasn’t anything she’d ever sought, even when she’d had occasion to work with

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the police department upon the discovery of twenty or thirty year old murder victims. She was too apathetic to be as unnerved as she might have been otherwise, though. She didn’t entirely understand the depression that had settled over her, the sense of loss. It made no sense to her, but she couldn’t seem to shrug it off. She was glad she was back, she decided when she had at last made it through the ordeal of customs and watched the container escorted off to the museum. Everything had been prepared for the all important opening of the sarcophagus and studies of what it held, but she wouldn’t begin her examination before the following morning. She had tonight to rest and prepare herself. Her apartment seemed alien to her, not the welcoming comfort and security of something familiar. She wondered as she stood in the center of her living room why she’d ever thought the décor she’d chosen was homey. The place, decorated in ultra modern chic, looked antiseptic. But then what did she know of homey? It was appalling to realize that the place looked almost as institutional as the Home for Girls where she’d grown up … except more, somehow. Instead of looking clean and bright, the whitewashed walls, pale beige carpet, white upholstery, and chrome and glass tables and display cabinets made the place seem cold, impersonal. Maybe it was personalized space, though, she thought dully? Colorless, like she was. Dropping her bags in the middle of the floor, she wandered from the living area to her room, stripping her clothes as she went and dropping them piece by piece on the floor in an untidy trail. When she reached her bathroom, she turned on the shower full blast, waited until the water was the next thing to scalding and climbed in, standing under the blast of water and allowing it to scour her. There was no food in the refrigerator, naturally. She’d cleaned it out before she left, and not much more in the cabinets. She wasn’t really interested in eating anyway, she decided. All she wanted to do was to fall across her wonderfully soft mattress, wrap herself in the fluffy comforter, and sleep. **** “As flattering as I find your grief, Moonflower, even oddly pleasing, I confess I’ve never entirely understood your race.” The voice, entwined with her dreams, thick with a Hispanic accent, didn’t entirely rouse Gaby at first. “Go ‘way,” she muttered groggily. “I don’t want to dream about you anymore.” His chuckle, deep, caressing, aroused her as his words hadn’t. “You know it wasn’t a dream.” Still drunk with sleep, Gaby shoved herself upright, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and stared at the man standing at the foot of her bed, feeling terror slowly claw its way up her throat. She couldn’t find her voice. She merely gaped at the stranger for endless moments, trying to command her body to leap from the bed and run. She’d no sooner accepted the reality of the intruder, though, than she became so excruciatingly aware of the fact that she’d fallen into the bed completely naked she found herself waging an internal battle with exposing herself versus self-preservation. The man lifted his arms, staring down at them thoughtfully … almost as if he’d

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never seen them before. “This body displeases you?” he asked doubtfully. “I confess, I was not too taken with it myself. This man is a pathetic specimen.” “I’ll scream!” Gaby managed finally, her voice hoarse and barely above a whisper. The man tilted his head. “Why would you do that?” Gaby’s jaw slid to half mast. “What are you doing here? How did you get in? What do you want?” His dark brows rose. He stepped forward out of the shadows so that the light spilling from the bathroom fully illuminated him at last. She hadn’t imagined the Hispanic accent. He was swarthy, his untidy, straight, black hair almost shoulder length and he looked more Indian that Spanish—slight of build. She doubted he was even five and half feet tall and her brain instantly produced the deduction that he was Mexican—not Cuban as she would’ve thought considering the sizable Cuban population in south Florida. Nevertheless, he was wiry with muscle and he was a man, which meant he would be far stronger than her even if he wasn’t that much bigger. He leaned forward and placed a hand on the bed, or rather her ankle beneath the comforter. Before his hand could tighten, Gaby leapt up as if she’d been catapulted from the mattress, uttering a mousy squeak. The sheets tangled around her like an anaconda as she attempted to leap from the bed. She slammed into the floor hard enough that it shook the floor, rattled the glass, and completely stunned her. Before she could scramble to her feet, he caught her, pulling her upright with unnerving ease. “Let me go!” she snarled, launching an attack with fingers curled into claws the moment she was on her feet. He caught her wrists, pulling her arms out to either side of her and using her own weight and the bones of her arms as leverage to hold her in place. Tilting his head, he studied her curiously. “I can not help but notice you do not seem pleased to see me, little Moonflower,” he murmured, his deep voice laced with amusement. “I don’t know you!” Gaby gasped. “I’ve never seen you before in my life!” His amusement deepened, his lips curling. “Oh, but you do, Moonflower. Look into my eyes and you will know me.” “Stop calling me Moonflower!” “You are feisty! I believe I like that,” he added musingly. “I don’t give a fuck what you like or don’t like! Get out before I call the cops!” “Why would I be alarmed by that?” he asked, obviously amused. “They’d put you in jail for breaking and entering and probably for assault, you asshole, that’s why!” He nodded understanding, but shrugged indifferently. “This body.” Gaby’s fear inspired anger wilted. Coldness crept into her. The man was crazy. “Simple,” the man corrected her. “Not crazy—a bit drunk, I might add.” A bit? He reeked of beer! It took Gaby several moments to realize she hadn’t voiced her suspicion aloud. She swallowed with an effort. “Who are you?” she gasped shakily. He drew her closer. Slipping an arm around her, he jerked her tightly against his body, gripped her hair with his other hand and dragged her head back so that she was staring up at his face. His eyes were dark, dilated with desire, but she saw emotion

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flickering there that seemed at odds with the situation, doubt, confusion. For a moment, though, that cleared and she saw something else … someone behind the man that physically restrained her. “I can feel what this body feels, Moonflower,” he murmured silkily, lowering his head until his hot breath caressed the sensitive shell of her ear. “You want what I desire, to share the carnal pleasures of the flesh denied both of us without a shell such as this.” A mixture of revulsion and desire wafted through Gaby. “I don’t want this!” Gaby finally managed through gritted teeth, wriggling one arm free at last and shoving at the shoulder of the man. He stared at her a long moment and finally, to her surprise, released her. “You are not pleased with this body,” he said, irritation threading his voice. Gaby staggered back when he let her go, flopping weakly on the edge of the bed when her legs connected with the mattress and her weight overbalanced her. She was staring straight at the man when Anka stepped out of him. The man wilted, landing on one knee on the floor. Throwing his arms out to brace himself as he pitched forward, he knelt on all fours for several moments and finally shook his head and lifted it to stare around him, slack jawed with stunned surprise. Uttering a string of Spanish—profanity Gaby didn’t doubt—he lurched to his feet, staggered a little drunkenly while he looked around and finally charged toward the door. She heard him slam into the outer door of her apartment, fumble for several moments with the locks and then the door opened and slammed closed again. Dazed and confused, Gaby turned to stare at the apparition. He looked displeased. He’d folded his arms over his chest and was studying her in frowning disapproval. “I had not expected you would be so hard to please,” he said irritably. “What? I’m not your little Moonflower anymore?” Gaby demanded testily. His eyes gleamed with both desire and amusement. Before Gaby could catch her breath or even attempt to banish the hallucination, she found herself swept backwards onto the bed, sprawled on her back with the ‘apparition’ planted firmly, and solidly, on top of her. How could she feel his weight? Heat? Even the tensile strength of his muscles and the silkiness of his skin? He shifted his ‘weight’ onto his elbows, levering himself slightly away from her to look down at her face. She felt the touch of his finger as he tapped the tip to her temple. “Because I make it so … here.” Gaby closed her eyes. “I knew I was losing my fucking mind,” she muttered a little sickly. His warm breath tickled her face as he chuckled huskily. “You do not truly believe that, my treasure, do you?” Gaby swallowed. “I don’t know what to believe … not anymore. Are you like … a ghost?” He studied her thoughtfully, but finally shrugged. “No. I am a being … as you are, just … somewhat different.” “Then why is that I only see you the way the statue looked? And what body lies in that sarcophagus we brought back from South America? It is a body, isn’t it?” He rose upward. He didn’t climb off of her and then the bed. He simply levered

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straight upright and settled on the floor. And then brushed his hands over himself as if brushing off dust. And then he was naked. A breathless sense of awe filled her. He was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. It took her breath just to look at him, stilled her heart in her chest and squeezed it painfully. As beautifully sculpted and perfectly proportioned as his body was, his face was … almost too handsome. He grinned her, showing even white teeth and a pair of dimples in either cheek, a purely human expression that was cocky, sensual, seductive and devastatingly effective. In the blink of an eye, literally, he moved from the side of the bed to sprawl on top of her once more. Gaby had a split second to feel absolute disbelief before he threw her into complete disorder. The feel of his mouth on hers was as real as anything she’d ever felt before, more real, more ravaging of her senses. She tasted him as he thrust his tongue into her mouth with possessiveness and hunger, and his taste sent a heady rush of pleasure through her. She felt his heated breath mingling with her own, stirring currents of fiery, exquisite need to life inside of her. Uttering a sound of surrender, making no attempt to fight the rush of feverish need that swamped her senses, Gaby’s body, mind, and spirit surged upward to join with him. She’d missed this desperately, she realized, wanted it with a hunger that had left her feeling unwhole, lacking of strength, or will, or spirit. Her body tingled at his touch, came to vibrant life beneath the stroking caress of his hands. Heat scorched her as she felt his mouth and tongue replace his hands. Her belly trembled with need, her passage clenching and unclenching rhythmically as her body sought the hardness of his flesh, wept for it. “Anka,” she breathed when she could breathe at all, the whispered word a blessing, a prayer, a demand for fulfillment. She sucked in her breath in a sharp gasp as she felt him penetrate her body, his cock surging and withdrawing along her passage as he rode her fiercely with his own need, thrusting into her almost savagely. Clutching at him, she began to moan as if she was dying. She felt as if she would, could hardly catch her breath for the fire that scoured her, for the tension that coiled her tightly into herself. Her climax broke over her abruptly, wrenching a hoarse cry from her throat. Every muscle in her body, it seemed, convulsed so hard it snatched her from consciousness and she felt as if she was falling into a deep pit. **** He had his head in the refrigerator when Gaby halted in the kitchen doorway. For several moments her heart seemed to stand still in her chest, not because she was afraid, not even because she was startled. What struck her was the very ‘normalcy’ of the scene, when nothing about it should have seemed the least bit normal. She’d woken feeling absolutely wonderful, satisfied, complete, and then discovered she was in her bed alone and she’d had to fight the urge to burst into tears and cry her heart out—because he was gone and she was alone and it hadn’t been anything but a dream. Finding him standing naked in front her opened refrigerator door was such a pleasant jolt of surprise that she could hardly believe she was actually looking at him for

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several moments. “What purpose does this serve?” Anka asked curiously when he’d shut the door. Swallowing against the tightness in her throat, Gaby folded her arms over her chest and leaned against the doorframe, content just to look at him and marvel over how absolutely gorgeous he was. “Refrigerator,” she responded absently. “It keeps food cold so that it lasts longer.” He had his head in the freezer by that time. “And this?” His voice sounded strangely hollow emerging from the interior. “Freezer compartment—freezes the food so that it lasts even longer.” He closed the door and looked at her for the first time, frowning when he saw she’d pulled on her robe. “I prefer you naked.” Gaby couldn’t help the smile that quirked her lips even though the imperious way he’d voiced his displeasure piqued her just a little. “Do you? Well, I’m used to wearing clothes. You should get used to it, too.” He shrugged dismissively. “I have no need for clothing. The elements do not touch me. I could not sense the cold of the box. This is why I asked.” Gaby frowned, digesting that as he moved to the stove, opened the oven and shoved his head inside to examine it. He couldn’t feel? Stupid! she chastised herself, distressed in a way she didn’t even want to examine. Nerves produced sensation and the brain interpreted it. Without nerve endings, no sensation. “And this is for?” “Cooking the food.” He straightened from his inspection and looked around the kitchen. “This entire room is set aside for food storage and preparation?” he asked in surprise. Gaby shrugged, examining the kitchen from an outsider’s perspective. It was a big kitchen for one person, granted, but it was the main reason she’d taken the apartment. “All homes have them,” she replied. “The chamber where I found you was pretty big,” she pointed out. His eyes crinkled at the corners with amusement. “Where I found you,” he corrected her. “There was a purpose.” “For the chamber?” “Yes.” “What did you mean, where you found me? Weren’t you in there before I got there?” “Long before, centuries I suspect.” “It’s 2006,” Gaby supplied. He chuckled. “This number means nothing to me, Moonflower.” Gaby reddened. “Of course not. That was stupid,” she muttered. He moved toward her, reaching to cup her face in his hands. “Thoughtless,” he corrected her, caressing her cheek for a moment before he was drawn away again to explore further. He stopped to study the small appliances. Bending down, he extended one finger toward the button that controlled the blender. “It’s not … plugged in,” Gaby said. Before she could finish the sentence, though, blue light shot from his finger tip and the blender started up, making them both jump at the sudden noise.

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“That’s handy,” Gaby commented, feeling uneasy for the first time. He glanced at her, but he didn’t respond to her remark. “Much has changed,” he said thoughtfully, “unless … this is a different land, no?” “It’s changed where you’re from, as well.” He studied her a long moment. “You do not know where I am from, Moonflower. You only know where I was when we met.” **** Gaby’s mind was a riot of conflicting thoughts and emotions as she stared down at the body on her examination table. Reluctance dominated, however. This was the man she’d spent the night with, she reflected. She was totally losing her mind, obsessing over a man who’d been dead thousands of years, and she couldn’t figure out why for the life of her. She had no idea how long she simply stood as if turned to stone, staring at the aged rags that covered him, but she didn’t emerge until someone in the room cleared their throat. The sound made her head lift, her eyes seek, instinctively, without conscious thought. After staring at her assistant blankly for several moments, she glanced at the Hispanic representatives waiting expectantly around the table and finally returned her attention to the mummy. What she was about to do was unthinkable and it had nothing to do with the fact that performing an autopsy on remains of this antiquity was rarely done because of the damage that could result. She wasn’t concerned about the possibility of losing what might be the greatest find of the century … or the one before, for that matter, maybe the greatest find of all time, she thought a little wildly. Her hand shook as she poised the scalpel in her hand at long last over a segment of bandaging. There was no end that she could see. She would have to make a cut to begin unwinding it from the remains. Something brushed lightly at the hair near ear. “This is interesting, Moonflower. I am not familiar with this particular ritual.” A jolt traveled all the way through Gaby from her ear to the hand holding the shaking scalpel. Goosebumps followed like geese taking flight. Puppet-like, Gaby’s head jerked upright. Everyone was staring at her tensely, but she couldn’t see that anyone looked the least shocked or disturbed in anyway. “They can not see me,” Anka murmured in a conspiratorial whisper. “Because you’re not really here,” Gaby muttered under breath. “Of course I am, my treasure, and like animals, they sense my presence even though I do not permit them to see me,” he said arrogantly. “Look at their faces, the tension in them.” Gaby looked. They did look tense and uneasy, but she’d figured that was because they were as on edge about the procedure as she was, albeit for a different reason. “It’s the body,” she muttered under her breath. “What about it?” Paul, her assistant demanded in a nervous whisper as he leaned closer. Gaby stared at him blankly, trying to jog her mind into supplying her with something to say. “Nothing,” she said tersely, and then glanced around at her audience.

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“Excuse me a moment. I’ll be right back.” Without awaiting a response, ignoring the looks of shocked surprise and dawning outrage on their faces, Gaby dropped the scalpel, peeled off her gloves, whirled on her heel, and stalked from the room. She was shaking all over by the time she reached the ladies room. Moving to the lavatory, she turned on the faucet, ran cold water over her palms, and finally cupped handfuls and splashed it over her face. When she lifted her head to look at her reflection, she saw him, sprawled negligently on the counter across from her on his side, his head propped in one hand as he studied her appraisingly. Uttering a squawk, Gaby whirled to face him. “What are you doing here?” she demanded when she discovered he hadn’t disappeared as she’d more than half hoped he would. “This is a strange place,” he said instead of answering her question. “What is it for?” Gaby blinked at him. Slowly, heat flowed into her cheeks. “The restroom?” she asked cautiously. He grinned. “This building.” “Oh. It’s a museum.” His dark brows rose questioningly. “We preserve and display antiquities here so that everyone can learn about them.” He looked amused. “Yesterday’s trash, today’s treasure?” She wasn’t certain if it was his arrogance that irritated her or the comment, which denigrated her work. “We learn from the past,” she said tightly. He sat up and settled to the floor, moving toward her with the slinking grace of a prowling cat. Delicious shivers crawled up and down Gaby’s spine as she watched the play of muscles with his movements. He was wearing the breechclout once more, and the leather gauntlets—not the mask, but he still looked like some dark, infinitely dangerous warrior who’d stepped out of the distant past. “Learn what, my pretty Moonflower?” he asked in a purring voice as he reached her and lifted a hand to brush his fingers lightly, caressingly along her cheek. Gaby stared into his tumultuous green eyes feeling perfectly blank. “Things,” she finally managed to say. Her mouth felt desert dry. Gathering moisture with an effort, she moistened her lips with her tongue. His gaze zeroed in on the movement, his eyes smoldering with heat. “I have given it a great deal of thought and I have decided that I am ready for procreation,” he announced calmly. “I am here because I have chosen you to bear my child.”

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Chapter Six Gaby felt her jaw slide to half mast. She decided after a moment, though, that she couldn’t have heard him correctly. “What?” He frowned. Turning away, he began to pace the tiled floor thoughtfully. “Unfortunately, even I can not manifest the seed that it would require to impregnate you without the … ah … use of one your kind. I had not expected you would be so resistant to the use of the male I chose. You are certain he did not appeal?” Despite the doubts that had been nagging at her, Gaby stared at him as if he was insane when he finally paused and turned to look at her questioningly. “Your … your … arrogance is not to be believed!” she managed to gasp out after several failed attempts at finding her voice. His dark brows rose. “You believe I have an over inflated opinion of myself?” he demanded in disbelief. “I am Anka!” Gaby blinked at the threatening growl of anger in his voice. “And?” He planted his hands on his hips, glaring at her for several moments. Finally, he lifted one hand and waved it in the air as if imitating the flight of a chopper overhead. A crack of thunder rumbled over the building hard enough the sound vibrated through the floor. Gaby’s jaw slackened. Whirling, she dashed to the window and peered through it. “Damn it! I left my windows down!” Anka looked distinctly irritated and more than a little disconcerted when she turned to glance at him distractedly. “Look! Do me a favor and just … stay out of my head, ok? I’ve got serious work to take care of. I don’t have time to play house. And even if I did, and I was agreeable to this insane idea you’ve gotten, you aren’t real. And even if you were real, I can’t have children. So you’ll just have to look for someone else, ok?” It had stopped raining by the time Gaby dashed to her car to put the windows up and the car was already wet. After debating whether she wanted it to steam dry in the Miami heat or air dry, she decided just to leave it. “Freak storm,” she muttered, heading back inside and rushing back to the examination room. Everyone glared at her when she returned. Deciding it would be best just to ignore them, she moved to the counter where she kept sterile gloves, drew on another pair and moved back to the table. This time, determinedly ignoring her quivering belly, Gaby picked up the scalpel and carefully cut through the first layer of … whatever it was. As she gently tugged it free, she peered at the material. It was something woven. The gloves prevented her from feeling the texture, but she could see the weave. It reminded her strongly of papyrus, but of course the flora of South America, even so far in the past, would have been vastly different. Certainly some sort of plant had been processed and the fibers woven—another indication of a very advanced civilization. “Their primitive minds were as clay.”

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Gaby went rigid. The voice was becoming disturbingly familiar, and the arrogance of the statement was a clincher. Slowly she lifted her head. Anka was standing directly in front of her, half in and half out of her assistant, who had a peculiar look on his face as if he’d just felt something crawling up his pants leg. “Yours is unable to believe anything at all unless it …,” he paused, seemed to be struggling for words and finally finished, “bites you in the ass. That is not an improvement.” “Learning the local slang, I see,” Gaby murmured under her breath. “I am not a figment of your imagination,” he growled. “Yes, you are. Now go away. I’m busy.” When she glanced up again, he was gone. Relief filled her … for all of two seconds. The heat of a body pressed against her back. A hand settled on her belly and slowly glided downward. Gaby’s eyes widened as she felt his palm cup her mound and then his fingers stroked lightly between her legs. She swallowed with an effort, cleared her throat. Surreptitiously, she dug her elbow backwards into … nothing. His heated breath caressed her ear. “Does that not feel real to you, Moonflower?” “If you’re real, then show yourself.” “I have.” “To them!” “For what purpose?” “So they’ll stop looking at me like I’m crazy for talking to myself!” “This will please you?” “Infinitely.” “So be it!” Gaby lifted her head to look at the people standing on the opposite side of the table. They were staring fixedly at her, or rather a point behind her. As she watched, the color drained from their faces. Finally, almost collectively, they blinked, and then exchanged uncomfortable glances with one another. They didn’t believe they’d seen him. She could see that. “Something more dramatic?” Anka purred against her ear. “Why not?” Gaby tried to say flippantly, though her voice quivered, ruining the effect. The mummy sat up on the table. Anka materialized out of it and the mummy fell back on the table with a dull thud as he stepped from it as if shedding an overcoat. Gaby staggered back, pressing a hand against her heart as it lurched painfully. The Hispanic woman and two of the men in the room screamed and dashed toward the exit. Anka cut them off, appearing in all his regal glory. “I am Anka! How dare you desecrate my temple!” he roared furiously. “I will lay waste to your lands. Your crops and animals will wither and die! Your man roots will shrivel. Your women will bear no fruit of their wombs!” For several moments, everyone seemed frozen. Abruptly, pandemonium broke out and everyone began to shriek and run around and around in circles as if seeking escape. Finally, after colliding with one another repeatedly, they turned in mass and ran to the far corner of the room to cower. Anka, Gaby saw when she finally managed to drag her gaze from her cowering co-workers and guests, looked immensely pleased with himself. He sauntered over to

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her, grasped her, and pulled her forcefully against his length. “You are pleased now, my treasure?” he asked smugly. It took Gaby several moments to gather her wits. “You scared the shit out of everybody!” she said accusingly. He turned and looked the huddled group over, sniffing disdainfully. “Not quite.” “It’s an expression!” Gaby snapped testily. He grinned cockily. “I know. I have gained an excellent grasp of your language and culture. Very interesting.” “My god!” Gaby gasped as it slowly sank into her that they really had seen him, heard him utter his dramatic ‘god’ speech. Maybe she hadn’t lost her mind? “Yes?” “What?” she asked distractedly. “You said, my god?” Gaby glared at him. “I didn’t mean you.” He glanced around. “There is none other here.” “You are not a god!” He tilted his head curiously, but she could see amusement dancing in his eyes. “The Brias believed I was.” The people of the city who’d built the temple to him? “Because you made them believe you were.” He shrugged. “Primitive minds.” Horror dawned. “God! You have no idea what you’ve done. They’ll tell everyone.” “And everyone will believe that they are mad,” he responded dismissively. “What if they don’t? What if … what if they’re believed? You’ll have news people swarming all over you! You have no idea what that’s like. I have no idea, but I’ve seen it.” “It matters not,” he said indifferently. “If they annoy me I will … make them regret it,” he finished at the look she gave him. “But what about me?” “If they annoy you, Moonflower, you need only say so and I will make them regret that also.” Gaby shuddered, wondering exactly what he was capable of. “Pretty much anything.” “You read my mind!” she exclaimed, aghast, realizing finally that he had seemed to know what she was thinking several times before. “It is a beautiful mind,” he said caressingly. “Well! You weren’t invited in, damn it!” She shoved at him. Finally, with a great show of reluctance, he released her. “You are damnably difficult to please!” he muttered irritably. “I am impossible to please!” Gaby snapped. “And now that you’ve figured that out, go away!” Liar! Anka whispered inside her mind, giving her a look that made her redden and long to slap his face. He folded his arms over his chest, studying her with a mixture of annoyance and amusement. “I can not help but notice that you do not seem properly appreciative of the honor I have offered to bestow upon you.”

