Read Online Alien's Concubine, The by Kaitlyn O'Connor - Free Book Online

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?
    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