Gabrielle grabbed hold of the vine, and almost immediately, felt herself being hauled up the cliff. It was only a matter of seconds before she was standing safely on firm ground again.
Gabrielle drew a deep breath, trying to calm her heartbeat, and then lifted her head to thank the owner of the blue eyes.
There was no one there.
Standing there for a minute, looking back and forth, Gabrielle couldn’t believe someone could disappear so fast. But the owner of the blue eyes was completely gone.
One thing was for sure…the eyes had belonged to a person. In the scant seconds that Gabrielle had looked into the them, she he had realized that not only was it human, but she was right about there being black hair as well. She had seen it again; a thick shroud of black hair; but that was all Gabrielle had been able make sense of.
Gabrielle suddenly realized the muddy ground would be a perfect way to follow the person, as it would highlight footprints, but when she looked down, there were none. Gabrielle shook her head, not understanding how that was possible.
“Hello?” she called out, not expecting an answer, but figuring it was worth a shot.
No answer.
“Thank you!” Gabrielle yelled then, just in case her mysterious rescuer was in hearing distance.
Gabrielle wandered around for a couple of more hours, trying to find a trace of her rescuer, but couldn’t discover anything. When the sun finally came up, she found herself exhausted and alone.
A couple of times during the night, she thought she might have glimpsed the blue eyes again, but now she was pretty sure she was just imagining it. Whoever the blue eyes belonged to, they had saved Gabrielle’s life, and that had dissipated any fear that might have resided in Gabrielle’s heart. It did nothing to reduce the mystery however, for the person obviously didn’t want to be found.
About a half hour after the sun rose, Gabrielle knew she had to get back to camp. In the daylight, she recognized where she was and following the river, she was soon back at her tent. The others were leaving for the day’s hunt, and only Russell bothered to check why she had just walked into camp, covered in mud. She assured him she was all right, and the men left her there by herself. Too tired to take a whole bath, she rinsed her hands and face in water from her canteens, and then she took the tranquilizer gun out of her backpack and laid it next to her pillow. She curled up in the tent and was asleep almost immediately, savoring the quiet.
She slept a few hours, and when she awoke, she wrinkled her nose at the stiffness of her clothes. The mud in them had certainly dried out by now, leaving her feeling extremely uncomfortable.
The camp was still empty, and judging from the position of the sun, it would remain that way for a while. Gabrielle quickly changed clothes in the tent, after risking a quick bath in the river, keeping her underwear on, just in case.
Out of curiosity, Gabrielle decided to follow the river bank, to see if she could spot where she had fallen last night. She suspected Blue Eyes must have had a reason for being so close, and that reason could be that she lived close by.
She hadn’t gone very far, when she heard angry male voices in the distance. Alarmed, Gabrielle took off at a dead run toward them.
The closer she got, the louder and more emphatic the voices became. She recognized several of them as being the most vocal. Gene’s was among the loudest. She was nearly on them now, and another sound struck her, a low keening sound of a wounded animal. Gabrielle felt her stomach sink, as she suddenly got the feeling of exactly what was going on.
She burst into a clearing, and saw chaos was reigning. Several members of the expedition where crowded around the trunk of a tree, shouting angrily. Most of them had thick sticks, and were swinging them at whatever they had trapped. Gabrielle heard a particularly loud thud of a stick connecting, then heard the sound like a big cat’s yowl again.
“What’s going on?” she asked, trying to see exactly what was captured. It certainly didn’t sound human.
“We got it!” Weaver Cotts said, grinning excitedly at her. “Me and Benji were traveling through that brush over there, when all of a sudden, this thing just burst out…guess it had been hiding in there.”
“We called the others on the radios and trapped it,” Benji added then. He had a messy looking cut opened up on his cheek.
The cry sounded again, and the group pulled back collectively, which Gabrielle found intriguing. Then she caught a glimpse of what they had captured.
It was a person despite being on all fours, and Gabrielle could see blood dripping from a lower arm. The creature wasn’t acting as aggressive as it sounded. There was a large black bag over its head and shoulders, no doubt to confuse, blind, and perhaps partially suffocate it. Gabrielle saw one of the men poke it with a stiff in the direction of a shoulder, and it gave out another howl, and tried to curl itself up tighter into a fetal position.