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“Don’t start with that procreation thing again! Yes, I am deeply honored, of course, but I can’t. You’ll have to find someone else to bestow the honors on.” “I chose you,” he responded implacably. “And I’m flattered,” Gaby said testily. “But I’m also sterile, so you’ll have to look elsewhere.” “You are not.” “Not what?” “Sterile.” “The doctors said ….” She stopped, abruptly remembering he’d told her that night in the temple that he would give her what she believed she couldn’t have. But he couldn’t mean that! Even supposing he could do such a thing, how would he have known how desperately she had wanted it when she had so determinedly ignored the desire to have a child of her own? Unless he’d been inside her mind before? “You’re telling me that dream I had was real?” “You know it was not a dream.” Gaby stared at him, but she simply couldn’t credit what he was telling her. Whatever he was—and she still wasn’t entirely convinced that he wasn’t a ghost, whatever he said to the contrary, maybe believed himself—he was just a little bit off his rocker. “My head hurts,” she said plaintively. “I don’t understand any of this and I’m not sure I want to. Just … go away, please.” His lips tightened, but after a moment he shrugged and turned to survey the group in the corner thoughtfully. He stalked across the room toward them purposefully. His body simply faded halfway there and in his place was a thin stream of dancing blue light. It moved toward them, passed through them one by one and finally vanished altogether. Her assistant, Paul, was the first to recover. Looking thoroughly confused, he glanced at the people huddled around him and shifted away from them. Everyone else, looking equally dazed and befuddled, straightened, looked curiously at the person next them and finally crossed the room to where she was waiting. They didn’t remember what had happened, Gaby realized after studying their expressions for several moments. She was sure that was a good thing, and yet at the same time it brought new doubts to the surface, made her wonder if she’d imagined everything that had just happened. Clearing her throat uncomfortably, she returned her attention to her work and began to carefully remove the cloths that had been soaked in something to help protect the remains. The body beneath was amazingly well preserved and still horribly desiccated because she could see the body was his, the beautiful shell that had once housed the spirit that seemed determined to plague the life out of her. She felt like weeping. She’d known she would. In all the years that she had studied bones, they had been nothing more than bones. She’d never met, never known the life force that had made them a human being. That part of them had been long gone before they came to her, allowing a detachment she’d never considered callous. How did she even know that Anka had ever looked as he appeared to her, she chastised herself? If her own perceptions were to be believed, he’d taken control of the man who’d been in her apartment the night before. Maybe what he said was true and he wasn’t a

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spirit at all? Had never had a body? And these remains, this body that made her feel as if she’d lost someone important was only some primitive man he’d chosen to house him for whatever reason? Which was harder to believe, she wondered? Ghosts? Or some being not human but dwelling among humans? Using them … for what? To amuse themselves? Because they liked playing god? And was he the only one? Or was he from a race of beings that had become deified because they were capable of things no human was capable of? She frowned as she carefully examined the remains for any sign of trauma that would indicate how he had died, her mind far more preoccupied with her thoughts than the body she was examining. The ancients had given their gods human-like traits. She’d always wondered why. To feel closer to those whom they worshiped? Or was it because the ‘gods’ they worshiped were like Anka, who displayed very human-like thought processes and emotions, but was neither human or actually a god? A novel thought occurred to her after a moment. What if, she wondered, these beings had learned their behavior from the humans they’d ruled over and associated with? Perhaps they had actually begun to feel the emotions, and perhaps not. Maybe they’d only begun to mimic human behavior through long association? Were they aliens, she wondered? Or something of this Earth that no one—at least no modern man—believed actually existed? Say it was true—they hadn’t actually remained undetected, she mentally debated with herself. People had known of them, worshipped them. Maybe the myths recorded about them were actually historical records? The argument against other mythical things ever having existed was that they’d never been found. There was no tangible trace that they’d ever existed beyond the imaginations of the ancients. Shaking the thoughts off after a time, she struggled to focus on her job and determine what she could about the remains. “There is no obvious signs of trauma that I can detect that would indicate a death that was not of natural causes,” she announced finally. “However, this appears to be a healthy male somewhere between twenty five to thirty five years of age and natural death is unlikely. The organs ….” She stopped, staring at the body hard, but she could see no incision that indicated the organs had been removed. “ … Are usually removed,” she added after a lengthy pause, “but even with them we might or might not be able to determine if he was poisoned, or died of some illness. “There are no outward signs of malnutrition or illness. The x-rays I had taken show no signs of broken bones pre or post mortem that might indicate blunt force trauma as the cause of death. “This was a strong, healthy individual who obviously hailed from a well structured, wealthy society … at least in the sense that there was plenty of food and a surprisingly well balanced diet. He has all of his teeth. They are in good to excellent condition, and the subject is over six feet in height—six, one, and three quarters to be precise—a veritable giant for the time he supposedly lived in. “This, of course, is merely a preliminary examination. If permission is granted, a portion of the wrappings can be submitted for carbon dating and there are a number of other tests that could be run on the remains—subject, naturally, to permission. Some

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would involve fairly minimal risks to the integrity of the remains as they would only require very small tissue samples, others would be more invasive and possibly more destructive. “I’ll see that everyone gets a list explaining the details and possible advantages/ disadvantages so that the committee can decide what course we should take.” Everyone simply stared at her blankly when Gaby had concluded her preliminary report. She wasn’t certain it that was because they were waiting for her to provide more information or if they were still rattled because of what had happened earlier. The memory lapse alone, and the discovery of finding themselves completely across the room from where they had been, was enough to disorient them even if they couldn’t actually remember what had happened. And she didn’t believe they could. “Thank you,” she added dismissively after several minutes had passed and no one made any attempt to leave. “This concludes the preliminary examination.” It wasn’t until everyone had left with the exception of her boss, Dr. Juan Mendoza, and her assistant, Paul, that Gaby realized Anka hadn’t left as she’d supposed. Either that or he’d returned. Almost as soon as the group had reluctantly filed out, she began to feel the eerie prickle along her skin that she’d learned to associate with his presence even when she couldn’t see him. “An excellent job,” Dr. Mendoza commented when their guests had finally departed. Gaby smiled wanly. “Thank you, Dr. Mendoza.” He nodded. “None the worse for your experiences?” he inquired probingly. Gaby tensed. As idle as the question seemed on the surface, his look was speculative. “I gather you’re referring to the night I spent in the temple?” He shrugged. “Field work can be physically challenging, and mentally and emotionally exhausting. As happy as we are to have you back with us, it occurs to me that you might need a little down time.” Gaby hoped he couldn’t see her smile was as forced as it felt. “What would I do with myself?” “A little R & R never hurt anyone. You haven’t taken a vacation in quite a while.” Because the little snot, Paul, had had a hard on for her position since he’d been hired and she didn’t dare give him an opening. She wouldn’t have gone off to the wilds of the South American jungle if she’d been in a position to refuse. She’d been expected to leap at the chance for field experience, and if she hadn’t Paul would’ve volunteered, which would have given him experience he could use in his campaign for her job. She could see from his body language, if not his expression, that he was hoping against hope that Dr. Mendoza would insist she take time off—which would allow him to proceed with the examination of the mummy by himself and take all the credit. It was bad enough she wouldn’t be credited with the find, even though it was her who’d fallen through the damned shaft and actually discovered the chamber. “I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine. Really. After all I’ve been through to get this far with the project I’d like to be the one to head up the studies of the Briacan Mummy.” A puzzled expression descended over Dr. Mendoza’s features. “Briacan?”

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A wave of cold crashed over Gaby. Giving herself a mental kick, she searched a little frantically for an explanation for knowledge she should have had no way of acquiring. “Sorry. I’d heard one of the natives refer to area as Bria. My Spanish is a bit iffy. I suppose they might have been referring to something else—might have actually said something else, but that’s what it sounded like to me and I sort of mentally tagged the place by that name. Of course it’s up to Dr. Sheffield and his team to officially name the site.” His expression lightened somewhat, but she could see he was still searching his mind for a Spanish word she might have confused. Finally, he seemed to dismiss it. “I’ll bow to your assurances that you’re able to continue then … for now. Don’t hesitate to talk to me about it, though, if you do begin to feel the strain. This is an extremely important find. It’s imperative that there be no question of professionalism regarding our part of the venture.” As kindly as it was said, it was a warning, and Gaby recognized it as such. There could be no more conversing with beings no one could see but her. She shouldn’t have allowed Anka to get her so rattled. Resolving to ignore him, she tamped her annoyance with both him and her assistant and focused on her studies for the remainder of her shift. She had never been more glad to see the end of a work day, though. She wasn’t just tired by the time she got to her apartment, she was dispirited. She didn’t want to examine the depression that hovered at the back of her mind, however, fearful that whatever she discovered about her feelings would instantly be known by her resident poltergeist. Her privacy was such an integral part of who she was that it had fractured something vitally important to her to discover Anka could peer into her thoughts as easily as a peeping tom could leer at her through a key hole or a curtain not properly closed. She felt naked and exposed and she hated the feeling. “I have promised I will not slip into your mind if it displeases you.” Gaby jumped at the sound of his voice, whirling toward it, uncertain of what she would see. Anka was lounging casually on her sofa on his side, one arm bent to support his head in his palm. At least, a man was. It took her several moments to recognize Anka. He was wearing black leather pants and boots. On his bare chest and arms was an elaborate, tribal sort of tattoo. And he had nipple rings and shorn hair that had been lifted into spikes all over his head. He rolled onto his feet and straightened, holding his arms out in welcome of her observation. “This is close, yes?” At the question, Gaby blinked, coming out of rigor. “You bastard!” she snarled. “You scared the pure hell out of me! Stop sneaking up on me and stop … peeking into my mind!” His eyes narrowed. “Woman, I have infinite patience. I have said that I admire your spirit, but I will not tolerate being bellowed at!” “You won’t have to if you take yourself off!” Gaby shot back at him. “Where did you get that body? Out of a trash can?” He frowned, looking down at the body that had seemed to please him moments before. “He was not using it anymore.”

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“Oh god! Eew! You mean he was … dead?” “Just slightly,” Anka responded defensively. “He was pronounced OD.” “This is beyond ick, actually. Playing with dead things is extremely taboo!” Gaby said with disgust. “A lot of really weird fetishes are accepted these days, but not necrophilia! So if you have any ideas that you’re going to use that thing on me, forget it! He’s probably riddled with disease!” She could tell from his expression that he hadn’t considered that possibility. He stepped out of the body, allowing it to collapse on the floor. Gaby shuddered. “You don’t mean to leave that thing lying there, I hope!” He looked down at the corpse with distaste. “What am I to do with it?” “Take it back to where you found it, damn it! They’re probably looking for it!” “You are a … bossy female,” he growled irritably, but he bent down and snatched the body up, shrugging into it. Assuming an air of regal dignity and displeasure, he stalked to the door and left. Gaby sank weakly to the floor after he’d gone, covering her face with her hands. She was not, she realized, equipped to deal with the emotional upheaval Anka had forced onto her. As boring as her life before had been, it had at least been comfortable, free of emotional stress in extremes. There’d been plenty of disappointment, but very little excitement. It would almost have been easier to accept that she was losing her grip on her sanity. She might at that if Anka was determined to hang around her—his ghost, or whatever he was. Why, she wondered, was he focused on her? Because of the fertility ritual he’d performed on her in the temple? Unlikely. Because of the sex? More unlikely, she decided. He was the fertility god! He’d probably banged just about every female in his city at one time or another. His position in the community would’ve made him practically a … rock star! She had certainly not encouraged him. She knew that. But had she done something she was unaware of that had somehow formed a connection between them?

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Chapter Seven She was too upset and confused, Gaby realized, to think at all logically—not that she could see a lot logic in what she was confronting. Feeling drained and weak, she finally got up from the floor of her living room and headed to her bath to try to soak away her tension and chaotic emotions. Emptying her mind, she settled into the tub full of hot water and focused on relaxing each muscle group and holding all thoughts beyond that at bay. She’d relaxed almost to the point of sleep when she felt the prickle of awareness that warned her Anka had returned. Without surprise, she opened her eyes to discover him lounging at the foot of her tub, studying her. His expression was intent and filled with a hunger that instantly aroused her body to full attention. At the same time, doubt arose within her. Swallowing with an effort, she closed eyes, trying to find the peace she’d felt moments before. Did he really find her so appealing, she wondered? Or was it no more than play acting a role that appealed to him for some strange reason? She felt him slip into the tub behind her, felt his arms surround her as he drew her back against his chest. His cock nestled against the cleft of her ass. It was hard and hot and the moment she felt it, the desire rose in her to feel him inside of her again. “You are so beautiful, Moonflower,” he murmured caressingly against the shell of her ear as he allowed his hands to roam her body before they settled on her breasts, cupping them and kneading them gently. Gaby sighed. She was a sucker. She couldn’t help it. Whether it was purely all in her mind or not, the fantasy did things to her she couldn’t imagine feeling with anyone else—anyone real. “Why do you call me Moonflower?” “You remind me of moonlight,” he murmured, amusement in his voice now. “I had never seen hair or skin this pale before.” Gaby wrestled internally for a moment. “Sheila is far more fair than I,” she said finally. “And younger.” He didn’t pretend not to know whom she was talking about. “But you are my flower,” he murmured, sending shivers of awareness through her as he nibbled the side of her neck. “When you are nestled next to me, I imagine I can smell the sweet nectar of your flesh, feel the petal softness of your skin.” She supposed his love talk was a bit flowery and archaic, but she found it appealed to her. It didn’t sound corny when he said it. It made her feel … beautiful and desirable. No one had ever made her feel like that before. His last comment pierced her lazy euphoria, though. “Imagine?” she asked, twisting in his arms to look up at him. His gaze moved over her face and then his expression hardened with reluctance. His eyes became shuttered. When he said nothing more, she turned again and settled back against him.

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Glancing down, she studied the sharp contrast between his dark skin and the white, white skin of her breasts and belly that had never seen the sun at all. She protected her skin as best she could whenever she was outdoors, but even so her shoulders and arms were darker than her natural skin tones. Lifting one of his large hands from her thigh where it had come to rest as she’d turned to look at him, she examined it, tracing the lines in his palm, exploring his long, tapered fingers with hers before she matched their hands palm to palm. His hand dwarfed hers, made her feel delicate and feminine. “It isn’t real, is it?” she said sadly. She heard him swallow. She felt his breath within his chest as it moved against her back, felt his warmth. She’d felt his breath against her skin, his mouth. She’d felt his sex nestled snugly within her own, found glorious release in the feeling of connection between the two of them. No one had ever given her such rapturous climaxes. How could none of that be real? She shivered, abruptly cold, when he withdrew. In a moment, though, she felt him lifting her upward. He turned her so that she was facing him, sitting wantonly astride his lap where he had perched on the edge of the tub. “You can not begin to imagine the hunger you stir in me. I want to feel this as you do,” he muttered in a rumbling growl that seemed equal parts frustration and desire as he fisted one hand in her hair to tip her head back and lowered his head to cover her mouth with his. For a split second, she felt nothing, and then she opened her mind to him and his scent and taste flowed through her in a heady rush. She felt the heat and pressure of his mouth, the faintly rough texture of his tongue as he explored her mouth, ravished it with his possessiveness. Closing her mind to her doubts, Gaby reveled in the heated cloud of pleasure that enveloped her. Her palms and fingertips tingled with sensation as she lifted her hands and skimmed them lightly along the bulges and dips of his strong arms, across his broad shoulders and then downward over his hard chest. She felt his heart pounding against her palm as she cupped his bulging pecs and when she traced a path downward, she curled her fingers around hot, turgid flesh that jerked within her grip. Nothing had ever felt more real, more right. Crazy she might be, but she loved the feel of him. How could every inch of her body, every fiber of her being come alive with the taste, and touch, and feel of him if none of it was real? Everything inside of her wanted to join with him, to feel him as a part of herself. He broke the kiss as she rose up to guide his cock into her passage, watching her movements, his hands catching her buttocks to help her to balance. He surged upward when she had engulfed the head of his cock within the mouth of her sex. The moisture slickened walls of her passage fisted around him in need as he bore down on her hips to slip deeply inside of her. He pressed his lips along her throat as she threw her head back in ecstatic pleasure at feeling him surging deeply inside of her. She felt the nip of his lips and teeth, the warm wetness of his tongue as he explored her throat and the side of her neck and her ear. She turned her face into his cheek, blindly seeking his lips once more as he slowly

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surged and retreated along her passage, massaging her deeply as he ground his groin against her. He met her offering with a ravenous need that was contagious. Heat surged through her at the urgency of his kiss. She felt her body climbing toward its peak with dizzying speed. She struggled against it to hold onto the pleasure only a little longer, but it was like fighting fire with gasoline. Her body fluttered with the first threatening quakes of release. He broke the kiss, catching her tightly against him as he set a more desperate pace, driving her control beyond her grasp. A long, keening moan broke from her lips as her body began to quake and seize with release. The intensity of her climax drained her of energy. She leaned weakly against his chest, her cheek resting on his shoulder, trying to gather her wits, to fight the desire to simply allow herself to drift away on the cocoon of bliss that closed around her. The soothing stroke of his hands as he caressed her body brought focus to her dwindling awareness of her surroundings. Something teased at her mind. She was inclined to simply ignore it, but it defied her attempts to push it away. He hadn’t come, she realized finally. She hadn’t felt his hot seed inside of her. She hadn’t felt his body convulse with the same pleasure that she’d experienced. With an effort, she lifted her head from his shoulder and met his wary gaze with confusion. He lifted a hand and skimmed it lightly over her face. “Sleep, Moonflower.” **** Gaby resisted when she felt herself drifting toward consciousness. She felt far too good to give it up, but even as she uttered a deep sigh and snuggled deeper into her pillow something began to tease at the back of her mind that wasn’t all warm and fuzzy. It was as she began to wonder if it was morning already that she realized she couldn’t recall going to bed, and then she remembered everything. Anka was stretched out on the edge of the bed beside her, his back against the wall. She blinked at him several times and closed her eyes again. “That was a dirty trick,” she muttered, but without heat. Because despite the dark thoughts hovering at the periphery of her consciousness, she still felt … wonderfully replete. And then her stomach growled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten. Ok, so fabulous sex didn’t do anything for that kind of hunger. And nothing at all, apparently, for his hunger. She lifted her head and stared at him a long moment. “You can’t feel what I do,” she said, determined to know the truth. He turned his head to stare down at her for a long moment. His eyes were tumultuous, but it was hard to say what emotions were seething inside of him. His expression was taut, but not angry. “I feel … more than you imagine.” Gaby pushed herself upright. “I want to understand.” She could almost hear him grinding his teeth then. “I want,” he said harshly. “We all want things that we can not have.” Anger surged to life as Gaby stared at him in surprise. “My mind isn’t primitive, you superior asshole!” she snapped. Rolling off the bed, she stalked from the room, slamming the bathroom door behind her. For all the good that would do, she thought angrily. If he wanted to come in he didn’t even have to use the fucking door! He didn’t follow her. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not, but when

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she went back into the bedroom to find clothes, she discovered he was gone … or maybe just not in a form she could see. She didn’t sense his presence, but then she was still too ticked off to focus on anything else. By the time she’d fixed herself a light supper of soup and sandwich, she’d calmed down somewhat. She was still insulted, but it had occurred to her that he probably hadn’t intentionally insulted her. It didn’t make it any better to think he considered her intellectually inferior because he was used to being around humans of inferior intelligence, or at least far less knowledge. From what she understood, humans basically had the same capacity for learning now as they’d had as soon as modern man had emerged. They had just taken many, many centuries to accumulate knowledge that they could share with one another. So what was he, she wondered as she settled in her living room to stare at the blank screen of the TV? Obviously, he had no intention of enlightening her. Energy, she realized almost at once, but something else. If he’d been pure energy, he wouldn’t have had consciousness, would he? They had to be something along the lines of spirits, or ghosts, she decided. Except she wondered if they’d ever had a physical form of their own. She’d begun to think Anka hadn’t despite the fact that she’d connected the mummified remains with him, still thought of it as ‘his’ body because even in it’s current state she could see that it had once been as he appeared to her now. Or was there a ‘they’ at all? At the museum when Anka had left he’d shifted from form to energy, appeared only as blue light. When she’d ‘dreamed’ in the temple, she’d seen the blue lights all around her before they’d taken the form of the dancers. Somehow, though, she didn’t think it had been others like him. She hadn’t ‘sensed’ but one real presence, as crazy and unprofessional as that seemed to her. She was certain, somehow, that he’d been alone in the temple. In any case, if he knew there were others like himself, wouldn’t he have been searching for his own kind if he felt the ‘urge’ to procreate? That alone seemed to indicate that there could not be others, or at least that he didn’t know of any others. That realization made her feel empathy for him and a connection with him that she hadn’t felt before. She had always been alone. Which was worse, she wondered? To be surrounded all day by others and still feel apart from them, as alone as if they hadn’t been there at all? Or not having even that much? Was that why, or at least part of the reason, he seemed to want to attach himself to her? Had he gone into her mind and discovered that she had no one either? Or was it only that the time most creatures in nature felt at one time or another had come upon him—the need, desire, instinct to procreate—and he was single mindedly searching for the way to complete the cycle? That thought was an unhappy one. He’d made her feel special in a way no one ever had before, in a way she’d been starved to feel, she realized with more than a little anger, embarrassment, and disappointment. She felt—stupid to have succumbed to the illusion of being important, special, when it seemed likely that he’d only ‘chosen’ her because she was available, or most handy at the time. It was disturbing how lowering that thought was, how deeply it wounded her. She

