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.
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 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.
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 e
ither 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.
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