“What in the hell are you doing?” Gabrielle suddenly screamed. “It’s not even trying to fight back! You’re going to kill it!”
“I think the fight is out of her,” Dr. Nichols agreed, stepping forward with a noticeable limp. “Let’s get her back to camp and tie her up.”
Gabrielle’s mind was reeling over the word “her”.
Russell was approaching her now, still panting from adrenaline. There was blood seeping through his shirt from under the arm. “You caught up with us too late to see what happened when we first surrounded her. She tried to kick our asses,” he told Gabrielle, obviously in defense to what they had done to her.
“Can you blame her?” Gabrielle returned. “You trapped her and captured her, beating her like an animal!”
“Her fighting skills are incredible,” one of the men said, and several of the others agreed with him.
“So that’s the reason you beat her to a pulp?” Gabrielle asked, still fuming.
“It was self-defense,” Gene said from near the injured woman, and once again, most of the men agreed with him.
Thinking back to what she had witnessed last night, and the act the creature…the woman…had performed to save Gabrielle’s life, Gabrielle realized this was no ordinary person. “Maybe in the beginning,” she answered slowly, enigmatically.
“Come on, time to go back to camp,” Nichols said, obviously uncomfortable with the developing situation.
Gabrielle watched in shock and amazement as the good doctor held a tranquilizing pistol up and not more than two feet away from the woman, pulled the trigger. The woman hadn’t been moving much, but now crumpled into an immobile heap. Gabrielle stared at Nichols, not able to get over his cold behavior.
“Tie the crazy bitch up and let’s go,” he said, pointedly walking away from Gabrielle.
“Crazy bitch?”
Gabrielle whirled on Russell, who looked like he was trying to disappear into the earth.
“Crazy bitch. Is that a technical term?”
“No,” Russell replied. “Of course not. It’s most definitely a female, although it has the strength of the male, and it just shook up Nichols, that’s all.”
Gabrielle turned her attention to the men. Gene was lifting the arms of the woman, and Hayden bent over for the legs. Gabrielle and the men were surprised to see the woman react, despite the powerful tranquilizer in her system. “Wait!” Gabrielle cried out desperately.
She was no doctor, but she could now see that the woman’s lower left leg was broken. “Please Nichols, can’t we at least build a litter?”
He looked at Gabrielle, then the woman. “Come on, Nichols,” Gabrielle added. “She’d be worth more to you healthy, won’t she?”
That must have made sense to him. “Good point,” he said, and he directed the men to build a travois.
“Aren’t you going to look at that leg?” Gabrielle asked Nichols as they waited on the men to finish. She tried to move closer to the woman, but the ones who remained to watch her weren’t being cooperative.
“No…as wild as she is, I think a painful injury will take some of the fight out of her.”
“What kind of doctor are you?” Gabrielle asked Nichols, staring hard at him.
He didn’t flinch. “The kind that’s going to be rich,” he replied with a sly smile.
Gabrielle felt nauseous. How could anyone be so callous?
After waiting for a while and seeing the woman was silent and motionless, the men began to relax a bit, and began attending to their injuries.
Gabrielle took the opportunity to kneel in toward the unconscious woman, and reached for the bag covering her head.
“No touching!” Weaver snapped, and pushed her away abruptly.
“Why not? She’s hurt!” Gabrielle protested. She had taken about all she could with this group.
“Nichols says she’s probably carrying all kinds of diseases,” Russell answered, still looking extremely uncomfortable. “He wants as few of us to come in to contact as possible.”
He spoke so softly, Gabrielle turned to look him in the eye again. She saw a pleading expression there, as though he were begging her to read between the lines. Looking back at the state of the men, and the woman before them, awareness suddenly flooded Gabrielle in a blush. Russell was trying to save more than the men…he was trying to save the woman. He was trying to keep them from acting on the carnal impulses the wild woman might have on them.
Gabrielle backed off, letting Russell know with a nod that she understood.