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felt herself sinking into a veritable quagmire of depression over it, found herself picking apart every moment they’d been together and re-examining it for the flaws she was suddenly certain must be there. She should have felt ridiculous and silly every time he called her Moonflower. Instead, it had made her feel beautiful and desirable, cherished even. He said it so caressingly, as if he’d been saying ‘dearest’, ‘sweet heart’. He must know her name like he seemed to know everything else about her, but he never called her Gabrielle, or even Gaby. It robbed her of individuality, she decided. It seemed to her, then, that it was a way of getting around acknowledging her as a person. It was like the guys that developed the habit of calling a woman ‘baby’ so that they wouldn’t fuck up in the throes of passion and call their latest lay Cheryl when she happened to be a Debra, or whatever. He didn’t feel what he made her feel, either. She’d been too enthralled by the things he made her feel to realize it before tonight, but he didn’t really share her passion. He could make her cum so hard she felt like she’d had a brain seizure, but he wasn’t similarly effected. He didn’t cum. Because he couldn’t. He might be a real entity, but he wasn’t an entity of the physical world. Everything he did to her happened in her mind. He made her body believe it sensed his touch. He made her believe she could feel his heat, taste him, breathe his scent. Was he completely detached during all this? Was he sitting back and watching her gasp and moan and writhe, convulse with pleasure so intense she’d never believed such a thing possible? Before she could work herself up into a rage of hurt and embarrassment, it dawned on her abruptly that he had been angry when he left. She had felt defensive about it. She’d felt inadequate, felt she’d failed to please her lover. Because she had. It wasn’t her fault, though. He had no physical form. He could enjoy it in his consciousness, or his psyche. Maybe he could even experience the things she felt and interpreted in her mind, but he had no body filled with nerve endings and nerve centers to feed those sensations directly into his mind. That was why he kept presenting her with bodies he’d ‘borrowed’ for the occasion! It wasn’t just that he needed a physical form to impregnate her. He needed it to experience the completion of his passion as she did. She examined that conclusion for a while, but she decided it wasn’t flawed. Well, maybe a little flawed. She was assuming she knew his motivations, but she, damn it, didn’t have the ability to read his mind as he was so underhanded about reading hers! It didn’t make it any easier to accept, she realized. She still felt used, abused, and completely inadequate as a woman. It was unthinkable to use the body of another person for his own gratification. She could understand why he’d want to. She could even understand, she supposed, why he saw no harm in it, but it was wrong regardless. Moreover, she couldn’t be a party to it, no matter how much she empathized with his plight. Ethics aside, she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of fucking a complete stranger, one who might or might not be aware of the fact that his body was being used

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and who might or might not be agreeable to it. Most of her early sexual experiences had been of that nature, what young people these days called hook-ups. She still wasn’t certain of what it was she’d been searching so desperately for—probably the love she’d never gotten, the acceptance she’d never felt—but it had always left her feeling worse about herself than she’d felt before. She was just fortunate she hadn’t paid the ultimate price for promiscuity and the stupidity of youth. She braked at that thought, realizing she had in a very real sense, though not with her own life. Of course that hadn’t been her decision, not completely her decision anyway. She’d been pulled into the ‘game’ by her need to be accepted. She didn’t think any of the boys had deliberately hurt her. She’d never thought malice inspired it, but she’d lost all desire to participate when she’d discovered it hurt, and they had refused to stop. Guilt at her part in it had kept her quite more even than their fearful threats— which had scared her but wouldn’t have scared her enough to keep quiet about it if she hadn’t felt so guilty herself. And of course there’d been no hiding her injuries for very long and the infection had caused the scarring that had ended any possibility of ever having a family of her own before she’d even reached puberty. That was a pretty high price to pay for stupidity. She surged up from the couch where she’d been sitting so long, as if by leaving the living room and seeking the sanctuary of her bedroom she could leave the memories behind, carefully stuff them back down into the dark recesses of her mind. She hadn’t thought about any of that for years and years. It was a sign of just how weakened her defenses were from everything that had happened since she’d fallen ‘down the rabbit hole’. She couldn’t allow it! She was not going to allow it! The past belonged in the past and she meant to keep it there where it had no power to wound, no power to influence the life she had now. She’d put all that behind her when she’d made the decision that she was going to be somebody, that she was going to do something of importance with her life, something significant. Maybe to most people what she did really didn’t make that much difference, wasn’t of any significance, but she knew that understanding the past was important to the future. Anka’s comment about ‘yesterday’s trash’ piqued at her as she readied herself for bed. She would’ve thought he of all people would be able to appreciate her work, but it seemed nobody really did except the other people in related fields. And anyway, he wasn’t human, was he? How could he be expected to understand that learning was what set humans apart from the other animals they shared the world with? Discovering knowledge that had been lost was just as important as discovering the previously undiscovered. Every little tidbit of information that was added carried the potential of changing the future for the better. She hadn’t thought when she settled in her bed at last that she would be able to sleep for the emotional turmoil, but she discovered she was wrong. She’d worn herself out emotionally and Anka had drained her of the tension that had coiled inside of her before. She was still debating with herself as she drifted off, though, as to how she would

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Chapter Eight Despite every attempt to focus completely on her job the following day, Gaby found her self-discipline left a lot to be desired. She managed to focus maybe half the time, but she emerged far too often to ‘feel’ about her for some indication that Anka was nearby, watching her. He didn’t appear. She told herself she was glad. She thought she was for the first few days, but by the time a week had passed with no sign of him she was forced to reassess the lie she’d told herself. She wasn’t glad. She wasn’t unnerved because she still expected him to pop in on her when she least expected it. She felt abandoned. Disgusted with herself, she took herself to task. She hadn’t been abandoned, she told herself. He’d done her a favor and left. Her life could return to normal. In a little while, she’d hardly even remember the interlude. Maybe she’d even realize that the whole thing had been in her mind and it had never really happened at all. With grim determination, she persevered in her determined happiness that Anka had, apparently, decided to take her at her word and look for a more likely candidate to bear his off-spring. More power to him, she told herself at least ten times a day. She doubted it would work, whatever he seemed to think. Obviously, he could use people as his little hand puppets, but he certainly wasn’t a god and that meant he couldn’t do a thing about DNA. If he wanted to think he could take a human man and use his body to fuck a human woman and produce something that was his, he had a right to his delusions, she supposed, but she wasn’t buying it. At least with some other candidate, he could delude himself. He would have found out soon enough that it wasn’t going to do him any good at all to fuck her. He could bring in a half dozen likely studs, and this filly wasn’t going to balloon out with fruitfulness. Anka had spent way too much time with ‘primitive’ minds. She was inclined to think they had convinced him he was a god rather than the other way around. It actually seemed likely the more she thought about it. Obviously, he had abilities that human beings didn’t—just like they had abilities he didn’t have. To primitive minds, those abilities would naturally have seemed like magic, would have seemed miraculous, even though they really weren’t. Those suppositions seemed to be borne up by the data she eventually collected from the remains. Anka, or at least the body he’d once occupied, had been poisoned. The toxicology tests she ran were inconclusive. There was too much deterioration of the tissue and whatever the natives had used to preserve the body had further compromised the tests available to her, but there was no disputing the fact that his body had simply shut down. Every organ had just stopped. There was the possibility that he’d contracted some disease, but there really didn’t

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seem to be damage from disease, which left only two conclusions and only one of those conclusions made any sense to her. Either Anka had deliberately sabotaged the body he’d inhabited and shut it down, somehow, himself. Or he’d been poisoned and it had killed the body so fast and damaged it so thoroughly that he hadn’t been able to stop it from shutting down. She wasn’t entirely prepared for how her findings affected her. As difficult as she’d found it to perform any of the tests on the remains, as hard a time as she’d had trying to separate her personal feelings from her professional objectivity in this particular case, she thought she’d done tolerably well. The discovery that he’d been murdered demolished the wall she’d so carefully erected, though. The sense of loss and anger was so profound it took all she could do to even pretend for appearances that she found it ‘interesting’ instead of devastating, that she was pleased about her discoveries, not crushed. After all he’d done for them, she thought angrily, the ungrateful bastards had stabbed him in the back! They hadn’t even had the balls to confront him over whatever it was that he’d done, or they’d thought he had done! The sneaky, underhanded, backstabbing cowards! It occurred to her that maybe he had done something horrendous, but she dismissed it as quickly as the thought came to mind. He had his faults, but he wasn’t mean spirited. He wasn’t callous. Even though he was certainly guilty of a superiority complex, and he did take shameful advantage of his ability to control people and manipulate them like puppets, he didn’t actually harm them. He hadn’t that she’d seen, anyway, and she felt like she’d seen the ‘real’ him. She felt like she would have sensed ‘evil’ in him. She’d thoroughly pissed him off several times and he hadn’t lost his temper and done anything ‘wrath of god’ like to her! Of course, there were all sorts of awful things attributed to the gods of mythology, but then she knew people! They were always looking for someone to blame for their own shortcomings. Maybe the old gods had been beings like him. Maybe they’d done some of the terrible things blamed on them, and maybe not. Whether they had or not, she didn’t believe for a moment that Anka had a vicious bone in his body, metaphorically speaking, of course. He was sweet, even if he was annoying as hell. He’d been sweet to her, anyway, and a generous lover. She wasn’t going to regret that or forget it. Those were memories worth holding on to, even if they were bittersweet. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry when the South American authorities exerted their right to the artifacts, packed them up, and returned home with them to conduct their own studies, eventually to settle them in their own museum. She was both, she supposed. As possessive as she felt about the body, she knew she didn’t have a right to it. He wasn’t hers even if she did feel like he was. It was cathartic she finally decided. She needed the closure. Anka was gone and now, finally, the last physical remains were gone, too. She could lay everything to rest and move on with her life. Pathetic and pointless as it was. Three weeks had passed, the longest, most miserable three weeks of her entire

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life, when there was a knock on her door one evening just as she climbed out of her shower. Her heart leapt instantly, and crashed just as fast. It wouldn’t be Anka, she realized belatedly. He wouldn’t have knocked. Feeling abruptly annoyed when the imperious knock sounded again, Gaby grabbed her robe and shrugged into it, tying it at her waist as she reluctantly went to answer the summons at her door. The man standing at her door was a complete stranger, a handsome stranger, she noted in a detached sort of way, but she’d never seen him before. He looked Germanic, she decided. Easily six foot, broad shouldered, heavily muscled—she supposed he would have been most any woman’s dream—except hers. His eyes were a pale gray-blue, not a vivid almost emerald green. His blond hair was cropped close to his head. It wasn’t halfway down his back and black as sin. His skin was tanned, but he wasn’t swarthy. His smile was nice. “Hello, Moonflower,” he said huskily, his deep voice laced with an accent she couldn’t quite put her finger on—guttural, though, not musical as Anka’s voice was. In spite of that, it seemed everything inside of her budded with warmth, surged toward him in glad welcome. “Anka?” she asked, doubt threading her voice. He swept her up into his arms and somehow they were inside, bumping the door closed behind them as he carried her against it. His mouth was heated, feverish, possessive, demanding as it closed over hers. Lava poured through her veins, pooled in her belly. Turmoil twisted inside of her, though, in spite of the fire that erupted at his touch, the dizziness of desire that began to bake her brain. There was a subtle but distinct difference in the feel of his mouth and tongue on hers, a less subtle more pronounced difference in his taste and scent. He was big and strong and muscular, and yet his body felt alien to her, not dearly familiar. Resolutely, she closed her mind to the doubts. It was Anka. She knew it with every fiber of her being. She wasn’t going to think about anything else. He lifted her against the door, supporting her with his knee and his lower body as he untied the robe and shoved it from her shoulders. Burying his face against the side of her neck, he breathed deeply. “You smell just as I’d imagined,” he murmured huskily, “except far better, Moonflower, sweeter than any nectar of any flower in the realm of man.” He sought her lips again after no more than a moment’s exploration, traced the curves of her body with his hands as she lifted her arms to his shoulders to help support herself and keep her balance. She heard the slide of a zipper, the click of a snap being flicked open. Impatience swarmed over and through her like the sting of ants as he cupped her buttocks, guided her legs around his waist. She gasped, tearing her lips from his and uttering a groan of pleasure as she felt the probe of his cock, felt the head sink into her opening. He arched against her once he’d breached her, his thrust aided by the dampness of want that had gathered along her passage. Tightening her arms around him, she bit down lightly on his shoulder as he sank deeply inside of her, filling her with a delicious, nearly unbearable fullness. He groaned as her body quaked around him, fisted tightly as if to hold him captive. Shifting her for better leverage, he launched a furious, pounding rhythm that spoke of desperate need and evoked an echo of it within her. Heaving together, moaning and shuddering, the rode the tidal wave of sensation upward together, found bliss

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together within moments. Breathless and weak in the aftermath, Gaby clung to him with an effort, dazed, her mind drifting with the surging, slowly dissipating currents of ecstasy. He hoisted her against his chest when he’d finally caught his breath. Turning, he carried her into her bedroom still wrapped around him like a limpet and fell across the bed with her. Gathering himself with an effort, he rolled away from her and tried to shuck his clothes and shoes without leaving the bed. Gaby chuckled affectionately and helped him struggle out of the tangle of clothes. She’d lost her robe somewhere between the front door and the bedroom. It saved her the trouble of discarding it. He pulled her against his length the moment he’d removed the last of his clothes and pitched them. “I will have to make that up to you,” he murmured with lazy amusement. “What?” Gaby murmured, inspecting his chest with her lips. “The rough tumble,” he responded with a chuckle, stroking his hands over her hair and back appreciatively. “I love fucking you, woman! It felt good plowing my flesh into you, spilling my seed at your womb! I had all but forgotten how good a body can feel, the pleasure it is capable of.” The comment caused her a pang—several actually. It had been good, she reminded herself, and nothing that rough and animalistic could be termed ‘love-making’. There was no sense in feeling hurt over his choice of words, and none in being distressed that it wasn’t ‘really’ him, or his seed. “I love fucking you, too,” she responded, resolutely curling her lips into a smile as she lifted her head to look at him, bracing herself to look at the face that wasn’t his face. He chuckled, rolling with her until she was beneath him. “This body pleases you,” he said with satisfaction. “I should have realized before that you would find a fair one such as yourself more to your taste.” Gaby felt her smile slip a notch. She didn’t want to feel unappreciative and she certainly didn’t want to show it. He was happy. He’d felt the things denied him before. It was selfish and stupid to wish for something she couldn’t have and deny him the pleasure he had every right to want for himself. “I liked the way you looked before,” she said, “but this is very nice, too.” He almost seemed to shrug. “That one would cost me more to utilize than I wish to expend. I do not know that I could revitalize it if I tried. I would almost certainly be too weak to get my seed upon you, perhaps too weak even to sustain myself. This works well enough. I am satisfied with the performance of this body.” Too weak to sustain himself, Gaby thought, feeling a shaft of fear spear through her? He had existed hundreds of years--thousands! It was almost inconceivable that he wasn’t immortal. Even though she knew he wasn’t really a god, she realized she had accepted that he was close. It boggled her mind that he could speak so offhand about ceasing to exist, but then she supposed it wasn’t something he need fear like humanity. He had had far more time to grow used to non-existence than mortals did. Another thought occurred to her on the heels of that. Did he sense his end? Was that the driving force behind his need to procreate? She found that it was too painful even to consider.

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Resolutely closing her mind to it, firmly tamping the certainty that she would disappoint him if he thought to breed a child on her, she focused on trying to give him what she could—pleasure. At least she could give him that, she told herself, if she couldn’t give him anything else. He folded his arms beneath his head as she kissed her way down his belly, sighing blissfully as he allowed her to ‘worship’ the body he’d ‘acquired’. Mildly annoyed and vaguely amused, too, Gaby determined to make him squirm before she was done. This is seriously kinky, at least for her, she thought as she took his engorged cock into her hand and sucked the head experimentally, tasting herself on his flesh. His eyes, she saw, slid half-closed. She dismissed her qualms, focusing on him, Anka, relishing the spark of passion she saw in his eyes as she caressed his shaft with her hands and mouth, gently massaged his testicles. He lay perfectly still, watching her, his chest rising and falling progressively faster as she teased him. His voice was husky when he spoke at last. “I am of no mind to spill my seed there,” he said chidingly. Gaby smiled around the cock in her mouth, but lifted her head after a moment. “Then hold it for me,” she murmured. He allowed it until he could no longer be still, until his hips began to lift seemingly of their own volition each time she took him deeply into her mouth. Uttering a growl finally, he bolted upright, caught her beneath her arms and hauled her across his body and onto the bed beside him, rolling on top of her with almost the same movement. Nudging her thighs aside with his hips, he traced her cleft with his cock head until he found the place that ached for his possession. Gasping with pleasure as he breached her, she closed her eyes, caught at him, digging her fingers into his flesh as he thrust and withdrew until he’d set a frantic pace that drew smoldering heat from the ashes of her spent passion of before. In her mind, it was Anka that possessed her, his body she felt, his muscles that rippled and grew taut with his movements, his engorged flesh that stroked the inner walls of her sex. They wept for him, pleasured by his touch. Feverish need moved her, drew body taut as a bow string, quivering on the edge of release. She could feel it, just beyond her reach, feel herself gathering to make the leap. The jerk of his cock within her, the hot flood of his seed bathing her womb as he found surcease, sent her rocketing over the edge. She cried out as she came, stunned by the force of her climax. She didn’t open her eyes when he gathered himself at last and moved to the bed beside her. She wanted to hold on to the illusion she’d clung to, couldn’t bear to allow the real image of the stranger’s face to intrude on her bliss. It was nibbling lips that woke her later. The room was dark. She had no idea what time it was, but her stomach told her she’d expended all the energy she could afford without refilling it. “You’re insatiable,” she complained without heat. “I don’t suppose I could interest you in nibbling on something a little more fulfilling?” The suggestion, to her surprise and more than a little chagrin, instantly distracted him. “Pizza,” he announced immediately. “Pizza?” she echoed quizzically. “When have you had pizza?” “I have not. I like the look of it.” “Ok,” she agreed indulgently. “What you want on it?”

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“Everything. Whatever you like,” he said graciously. “Go out? Or order in?” Gaby asked, sitting up to turn on the bedside lamp and turning to glance at him quizzically before a sudden thought fractured her bubble of tolerant amusement. “Wait … where did you … ah … acquire this … man?” she asked as delicately as she could. He dismissed her qualms. “Many miles from here.” “How many?” He frowned, considering. “It was a fort.” “Fort Lauderdale?” His frown didn’t clear. “Perhaps.” “We’ll eat in,” she said decisively. “It could be … uncomfortable running into somebody who knew … knows him.” He seemed unconcerned about. He would be, she thought dryly. She wasn’t comfortable, however, and aside from the ‘uncomfortable’ part, the guy might have been reported missing, in which case there was the potential for running afoul of law enforcement. One thing she did not need was to get raked into something that could make headlines. Pushing the thoughts from her mind, she ordered the pizza and went in to take a shower while they were waiting for delivery. Anka joined her. She wasn’t particularly happy about that. She would’ve liked a little alone time with the vague sense of hysteria shimmering in her belly. It sent an unpleasant jolt through her every time she glanced at Anka and saw a strange face in his place. It wasn’t that the guy wasn’t good looking. He was, and if she hadn’t been so … taken with Anka, then maybe she would’ve been interested. As it was, everything about the situation set her teeth on edge. I’ll get used to it, she told herself. I can do this … for him. I want to. The man will never remember. What’s the loss of a few days, after all? Surely he’s feeling the pleasure the same as Anka? It was wrong, of course, very, very wrong, but how could she object? She cleared her throat. “This man … He has a life of his own,” she said tentatively. Anka shrugged, examining the scent of the shampoo before he poured a handful and began to rub it over his chest. “He is here with me. He is not harmed.” Gaby took the bottle out of his hand and gave him the bar of soap. “Aware?” “Yes,” he answered absently, smelling the soap, then setting it aside and grabbing the shampoo again. Gaby frowned. “That’s for hair, not the body. Pissed off, I guess?” He lifted his brows at her questioningly, but obliging rubbed the shampoo into his hair instead of on himself. “He was. He enjoyed the fucking, though. Right now he is … resting.” Gaby stared at him in horrified fascination for several moments and finally cleared her throat. “He was aware of … that?” “He would not have enjoyed it otherwise,” he responded dismissively. Gaby smiled with an effort. “Wow, two for one. I hadn’t realized just how kinky that was.”

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He looked displeased by that comment. “It did not seem right to oust his spirit for the use of his body.” “Because it isn’t,” Gaby said firmly, trying to ignore the uncomfortable fluttering of her heart at the offhand comment. “But I do not like sharing.” Gaby studied his eyes searchingly. “You’re just … ‘borrowing’, right? Like … for the night?” “The fucking was good, but I did not procreate this night. It is not your time,” he said pointedly. “Even I can do nothing about such things.” Gaby felt vaguely nauseated. She’d hoped he would be satisfied with what she could give him. Stupid! This was why she’d avoided any kind of relationship. She’d suspected, sooner or later, it would boil down to her ‘true’ function as a woman and she would be found lacking. He pushed her chin up with one forefinger. “You do not trust easily, Moonflower. I gave you back was taken from you.” She looked at him helplessly. She didn’t want to fight with him. She’d missed him. She just wanted to enjoy being with him, whatever the circumstances … just for a little while. Was it too much to ask when she’d never had anything of her own? It was selfish. She knew it was, and it was going to plague her conscience, but, just for once, she wanted to be selfish even if she had to pay for it later. Despite those thoughts, it trembled on the tip of her tongue to try to reason with him, to try to make him understand that what he was doing was wrong, even for a little while. The man had a life, maybe a family, friends, certainly a job. He could lose everything while Anka used him as if he was no more than a … puppet. “You were revolted when I brought the one whose life force had left him,” he said, his voice tight with temper he was struggling to control. But it wasn’t just that. Gaby sensed frustration, disappointment … and confusion in him, as well. She shook her head. Before she even try to explain her feelings on the subject, though, or complain about him eavesdropping in her mind again, she heard the doorbell. It was almost a relief. “That’ll be the pizza,” she said, rinsing quickly and grabbing her robe on the way out of the bathroom. The pizza restored Anka’s good humor … somewhat. Obviously, he thoroughly enjoyed the things sensory perception allowed him to feel, and taste was high on his list of things to explore. Diet soda didn’t meet his standards. His expression once he’d taken a long draught was almost comical. “You get used to it,” Gaby said, amused. “Why would one wish to, that is the question?” She glanced down at her pizza, feeling her belly knot with anxiety, choking off her appetite when she’d hardly eaten more than a few bites. “Eating too many good tasting, high calorie things, can make you unhealthy and unattractive. I cut calories where I can so I can have some of the things I really like. This doesn’t have real sugar in it, but it still tastes a lot like the regular cola does.” He lifted the can and studied it thoughtfully and she knew suddenly, without any abilities for mind reading at all, that he’d grasped the correlation.

