Alien's Concubine, The (2 page)

“
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.

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.

These days there was some hope for
women like her, of course. Despite the scarring 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 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 were 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
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 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!