Wolf (27 page)

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.

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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 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
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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
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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!

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
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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.”

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
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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 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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