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“It just takes a little time to get used to,” she added after a moment. He nodded. He didn’t seem as angry as before, but she could see he was still wrestling with something that bothered him. **** Gaby didn’t know whether to be more amused or more annoyed that Anka seemed to take it as a matter of course that he was completely welcome to move in with her. He didn’t ask. He simply made himself at home. It was disconcerting to come home when she’d lived alone her entire adult life to discover a man lounging on her couch, the TV scepter in his hand—watching soaps. He found the high drama of those fascinating for some reason that escaped her, but, to her surprise, he didn’t seem to have had any difficulty grasping right away that it was play acting. He didn’t have any trouble determining which programs were ‘real’ and which were plays, which actually didn’t surprise her until it occurred to her that he’d never seen anything like it at all. It wasn’t just the TV itself that was technology he couldn’t have been familiar with. Acting and storytelling went back a very, very long time in human history, but it seemed doubtful his culture would have done such things. Rituals would’ve been the central focus of both entertainment and religion and probably the only way the people had escaped from the day to day drudgery of survival. She hadn’t thought that she thought of him as having a primitive mind—she knew he was intelligent even if he was ignorant of the hundreds of years of knowledge that had been accumulated since his time--but obviously she’d expected just that or she wouldn’t have been surprised that he could soak up knowledge so easily. He amazed her with how quickly he absorbed the knowledge available to him, which was a lot more than even she’d realized. The third day after he’d shown up at her door in his newest persona, she came home to discover that, instead of lounging on the couch, he was in her kitchen. The sounds and smells of cooking food accompanied by a disembodied voice drew her. When she’d peered around the kitchen door, she discovered a disaster area. A small, portable TV sat on the counter. Anka was standing near the stove with a pan in one hand, watching the TV chef intently. The counters were littered with ingredients and all sorts of prepared dishes, many of them burned, but some giving off fairly appetizing smells. Anka, Gaby realized with a sinking heart, had discovered the cooking channel. They were in serious trouble if he decided to watch the home improvement channel! Her landlord would shit a squealing worm a mile long if Anka took it into his head to ‘improve’! Deciding she wasn’t currently in the mood to deal with the disaster area or the fact that Anka had, apparently, emptied both her refrigerator and her cabinets in his quest to become a cooking aficionado, Gaby whirled away without a word and headed for her bathroom. She wasn’t ordinarily impatient of others. She didn’t know why she felt ‘invaded’. She supposed it was because she just wasn’t used to sharing her space with anyone. More precisely, she’d gotten unused to it. She hadn’t had her own space when she’d been growing up. Not only had she had to share it with a succession of strangers

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as the other kids made the rounds from group home to foster home and back again, but she’d never been able to feel like she belonged there or that the place was ‘hers’. Because even though she couldn’t remember ever living anywhere else, it was still an institution—not a real home, something she was always keenly aware of. Anka was right, she thought wryly as she adjusted the shower and finally stepped inside. She was hard to please. And, truthfully, she couldn’t figure out what her problem was. She enjoyed Anka’s company. His presence, even when he was watching TV while she did something else, or when he slept beside her at night, knowing he was close even when he wasn’t actually inside the apartment with her, was comforting. The sex between them was mind blowing! And she could not complain that he actually crowded her. He seemed to know when she didn’t want to talk and when she wanted to be alone to read or work. It was fear, she finally realized. She was afraid she would get used to it, and then he would be gone and she’d have to get used to being alone again. It was typical of her, Gaby thought disgustedly. She had never been able to enjoy anything without worrying about the consequences or worrying about when it was gone or over. She wondered if everyone else was as prone to leavening their life with fears of the future, or if it was just her. She couldn’t help being that way, and at the same time it was something about herself that she hated. She felt like she’d missed out on so much in life because she wasn’t a ‘seize the day’ sort of person. Or maybe she was just greedy? Refusing to take a nibble here, a bite there, just because she couldn’t have the whole pie? Whatever it was, this thing with Anka—whatever that was—was working against her nature big time. She was so on edge, expecting the bubble to burst, she couldn’t even properly enjoy the bubble! Dragging in a deep, cleansing breath, she resolved to try. If she had to meditate, or practice a little self-hypnosis, or just give herself pep talks, she wanted to make the most of her time with Anka. She’d just soaped her hair when Anka joined her in the shower. She felt his hand slide over her buttocks as she stepped into the spray to rinse the soap from her face.

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Chapter Nine “Have you mastered cooking yet?” Gaby asked teasingly as she turned to look at him, tipping her head back beneath the spray to rinse the soap from it. His gaze was on the sudsy bubbles gliding over her breasts. “I believe this is a skill that takes much practice,” he murmured absently, lifting his hands to cup her breasts and then rubbing his thumbs over her nipples until they were tight and hard. Warmth stirred in her belly as he moved closer, bending to match his lips to hers. Closing her eyes, she rose up on her toes to meet him readily, opening her mouth to him in welcome. The touch of his mouth as his lips met hers, the thrust of his tongue, was possessive and yet persuasive rather than hungrily demanding as he usually was. A little surprised, Gaby felt the warmth blossom into heat nevertheless as they moved together and he deepened the kiss, exploring her mouth in a thorough, leisurely manner that set her heart to thrumming just a little faster. Sighing into his mouth with pleasure, she settled her hands at his waist as he reached around her to cup her buttocks and lift her up and toward him, penning his erection between them. She curled her hips against him rhythmically, rubbing her breasts against his chest very deliberately and feeling her desire climb as her sensitive nipples brushed back and forth across his male breasts. When he broke the kiss, she lifted her eyelids with an effort to look up at him. His gaze was as slumberous with desire as hers, filled with expectancy. She settled flat on her feet and began to explore her way downward from his neck and across his chest with her lips until, at last, she settled on her knees and took his cock into her hands, teasing the head with her lips and tongue. He made a sound of pleasure deep in his chest, spearing his fingers into her hair and cupping the base of her skull as she stroked and sucked him, traced the sensitive ridge around the head of his cock with her tongue. The impulse came over her as she finessed his engorged flesh with her mouth to bring him off with the play of her mouth and tongue. The thought aroused her more and she began to stroke his cock more feverishly with her mouth and hands, sucking hard each time she pushed him deeply into her mouth and holding him tightly as she allowed his flesh to slip out again. Cupping his testicles gently in one hand, she caressed them, as well, alternating between stroking his cock and his testes and finally moving downward to suck his balls into her mouth. He shuddered, his hands kneading her scalp. His breathing became harsh, labored, as his own desires escalated. She was disappointed when he broke away from her abruptly, pulling her to her feet, but the discontent was brief. As he pulled her upward, he pressed her back against the shower wall and kissed her with fierce hunger, running his hands over her body with feverish need. She felt weak and heavy with her own needs. She could barely stand as he drew away at last, shut the shower off and stepped out, pulling her behind him. Handing her a towel, he took one for himself, dried cursorily and then swept her off her feet. They were both damp still when they tumbled onto the bed. Gaby reached for him as he settled half atop her, stroking her hands over his muscular body encouragingly as he worshipped

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her body with his hands and mouth and tongue, with exquisite care to leave no sensitive patch of flesh wanting for attention. “Now, please,” she gasped when he’d teased her until she felt as if she would orgasm without him ever having entered her at all. “I want you inside of me.” He ignored the plea, moving downward from her breasts to her belly and then lower, nibbling along the inside of first one thigh and then the other. She knew where he was going and struggled against it half heartedly, wanting to feel his mouth on her there and at the same time unwilling to give up the chance to cum with him deeply inside of her. He didn’t give her the choice. He pushed her thighs apart and covered her nether lips with his mouth, parting them with his tongue and dragging it along her cleft in a way that left fire its wake. Electric tremors went through her when he found her clit at last and tugged at it with his lips, strummed it with the tip of his tongue until she thought she would lose her mind. She arched against him, writhed beneath him with the fires burning her up from the inside out, gasping for breath. Her body burgeoned, tightening until she ached all over. From one moment to the next she struggled against the release she could feel building, and struggled toward it. She wanted it, needed it. She wanted him inside of her more. He ceased abruptly, shifting over her and aligning his cock with her opening with a feverish haste that spoke of his own imminent release. She groaned as she felt him ramming his engorged flesh inside of her in a series of short incursions and retreats that drove her over the edge almost the instant he filled her completely. She dug her nails into his arms as the first convulsion hit her, uttering a high pitched cry of rapture. She heard his teeth grinding together as if he was struggling for control, felt tremors begin to run through him as he sought the pace and rhythm he needed. A groan that sounded almost more agonized than filled with pleasure escaped him. He shuddered, drove deeply inside of her and she felt his cock jerk inside of her with his own spasms of release. Satisfaction filled her as her own climax reached its crescendo and began to dissipate in warm shivery waves of repletion. She clung to him as the tension abandoned her body along with her strength, gasping for breath. She felt the tension go out of him, as well, felt him begin to sag more and more heavily against her. Finally, he rolled off of her and dragged in a deep, shuddering breath. Deprived abruptly of his heat and nearness, she rolled toward him to drape herself limply across him. “Mmmm,” she murmured in satisfaction, brushing her lips lightly along his chest. “I could get used to this, very used to it.” He tensed. Surprised, she lifted her head to look up at him. He stared back at her for a long moment, his eyes glittering with some emotion she couldn’t quite grasp. Disentangling himself from her, he rolled to the edge of the bed and got up, took two quick strides and then abruptly crashed face first on the floor with an impact that shook the furniture in the room. Gaby bolted upright, gaping down at his prone form in shock. “What do you mean by that?” Anka growled, dragging her gaze from the body on the floor.

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Gaby blinked, a jolt going through her as she saw Anka standing over the prone man, his hands planted on his hips, his face taut with anger. After glancing blankly from him to the man, she scrambled out of the bed to examine the man, tugging at his shoulders to try to roll him over. It was useless. He was far too heavy for her to budge him. “What did you do that for?” Anka’s eyes narrowed. Shaking her head in confusion, Gaby dragged her gaze from his and checked the man for injury. He was breathing, which was a great relief, but he seemed to be unconscious, and she could see that he’d bloodied his nose when he hit the floor so hard. He hadn’t even attempted to break his fall, she realized. He must have been unconscious when Anka had abandoned him. Getting to her feet, she headed to the bathroom to get a cold washcloth to staunch the bleeding. Anka grabbed her arm as she started past him, dragging her to a halt. “Where are you going?” Gaby frowned at him, tugging at her arm. “To get something to stop the bleeding. I think he might have broken his nose when he fell.” “You have great concern for his little hurts,” he growled in an accusing note. Gaby’s jaw sagged in surprise. “What are you talking about?” He studied her face for a long moment and abruptly released her, transferring his gaze to the man on the floor. A shaft of uneasiness went through her when she saw the look on her face, but she shook it off and hurried into the bathroom to grab a washcloth and soak it in cold water. Grabbing her robe off its hook on the bathroom door, she shrugged into it and tied the belt around her waist, then wrung the excess water from the cloth and headed back into the bedroom. Both Anka and the man had disappeared, she discovered, coming to a halt in surprise. After staring around the room blankly for several moments, she left the bedroom and traversed the short hallway to the living area and then, when she didn’t see them, went into the kitchen. The apartment was empty save for her. Thoroughly confused, Gaby returned to the bedroom finally and settled weakly on the edge of the bed, trying to figure out what had just happened. Anka was displeased with her. That much seemed indisputable, but she had no idea why. She got up after a few moments and dabbed at the blood spots on the floor to clean the carpet and returned to the bathroom to rinse the cloth. There was still no sign of either man when she’d finished, and finally she returned to the bathroom to bathe and dress. The kitchen was still a wreck from Anka’s cooking efforts. She busied herself cleaning up, sampling a bite of the food here and there as she cleaned and disposing of most of it. She hadn’t eaten, but she discovered she wasn’t really hungry. Anger began to displace the tension and confusion after a while because the longer she thought over Anka’s anger, the more guilty she began to feel and she disliked that feeling. She wasn’t even sure of why she felt it beyond the accusation she’d sensed in his behavior. She hadn’t done anything wrong, she kept telling herself, but she felt as if she had. After wandering around her apartment for hours, trying to think of something to

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do to occupy herself when she’d gotten out of the habit of doing so, Gaby finally gave up and went to bed, still feeling vaguely affronted, uneasy, and guilty. She lay awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling while she went over and over everything that had happened between them and everything that had been said, looking for some clue. No explanation beyond jealousy occurred to her, no matter how hard she examined everything, and she dismissed that because it just didn’t make any sense. Aside from the fact that Anka had made it clear he expected her to grow accustomed to the form he’d chosen—and, deep down, she had never actually lost the sense of betrayal she felt whenever she was with him in that guise—she couldn’t think of any way he could have misinterpreted anything she’d done or said. Maybe it wasn’t her at all? She thought finally. The man had awareness. Maybe it was something he had thought that had made Anka angry? But, if that was the case, why had Anka behaved as if he was mad at her? By the time Gaby got off work the following night, she was spoiling for a fight. The apartment was empty, though, when she arrived. After pacing a while, mentally rehearsing the tongue lashing she meant to give Anka the moment he appeared, she was slowly but surely brought to the realization that he wasn’t going to give her the opportunity to blast him with her temper. That realization sent her emotions in two diametrically opposed directions at once. Depression descended upon her, undermining her sense of righteous indignation, and then completely irrational anger filled the void. Stalking into her bathroom, she bathed. Instead of preparing for bed as she usually did, however, she stomped to her closet and examined the clothing there for something suitable for a night out. Finding that she didn’t really have anything that currently suited her mood did nothing to improve it. She was a respectable woman of science and had carefully chosen a wardrobe to reflect her position. She wasn’t about to go out in anything that screamed respectability, however. If Anka wanted to throw a jealous fit for no good reason, she’d damned well give him a good reason! Abandoning the closet, she began a search through her chest of drawers and finally unearthed a pair of jeans that had passed beyond respectable to slutty when they’d become too tight and worn in some fairly indecent places. She had to lie down on the bed to fasten and zip them. Ignoring the little roll that blossomed over the waistband when she stood up, she searched until she found a collarless knit shirt she’d bought that she’d never worn because it was just a little more fitted than she liked. The placket down the front ended just above her sternum. After studying the effect bra-less and then with bra, she discarded the bra and unbuttoned the placket to the bottom. Her breasts looked fuller with the snug knit, and, in point of fact, looked as if they were on the point of spilling out the neck of the thing. “Good!” she muttered, dragging a brush through her hair and then deciding to leave it loose instead of bundling it up in a neat little ball on the back of her head the way she usually wore it at work. Finishing up with a pair of clogs, make-up, and a cloud of ‘come and get me’ perfume, she shoved cash and her ID into one of the pockets of the jeans and slammed

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out of the apartment. The vague hope that she would run into Anka on her way out so that they could have a rousing good fight was dashed when she reached the sidewalk outside without incident. After chewing her lower lip indecisively for several moments, she struck off toward the only nightspot she recalled in the area. It was several blocks from her apartment, but she was determined to have at least a few drinks before she headed home again—determined to look like she’d had a good time whether she did or not—and taking her car seemed unwise given her agenda. She could take a cab home. Unless she caught a ride with someone. It was late when she finally arrived at the night club. Her feet were already killing her from walking so far in shoes she wasn’t used to wearing and her clothes were clinging from the sweat she’d worked up in the brisk walk. Her body had heated up the perfume she’d unwisely applied a little too generously and she felt just a little lightheaded from the ‘tainted’ air. The place was rocking, packed to the gills, she discovered with more than a little surprise since it was the middle of the week. It was lady’s night. Disconcerted when she found that out, she was already wondering if there was any point in the exercise when she got inside and discovered her timing was far better than she’d dared hope. Lady’s night only meant women could get in free and drinks were half priced till eleven, and ‘ladies’ were on the menu. Droves of men were jostling to get in. “All righty then,” she muttered under her breath, uneasily glancing around the place in search of a spot to light. She wandered around for a while, looking for a table that wasn’t occupied and finally found one that was tucked away in a corner. It wouldn’t give her much of a view, she realized, or anyone much of a view of her, but she settled there anyway, looking around expectantly for a waitress. She’d just caught a glimpse of Anka—or a man she thought looked like him-when a waitress zoomed up to the table to take her order, effectively blocking her view. Feeling breathless with the way her heart was hammering in her chest, Gaby looked at the women blankly for several moments, trying to decide what to order, and finally settled on a screw driver. When the waitress had darted off, she discovered the man had disappeared. Maybe she was wrong? She hadn’t really gotten a good look at the tall blond near the bar. She scanned the room anyway and caught another quick glimpse as he stopped to speak to a woman. Her eyes narrowed, hurt and anger flashing through her. Her heart pounded a little harder. She’d just positively identified him when the waitress reappeared with her drink. She’d lost all desire to stay by that time, but she paid for the drink and sat staring down at the liquid blindly. So much for teaching Anka a lesson! Dragging in a deep breath to compress the hurt crushing her chest, Gaby lifted the glass and took a large gulp. Fire coursed down her throat. The Vodka settled in the pit of her empty stomach like a pool of lava. A wave of dizziness rolled off of it, making her

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brain feel as if it had spun in her skull. Bracing herself against the dizziness, she took several more quick drinks of liquid courage and finally looked around again. Acutely aware, now, of Anka winding his way through the throng at the other end of the bar, Gaby studied him through narrowed eyes, glancing away each time he lifted his head to look around. She wondered if he could sense the dagger gaze or if he was just looking over the selection of women and trying to determine which appealed to him most. Angry and hurt, she determinedly looked around, as well. She wasn’t terribly impressed with the selection. The place abounded with women from passable to very pretty, but the men—average to below average—certainly nothing she could see that had the potential to make Anka feel the least threatened. Ok, average it is, she decided, immediately lowering her standards and looking around for a man that at least had some physical appeal. The variety there was fairly wide—tall, short and everywhere in between, thin to downright pudgy, shaved heads to shaggy. A big man was hunched over his drink at the bar. The knit shirt stretched across his broad shoulders looked promising. His profile wasn’t bad either, but there was something about the way he was hunched over his glass that set off warning bells. This one was either a dedicated drinker, or he was carrying way more baggage than she wanted to deal with. Dragging her gaze from him, she finished her own drink while she took another survey. Anka had moved onto the dance floor with a giggly blond that looked like she must have used someone else’s ID to get in the door. The bastard! The blond was all over him as the music moved into ‘bump and grind’ rhythm, rubbing her ass against his crotch one moment and then hunching his thigh. Jesus fucking Christ! Gaby thought furiously. Was she going to fuck him on the dance floor? Draining her glass, she got up a little unsteadily and looked around for the ladies’ room. Spying a lit sign, she threaded her way along the edge of the dance floor toward it, ignoring the speculative glances of several men along the way. She’d already entered a stall and unfastened her jeans to take a pee before it sank into her clouded mind that she’d had to lay down on the fucking bed to fasten them to start with. Trying not to panic, she finished and pulled them up again. She was sweating profusely and dizzy from holding her breath by the time she’d managed to fasten the pants and zip them. Weaving slightly, she left the stall and headed for the lavatory. The mirror above it gave her an unpleasant jolt. The florescent light above the sink area washed the color from her face, at the same time deepening the shadows beneath her eyes and nose—and the lines on her face. The humidity had turned her hair into a wild, poofy tangle of frizzy curls. She hadn’t brought a purse and therefore had no tools to even attempt to repair the damage—not that a brush and a pound of makeup, she thought dismally, would do the trick. Trying to ignore the sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach as she compared her own visage to that of the teenyboppers around her, Gaby washed her hands and

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carefully patted the cool towel over her face. It didn’t help. The old hag in the mirror was still there when she took the towel down again, and her spirits had gone down the toilet, as well. Tossing the paper towel into the trash, she headed out of the ladies room with nothing but escape on her mind. Her preoccupation cost her. She slammed full tilt into a man and bounced away again. He caught her arms to steady her. “Sorry! Excuse me!” she muttered without looking up. “Where you going, baby?” he demanded, his voice slurring noticeably. The voice was all too familiar, even with the deafening roar of music in her ears. Gaby’s head shot upward in recognition before she could decide how she wanted to respond. He gave her a dopey grin. Gaby glared at him. “Don’t you dare ‘baby’ me you asshole!” she snapped. He blinked, staring at her owl eyed for a moment before a frown of confusion knit his brows. “You mad?” Gaby gave him a look and pulled away. “You are so fucking observant!” she growled shoving past him and stalking toward the exit. He caught up to her within a few steps. Grasping one arm just above the elbow, he guided her toward the exit. Gaby tried to shake his hand off, but he refused to release her. “Let’s go outside where we can talk.” Gaby ground her teeth, more irritated that he was behaving as if it was his idea to go outside when she’d already been headed out. And she had no desire to talk to him—ever again! He pulled her to a stop when they’d exited the building, looking around as if searching for something. “Where’s your car?” he asked finally. Gaby jerked at her arm again. This time he released it. “I walked,” she said tightly. “I’ll take you home, then,” he said decisively, falling into step beside her as she struck off along the sidewalk. “No you won’t! You’re drunk!” He grabbed her arm again, using Gaby’s momentum to swing her around. He pulled her against his body as she swung toward him, caging her loosely in his arms. “Hey! What are you so pissed off about?” Gaby braced her palms against his chest, looking up at him angrily. “Why don’t you think about it and … when you’ve sobered up enough to figure it out … go fuck yourself!” she suggested tightly. He looked down at her with a mixture of anger, confusion, and amusement. “You’re jealous!” he observed, his lips tipping up at one corner. “Oh! You are so full of yourself!” He chuckled, drawing her closer in spite of her efforts to keep some distance between them. A shadow fell across them. Both of them looked up to see what had suddenly blocked the light. Gaby felt her jaw slowly sag to half mast as she stared at the furious countenance of the hulking giant glaring at the two of them. It was the man from the bar, she realized dimly. He looked a lot bigger close up than he had when she’d been looking at him across the bar.

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And pissed, really pissed. Anka looked disconcerted, but only for a moment. “Fuck off, chief!” he growled at the really big, really pissed off looking Indian man. Seminole? Gaby thought bemusedly as Anka grabbed her arm and struck off at a fast clip down the side of the building and around the corner. Gaby glanced back uneasily as they rounded the corner. The Indian guy, she saw with dismay, was right behind them. “Anka,” she said uneasily as the three of them halted just beyond the view of the people milling about outside the club. The Indian glanced at her. ‘Anka’ glanced at the Indian. Gaby glanced from the blond man to the Indian, feeling a sinking sensation in the pit of her belly. “Let her go,” the Indian growled. Thoroughly confused by now and dizzy with the alcohol she’d consumed compounded by the abrupt upsurge of adrenaline within her blood stream, Gaby swayed slightly when the blond man released his grip on her arm and ‘bowed up’ at the Indian in a stance that was clearly antagonistic. “Found a new soul to steal,” he snarled angrily, looking the dark skinned man up and down contemptuously. “Maybe we should let her decide which of us she wants to go home with?” “Oh hell!” Gaby gasped as it finally sank into her beleaguered mind that she’d mistaken which body Anka currently occupied. How the hell was she supposed to have known, though, she thought with a mixture of fear and indignation? “How about neither?” she stammered uneasily. Whirling on her heel, she glanced around to get her bearings. She did not get far, however. The Indian—Anka, balled his fist up and slammed it into the blond man’s jaw. The blond flew backwards, slammed into the pavement and skidded several feet before he finally came to a halt. Gaby froze, undecided whether to run or try to break up the fight. The blond man struggled to his feet, shook his head like an angry bull and charged Anka. It might have been a fairly even fight if Anka hadn’t been occupying the body of the Indian. They appeared to be close to the same height and weight. The Indian was a few inches taller and had a slightly longer reach, but not much—and he seemed just a little more intoxicated than the blond. “Oh shit!” Gaby exclaimed as they came together again in a whirl of flying fists, grunting with exertion and growling more like battling beasts than men. “Fight!” she heard somebody yell from the front of the building. A dozen gawkers swarmed the neck of the alley, blocking off the nearest exit. Dashing to a safe distance from the two men, Gaby watched them in horror, struggling to wrap her mind around the violence and the possible consequences. She hadn’t actually managed the feat when she was distracted from the crashing bodies by a disturbance within the crowd. Two uniformed policemen appeared. Gaby felt faint. Headlines flashed before her eyes, images of the three of them being shoved into police cars and hauled off to jail.