Something about all this just wasn’t adding up for her, but Gabrielle decided to let it go for now, waiting until she was alone before trying to figure out the situation. She was too outnumbered to do much about helping the woman right now.
They carried the woman back to camp, and Gabrielle was kept as far away from her as possible. She noticed a lot of injuries on the men around her, including several bite marks, that looked painful, She told herself the men wanted her to stay away so she wouldn’t be hurt too.
Back at the camp, the men left the woman tied to the litter, and Nichols posted two men to keep watch over her. He claimed it was to keep her from waking up and breaking loose, but Gabrielle suspected it was to keep her from getting to the woman. It had suddenly become her against everyone of the men, even including Russell. Gabrielle went back to her tent early, formulating a plan.
Gabrielle was able to watch the guards through the slit in the door of her tent. The men were taking care of each other’s wounds, and then they gradually disappeared early into their tents as well, no doubt eager to get the woman back to civilization and receive their payment.
Gabrielle could see the woman begin to stir despite her restraints, and heard her yelp of pain. The guards glanced down at their captive, but went on talking to each other, ignoring her.
After waiting just a few more minutes, allowing the woman time to wake up more fully, Gabrielle began to act. She hoped the woman would recognize her, and realize she wanted to repay the favor of saving her life.
If she didn’t, Gabrielle was hoping the woman would at least have enough strength to be able to escape. Either way, she was going to free the woman.
Just a few minutes later, Gabrielle had talked herself into making her move. She strapped both of her bags on her back, then picked up the tranquilizer pistol Russell had given her. She released the safety of the gun, and lifting the back wall of her tent, she crawled out underneath it..
Gabrielle made her way as stealthily as she could so she was standing behind the two guards. She took careful aim, and seconds later, Andy and Weaver were unconscious on the ground.
As Gabrielle approached, she heard the sound of the woman’s labored breathing. She was suddenly beside the litter, and knelt down beside the captive, whose head jerked back in reaction to hearing Gabrielle’s approach..
“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered as gently as she could. “I’m here to help you.”
Gabrielle tried to remove the bag covering the woman’s head, but it was stuck underneath some of the ropes that held her in place. “God, are they that scared of you?” she asked aloud, before she began to undo the numerous complicated knots in the ropes.
The woman didn’t move while Gabrielle was untying her, and Gabrielle could hear her breath catch in her throat from time to time. She didn’t know if it was from pain or fear, but eventually, she was able to pull the bag from the woman’s head. A mass of black hair was suddenly shaken free, and it parted enough for the now familiar blue eyes of the woman to blink open and focus on Gabrielle’s face. The terror was there, along with the pain, but Gabrielle thought she saw a glint of recognition too.
“I know you’re hurt,” Gabrielle said softly. “But I’ve got to get you away from here before I take care of you…if you can hang on that long…”
Gabrielle had no way of telling whether or not the woman could understand her, but she didn’t react when Gabrielle bent over and began working on the rest of the ropes that bound her.
“God, why did they have to hurt you so much?” Gabrielle asked as she uncovered the woman’s shoulders and saw the raw cuts and abrasions on both of them.
The woman laid there quietly, her breath hitching occasionally when Gabrielle would accidentally touch one of her wounds. Her disconcerting blue eyes bore into Gabrielle, watching very carefully every move the blonde made.
As Gabrielle gradually freed the ropes from the woman’s upper half, her eyes grew wider at the body she was revealing. The woman was dressed in some kind of animal skins, that was tightened with a drawstring along the top and bottom of her breasts. It covered about half of the globes of the woman’s full chest. Gabrielle could see the men had even struck her there, as bruises were forming on the flesh that was lighter than the rest of her that she could see.
The woman’s arms were free now, and immediately, she was struggling to sit up. Gabrielle untied the ropes around her waist, desperately trying not to gaze in rapt fascinating at the loincloth the woman wore over her lower half. The woman was able to complete her motion of sitting, with a light moan. She reached for her injured leg immediately.
Even it had been wrapped in rope too, and while the woman was untangling herself, Gabrielle quietly pulled the top part of the travois apart.
