Alien's Concubine, The (18 page)

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, poufy 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 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.

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.

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 fleeting? 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.

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 in
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 thought 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 over ‘his’
performance.