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The two cops surged forward as Anka and the blond man broke apart briefly. One of the men caught Anka’s arms, dragging them behind him. The other surged between the two combatants, trying to hold them off one another. Anka seemed to expand in size, throwing off the cop that was trying to wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him. Grabbing the other cop by the shoulder of his uniform, he swung the man toward the brick wall. “Not the cop!” Gaby screamed. “Anka, stop! They’ll throw us all in jail!” She didn’t know if he heard her or not. If he did, he ignored her, slamming his fist into the blond man again the moment he’d managed to throw off both cops. Within moments, the melee had widened to include all four men. The whoop, whoop and flashing blue lights of another police car arriving on the scene scent Gaby’s heart spiraling toward her toes. “Anka! For god sake! I’ll get fired if I end up in jail!” One of the cops managed to down the blond man and then both of them turned on Anka. Slamming him against the wall on the other side of the alley, they both pounded on him. Abruptly, the Indian/Anka began to slide toward the pavement. Stunned, terrified that they’d killed him, Gaby tried to run to the downed man. A hand clamped over her wrist, yanking her back and she turned to see Anka standing beside her. “Go!” he growled, gesturing imperiously toward the other end of the alley. She staggered back when he released her, uncertain of whether or not to obey the command when she saw several other policemen surging into the alley. She took several steps back, wondering if they’d shoot her in the back if she tried to flee. Anka dissolved into a blinding blue light that seemed to merge with the flashing blue lights from the cop cars. Abruptly, everything and everyone seemed to freeze, as if time had stopped. Anka stalked to the slumped Indian man, shoved the two cops standing over him to either side and lifted the body until it was standing upright. The blue light disappeared into the Indian man’s chest and he lifted his head. Staggering a little unsteadily, he approached her, grabbed her wrist and tugged her behind him as he headed down the alley. “How long?” Gaby gasped, glancing back at the frozen tableau behind them. “Not long,” Anka responded grimly. Snatching her off her feet, he tucked her beneath one arm against his hip and began to jog down the alley at an unsteady lope. His hold on her and the jolt of his movements squeezed the air from her lungs, dragging Gaby’s attention to a more immediate problem—breathing. She managed a fleeing glimpse behind them as Anka rounded the corner at the other end, enough to see that whatever ‘spell’ he’d placed on the crowd had dissipated. Looking dazed and thoroughly confused, everyone was milling around the other end of the alley as if they had no idea what they were doing there. Setting her on her feet finally, Anka grasped her arm and headed toward her apartment. There was fury and brooding violence in every line of his body, though, and Gaby realized with a sense of doom that she was about to get the fight she’d wanted earlier.

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Chapter Ten “You are enamored of that man?” Anka growled the moment he’d slammed the apartment door behind them and turned to face her. Gaby gaped at him, her mind still such chaos that it took her several moments even to assimilate the accusation. “What?” she asked, demanding clarification as anger slowly ousted her uneasiness. Anka’s eyes narrowed. The face was bruised and bloodied from the fight, his closely cropped, blue, black hair sticking up around his head as if he’d been in a windstorm. His shirt and pants were torn in several places and caked with dirt from the alley and blood from scrapes and scratches. He reminded her more of the ‘real’ Anka than any body he’d occupied before, and there was still enough difference in the facial features that it sent a jolt of confusion through her as she studied the less angular, purely American Indian features of his face. Or maybe it was only that this man was slightly more stocky than Anka, not the difference in race, or at least, tribe? “I though as much,” he growled, as if she’d actually answered him. “Now, wait just a damned minute!” Gaby snapped, surfacing as he turned his back on her. “Exactly how was I supposed to know he wasn’t you anymore?” He turned to look at her speculatively. “You are saying you thought that it was me?” Right up until he said that, Gaby had been certain she had been completely confused. It dawned on her abruptly, though, that she had sensed a difference. His speech patterns hadn’t been at all the same. There had been a number of more subtle differences, but then she hadn’t been looking for a difference, and she’d been more than a little tipsy, and upset besides that. “You didn’t tell me you’d gone out to make a switch,” Gaby pointed out. “In fact, you didn’t tell me a damned thing. You just got all pissed off and left. I don’t even know why you were angry to start with.” Anka’s lips tightened with anger. She still had not said that she had not developed an affection for the man, and he suspected that meant that she had, though he was reluctant to delve into her mind for the answer. He was no more inclined to tell her why he had become angry. He was not altogether certain of why, but the part that he was certain about was not something he wished to tell her. Mostly, it had been because of the man, himself. He had become increasingly difficult to control and Anka suspected that was because he had developed a tenderness for Gaby, for it was when the three of them came together in passion that the man exerted the strongest will to oust Anka from his consciousness. The battle they had waged the last time had infuriated him. He had been so focused upon maintaining control of the man himself that he had lost control of the body. Which was why he had not been at all pleased when Gaby had curled up to coo

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over ‘his’ performance. And why he had rendered the man unconscious and slammed his body into the floor. And then abandoned him to find a new host. He was still angry because of that, and furious because he had found Gaby leaving the club with the man. He was not so angry that it did not occur to him that Gaby had a right to be confused, and that it was possible that she had not realized it was not him inside the man any longer. Just enough doubt lingered, though, that he could not entirely tamp the anger. “You have not said why you were at the club to begin with,” he muttered finally. Gaby gave him a look. “Neither have you!” He held his hands out at his sides. “As you see.” Gaby narrowed her eyes at him. “What I saw was you bending your elbow at the bar, and you looked like you had been there awhile!” He tilted his head curiously. “You saw me at the bar?” he growled, his voice vibrating with anger again. Gaby’s eyes widened a fraction, but then she heaved a frustrated breath. “Damn it, Anka!” She stabbed a finger at his chest. “This man, this body! How in the hell do you think I can keep up!” He grabbed her, hauling her angrily against his chest, and swooped down to kiss her. To shut her up and end the dispute, she didn’t doubt. She tensed, but he had grabbed a fistful of hair to hold her when he ground his mouth angrily against hers. She resisted. The temptation was strong, though, to simply give in and make up. She didn’t really want to fight with him. And she found his masterful possession wildly exciting, truth be told. He broke the kiss almost as abruptly as he’d begun. “Shit!” he growled, fingering his swollen lip with a mixture of surprise and anger. Gaby looked at him in astonishment for a moment before amusement descended. “You caught a couple of flying fists to the face, I see. Come on. I’ll get an ice pack to help with the swelling.” He frowned, but he released her and followed her into the kitchen, sinking heavily onto one of the kitchen bar stools while she dragged a plastic bag out of the cabinet and filled it with ice. “Next time, you should consider blocking or ducking,” she said teasingly as she examined his face. He sent her a resentful glare. “This one has had far too much to drink. I had difficulty controlling his coordination.” After sealing the bag and wrapping it in a towel, she handed it to him and looked him over more critically. “The cops beat the shit out of you, too.” He shrugged. “Him.” Gaby gave him a look. “If you feel everything the body feels you’ve got to be feeling as if you had the shit beat out of you, too.” He frowned. “There is pain, but I can find no permanent damage.” She moved behind him, rubbing his shoulders. “What you need,” she whispered, slipping her arms around his shoulders after a moment and bending her head to kiss the

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side of his neck, “is a bath and bed. You—he—reeks of whiskey, and some less pleasant odors from rolling around in the alley.” He rose a little unsteadily at the suggestion. Catching her hand, he dragged her along behind him as he headed into the bathroom. She helped him peel the clothes off since he seemed a bit unsteady on his feet. Instead of objecting when he climbed into the shower and turned to look at her expectantly, she pulled off her own clothes and joined him. Soaping up a cloth, she bathed the battered, bruised body with tender care, wincing inwardly at the sizable bruises she could already see forming on his body. No one compared to Anka favorably, but this man was well built and strong, his muscles well developed, though not sharply defined. Whoever he was in his ‘real’ life, it seemed obvious he labored hard to have developed such strong muscles. “Iron worker,” Anka supplied succinctly. Gaby lifted her brows questioningly. “He erects the steel structure of the buildings called sky scrapers.” That explained the strength. It would take a good bit to work with steel. She didn’t ask him to elaborate. In the first place, he appeared to be ‘coming down’ from his high and seemed to have more and more trouble just focusing on staying on his own feet. In the second, she couldn’t bury her head in the sand if she knew too much. When they’d finished bathing, she helped him to dry off and led him to the bed. He settled on it heavily and fell backwards. It took a great deal of shoving and tugging to get him turned around in the right direction, making it obvious that Anka was sinking into the same oblivion as his drunken host. Sighing with a mixture of irritation and relief when she realized he was out, Gaby curled next to him and drifted to sleep herself, hoping whatever it was that Anka had done to the people outside the club, no one was going to remember them being at the scene of the fight. **** It didn’t occur to Gaby until she was at work the following morning that she and Anka hadn’t really resolved anything the night before. They hadn’t because both of them had been carefully avoiding an admission that might stir up even more trouble between them, she realized uncomfortably. She had not actually gone to the club looking for trouble, but she hadn’t been looking for Anka either. She wasn’t certain, now, why she’d gone except for the promptings of her pride. She hadn’t really wanted to find a man, or take up with one— but she might have if the opportunity had arisen. Mostly, she just wasn’t about to be found sitting at home waiting if Anka had come back. Why had he been there, though? Just looking for another host? Or had there been another reason? And why had the blond man been there if Anka had abandoned him? That thought prompted one she hadn’t considered before. Anka had said the man was aware of her, and yet she’d not believed he was really conscious of her in the sense that he had total awareness of what was going on. But if he didn’t, then how had he recognized her? He had recognized her. Moreover, he had deliberately misled her because he hadn’t made any attempt to explain that Anka was no longer with him.

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And what was that crack about ‘soul stealing’ anyway? Had he been angry that Anka had ‘taken’ him to start with? Or angry that he’d been discarded? He’d been angry, she realized after studying over it for a while, that Anka had abandoned him. He’d had the fevered look of an addict when he had glared at Anka. Imprisoned within his own body or not, it must have been a hell of a power trip to feel a part of such an extraordinarily powerful being as Anka and a serious let down to become nothing more than an ordinary human again. A shiver skated down her spine as it occurred to her to wonder if he’d been trying to get even with Anka somehow by deluding her. Had that been his motivation for following her outside? She thought back over the exchange between them. Try though she might, she couldn’t think of anything in his expression that even hinted at malice. He’d behaved and spoken to her as if he knew her, but either because of the drinks he’d consumed, or faulty memory, he hadn’t behaved as if he’d understood why she was angry with him. He’d said he wanted to talk. His body language had said he had something else entirely in mind. She realized she couldn’t even, positively, be certain that he had recognized her. He’d seemed to, but he’d called her baby—not Gaby, or Gabrielle, or Moonflower as Anka was so prone to call her. Maybe he had only thought to seize the opportunity to get a piece of ass? He had recognized Anka, though, she realized in the next moment, not right away, but he’d certainly recognized Anka’s name. That was when he’d made that snide comment about soul stealing. That was when he’d gone from merely being annoyed about the intrusion to an explosion of violence. So—maybe his intention toward her hadn’t been malicious, but could she count on that being the case if she ran into him again? Or had Anka erased everyone’s memory when he’d done that—whatever it was that had seemed to freeze time, or at least frozen everyone in place? She thought he must have. Otherwise, the police would have been looking for both of them by now. Why hadn’t he erased the man’s memory to begin with, though? Or had he tried, but just hadn’t managed to remove all of the memories? Maybe it wasn’t just the alcohol that had confused the man? Finally, she simply pushed the thoughts as far back into her mind as she could. She would deal with it when, and if, she had to, she decided. It might have been better to try to get everything out into the open and work things out between them, but she was keenly conscious of the fact that she was living on borrowed time. She and Anka had no real relationship. How could they? If they had, it would have been worth whatever arguments and hard feelings might arise from battling it out, because there would have been time and chances to resolve things and smooth them over again. As it was, she never knew from one day to the next when Anka might disappear as abruptly and completely as if he’d never been with her at all. She would have had trouble with any kind of relationship simply because she wasn’t emotionally equipped to handle them. She had little experience with any sort of relationship. Anka was not even

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human, though, and she couldn’t even apply the little she knew about her fellow man to him. There might be no real rhyme or reason to the things he did, but even if there were it seemed likely to be outside her understanding. He seemed to think it would be, anyway. At any rate, she had enough trouble adjusting to the fact that she never knew what Anka would look like when she saw him. She’d only just begun to grow accustomed to the blond Germanic Anka, and now he was Seminole—she thought—definitely an American Indian, anyway. And far stronger willed than the Germanic man, Gaby suspected, completely unsettled every time she glanced at the man and saw him looking back at her with his nearly black eyes. Except for the fact that he was roughly the same size, weight, and build as Anka, and hailed from a similar gene pool, there was really very little resemblance between the host and Anka, but in some ways it was still easier to accustom herself to the man, because he did remind her of Anka. She had discovered early on that the eyes were the true mirrors, however. Anka’s eyes were green and whenever he looked out of the man’s eyes, they had the greenish hue. If they were completely dark, it wasn’t Anka staring at her, and it was very hard to get any sense of the emotions behind those dark eyes. She was certain that it was a given that he wasn’t happy about the situation, particularly since it seemed obvious to her that there was a great struggle for dominance between them. What she wasn’t certain of was how he felt about her. Did he blame her for the situation? Did he feel violent toward her? Or was she completely wrong in her estimation? People were giving up more and more freedoms every day just to be watched over and taken care of. And more and more people were choosing to allow drugs to rule their lives. Maybe the average person didn’t really want control of their lives? Maybe yielding the responsibility to someone else and allowing them to do the ‘driving’ wasn’t as repugnant to the hosts Anka chose as she thought? Maybe, and then again, maybe not. She couldn’t salve her conscience with that possibility, she discovered, because she just didn’t know. **** It occurred to Gaby with something akin to pure amazement as she left work that she and Anka had been together an entire month. The concept was so mind blowing she dragged her checkbook out of her purse to study her calendar once she’d settled in the car. A whole month, she thought in wonder once she’d checked it. She hadn’t shared a household with anyone for that length of time before! “My how time flies when you’re having fun!” she muttered dryly, images flickering through her mind of all the ups and downs they’d had in the time since he’d moved in with her. A smile curled her lips after a moment, though. As rough as it had been, as much emotional turmoil, aggravation, and as many really scary moments as she’d experienced, there’d been a lot more that had been good—pleasant, amusing, comforting, sweet … and then there was the mind blowing passion. Warmed by those thoughts, Gaby decided as she headed to the grocery store to get their weekly supplies that she would plan a special night to celebrate.

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She had decided she would cherish what she could and try not to think about the uncertain future, and making the most of their time together should include a celebration for such an important milestone, as silly as she would have considered such a thing before. A simple meal, she decided once she’d reached the supermarket. Anka was the one trying to master superior cuisine. She was barely competent in the kitchen. And, anyway, he liked steak. Remembering that she didn’t have potatoes or salad at home as she neared checkout, she altered course and headed for the produce section. When she’d chosen the potatoes and a bag of mixed salad greens, she turned toward checkout again, but the flowers near the edge of the produce section caught her attention. Ordinarily, although she loved flowers, she barely gave them a glance, but it was a special night and that should include flowers. Unable to make up her mind, she grabbed a bundle of roses and a bouquet of mixed flowers. She studied them as she waited her turn in checkout, still trying to decide which she should take home with her. Good food—great sex. Roses. A smile curled her lips as she considered the effect of rose petals. She decided to get both. If she was in luck, Anka wouldn’t be in the apartment when she got there and she would have the chance to set the stage for seduction. As often as not, these days, he was off somewhere doing something when she got home and came in later. If he was there, she’d just tell him it was an urban ritual and make him wait in the living room while she beheaded the roses and strew rose petals everywhere. Having settled the matter in her mind, she carefully placed both flower bundles in her buggy and began to mentally sort through her lingerie drawer to decide what to wear. The sense of being watched finally penetrated her preoccupation as she reached the conveyor belt, and she looked up and around the store as she felt the prickle of uneasiness. Several people met her gaze as she glanced around, but she couldn’t see that that was anything more than their reaction to her looking at them. Shaking the sensation off, she unloaded her buggy, paid for her purchases and headed for her car. The prickle washed over her again as she loaded the groceries in the car, but again, when she looked around, she didn’t see anyone. She locked her car doors when she got inside, fiddling with her keys and glancing around as idly as she could manage, but she still didn’t catch sight of anyone who seemed particularly interested in her. It didn’t matter, she told herself firmly. Even if there was anything to it beyond pure imagination, she was in the car. The doors were locked. Maybe somebody had been eyeing the expensive items she’d put in her cart and thinking about snatching her purse, but they’d play hell chasing her down in the car to snatch it. She decided on the way home to make a quick detour to the mall to grab a sexy nightie from her favorite lingerie shop. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have considered leaving groceries in the car for such a thing, but she hadn’t thought about getting something seductive before, and she figured it wouldn’t hurt to leave them such a short time. Getting out once she’d parked the car as close as she could, she locked the doors and

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dashed into the mall. The selection was better than she’d expected, making it harder to decide, but she finally eliminated the problem by buying all three of the slinky undie outfits she liked best. She had her mind on the money she’d just frivolously dropped at the mall when she reached the apartment. Gathering up all the bags, she headed inside with them, her arms loaded and visibility impeded by the bags. At her door, she juggled the bags, her purse, and the keys, and finally managed to get the door unlocked. Someone slammed into her as she pushed the door open. The blow sent her flying forward and bags in every direction. She hit the floor so hard she skidded several feet before she stopped moving. More stunned than hurt, it took her several moments to get her bearings, critical moments. Before she could gather herself to rise, someone grabbed a handful of hair at her scalp and wrenched her head upwards and around so sharply she felt a bone pop in her spine. She stared blankly at the dark, twisted visage so close to her own. A flicker of recognition went through her. “Putta!” the man snarled, using her hair to drag her to her feet. “Where’s the stuff?” Gaby gaped at him, struggling against shock and pain to figure out what it was he was demanding. “What stuff?” She didn’t see the fist coming. He punched her so hard in the jaw it wrenched her head sideways and darkness enveloped her. Either he let go of her hair as he swung at her, or the force of the blow separated the hair from her scalp. She flew away from the punch, sprawling on the floor again. He followed her. Standing over her, he leaned down and punched her in the face several more times despite her ineffectual efforts to cover her head with her arms. “Where’s your stash, bitch?” She curled into a ball when he stopped hitting her. Uttering a growl of fury and frustration, he commenced to kicking her, slamming his booted feet into her ribs and belly and back until she threw up. She couldn’t breathe. Her mind was totally wrapped up in the struggle to drag a breath of air into her lungs. She wasn’t even aware, at first, when he stopped pounding on her. The pain and the fight to gasp in a little air consumed her. She choked when she finally managed to draw breath, coughing. The metallic taste of blood filled her mouth and she spat, wondering if she’d coughed up the blood or if her teeth had cut the inside of her mouth when he’d been punching her in the face. He was insane, she thought wildly. That thought clicked with the vague sense of recognition she’d had before. It was the Hispanic man Anka had taken over that first time, she realized. It took a tremendous effort to lift her head. She saw when she’d managed it that the man was taking the apartment apart—searching for something. Stuff? Stash? He thought she had drugs, she realized. Why would he think that, she wondered, completely bewildered? She shook that thought off. He was preoccupied. It might be the only chance she had of escape. Even the fear was dulled by her shock, though, and it failed to lend her much strength. She focused on the view she saw when she lifted her head, the open door of her

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bedroom—bedroom, door, lock, phone, police. The pain increased tenfold as she struggled to drag herself toward the door. Her progress was measured by inches. Hurry! Hurry! She thought, unable to form anything but disjointed words in her mind, unable to complete more than the most simple, basic thoughts. Her head felt as if it would explode. Blood cloyed in her throat, choking her, making it almost impossible to drag in a breath without feeling as if she was drowning. The man was muttering to himself in Spanish, cursing. Having emptied every drawer and shelf onto the floor, he grabbed the cushions off the sofa and chairs and began shredding them with a knife. The glimpse Gaby caught of the knife was enough to galvanize her when she’d reached the point of giving up. Gathering herself, she struggled to fend off the darkness threatening to overcome her and pushed herself a little further along the floor. She’d almost reached the bedroom door when she heard him coming for her. She screamed when he jerked her off the floor and pitched her head first through the doorway of her bedroom. It wasn’t much of a scream. She couldn’t draw enough breath to produce much in the way of sound, and it was cut off abruptly when she hit the edge of the bed and rebounded onto the floor. She curled up again, expecting him to begin pounding on her. Instead, he began to systematically tear the bedroom apart as he had the living room. He would be back, she realized dimly, trying to focus her mind on survival. The bathroom was the only possibility of sanctuary left. Uncurling, she began trying to crawl toward the door. He saw her. Apparently, he decided that must be where she’d hidden the ‘stash’ he was looking for. He ran at her, drawing his leg back and kicking her as hard as he could, as if he was trying to field goal her body. She grunted at the impact, began to whimper at the pain that made her feel as if her whole body was on fire. The search of the bathroom didn’t last long. He was back in a moment. Dropping to his knees, he rolled her onto her back and straddled her. Leaning over her, he pressed the knife he still held against her throat. “Where’s the stuff, you fucking cunt?” Gaby peered at him beneath her lashes. “No drugs,” she managed. He bore down on the knife until she felt the burn. “Don’t lie to me, bitch! The shit you gave me last time I was here! Where is it?” It coalesced in her mind. The ‘experience’ he’d had when Anka had seized control of his body had been a ‘high’ for him. He thought he’d had some kind of drug induced ‘trip’—and he’d liked it. He wanted another high. The thoughts focused her mind on Anka for the first time since he’d attacked her. “Anka!” she whispered. “Anka, come to me! Please, Anka! I need you!” A look of confusion crossed the man’s features for a split second before rage replaced it. “I’ll gut you like a fish, you stupid bi ….” Something slammed into him, sending him flying backwards. Dizziness swept over Gaby as she felt herself being lifted from the floor, enveloped in a warm, gentle embrace. It took an effort to lift her head, but relief surged through her as she looked up into Anka’s eyes. “Anka,” she whispered, feeling gladness warm her. Before she could say more, she felt fire spear through her. Shocked at the pain, she glanced down at the center of it as the Hispanic man withdrew the blade from her

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belly. Anka glanced down, as well, consternation contorting his features for a split second before fury replaced it. Darkness began to descend over Gaby and with it a profound coldness. She felt herself drifting downward like a feather floating on a whimsical breath of air. Dimly, as if from a great distance, she heard the man scream, heard a gurgling noise, the sickening crunch of bones shattering, and then silence. She lifted toward awareness as she felt the gentle touch of a hand. It took an effort to open her eyes. “Gone?” she managed to ask through stiff, uncooperative lips. “Shhh, Moonflower,” Anka crooned. “I will take away the hurt.” She nodded, or thought she did. “Doesn’t hurt now. Cold,” she complained. She thought she heard him swallow, then she felt his hands moving over her. Warmth began to displace the cold, slowly at first, and then more rapidly until she felt as if she was on fire. She moaned as the pain erupted again, became more intense. Abruptly it ceased and she felt a sense of floating. Anka, she discovered with a touch of surprise, was with her, a part of her. She could feel him as she’d never felt him before. Am I dead? She wondered, not distressed by it particularly, merely curious … almost pleased as it occurred to her that now she was spirit as Anka was. And they were together. No, my treasure. I don’t understand. I know, beloved. Be at peace. I am here now. I would that I could have prevented anything like this from ever touching you. I can not change that it did, but I can and will take away all that is ugly and hurtful. A sense of profound peace settled over her. And then there was nothingness.