The woman’s body was completely untied now, and she was moving as if she was trying to stand up.
“Wait!” Gabrielle squeaked, putting her hands on the woman’s biceps. She couldn’t help but notice how hard the muscles were. The woman tried again to stand, but her shattered leg refused to support her. She sunk back on the ground, looking helplessly at Gabrielle.
“I’m going to try to help you, “ Gabrielle told her,” if you’ll allow me.”
Gabrielle fashioned a splint around the broken bones in the lower leg, trying to steady them. The woman was watching Gabrielle’s every move again. “Can you pull this tighter?”
When she didn’t get a response, Gabrielle took one of the woman’s hands, and put it on one end of the rope. She took the other hand and did the same. She mimicked the motion she wanted, and the woman caught on quickly.
It took a couple of tries for Gabrielle to communicate how tight she wanted the rope, but the woman soon pulled the rope very snugly against the wood holding the bones. She hissed, but the pain in her brow looked lessened somehow, when she was done.
“Okay,” Gabrielle said. She got to her feet and then helped the woman stand. The dark woman winced in pain, but managed to get to her feet.
“We need to get out of here,’ Gabrielle said again. “Do you understand? We need to get way from these men.” She pointed to the two unconscious guards.
The woman seemed to understand, and she started off, but almost immediately stumbled on her bad leg. Gabrielle slipped her shoulder under the woman’s arm, and wrapped her other arm around the woman’s waist. With the woman leaning heavily against, her, and they started off in an awkward manner.
Gabrielle felt the body she was helping to support leading them into the woods, but the weight of the woman was getting more and more heavy as they continued. Gabrielle was soon gasping for breath, just from the effort, but the breaths rattling out of the dark-haired woman sounded far more serious. The evening air was cool, but Gabrielle felt perspiration from the woman coating her. The injured woman never made a sound, but Gabrielle knew her strength had to be going fast.
There were a couple of times when the path grew difficult, but finally, the woman was leading them down a sloped path toward the river. At last, the woman stopped moving, and stood looking back at the bank.
It took Gabrielle a couple of minutes to realize it, as she had been keeping her head down watching the rocky terrain. When she looked up, she saw they were standing in front of the entrance to a cave in the river bank.
Gabrielle laughed in relief. “Is this your home?” she asked.
She wasn’t surprised when the woman didn’t answer. Gabrielle tried to move to take her companion into the cave, but the woman grunted, and pulled her back.
“What now?” Gabrielle asked, feeling like she couldn’t support the woman’s weight much longer.
The woman turned her toward the water, and Gabrielle flashed twelve colors of red when the woman suddenly pulled her loincloth aside, demonstrating she wore no underclothes, and with Gabrielle’s help, managed to bend a bit. She then proceeded to empty her bladder into the edge of the river.
“Oh my God!” was all Gabrielle could say, over and over. “Oh my God!”
When the woman was finished, she pointed at a couple of old pieces of cloth that were partially held under a rock upstream. Gabrielle bent and picked one of the towels up, and the woman took it.
Gabrielle’s eyes bugged out again, when the brunette used the cloth to wipe herself, and then handed it back to Gabrielle, careful not to hand her the soiled part. Gabrielle understood, and put the cloth were it had come from, for the stream to clean it again.
“I’m glad you practice good hygiene,” Gabrielle muttered, trying to maintain her composure. “But you need to wipe from front to back.”
The woman gave her a side-long glance of confusion, but Gabrielle just shrugged, and shifted the woman more solidly around her shoulders. Together, they made their way into the cave.
“This is your home, huh?” Gabrielle asked again, when the woman urged her to a pile of furs on the far side of the cave. Gabrielle helped the dark-haired woman sit, and then knelt besides her, not really taking the time to look around her new surroundings as the woman yelped in pain.
“We need to get the splint off and get some blood flow back into your leg as soon as possible,” Gabrielle said. “I know this is going to hurt, but I don’t know what else to do for you.”
The woman’s head was lowered, but her eyes locked with Gabrielle, the level of trust in them amazing. Gabrielle reached out her hand, and brushed the thick ebony hair from the left side of the woman’s face.