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Chapter Eleven Gaby woke feeling like death warmed over. She lay staring at the darkened ceiling of her bedroom for a while, searching her mind for the reason she felt so badly, but no answer came to her. Finally, after glancing over at Anka’s sleeping form several times, she rolled out of the bed quietly and headed for the bathroom. She felt—achy all over, as if she was coming down with a fever, or maybe had had a fever, but she couldn’t tell that she was the least bit over warm or detect any other symptoms that spelled the onset of a cold or flu and she certainly couldn’t remember having been sick. She didn’t look sick, she decided after she’d examined her reflection in the mirror, just heavy eyed from sleeplessness. When she’d used the bathroom, she took a bottle of aspirin from the cabinet and tapped a dose out into her palm, then headed into the kitchen to find something to wash the tablets down. Something seemed ‘off’. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, but something just didn’t feel quite as it should. Puzzled, she wandered around the darkened apartment, but she was no wiser when she’d checked everything. She couldn’t remember going to bed, she realized. After probing her memory for several moments, she finally produced the memory that she’d planned a surprise for Anka to celebrate their time together. Oddly enough, she couldn’t remember actually doing anything, though. Anka, she discovered when she finally turned to head back to bed, had followed her. It gave her a start when she saw his dark form leaning against the bedroom door frame. She lifted her hand to her painfully hammering heart. “You startled me,” she said quietly. He pushed away from the door and moved toward her. Reaching her, he slipped his hands caressingly along her arms and finally took her hands in his. “You should rest, Moonflower,” he said caressingly, lifting her hands one at the time and placing a light kiss in the center of each palm. Gaby smiled up at him teasingly. “You’re sure rest is what you have in mind?” To her surprise, he merely pulled her lightly against his chest. Wrapping his arms around her, he cupped the back of her head, guiding her head to rest against his shoulder and then lightly stroked her hair and back. “Just now, yes,” he murmured, his voice husky with some emotion she couldn’t quite identify. Vaguely disappointed at the answer, she allowed him to lead her back to bed. He seemed in a strange mood, she thought, curling against him willingly enough when he merely cuddled her and told her to go to sleep. She didn’t worry about it overmuch, then, but she couldn’t help but notice he seemed almost distant. Days passed, and he not only made no attempt to initiate sex between them, he firmly, if gently, refused her when she tried to steer him in that direction. Confused and hurt by his strange behavior, Gaby wracked her brain to figure out

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what she’d done to cause it, but nothing at all came to mind. They’d been together a full month, though, she realized after a while. Maybe he’d realized he couldn’t make her fruitful? Once that thought had jelled in her mind, she couldn’t shake it or the sense of impending doom it brought with it. The anxiety that caused her surpassed everything that had gone before. She went from expecting to find Anka waiting for her each time she returned home to expecting to find him gone. His behavior didn’t do a thing to alleviate her concerns. He blew hot and cold so regularly that she couldn’t decide what to think. Days would go by when he would merely watch her with a brooding expression on his face, erecting a wall between them that she couldn’t seem to breach even when she was desperate enough to try to initiate sex herself. And then he would make an about face and behave as if he couldn’t get enough of her, making love to her over and over with a fierce driving need that sometimes felt almost more like punishment—though she couldn’t tell whether it was her he was trying to punish or himself. On top of that, the discovery that she’d lost half a day in time bothered her. Try though she might, she couldn’t remember anything, but there was a sense that, behind that closed door, was something horrendous. She’d felt weak and achy for almost a week, bruised, jumpy—not entirely herself. She couldn’t simply dismiss it, but in time the anxiety over it diminished. **** I’ll get use to this, Gaby told herself every time she looked at the man that wasn’t Anka, but some unfortunate soul that had caught his interest. I can do this … for him. There’s no other way that he can enjoy the things we take for granted. The man won’t remember later. What’s the loss of a few days, after all? If he’d had the chance to chose, he might even have welcomed it. Anka had told her he enjoyed the sex, too. When else could a person enjoy such a weird and crazy kinky three way? She clung to those thoughts with grim determination for days on end, a week, two weeks, wringing every ounce of pleasure she could from the time they spent together, lavishing him with the carnal pleasure he craved. She couldn’t keep the world out forever, though, no matter how hard she tried, or salve her conscience no matter how much salve she applied, or even get used to seeing a stranger’s face when all she wanted was Anka. She’d never rode such a wild roller coaster of emotions in her life. She felt like weeping at least as often as she felt deliriously happy. The rest of the time she was just plain scared, afraid that the CIA, FBI, state and local police and maybe even the military would show up at her doorstep any day and haul her in for ‘drugging’ the guy and using him as a sex slave. Her own lapse in memory, she thought, was what finally tilted the scales. If she hadn’t experienced that herself, she might have been able to continue lying to herself right on. Under the circumstances, she couldn’t, because she reached a point where she could no longer bury her head in the sand and merely accept. As much as she felt for Anka, she knew he could not feel anything like that for her. He used people without any regard for their sensibilities. She didn’t condemn him for it. She accepted that he was simply not human and couldn’t fully grasp that what he

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was doing was just wrong. But that made her realize that she had to include herself in the category of ‘unimportant’. How could she mean anything at all to him if no other human did? She was almost relieved when her boss called her into his office to speak to her. This, she knew, meant the end. Her life was about to change again, and she was almost as fiercely glad as she was devastated. It wasn’t at all what she’d expected, though. She’d been so distracted by thoughts of Anka when she was supposed to be working, so anxious to leave work each day and return to him, that she was instantly certain when she was summoned that she was about to be fired. It penetrated her mind fairly quickly, though, as she settled in a chair across from his desk, that Dr. Mendoza was struggling with excitement not anger. “Dr. Sheffield gave me a call last evening. He’s asked me to send you down to the dig site again. They’ve found something.”

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Chapter Twelve “I have to go,” Gaby said, tension in every line of her body as she dragged her bags from the floor of her closet and set them out to pack. “Dr. Sheffield wants me back at the dig and my boss will send Paul if I don’t go.” Anka/the dark stranger, was sprawled on her bed, watching her with interest, his arms propped behind his head. “Then let Paul go,” he responded coolly. Gaby sent a glance in his direction, but she didn’t actually look at him. She hadn’t gotten used to not seeing the Anka she knew. She was never going to get used to it and she’d gotten to where she almost hated the sight of the stranger. He was a constant reminder that she was just as guilty of using him as Anka was … more guilty really. Anka didn’t understand that it was wrong. She did. He rolled onto his side. “This man who dwells with me is completely satisfied with the arrangement. You’ve no reason to feel any guilt.” Gaby glared at him. “I wish you wouldn’t read my mind!” she said testily. His expression relaxed. A faint, indulgent smile curled his lips. “If I did not, then I would not know what was going through your mind. You will not say. You will only look at me as if I have hurt you or offended, and you will not say how.” Guilt jolted through her at the comment, and pain. She struggled against feeling them, wondering if he’d been hurt by those things he’d sensed or just annoyed. Annoyed, she suspected. What did she really know about him, after all? He wouldn’t tell her anything. Any time she asked, he would either ignore the question all together, change the subject, or tell her something cryptic that she couldn’t make heads or tails of. She was as tired of trying to batter down the solid walls he’d erected around himself as she was of pretending she was content to live a lie. It was a lie, regardless of how Anka perceived it. He was there, yes, but in a stranger’s body and she was aware of it every moment she was with him—that she was with him, but with someone else. As hard as she had tried to convince herself that it was ‘cool’ and ‘kinky’ she just felt guilty about it. Even when she was thoroughly enjoying herself—especially then—she felt like she was being unfaithful to Anka. She hated that. She hated the way it made her feel about herself. She let out a huff of irritation. “How do you know he doesn’t mind? Do you listen to his thoughts, too?” “Yes,” he said calmly. “He has been graciously compensated for the use of his body, and he is satisfied. I do understand the way of your world, regardless of what you seem to believe.” His tone was chiding. It really irritated the hell out of her when he spoke to her as if she was a mere child. She was thirty five years old for god’s sake! Sure he was older, a lot older—she was never going to know how much older, but that didn’t mean she was less mature. She had more life experience than a hell of a lot of people did!

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Gaby plunked her hands on her hips. “How has he been compensated?” Anka shrugged. “He enjoys fucking you as much as I do. And I have helped him obtain the position that he wanted. He is in no great hurry for me to leave. He knows he will have to keep his position without my help once I am gone.” The first comment distressed her in a way she didn’t even want to contemplate, especially knowing that Anka delved into her mind whenever he pleased. She felt slightly mollified by the last, though. She stopped what she was doing and studied him intently. “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?” “Yes, but it is also true.” Gaby let out a relieved breath, feeling a great weight drop from her shoulders. “So, now you do not need to go.” She eyed him suspiciously. “Yes, I do, because I need my job and I’m not about to let that snot Paul take it. As you pointed out, it’s the way of my world. I have to have money to live and I’ve no desire to play underling to Paul, or look for another position.” “Why do you not like this body?” he demanded abruptly. “This is a very good body.” Gaby felt a knot of misery well in her throat. “It isn’t you!” she said angrily. “The image you hold in your mind is not me either,” he said tightly, coming off the bed. She looked at him sadly. “I know. In my head, I know.” He looked at her strangely for several moments, his anger vanishing abruptly. Finally, he closed the distance between them. Reaching her, he settled his palms on her shoulders. “But in your heart, Moonflower?” She did not want to talk about her heart! Or the pang it gave her to have to face the truth. He’d begun life as he was, not as a human who’d become something else. She realized she’d thought of him that way, though. She’d wanted to believe he was really the same as her in every way that mattered. The out of body thing was just a … special gift he had that made him seem different when he really wasn’t. But the way she’d first seen him was Anka to her. Even though, on an intellectual level, she knew her perceptions were faulty, she couldn’t separate the being he was from the image she held of him. And she couldn’t accept that she could never really be familiar with anything about him beyond his personality. It was the essence of what made a person that really mattered—their thoughts, their personality—without that the body was nothing but an empty shell. But in her plain of existence, the laughter, the loving, the warmth of a touch, the sound of a voice—all of those things were just as necessary, just as much a part of the person as the spirit that dwelt within. She drew in a shaky breath, forced a smile, though she didn’t meet his gaze. “It doesn’t matter. I do understand. I just have to … accept.” “Accept what?” His hands dropped from her shoulders as she turned away. “That some things just can’t be changed, no matter how much you’d like to change them. I have to go. This is important to me, important to my career.” She hesitated, unwilling to say what she knew she needed to say. She busied herself with dragging first one thing and then another from her chest of drawers and shoving it into the bag. “I need for you to accept and understand me, too,” she finally said. “You won’t find what you’re looking for with me. I’d like for you to go, please.

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I’ve always heard there’s someone for everyone. You just have to look. I’m sure you’ll find the right woman if you just look. “But I’m not the one. I’m not. And …. “You could be pretty much anyone you want to be, can’t you? If you just looked around, I’m sure you could find some gorgeous idiot just waiting to throw his life away … there are always lots of them, addicted to the thrill of cheating death ... or just addicted to drugs—race car drivers, actors, singers—pretty much anybody with enough money to self-destruct. And then you’d have a perfectly good body that you wouldn’t have to share. It’d be yours by default, you know?” She closed her eyes when he came up behind her and she felt his hands settle on her arms, pulling her back against him. She resisted, resting stiffly against him and fighting the urge to just turn around and burrow against him. She wanted to, but she couldn’t pretend anymore than everything was going to work out all right. She couldn’t continue to delude herself that he would stay with her. Why would he? She was nothing special. She couldn’t even give him the child he wanted. And where would they live? How would they live? She had a good income, but it wasn’t enough for two, and there weren’t many people in the market for fertility gods, she thought a little hysterically. Anka stared down at the top of her head and the little of her face that he could see, feeling things he had never felt, pain like nothing else. She was right, he realized, feeling ill. They could not go on as they had. He had willfully ignored the possible consequences to her because of his own desires and because of that he had nearly lost her. Coldness swept through him as he recalled how close it had been, how nearly he had failed her completely. For all his powers, the fight to keep her spirit within her body had nearly depleted him. If she remembered, would she despise him as he despised himself for it? He did not know, but he did know that he was not willing to take more risks with her. She was too fragile, too precious. There was only one thing that he could do that might make him worthy of her regard, but he would be risking all and he was not certain that he could do it. Regardless, he had to try, but he could not even do that until he had gained the strength to confront the task. He released her after a moment, much to Gaby’s sorrow/relief. She stood perfectly still where he’d left her, listening to his tread as he walked away, listening as the door to her apartment opened and then closed again. Her shoulders slumped when he’d gone. “That was easy,” she muttered, swallowing with an effort around the hard knot of misery in her throat. She stared dully at the shirt she held in her hands for several moments and finally knelt down and dragged everything out of her bag again to see what she’d packed. **** She’d forgotten how ungodly humid the place was, Gaby reflected as she wearily climbed down from the plane on the landing strip. A truck, of the type generally used by the military, moved off the grass that verged the narrow landing strip and shot toward the plane. Gaby’s heart clenched uncomfortably in her chest when she saw the military

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uniforms and guns of the men stationed at each of the four corners of the back of the vehicle. It didn’t settle much even when she recognized the man seated on the passenger side of the cab. Mark climbed down when the truck skidded to a halt that shot dirt and small rocks into the air. “Dr. LaPlante!” he called by way of greeting as he started toward her. “Glad to have you back!” Gaby nodded uncertainly. “It’s good to be back,” she lied automatically because it seemed appropriate, not because she really was. “The government’s taken a keen interest in the dig, as you see,” he murmured when he reached her. “Officially, they’re here to protect us and the site from looters and/or guerrilla’s who might take the notion that some of the artifacts could finance their cause.” Gaby nodded again, averting her gaze from the soldiers as they leapt down from the truck and hurried to collect her baggage and stow it the truck. The implication from those comments, she realized, was that, unofficially, the government didn’t trust the Americans not to make off with something valuable. She wished that someone had thought to mention the situation to her before she’d agreed to return, although she supposed it wouldn’t have changed anything. Her position wouldn’t have allowed her to make any other decision but the one she had, but she would’ve liked to have prepared herself. Mark helped her into the cab of the truck and she settled uneasily between the soldier driving and Mark, who’d taken the window seat. She hoped the show of military strength didn’t indicate the possibility of snipers, or attack by rebels, but she didn’t like to pump Mark for that sort of information within their hearing. Chances were none of them spoke English, but she’d rather not find out the hard way that they did. Instead, as they headed out along the narrow jungle track, Mark focused the conversation on generalities. She struggled for a while to keep the polite conversation going but she wasn’t sorry when Mark finally gave up the effort and she was allowed to retreat into her thoughts. Not that they were pleasant by any means, but the jouncing progress of the four wheel drive along the horribly pitted road made it pretty impossible to focus on anything beyond trying to stay in her seat. At that, she could see some work had been done at improving the track. The first time she’d come the jungle had encroached so closely upon it that anyone outside the vehicle ran the risk of being slapped from the vehicle by limbs and fronds, and that time she’d been picked up by an open jeep. This truck was far larger, indicating the narrow track had been widened considerably, and it looked like the pits in the track had been formed by a good number of similar vehicles where before it had only been exposed roots and washouts from the rain that had made riding along it an exercise in torture. Her first trip had been miserably uncomfortable and unnerving because she wasn’t accustomed to sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag or the sounds of the jungle at night, and her awareness of the wildlife hadn’t helped one iota. This trip retained all the same elements but added to that was the anxiety that they could be attacked by rebels or the soldiers with them might take it into their head to take advantage of her since she was completely at their mercy. She tried not to think about the fact that Mark, who probably didn’t weigh any more than she did and was only about twenty six, was all that

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stood between her and the men. It would be all too easy to gang rape her and then dispose of both of them and report them as casualties along the way if they felt the inclination. She didn’t like the looks she encountered from time to time. She was acutely conscious of the fact that men in most countries outside the US, particularly the predominately Catholic South American countries, viewed American women as whores because they actually had civil rights. And the looks and that knowledge together combined to make for sleepless nights. The only bright side was that she couldn’t spare the time to wallow in her misery over Anka, but she discovered once they reached the dig site that that was no longer the case. The military was strongly in evidence at the site, as well, but the American enclave had nearly doubled since she’d left and now included a half a dozen more specialists and their assistants. Her stomach seemed to take a freefall when she got her first good look at the city that was emerging from the mountainside like Atlantis rising from the sea. Dwellings, many of them almost intact, dotted the landscape around the temple, but it was the temple itself that commanded attention. The government, apparently impatient to uncover the treasures of the ancient city, had sent a significant number of soldiers to add to the work force removing the bulk of the soil, and even some heavy equipment to hurry things along. The team must have been thrilled by that, Gaby thought wryly, wondering how much of the city the ‘helpers’ had damaged or destroyed in their enthusiasm to dig it up. One definite improvement was that the government had brought in a huge diesel generator and set up floodlights around the perimeter. Of course it was obvious the objective was to secure the site from possible looters, but it was welcome as far as Gaby was concerned nevertheless since the light and increased round the clock activity was bound to discourage the local wildlife from wandering into camp. It still had the look of a prison, which was unnerving. Gaby arrived at the site near dusk. She was disappointed on one level since it meant she couldn’t set to work right away. On another, she was relieved. The trip had exhausted her physically and the prospect of a decent night’s sleep was welcome. The group gathered for dinner, but Dr. Sheffield refused to discuss the find that had inspired him to solicit her participation again. She could see that he, all of them, were struggling to contain their excitement, but as Dr. Sheffield pointed out, they wanted her to view it with fresh eyes, unprejudiced by their own speculation. They had plenty to talk about that didn’t pertain directly to the find she’d been sent to investigate. The carbon dating of the mummy’s wrappings had placed the date of his burial during the age of the Olmec civilization. The team had discovered a number of other artifacts that substantiated that finding, but nothing that pointed to the city having been built by the Olmecs. The only conclusion that could be drawn from that was that a rival tribe had arisen to build an impressive civilization at virtually the same time. The theory that they were working on was that the people of the city, which was still unnamed, had been driven out by the Olmecs, who’d prevailed with their own civilization until the Toltecs had overrun them. Gaby couldn’t see that there was anything to substantiate that theory beyond the

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fact that it was already established that the Toltecs had reigned supreme until the Incas had risen to power. None of the artifacts she was shown showed any influence from the little known Olmec culture. If the Olmecs had destroyed the culture that had risen to power with this city, it seemed logical that they would then have taken over it and left their own mark on it. Instead, everything seemed to point to the conclusion that the city had simply been abandoned and that pointed to some natural disaster not a manmade one—famine or disease most likely, or maybe both. The city was too high for flooding to be likely besides the fact that they hadn’t uncovered sediment that pointed to that. There was also no evidence of volcanic activity or earthquake. Everyone at least agreed that there seemed to be a strong ‘old world’ influence in the art and architecture of this culture, including Egyptian, but it had emerged with an individuality that made it difficult to pinpoint any definitive influence from any single group. And, of course, nothing had been found, beyond that influence in style, that tied any of the cultures of the Eastern hemisphere to the west. Gaby felt, almost from the moment she arrived, that eerie sense of being watched that had plagued her almost from the start of her first visit. It wasn’t inconceivable that Anka had followed her ‘home’ or even that he’d returned when she’d sent him away, but she decided she was probably just imagining it. There seemed no reason for him to return. He wasn’t bound to the place, obviously, or even bound to the body that he’d once occupied. That had been returned to the country of origin long since. Scientist or not, disbeliever that she’d thought she was, she realized that she had ‘accepted’ that Anka was a ghost. What he actually was, was so completely beyond the realm of her understanding that it was easier to accept that he was a ghost, something she’d never believed in, or thought she hadn’t, than what he actually was. Even now, she was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, trying to make him fit some mold, any mold that was even a little familiar. If he had been a ghost, maybe he would’ve been capable of some of the things he’d done anyway. But there would’ve been rules that applied, unwritten rules, maybe, but established behavior patterns that were generally held to be true. He would have been tied to this place because this was where he’d died. He hadn’t actually died, however, because he’d never really ‘lived’. Only beings of a biological nature were bound by the cycle of birth and death. Anka simply existed. It was almost as hard to fully grasp that concept as the infinity of the universe, and that had always given her a headache. Everything had a beginning and end. That was the one law of nature that mankind held as a universal truth, and no one could wrap their mind around the concept of infinity. She couldn’t in any event. She decided, though, that it was wishful thinking on her part that made her ‘feel’ Anka’s presence. He was gone, off to find a willing candidate for his current project, producing off-spring, she didn’t doubt. He was amazingly single-minded when he set out to do something, she thought somewhat irritably. She would have been much better off if he’d only singled her out because he enjoyed the fucking. Then she would have had him until he’d grown bored with it and her and moved on. The procreation thing … well, that had very definite limitations. Even if she had been able to accept the ‘new’ Anka, even if she’d gotten