“Oh my,” Gabrielle murmured under her breath. The eyes she looked into were piercing and heart-rendering and the figure of the woman was incredibly muscular and firm, but Gabrielle never expected the supreme beauty of the face before her. Incredibly high, pronounced cheekbones framed a slender, feminine nose. And the full lips, pursed in concentration, made it difficult for Gabrielle to remember what she was supposed to be doing.
Then, before Gabrielle’s eyes, the pain intensified in the woman’s expression, and Gabrielle was shaken back to reality. “I’m really sorry,” she said, her fingers working at the knot in the ropes holding the splint in place.
There was no response for several seconds, then the woman groaned and sucked in her breath. The groan intensified into a long agonized moan, and her hands clasped around the broken bone as the blood rushed to pound through it again.
“I know it hurts,” Gabrielle crooned, trying to be as gentle as she could with her voice. She took the splint and pressed the wood back against the break, and tied the splint back in place, although not nearly as tightly this time. She was no doctor, but it looked like a clean break, and other than some swelling, the leg appeared normal when the splint supported the bones against each other. Gabrielle could only hope the bone would knit back together in a straight fashion on its own.
Gabrielle grabbed a couple of the furs behind her, and quickly folded them until they were stacked several inches off the ground. Then she gently reached for the woman’s injured leg, and lifted it on top of the furs.
“Try to lay down,” she said, soothingly, taking the woman’s shoulders, urging her to relax on the furs.
The dark woman didn’t agree with that and reached up to push Gabrielle’s hands away. “What’s wrong?” Gabrielle asked, but the woman was stretching her body, twisting it half to the side. It took a minute for Gabrielle to realize she was reaching for something, and then the woman had achieved her goal and was setting a bowl of water down next to Gabrielle.
Gabrielle sat back a bit. “Are you thirsty?” she asked.
The woman pointed behind Gabrielle, and when the blonde turned, she saw a few strips of animal hide that had been stripped of hair and looked as if they had been softened somehow.
“Is this what you want?” Gabrielle asked, holding out a couple of them.
The woman took one of the cloths and dipped it not the bowl of water, then squeezed out the excess. She began to gingerly touch it to the cut on her left shoulder.
“Here, let me do that,” Gabrielle said, catching on. She held her hand back out, and the woman returned the cloth strip to Gabrielle’s grasp.
The cloth had a slight abrasive quality that would help clean the cuts of any foreign matter. Gabrielle started on the same injury the woman had been cleaning, and was as gentle as possible in removing the dried blood and dirt from the broken skin. Satisfied she could do no more with the animal hide, Gabrielle reached into her travel bag and pulled out her first aid kit.
The woman was understandably uncomfortable watching Gabrielle pull out a tube of antiseptic and squeezing some on her fingers. When she reached toward the injured shoulder, the woman jerked it back.
“It’s okay,” Gabrielle said, her voice soothing like one would speak to a scared child. “It’ll make you feel better…honest…”
The dark woman continued to shy away from Gabrielle to the point that she appeared to be ready to try to stand again.
“Okay, okay…” Gabrielle realized this wasn’t going to work. She pulled back her hand and wiped it clean on a piece of gauze from her kit. “I’ll bet bandages are out of the question too, huh?”
The woman watched her when she spoke, as thought she was trying very hard to understand. Gabrielle took up the cleaning cloth again, and began to work on the woman’s other injuries.
She had a multitude of cuts, bruises, and welts on her arms, legs and torso, along with a good supply of dirt and grime. Gabrielle was pleased to see that with the exception of the leg, the wounds didn’t appear too serious. If she hadn’t arrived when she did, however, Gabrielle knew it could have been far worse.
The woman was definitely relaxing under Gabrielle’s touch. The blood flow had resumed its regular course in the injured leg and immobilized as it was, Gabrielle hoped that after a while, the pain would ease in it.
Gabrielle, for her part, was doing her best to keep her feelings neutral as she continued cleaning the woman’s body. She had never been attracted to a woman, at least not sexually. But…there was a definite pull between her and this particular example of femininity.
It was more than just the woman’s natural beauty and incredible figure, although that had a lot to do with it. Gabrielle had covered her fair share of celebrities and royalty in her work, and had been around some of the most beautiful people there were. She had never felt the curiosity that was burning in her now…most notably her wondering what the woman would look like completely unclothed.
The muscular arms had already impressed her, but as Gabrielle cleaned the woman’s legs, she became aware of even more. Coiled power…incredible strength that would make this woman capable of incredible feats.
By the time she had reached the top of the thighs, Gabrielle’s hand was shaking, and she felt heat flushing through her body. The loincloth was long enough to cover a few inches below where her thighs met her body. Gabrielle thought about pushing it upward to “clean” a little more of the luscious flesh. Her face colored dark at that that thought. What was she thinking?
The woman’s abdomen was covered in a mass of bruises that angered Gabrielle even further. The men of the expedition had absolutely no shame. Gabrielle couldn’t help but wonder if their actions would have branched out into more sexual actions. Every pore of this woman exuded sexuality…which surely had worked its magic on the men as well as it had on her.
The woman sucked in her stomach a bit when Gabrielle hands slipped toward one side to clean along her ribs. “Ticklish, huh?” she mused.
The woman had the same puzzled look on her face. Almost as if what Gabrielle said was familiar, but not quite there.
Gabrielle quirked a half-grin which faded quickly when her fingers brushed the underside of the brief top the woman wore. Even flat on her back, Gabrielle was aware of the firmness of the woman’s breasts. The very fact that she covered them, coupled with her demonstration of hygiene, told Gabrielle that the woman must have been part of civilization at one time.
And if she had been part of civilization, then perhaps she could recognize some word…
Gabrielle regretfully drew her fingers back from the woman’s top, and began to clean her neck, then moved to her face.
There was something very sensual about cleaning the woman’s face. Her dark features were relaxed, and she moved her head into Gabrielle’s touch. There was a small cut just above her chin on the left, and a darkening bruise on her right cheek, but that was the extent of the injuries on her face. Her perfect, symmetrical, incredibly divine face.
Gabrielle pushed some of the woman’s hair behind her ears and cleaned her forehead. With her face clear of her dark thick hair, the woman looked wholly different.
There was an intelligence in her eyes and a slight look of bemusement at Gabrielle, as well as still a great deal of pain.
Gabrielle decides to try a little experiment. She placed a hand on her own chest. “My name is Gabrielle,” she said, speaking very slowly. “Gabrielle…”
The woman watched intently.
“Gabrielle,” she said it one more time., then pointed toward the woman. “What is your name?”
The woman’s mouth worked slightly, but no sound came out. Encouraged, Gabrielle tried again. “My name is Gabrielle. Your name is…”
The woman’s brow furrowed in deep concentration. Gabrielle leaned in…her breath held in her throat.
“Cee…eee…”
“Cee…cee…” Gabrielle repeated the sound, trying to figure out what the name might be.
The woman shook her head and tried again. “Cee…aaa…”
“Ceeya?” Gabrielle echoed. “Ceeya?” It was a name she had never heard before, but everything else about the woman was unusual, so it might be close.
The woman seemed exasperated, and then brightened again visually. She pointed to the wall to their right.
It took Gabrielle a second to realize what she was looking at. There was very little light in the cave, and the dwindling campfire made a myriad of shadows against the stone wall.
But after a moment, her eyes made out a series of lines that were slightly darker than the rest of the shadows. As she continued to study them, Gabrielle’s eyes widened in surprise.
She turned back to the woman.
“It’s an X!” she exclaimed. “You drew an X on the cave wall!”
The woman blinked calmly at Gabrielle, as if it were no big deal.
Gabrielle wracked her brain. “X…like in xylophone…Xeeya…your name is Xeaaya.”
“Xena…”
The voice was very low and deep, but had spoken very clearly.
“Xena…” Gabrielle repeated, her eyes riveted to the dark beauty.
The woman slowly nodded, then laid her head back down, as exhaustion set in..
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