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used to him looking so radically different than the man she’d fallen for, time was her enemy in that little game. He didn’t strike her as a man, or being, of infinite patience. She doubted he would’ve been satisfied to wait around months and months before he finally had to accept that he couldn’t get a child on her. One would’ve thought that a being that existed for centuries would have all the patience in the world. After all, time couldn’t mean much to someone like that. She didn’t like to think that there might be a reason why he’d become impatient. Regardless of what that meant in relation to her own life span expectations, she wanted to think of him being forever. She could live with her own mortality. She couldn’t bear the thought that he might simply cease to exist. Needless to say, she didn’t rest much despite the opportunity to do so. She was almost as tired when she woke the following morning as she had been when she went to bed, but excitement threaded her as she rose and performed her morning ritual. By the time she was prepared to face the day her heart was already skipping with expectancy. The scary ladders leading down into the pit had been replaced by an even scarier switchback track that was dangerously narrow and steep. Metal poles had been planted along the outer edge and a guy wire threaded through to give the illusion of protection, but it didn’t do a thing for Gaby. She was as certain as she wanted to be that one body slamming into the ‘safety fence’ would be enough to take out the whole fucking lot of them and the only result would be that one arrived at the bottom with a ton of wire and posts instead of just rocks and dirt. Burros had been added to the equation, too. Everyone mounted on one, including her, even though she trusted her own surefootedness much more than she trusted theirs, and the entire team wound downward on the smelly beasts. It was rather like an excursion into the Grand Canyon, except the pit wasn’t even nearly as deep and probably not nearly as safe, either. The temple, its upper reaches wreathed in the morning mists, was an awesome sight to behold. Most of the focus of the digging had been concentrated around unearthing the structure and it was massive. Staring at it as they wound downward, Gaby marveled at the construction of such a mammoth structure by primitive man, wondering how many generations had labored on it. It seemed impossible to believe that it hadn’t taken generations to build, but then it was staggering that they’d managed it at all. “The remains we discovered are on the lowest level,” Dr. Sheffield said as they reached the bottom and he managed to maneuver his burro alongside hers. Gaby dragged her gaze from the temple and looked at him. “How many?” He shook his head. “We haven’t determined. I decided to leave the chamber untouched until you could examine it. I didn’t want to take the chance of disturbing possible evidence.” They stopped outside the entrance, which Gaby saw had been sealed and obviously broken into when they’d uncovered the lowest level. Dr. Sheffield moved to a small generator and started it. Light immediately flooded the interior and spilled out of the entrance. Gaby studied it while she waited for Dr. Sheffield to rejoin her. “If you don’t mind,” she said when he came to stand beside her, “I’d like to go in alone for now and see what my first impressions are.” Dr. Sheffield frowned but finally nodded in agreement. Calling to the other team

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members, he led them away. The sense of Anka’s presence was far stronger now, but then so were her memories. Shrugging it off after a while, Gaby braced herself and moved to the entrance. From the opening, she saw that the chamber was enormous, maybe three times the size of the chamber they’d first found near the top of the edifice. Columns sprouted from the floor like a denuded forest—a manmade forest because they were lined up in neat, precise rows. Even with the lights that had been rigged up inside, there were shadows and Gaby tried to envision what it must have looked like in the days when the place was used—for whatever purpose it had served. It seemed it must have served some purpose. She couldn’t imagine that they would have built something like this if it hadn’t been a place of gathering. The proportions also suggested that there must have been hundreds of souls who had gathered. Maybe it hadn’t merely been a temple for worship? Maybe this had been the center for government as well as worship? As she stepped inside and looked around, she saw that an elaborate frieze ran the perimeters of the walls just as they had in the burial chamber of Anka. Early cultures rarely had a written language, but they still liked to record the events of their lives and generally did so in pictures. She felt the urge to examine them, but she’d been summoned to examine the remains found inside. Letting out a shaky breath, she moved to the low wall that formed a pit in the center of the great room. She would’ve suspected that it had been built as a fire pit, probably for light more than heat except for the scaffolding around it that indicated something else entirely. But maybe that had been the original purpose? Scanning the ceiling above the pit, she saw nothing that looked like soot to support that theory and as she drew closer, she also saw that the workmanship that had gone into building the pit wasn’t the same careful craftsmanship that had gone into building the temple. It looked hastily and haphazardly done, as if the workers hadn’t been as skilled or they had just been in a hurry to get the job done and it actually was rushed. Stone slabs had been stacked beside the pit, which meant it had been sealed when Dr. Sheffield’s team had found it. Ignoring that for the moment, Gaby climbed the scaffolding at last and looked down into the pit. Horror filled her as she stared down at the skeletal remains, their bare skulls grinning up at her in frozen screams. This, she saw instantly, was no ordinary burial pit. The corpses had not been carefully prepared for burial and carefully settled in their final resting place. They’d been murdered and tossed into the pit—or maybe even tossed inside and buried alive.

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Chapter Thirteen A shudder went through Gaby. Bile rose in her throat. As her shocked gaze inspected the tangled bodies, she saw fury in the slaughter. There were broken bones and cracked skulls. She didn’t believe this was no more than the result of careless burial. Whoever they were, they’d been brutally attacked and beaten to death, not offered up in any kind of ritual sacrifice. Loathe as she was to enter the pit, there was no way to examine them and determine if her first impression was right except to join them. Her flesh crawled at the thought, but after a moment she took her recorder out and turned it on. Making a note of the date and time, she recited her first impressions and finally moved to the ladder to climb down. She wasn’t prone to such fanciful notions as ‘feeling’ a sense of brooding evil, and yet as she carefully climbed down the ladder, she felt just that, as if something undetected by her normal senses resided there. Brushing the thoughts aside, she knelt beside the first body and examined it carefully. It was the body of a woman barely five feet in height. The size threw her for several moments. She glanced around, noting that none of the skeletons within view looked much, if any, bigger and she thought at first that the bodies might be children. The skeleton she was examining was definitely a woman, though. The bones of her pelvis indicated she’d given birth, so she was mature enough for that. Given the life spans and practices of the ancients, she might still have been young enough to be considered a child by modern standards—maybe no more than thirteen to fifteen years of age, but by ancient standards a girl capable of bearing a child was a woman full grown. There was a hole in her skull nearly as big as Gaby’s fist. It didn’t take a scientist to figure out the cause of death. She examined the broken bone anyway, just to be sure it was unlikely to be the result of something that had happened after death. When she’d satisfied her initial impression, she moved to the next body, and then next. She lost track of the time as she studied one after another. Dr. Sheffield startled the hell out of her when he appeared above her some time later. “Ready to break for lunch?” She stared up at him blankly, trying to get her racing heart under control. Food was the furthest thing from her mind, but she nodded anyway. The urge to race from the pit into the sunlight was nearly uncontrollable once the offer was made to relieve her. A portable chemical toilet had been set up near where the others were working, she discovered when he led her to where the others had gathered around an umbrella shaded portable table to eat their sandwiches. She hated the things but they beat the hell out of squatting in the woods and baring her ass to snake bite. The thing still had to be inspected for deadly critters before she could use it. When she’d used a canteen to wash up, she joined the other members of the team at the table. No one said anything for a few minutes, but she could feel their questioning gazes as she struggled to eat the food provided.

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“What did you make of it?” Dr. Sheffield finally asked. Giving up the effort to chew and swallow, Gaby set the remains of her sandwich down. “It was a massacre. The thing that puzzles me is that they were entombed at all.” His brows rose. Everyone at the table exchanged glances. “You don’t think it was a sacrificial bloodletting?” Mark asked finally. Gaby shook her head. “Those women were butchered. Clearly, the motivation was rage.” “Women?” Sheila gasped in obvious shock. Gaby glanced at her in surprise and then looked at the others. She could see this was news to them. “Granted I’ve only examined maybe a third of them, but, yes, it’s all women as far as I can tell in my preliminary examination. The bodies were tossed into the pit after they were killed—at least most of them seemed to be. They’re lying on top of one another, but the sizes of the skeletons indicate women.” She cleared her throat, swallowing against the sickness that cloyed her throat. “Some of them were still alive when it was sealed, probably already dying, but not dead.” Several of the students looked downright green at that announcement. Even Dr. Sheffield and Dr. Ramiro, who was new to the dig, looked more than a little disturbed. “You’ve determined this for certain?” “There are … claw marks along the sides in several places.” She was relieved they accepted it at that and didn’t demand a more detailed explanation or question whether or not she was certain that the marks been made by someone trying to claw their way out. She was as certain as she could be that it wasn’t tool marks. In the first place, there could be no rhyme or reason for tool marks inside, especially not in that pattern. In the second, one of the women had died with her arm extended and her hand resting against the wall she’d been clawing at. Reluctance coiled in her belly when everyone rose to return to work, but she did her best to look unconcerned even if she couldn’t manage the enthusiasm everyone else displayed at getting back to the adventure of discovery. By late afternoon, she’d counted twenty eight bodies. As far she could tell, that was all, but they wouldn’t be absolutely certain until the remains had been removed and all bones accounted for. She’d discovered bits and pieces of garments strewn among the skeletal remains. It seemed improbable that ordinary garments would have survived so long without something that would’ve been used to preserve them despite the fact that the crypt seemed to have been sealed quite well—and clearly no effort had been made to preserve the bodies entombed. A closer examination revealed that they were extraordinary. Gold threads had been woven together to form the pieces she unearthed and jewels were sewn into the garment to form decorative patterns. That only deepened the mystery of the bodies, though. Their connection to the temple itself seemed inarguable. She couldn’t imagine that ordinary citizens would have worn such things. Priestesses? But if that was so, why had they been murdered and by whom? She realized as she trudged back to the living quarters of the archeology team that evening that it was unlikely she would find the answers to the mystery in the tomb itself. They might never know. It seemed equally unlikely that the deed would’ve been recorded in the pictorial record on the temple walls, but she decided it was worth a look. She might at least find something that hinted at the reason for the massacre.

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As tired as she was once she’d bathed and eaten, she was still restless, her mind on the walls of the temple and the clues she might find. She would have to begin excavating the bodies the next day, or at least oversee the work to try to keep the remains from being tossed together and pieces separated from the proper owner. Otherwise she was going to have her hands full just with the sorting. And, of course, once all the bodies were removed she would be caught up in sifting the debris beneath them for clues, and then after that she would be tied up with carefully examining each body to record everything that could be discovered. There would be no time in the course of the day to study the mosaics. If she wanted to do so, she was going to have to do it on her ‘own’ time. It was creepier going to the temple at night alone than it had been during the day. She would’ve like a weapon … a club, at least, to discourage any of the soldiers that took it into their head that her presence, alone at night, was an invitation. She took a long gripped flashlight, deciding it was heavy enough to discourage anyone that might get that idea … as long as it wasn’t a gang. Most of the floodlights had been focused upon the pit, leaving shadows along the wall, but the cross beams from one side of the chamber to the other chased away all but light shadows. Flipping the flashlight on that she’d brought with her, Gaby started just inside the door and walked slowly around the perimeter, trying to decide where the story began and ended. Was it in chronological order? Or any order at all? And was it as true and accurate an account of events as the recorders could manage? Or had politics influenced the account? The walk-by didn’t enlighten her. Returning to the mosaics on either side of the entrance, she stood and stared at each in turn, trying to interpret what she was looking at. Finally, deciding the depiction to the right of the door was the beginning, she settled on the floor and tried to figure out what the event was that was supposed to be depicted. There were at least a dozen figures in it, all of them prostrated as if in worship. In the center of the group was fire that burned with blue flames. She’d been staring at it for so long the cold from the stone floor had turned her butt cheeks to ice before it finally dawned on her that the face she saw behind the column of blue flame wasn’t a figure on the other side as she’d first supposed. The face was a part of the column of fire. She might have tumbled to that sooner except that the face wasn’t Anka’s. Getting to her feet stiffly, she moved a little closer, but the pattern of the colored stones was lost when she moved too close. Stepping back just far enough to detect the pattern, she examined the face in the blue flames for a while and then studied the other figures. One stood out because of the elaborate headdress he was wearing. A priest, she wondered? He looked older the others, in fact his hair was white. Beside him was a woman, also white haired. Her garb, like that of the old man, was more elaborate than the simple clothing worn by the others, she realized. Still clueless as to what the meaning was, she moved to the next depiction. This one was easier to decipher. It was a birth … obviously a birth of great importance to have found its way into the temple. The same blue column of fire appeared in it, and so, too, did the two elders that had figured prominently in the first picture. The old woman had the baby’s head pressed to her bare breast.

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The two old people weren’t a priest and a priestess. As impossible as seemed, it still appeared clear that they were the parents of the infant. The worshippers were around the threesome now. After moving back and forth between the two pictures, Gaby decided the two elders were leaders, either a priest and priestess, or possibly a Chieftain/King and his wife. They were not only dominant figures in two different records, they were the only ones besides the figure in the blue flames that had any real detail to their features. And their garments were notably richer than the garb the others wore. A man and his wife, then, had prayed for a child and been granted one? A miracle child, because both were clearly far too old to bear a child, assuming she’d figured it out and that was what was happening. The next five pictures were of battles, or maybe just one great battle that they thought had glorified the people enough to deserve several different view points. Gaby gave them only a cursory glance before moving on. The segment following those depicted a boy or young man lying on an altar. Blood flowed from a chest wound. Gaby had just decided it must be a depiction of a sacrifice when she noticed that the same elders appeared in this picture, as well, once more prostrate in a worshipful pose, their faces lifted up as if in supplication to the blue flame. After staring it for some moments, she moved back to the battle scenes she’d barely glanced at. She saw then that it wasn’t, as she’d at first supposed, a single battle. The pictures suggested different battles. At the center of each of the first two pictures was the old chieftain. In the first he held the infant, the second a tiny child. In the third the child stood before him. In the last two, the old man was absent, but a young boy stood at the center. She could tell by the size and build that he would barely have been pubescent even in the last of these. A boy—the miracle child obviously—had led his people in battle? Many battles if she’d interpreted the pictures correctly. And died, she saw, with a spear through his chest. Blue rays of light spilled through the gaping wound. She stood thinking over what she thought she’d deciphered for some time, staring into the distance. She couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around it, however, and finally, deciding she was just too tired to think straight, she abandoned the quest for the night and sought rest. She didn’t rest much. The scenes she’d studied so hard intruded into her dreams and whether guided by any truth or not, solidified in her mind as the story she’d pieced together. The child hadn’t merely been a miracle of birth, though. He’d been far more than that if he had led his people in battle—to victory many times—before he’d even attained adulthood. It took all Gaby could do to focus on the task of separating and removing the remains in the pit the following day. Her mind kept wandering to the story of the mosaics. At lunch, instead of joining the others, she relieved herself, grabbed a drink and a sandwich and returned to examine the pictures again to see if, with a clearer mind, she interpreted them differently. Try though she might, she couldn’t pick up any other story that they might have been trying to tell. It dawned on her, though, that Anka had lied to her. This was his temple. This

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temple was built to worship him and the story contained on the walls of his temple wasn’t just the story of the civilization that had built it. It was Anka’s story. He’d been borne of human parents, or at least a human mother. The being in the first mosaic didn’t look like him because it wasn’t him. It was his sire, his true sire, a being just like him that had sown his seed in the withered womb of a woman far too old to bear children. The next picture confirmed it, for her at least. It depicted the same boy on his knees, with no wound. The blue fire was all around him, and beyond the altar where he’d been lying was a huge crowd of worshippers, some prostrated on the ground, others with looks of awe or horror on their faces, some running or cringing as if fearful for their lives. This was what Anka had implied, that he’d taken the body of the human when the soul had left it, but the pictures before that clearly gave that the lie. No ordinary human child would have been capable of the things attributed to this child. Why, she wondered, had he lied to her? Why had he said the body they’d found entombed here wasn’t him when it was? And if he’d lied about this, what else had he lied about? Doubts arose to plague her as she finished the day’s work, but she didn’t know if that was because she just didn’t want to believe Anka had lied to her or if there was substance to the thoughts. She did know, though, that historians had been known to exaggerate or outright lie. What if they’d only depicted the tale that way because they had wanted to believe he was special from the beginning? It wasn’t unusual at all for humans to claim kinship to the gods. Pretty much all of the ancient rulers had claimed to be gods, or the off-spring of gods. Was that all it was? Was she as guilty as they were of wanting to believe something that wasn’t true at all? If that was the case, though, what about the old ruler and his wife? Had they just thought they were too old to bear a child and that was why they’d considered their son a gift of the god they’d prayed to? Or had they not thought any such thing, but told that tale to their people so that the people would look upon him with the ‘proper’ respect and awe? Had the man, old and perhaps in failing health and with no healthy heir to pass his reign to decided to protect his son with the lies? It was a possibility she decided. The most significant miracle attributed to the young King of the Biac’s was his resurrection, and that would’ve been when Anka had taken over the boy’s body. One other possibility emerged, but Gaby forgot all about it when they made a new discovery. She had focused most of her energies on piecing together the story, had completely forgotten that her original reason for doing so was to see if she could discover some clues of what had happened in the temple. It took most of a week to remove the bodies to a special tent that had been set up to study the bones. Gaby hadn’t really expected to find anything of any significance beneath the bodies, perhaps random bits of bone and/or more pieces of the garments she’d first found. She certainly hadn’t expected to find that the stones in the center of the pit had been removed and a shallow grave dug. She hadn’t expected to find the mummified remains of a woman and her unborn child.

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Chapter Fourteen Temple priestesses, Gaby decided as she examined the pieces of garments she’d begun sifting from the debris beneath the skeletal remains. Only now and then did she find pieces large enough to identify patterns or specific parts of the garment. Most of the pieces were little more than swatches. Whatever materials had been woven to make up the primary parts of their garments had deteriorated beyond recognition. The bejeweled pieces threaded together with gold thread and attached to the woven gold were borders, she finally decided, trying to envision what the gowns might have looked like. Simple in form and flowing lines, she was certain. Fastenings of any kind were rare on ancient garments, and few cultures had developed the tools to cut garments into precise shapes, so most were nothing more than a series of squares and rectangular pieces tied together. The larger pieces she found seemed to bear up that theory. Dr. Sheffield had wanted to put some of the others with her, but she had convinced him that it would be better if she worked alone to gather the pieces of the garments since they were so fragile. Despite the number of bodies they’d found, the pit was not a very large one and it would be hard for several people to work inside of it without risking the loss or damage of what they might find. It was a valid argument, but mostly she had just wanted to work alone. She worked better without the distraction—she had enough to distract her as it was. As she worked, only half her mind was on the sifting search. The other half could not be dragged from the story Anka. Occasionally her mind would drift from the friezes to Anka himself and she would wonder where he was, what he was doing … if he’d found the woman she’d insisted he should look for. Those thoughts were far too painful, though, and she would shove them into the back of her mind and focus again on unraveling the mystery. Without verification from Anka himself, she was never going to know for sure which of her theories was closest to fact. It was entirely possible that the answer to that was none. She’d realized after puzzling over whether or not the old king had made up the story that she had no way of knowing if there even was an old king. The ancients hadn’t liked mysteries anymore than modern man did. If they couldn’t solve them with actual facts, they made up things that seemed reasonable to them. The whole story might be nothing more than a myth to explain Anka’s arrival among them. It certainly was if what Anka had said was true. No infant, toddler, or even young boy would have had the capability of leading an army, not a purely human one. An intelligent, already mature, being with powers far beyond humans might have directed a battle, even from within the body of a child. And, of course, she’d seen some of what he was capable of. Whatever the age or strength of the body he occupied, he could have thrown the opposing army into complete disorder, manipulated them into believing what he wanted them to believe. So, she now had at least three theories. Any of them were possible, and she had no way to eliminate even one.

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She had uncovered parts of the remains before she realized she’d found another body. Pausing when she felt a shape beneath the dirt she’d been brushing at, Gaby peered down at it for several moments before she realized it was a body and that this one had been mummified. She had to revise that first assessment when she had cleared the dirt from around the body enough to see it better. Someone, she realized, had attempted to hide this body. It had been wrapped, but unlike the mummified remains of their god, the preservation process had been haphazard. Whoever had done it had soaked the wrapping in whatever they used to preserve the dead, or at least the more important dead, but it looked like the job had been a hasty one, designed more to hide what had been done to the body than to actually preserve it. Then, it seemed obvious, they’d decided that wouldn’t hide the crime and instead of seeing that it was encased in a sarcophagus, they’d simply dug a hole in the middle of the fire pit, shoved the body in and covered it up. There was no charring of the wraps that she could see, though, which seemed to indicate their crime had been discovered. Otherwise, a fire would’ve been built over it and most, if not all, of the body would have been burned. She thought. Because, clearly, the pit had been used as a fire pit at some point. There’d been a layer of ashy debris and partially burned timbers at the bottom indicating as much. The body was buried beneath maybe a foot of dirt, though. The dirt would have kept it from catching fire, but then the body would have slow baked and that would’ve eliminated even the minimal benefits of the preservatives they’d used. The preservatives themselves might have caught fire, for that matter. They still hadn’t determined exactly what the natives had used in the process except that it wasn’t what the Egyptians had used. When she’d summoned the men to remove it to the ‘morgue’ tent, Gaby followed them to examine the body. She knew from the size, even before she’d unwrapped it, that it must be another female, around the same age as the others. There was some tissue left, not much, but enough to yield up the gruesome secret. This woman, unlike the others who’d been bludgeoned to death, had been strangled and stabbed repeatedly. Serious overkill, and the assault was very personal. Gaby thought for several moments that she would throw up. Women who died like this were usually murdered by their husbands or lovers. She was still struggling to come to grips with that when she examined the woman’s abdomen in an attempt to pinpoint her age and discovered the tiny bones of her unborn infant. Fighting for breath, she abandoned the tent. She couldn’t fall to pieces, she told herself fiercely, struggling to take deep, calming breaths. Everyone would think she’d gone off the deep end to get so emotional about a corpse thousands of years old. It wasn’t Anka who’d killed her, she told herself fiercely. She knew it couldn’t have been him. She knew him. She knew he’d never do anything like this. She didn’t even know that the woman had any kind of connection with him beyond her presence in the temple! Why then? And who?

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When she’d calmed down a little, she began to wonder if the death of this woman was connected to the deaths of the others. She could carbon date, but that wasn’t going to be precise enough to prove or disprove a connection. She’d gotten so wrapped up in trying to learn about Anka, she realized, that she’d completely forgotten her original purpose in trying to decipher the story on the walls. She’d been looking for answers to the deaths of the other women. They weren’t sacrifices. She knew that, felt it in her bones. The act itself had been too brutal, not ritualistic. And the woman she’d just found certainly didn’t follow any previously known ritual sacrifice. It took all she could do to make it through the remainder of the day with even an appearance of normalcy. The answers she was looking for had to be recorded in the history on the walls. If not in the main chamber, then it would be recorded somewhere else. She was convinced it must. She prayed it was, because she had to know the truth. She hadn’t examined the whole frieze, though. Deciding she would, that night, if she had to stay up all night to do it, she tried to focus on what an examination of the woman’s body would tell her. It told her a lot, but it didn’t really answer the questions pinging back and forth through her mind. Swatches of long, black hair that had once flowed nearly hip length on the woman were evidence she’d been young—there were no silver threads among the black. The infant had been near to term. It was too large to have been far from birth, and it was a male child. There were enough stab wounds to have killed her and the baby several times over, but she couldn’t tell if the woman had been strangled to death and then stabbed over and over, or if she’d merely been subdued by the garrote while she was stabbed to death. There wasn’t enough tissue left to determine that, but the baby didn’t seem to be the target. Rather his death seemed incidental. Most of the stab wounds were in the woman’s chest and back. As revolting and thoroughly unsettling as those discoveries were, they paled beside the shock the entire archeology team received that afternoon. After considerable thought and debate over just how to best utilize the treasure of the newly discovered city, the government had finally decided that turning it into a tourist attraction would bring in the most money. An entourage of specialists arrived that evening with the mummified remains of the god Anka encased in a clear acrylic coffin which they intended to display in its original crypt. The specialists who arrived with it were to begin right away to set up an electronic security system to protect the ‘living museum’. Dr. Sheffield was livid. “My god!” he roared furiously when he’d recovered enough from his shock to feel his anger. “Do those fools think we’ve uncovered a prehistoric Diz Land? Next they’ll be setting up rides! It’s … it’s obscene!” Gaby couldn’t have agreed more. Setting aside the value of the find on a scientific level, this city had been the setting for a blood bath. Either they didn’t know that part yet, because they hadn’t been informed, or they thought that the gruesome aspects would make the place all the more popular as a tourist attraction. And they might be right, she reflected.

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The plans threw the entire dig team into an uproar. They were to be allowed only a few more weeks to conclude their studies and then they’d been invited to leave. They’d barely begun to unearth the city itself. Most of their focus had been on the temple. Dr. Sheffield and Dr. Ramiro made plans to leave the following morning to try to argue their case. The remainder of the team would stay and work like crazy to get what they could while they could since no one really thought Dr. Sheffield’s efforts would make a difference. The government’s plans seemed half baked at best, as far as Gaby was concerned. It also seemed stupid and precipitate to return the mummy to the temple when they couldn’t possibly ready the place to open it for months, but they had the military in place already. And, maybe, they hadn’t really been comfortable keeping the remains from its final resting place? Who knew what thoughts had run through their minds, but Gaby wasn’t happy knowing it occupied the temple once more. Not that she had any intention of returning to that particular chamber. The statue was there, and the presence of the effigy of Anka was far more disturbing even than the mummified remains, serving as a painful reminder of her experience there. She more than half expected to be turned away from the temple when she returned to it that evening, but apparently the guards had been ordered to allow the scientists free reign until they departed. She knew the pictorial history began near the door and wound to the right. She’d studied those depictions fairly thoroughly. But she also knew the chronological order would be critical to understanding what she was seeing, and she really had no idea when the ‘event’ had taken place. She thought it seemed likely that it had been the last act before the temple and maybe even the city had been abandoned, but she couldn’t be sure. And if she was right, there might be nothing about the deaths at all, which made it all the more important to understand the events that had led up to the massacre because that might be the only clues she got. Bypassing the first segments, she only devoted enough time to the following segments to get the general idea of the story it was meant to convey. They seemed fairly straightforward in any event. Dozens were devoted to the ‘feats’ of their patron god and the rise of their civilization. She’d been cursorily examining one after another for hours when something on one finally caught her attention. It was a ritual of worship, the first depicting priestesses. She’d dismissed it at first, but the design on the garments finally clicked in her mind and she studied the mosaic more closely. Priestesses, she decided, just as she’d suspected. With the completion of the temple, which housed the god they thought of as both protector and the god of fruitfulness. Their perception of him seemed to have shifted at some point from a more all encompassing god of wealth and prosperity to primarily the god of fertility. She couldn’t really pinpoint what had caused that shift, but it was immaterial to her. The important thing was that the priestesses had appeared on the scene and the count matched the bodies she’d found … if she included the one that seemed to have been murdered before the others. The next mosaic gave her a jolt. It depicted Anka with one of the priestesses at his side, set apart from the others, obviously favored above the others. It was hard to say what her role was for certain—she was garbed like the others, but her positioning above

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them seemed significant. Jealously and resentment instantly washed over her. She did her best to ignore the sick/angry feeling when she finally identified it, but she couldn’t deny that that was exactly what it was when she moved to the next mosaic and saw that the woman had clearly been chosen to mate with the ‘god’. That mosaic showed them entwined like lovers. She’d expected the possibility that she would see something she might not want to know, but this wasn’t expected at all. She couldn’t decide whether her own feelings had colored her perceptions or if her instincts were to be trusted, but it seemed to her that in each mosaic that followed, resentment was building toward this woman who had been favored by Anka, obviously taken as his concubine—the chosen one to bear his child. The bastard! He’d allowed her to think she was his chosen, as if he hadn’t done it god only knew how many times before! Superior being, my ass! She thought furiously. If that wasn’t just like every other lying, cheating man she’d ever met in her life! She wasn’t certain how long she stood glaring at the happy couple, feeling resentment boil inside of her before she finally managed to get a grip. She was tempted, though, to simply leave the damned temple and to hell with the mystery! What difference did it make anyway? All of it had happened forever ago, and the damned government was booting them out. They were never going to finish studying the city and get any clear idea of the people and culture in the little bit of time allotted to them. It was as she stood glaring at the superior attitude of the ‘chosen’ that something finally clicked in her mind. Jealousy! Tamping her own with an effort, she studied the figures around the god and his ‘bride’ with as much detachment as she could manage. Either her imagination and her emotions were ruling her logical mind, or she wasn’t the only one jealous! The more she studied the mosaics, the more certain she was, though, that she’d stumbled upon the motive behind the woman’s death. It didn’t even come as much of a shock to her when she came at last to the one that told the sordid tale. The other priestesses, enraged by her superior attitude, jealous and resentful that she’d been favored above them, had slain her. The god, Anka, was inconsolable at the loss, and then enraged. His worshippers, either fearful of his wrath, or furious because the women had ruined everything with their jealousy, slew the women. But that didn’t appease their god. He withdrew from them, turned his face from them. And when he did, the civilization that he had helped to build began to crumble. The great Anka had departed the body and left them to fend for themselves. Three entire mosaics were devoted to their efforts to preserve the body and summon him back, but despite their efforts, he’d ignored them. A great plague descended upon the land, brought about, they believed, from the god’s wrath or his desertion. Crops failed, their animals died—drought, feminine and pestilence completed the fall of their civilization and the people who survived fled. Gaby felt—empty when she’d deciphered the last of the tale. Even the jealousy had abandoned her.

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High drama aside, it seemed inescapable that Anka had been completely devastated when his woman and child were murdered. He’d withdrawn from the world of man, from man himself, into he temple that had been built in his honor and stayed there until she’d stumbled upon his sanctuary. His contempt for ‘primitive’ minds, even the superiority that had annoyed her so often and his callous disregard for the feelings of humans were far more understandable now. That didn’t make it right, but then people that were hurt could do terrible things in their pain and Anka’s experiences were enough to leave a bad taste. Maybe he hadn’t been devastated so much as he’d been thoroughly disgusted? Maybe he’d just reached the point where he thought humankind was just unworthy of his attention? But then why had he stayed here? Even if it had been abandoned by humans, it had been built by them. It would have been a constant reminder. Maybe he’d thought he needed that to keep him from making the same mistake again? Or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to go far from the woman and child? And if any of that was true, where did she figure in? Was it something in particular about her that had drawn him out at last? Or was it just that she was the first human he’d had contact with in so long that he hadn’t been able to resist? He’d lived as a human for many years, certainly long enough to have begun to think and behave as a human. He’d shunned the form he’d ‘worn’ for so many years, the warrior/king/god Anka. Because it was too painful to be the person he’d once been? But he’d appeared to her in that form—Because that was the way he still thought of himself? Or maybe it was only because that was the only form familiar to him? She felt empty, she realized, because she’d sent him away and it was the last thing she’d really wanted to do. It didn’t matter how unreasonable it was, she loved him and she was afraid he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, love her back. It was just easier to turn her back on him before he could leave her. It was cold comfort. She should have taken what she could get while she could have it! How stupid was it to turn away happiness, even bittersweet happiness, for loneliness? It wasn’t as if she’d had so much that it was meaningless to her. It wasn’t as if she had much chance of ever having a taste of it again! So it was crazy to love a being that was practically a god compared to her own kind! Unlikely that he was even capable of feeling any of the same things she did! She could’ve loved him if she hadn’t been so stupid! That would have made her happy, however briefly, damn it! The almost frantic urge rose inside her to get home, to look for him, to try to call him back. She had to fight the impulse to get up at once and rush back to her tent to pack, to wake Dr. Sheffield up and beg a ride to the airstrip with him. He’d think she’d lost it. He was so furious with the government and their interference with his project he wasn’t likely to listen, or to spare the time to make arrangements to get her home. Her shoulders sagged at that realization. No matter how desperately she wanted to go home to look for him, it was very unlikely she’d get the chance before the entire

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team was packed up and shipped off. It probably wouldn’t do any good anyway, she thought morosely. He hadn’t made any attempt to contact her since she’d told him to go away. Damn him anyway! She’d told him to go away over and over. He’d picked a hell of a time to decide to honor her wishes! Deeply distressed and wrapped up in her own jumbled thoughts, the room around her had already begun to glow brightly with blue light before she noticed the change. Her heart seemed to stammer to a halt when she noticed it at last. Anka was standing behind her when she turned, his arms crossed over his chest, his feet planted slightly apart. His expression was unreadable, however, and Gaby felt no sense of welcome. She swallowed with an effort as he moved toward her and finally halted less than an arm’s length away. His gaze moved over her face fleetingly before he lifted his head to glance around the room. “You are far more clever than I gave your credit for,” he said finally, thoughtfully. He brought his gaze back to her. “I thought I had appreciated you as you deserved, but you were right about me. I was worshipped until I have an over inflated opinion of my worth … and too little appreciation for your kind.” The praise warmed her, but she felt a distance between them that held her where she was, that killed the impulse she’d felt to throw herself into his arms. She swallowed with an effort. “I was right about the story?” He tilted his head slightly. “Partially.” Gaby frowned, turning to look at the mosaics. “About which part?” she asked uncertainly. He closed the distance between them, pulling her against his length. “I did not love Sho-etnue,” he said quietly as he cupped her face with one hand and bade her look at him. “I have never felt love for any human before. I enjoyed their adulation. I gloried in the pleasures only flesh could provide me with—the taste, and smell, and sounds, and feel of the world and everything in it. Without the body, I can not sense any of those things. I can draw them from my memory, ‘feel’ them in a sense because I knew all of that long, long ago, but not as you do.” Releasing her, he moved toward the mosaics he spoke of, studying the depictions. Gaby stared at him for a long moment and finally followed him. “I did not retreat from the world because I was devastated by Sho-etnue’s death. She was weak and shallow, vain and stupid.” He hesitated, as if weighing her reaction to what he’d told her, or maybe considering the wisdom of telling her more. “I desired her because she was beautiful and I enjoyed the pleasure I felt when I was with her as man. And, for a little while, I fancied the concept of human love and allowed myself to believe I felt more than passion. “I came to realize long before her death, though, that I was in love with the concept of love, not Sho-etnue and that she, assuredly, felt no love for me. How could she when she was her entire world? She was the only love of her life,” he said with wry humor. His expression hardened as he studied the depiction of the murders of the priestesses in the temple. “I withdrew from mankind because I had grown to despise them, because I was sickened by their greed, their brutality … but mostly because I

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wanted to destroy them all for the death of my son and I knew if I stayed that I would.” Jealousy mushroomed inside of Gaby in spite of every effort to tamp it, in spite of his claim that he’d felt nothing for the woman he’d given his child to—beyond passion, as if she would have no reason to be jealous of that! Rationally, she shouldn’t have. It had all happened long, long before her time and she could no more condemn him for the life he’d had before he knew her than she expected to be judged on the one she’d had before she knew him. Irrational or not, though, she was still jealous, and she still felt cheated because that woman had carried his child. She couldn’t help it. Above that, though, she felt pain for Anka’s suffering. How could she care about him and not? Taking his hand, she turned it palm up and lifted it to her cheek for a moment before she turned her face into it and kissed the center of his palm. “I’m so sorry.” He looked down at her with a touch of surprise. “For all that happened. For the son you lost.” He frowned curiously. “You had nothing to do with that. Why would you feel guilt?” Gaby swallowed with an effort. “Because I’m human, too. But …,” she hesitated, “also because it hurts me that you were hurt.” She released his hand. “I’ve … in all the time we were together, all I could think was that you were using humans, but they used you. How could you have learned anything differently from being among humans?” He looked torn between relief and disbelief that she’d forgiven him, and amused, and vaguely irritated, probably because of her judgment of his behavior. “You should not be so swift to forgive me,” he muttered, “perhaps would not if ….” He stopped and shook his head. “I believe you would, at that, though I am as certain as I can be that I am not worthy of your forgiveness. I can never forgive myself that my arrogance nearly cost me the most precious thing this world has to offer. “Nevertheless, contrary to what you think, it is not inherently ‘wrong’ to use … or to be used. So long as it benefits both, it is right. Giving and taking is not only natural, it is fulfilling. The only thing that is wrong is to take without giving, without being given permission to take. “What I did was wrong, and nothing that was done to me before made it right—I compensated them, yes, but I did not give them the choice.” He fell silent then and Gaby felt a terrible sense of loss begin to engulf her. She was glad that he’d learned, that he understood now why it had been so hard for her to accept, but that also meant it was well and truly over between them and that was something she was going to have a hard time accepting. “What will you do now?” she asked forlornly. He turned to study her. After a moment, he pulled her into his embrace, holding her tightly for a moment. “What I know that I need to do.” He swallowed audibly. “I want you to leave this place, Moonflower. It is dangerous for you here.” Gaby nodded. “I know. We’ve been told to leave. We only have a few weeks.” He pulled away, grasping her shoulders. “Do not wait,” he said in a low, rumbling growl of anger. “You have learned what you came to learn. Go home! In time, if it is possible, I will come to you.”

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Gaby looked up at him with surprise. Fear and hopefulness warred within her. “What do you mean, if it is possible?” she asked fearfully. He shook his head. “Just … promise me that you will go as soon as arrangements can be made to leave. You have no reason to linger here and every reason to get as far from this place as possible. There will be trouble here, and soon. I want … I need to know that you will be safe even if I can not be nearby to protect you. Promise me.” She stared at him miserably. She wanted to give him her word, but at the same time a nameless fear tore at her. Finally, because she couldn’t hold out against his silent demand, she nodded. He lifted a hand to caress her cheek and then simply vanished. An avalanche of grief crashed over Gaby the moment she realized she was alone. She didn’t even know why she felt it. He’d all but promised that he would come back to her. Why would he have to, though? Why couldn’t he go with her? What did he plan to do that made him feel as if it was something that might keep him from her? Because she sensed that. He hadn’t wanted to tell her he had doubts, but he’d said ‘if it was possible’. The urgency to find him swamped her as it had before, except that this time a nameless fear had joined it. She was going to lose him forever. She felt it like a crushing weight on her chest. She didn’t even realize that she’d been drawn by her need to be near him to return to the chamber where she’d first met him until she found herself stumbling along the darkened corridors that led up through the temple. He wasn’t there anymore, she told herself angrily, but she continued to climb the steep corridors that led from one chamber to another until, at last, she found herself standing before the statue. Her throat closed as she looked up at his image, realizing abruptly what it was that he meant to do, and her fear nearly overwhelmed her. “It didn’t really matter,” she whispered, fighting the wobble in her chin. “I was just too … shallow to realize that it’s you I love, not what you look like.” When he didn’t answer, she sat down on the cold stone floor at the feet of the statue, covering her face with her hands, struggling to keep from sobbing aloud. “If you could … just give me another chance.” She thought at first when she noticed the blue light filtering through her fingers that he’d come back, that she would have the chance to convince him not to risk his life for something that was so meaningless. She could see nothing through her tear blurred eyes, though, except that the room was filled with blue light. “Anka?” she whispered. He didn’t appear to her, not in any form. The blue light intensified, filling the room and then began to dim. Her heart nearly failed her when she saw that the light was emanating from the crypt itself. Leaping to her feet, she rushed to the low wall and peered inside. The light nearly blinded her. Shielding her eyes the best she could, she tried to peer past the light. Slowly, it congealed in her mind what was happening. “Don’t!” she cried out. “If you’re doing this for me, please don’t!” He didn’t answer, but she saw the wrappings burst as the emaciated flesh contained in the rotting material expanded, became smoothly sculpted muscle and tissue.

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The withered skin became lighter, smoother, tinged with the pink of blood flowing beneath the surface. A new fear arose as she watched the slow transformation. The casket that held him was sealed. He would suffocate even if he managed to revitalize the body! She was casting around for a rock to break the container when it exploded, sending heavy plastic shards outward and every light winked out save for the blue/white energy radiating outward from Anka himself. Struggling up from the floor where the force of the blast had thrown her, Gaby finally gained her feet. Glass from the shattered lights crunched beneath her feet as she rushed back to the crypt to peer inside. Her heart seemed to stop in her chest when she looked down at him. He looked just the way she’d always pictured him in her mind … except more handsome if possible, real, solid, alive. He opened his eyes, sucking in a sharp gasp to fill his lungs with air. Gaby had uttered something between a sob and a laugh when she realized that something was wrong. The blue light was weakening. She could see him without peering at him beneath her lashes to try to battle the bright light. His eyes were glazed, she realized—with weakness or pain or both. They closed even as she gasped with sudden, painful fear and launched herself up and over the low wall to reach him. She fell over him, cutting her knees and palms on the shards of plastic that surrounded him. Ignoring the pain, she scrambled off of him and touched his face, his shoulder. He didn’t respond. Worse, his skin was cooling, his breath becoming more and more shallow. He was dying, she realized in absolute horror, and it was all her fault! She hadn’t been willing to accept him as he was! Making no effort to stem the sobs that were wrenched from her chest in painful gulps, she struggled to lift his head and shoulders onto her lap. “Don’t go, Anka! Please! Just … let this go! Don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me! I love you!” “Moonflower,” he said hoarsely, his voice little more than a breath of sound. “I love you, too.”

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Chapter Fifteen Fat fluffy snowflakes drifted downward, joining the growing mound blanketing the world outside. The view from the window above the bath made Gaby shiver despite the hot, bubbling water lapping at her breasts. At times like this the life she’d had before seemed distant, almost as if it had happened to someone else—which was bizarre she supposed considering the life she had now, the things she’d done. As scary as it had been, though, to find herself on the wrong side of the law, international law at that, she wasn’t sorry. As unnerving as it had been smuggling her ‘wetback’ out, she would do it again. Actually, she hadn’t done all that much on that end. Anka had been so weak after he’d made the transition, he’d needed her until he’d finally regained his strength—weeks of recuperation that had made for the worse time of her life. He’d known the city, though, known where he could hide to recover his strength while the militia went crazy searching for the ‘missing’ mummy of the temple. All she’d had to do was sneak past them to bring him the food and water his body required. Anka had refused to allow her to risk any more than that, though. She thought he would have refused that much from her if there’d been an alternative. When the time had come to leave, though, he’d dismissed her plans for getting him out of the country and across the border. He’d made his own way, leaving her to gnaw her nails in anxiety until he’d appeared one day on her doorstep—with his treasure, which he’d refused to leave. He was right. It was his, but the South American government wouldn’t have seen it that way if they’d caught him with it. Fortunately, no one but him had known of its existence. Otherwise there would’ve been a more frantic and widespread search for their missing mummy. And the treasure had come in handy when they finally managed to move it through the black market and exchange it for actual money. It had bought the ranch in the wilds of Montana, paid for Anka’s new identity, insured a safe, comfortable life for the two of them. She still cringed at the ‘life of crime’ she’d had to resort to to protect her family, but she wasn’t sorry she’d done it—not at all. Some things were worth a risk, worth tremendous risks. “You can not be cold,” Anka murmured lazily. “I am roasting alive.” Gaby chuckled, twisting around to look up at his face. In all the months they’d been together, it still sent a pleasant jolt of surprise and appreciation through her when she met his green eyed gaze. “The water isn’t that hot!” she disputed. “I am,” he whispered when he’d bent his head to align his lips with her ear. The comment pleased her, even though she didn’t really believe it. Her belly looked as if she’d stuffed a basketball—or maybe a watermelon—beneath the skin. If he

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got much bigger, they weren’t going to have to wait for him to make his appearance by the natural route. She was going to pop open like an overripe watermelon. Anka splayed his hands over the mound in question. When nothing happened after several moments, he thumped it lightly. “Very ripe,” he agreed with a husky chuckle. Before Gaby could take exception to the comment he slipped his hands upward to cup her bare breasts, massaging them gently. “These too,” he whispered against the soft skin just beneath her ear. “Very nice melons, topped with ripe little cherries.” Warmth wafted through Gaby that had nothing to do with the hot bath they were soaking in. “You must be hungry,” she teased him. He caught her hips, lifting her up and settling her on top of his legs. “I am, Moonflower. Hungry for you … always,” he murmured nipping at her shoulder with the sharp edge of his teeth. “Mmm,” Gaby moaned. “You should do something about that, then. Doctor says no more fooling around after next week.” He grunted. “That’s because she doesn’t know how I fool around.” Gaby twisted her head to look at him with interest. “I thought you didn’t get anything out of doing it that way?” “Where did you get that idea?” he asked, amusement threading his voice. Gaby sat up and turned to look at him. “From you.” He speared his fingers through her hair, dragging her closer and sealing his mouth over hers in a heated, mind drugging kiss. The bud of desire stirred, opening more fully as his taste sent a heady rush through her. “I never said I didn’t get anything out of it,” he whispered, plucking at her lips between each word when he’d lifted his mouth from hers. “Then why …?” Gaby broke off. It didn’t matter now, but she cringed inside every time she thought about how closely he’d come to dying that day he’d decided nothing would do for her but to resurrect the body he’d abandoned so long ago. He lifted slightly away to look into her eyes. “Because loving you that way only made me hunger for more—so much so that I was blinded to the risks to you. Because it wasn’t enough to possess your mind and soul. I wanted your body, as well. I wanted to feel my flesh merge with yours. But more than anything, I wanted to unite my life force with yours.” Gaby felt her throat close with emotion, with both love and heated desire at his words. Pulling his hand from her cheek, she guided it downward between them, over the rounded belly that housed their child to the center of heated need. She stroked his damp hair away from his neck and shoulders as he began to tease her clit with the tip of one finger. He usually wore it tied at the base of his skull with a band when he was working around their ranch, but when they alone he wore it down for her, because he knew she loved to run her fingers through his long, silky hair. People stared, of course, on those rare occasions when they went to town, but Anka was oblivious to it, and she didn’t care. She saw the speculation in their eyes when they looked at him. The men were thinking he was an Indian, or worse, Hispanic. The women were thinking about what a lucky, lucky woman she was. The women were right. She was lucky to have him. The men …. She shrugged. They’d chosen a Hispanic surname for him when

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they’d created his identity, but the fact was he wasn’t anything any of these people had ever seen before. He was certainly from South America. He was part Indian, but he was born long before the Spanish invaded South America and even if he hadn’t been, he was still only part Indian. The rest of him was … purely divine.

The End.