"You really should report it," the woman with hennaed hair cut in a bob said. "There are reports coming in from all over the area."

The other woman, taller, with frosted blond hair, shook her whole body in a shiver of negation. "It scares me even to think about it," she said. "Besides, who's really going to believe me?"

"Well, there have been a lot of sightings of strange animals. It's even in the paper."

"I just remember seeing that shape crouching on the slope right over my garden wall. All I could see was a shadow the size of a Shetland pony. It looked at me with those eyes – those red-glowing eyes! I'll be having nightmares forever. And that strange sound it made, like a baby crying. Or was it a woman screaming – ?"

They passed beyond earshot to the cash register up front. Annja felt a strange sort of shuddering emptiness within.

She was aware of Godin – Robert, he'd insisted she call him – watching her intently. Those pale jade eyes missed very, very little, she was sure. As she was sure there was a very great deal he wasn't telling her about his life.

"'And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth,'" the priest quoted softly.

Annja glanced sharply at him. "Revelation 6:8," she said. "The fourth seal, if I recall correctly."

"You do."

"Do you believe these are the end times?" Annja asked.

He gave slight smile. "I shall leave such speculations to your primitive Protestant millenarians," he said. "Nevertheless, it does seem we may be entering upon very perilous times."

"Why do you say that? The economy? The situation in the Middle East?"

He tipped his head to one side and hunched a shoulder upward. "Those, too. And these sightings of mysterious black creatures, prowling not just up in your legend-haunted mountains, but even appearing along the ridges of the affluent suburb of Lamy, seem to me ominous. And surely you have heard the prophetic pronouncements of this mysterious child who keeps appearing?"

"You take those seriously? I mean – I know you're a priest. I just think of Jesuits as having a more...scientific bent."

"Because you know much of our history. Many of my order have been scientists of note. The least of us is supposed to be, at minimum, a scholar. I have yet to evaluate these apparitions of an ostensibly Holy Child, much less validate his alleged prophecies."

He shrugged again, this time with both shoulders. "Still, my preliminary investigations suggest that those who report meeting this Santo Niño are sincere for the most part. It certainly raises questions."

"You think these appearances might be miraculous?"

"I sense skepticism in your voice, dear lady. In this you resemble our good archbishop here in New Mexico, who, it seems, prays most fervently that no authentic miracles should appear on his watch. They might disrupt his simple faith in dialectical materialism."

"I guess I am something of a skeptic by inclination," Annja admitted.

"As attitudes go, there are worse. So long as one does not permit doubt itself to become an article of faith."

"Do you believe in miracles?" she asked.

The smile he showed her seemed bittersweet. "I believe in strange things, surely," he said.

Such as swords that can appear and disappear at will?she thought incongruously.

"But I fear I have seen far more," he went on soberly, "and more concrete evidence for the existence of evil in this world than of good."

"A crisis of faith? In a Jesuit?"

He laughed. "We are human – all too human, to borrow from that most misunderstood of Western philosophers, Nietzsche. You must know, since you know so much of our history, that we Jesuits are notorious for such crises. As well as for our outbreaks of outright materialism. If not cynicism.

"Worldly education – the pursuit of knowledge– wars with faith. Even as the early church fathers perceived and feared."

"But you've pursued what you call worldly knowledge pretty vigorously, haven't you?"

He nodded. "I continue to, my dear. Pursuit of knowledge is pursuit of truth, is it not? And did not our Lord Himself name Himself the truth? But understand, please. A weakening of faith in faith– in things taken for granted, without questioning – does not necessarily imply weakening of belief in God."

She sat back, crossed one long leg over another and regarded him.

"You could always give up on the whole God issue."

His eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed briefly.

It was a low blow, she admitted to herself. Why do I suddenly feel an urge to bait this old man, who's shown me nothing but kindness and respect?

"Alas, my dear," he said softly, "that option is foreclosed to me. I know there's a God. I simply must suffer likewise knowing I shall never understand Him."

She found nothing to say to that, and sought refuge staring at the dregs in the bottom of her heavy blue pottery mug.

Father Godin leaned forward with his elbows on the table and his fingers laced above his coffee mug. "One wonders, in all this – might there be some connection between the apparitions of this Holy Child and these other – how shall we say – less holy sightings?"

Feeling unnerved, Annja glanced at her watch. "Oh. I'm sorry. I have to be going. I'm afraid I've got to rush away. But it's been lovely."

He stood up as she did. She offered her hand. He took it, bowed over it, kissed it briefly.

It's a corny, male-chauvinist gesture¸ she reproved herself sternly. Yet she found herself utterly charmed.

"I just have a plane to catch," she said. "Down in Albuquerque. And with the balloon fiesta, and all the security hassles..."

"I quite understand," he said, holding her hand for a lingering moment. His other hand came up and pressed something into hers.

"My card," he said as she looked at it. It identified him as Father Robert Godin, SI. The card also showed his cell phone number and e-mail address.

"SI?" she asked. "Oh. Societas Iesu."

"So you know Latin?" he asked.

She saw no reason to dissemble, although something had suddenly put her on her guard. "Yes."

"An affectation on my part. So, then, where must you be off to in such a rush?"

"Mexico City," she said.

Chapter 8

"We can be somewhat defensive here in Mexico," Dr. Lorenzo Márquez, of the Department of Mesoamerican Studies of the National Autonomous University, told Annja as they strode along a corridor with modern Mexican folk-style paintings spaced along the polished wood wall to their right. On their left was a series of tinted windows looking out on a spacious courtyard garden of ferns and broad-leaved tropical bushes, surrounding a huge round helmeted Olmec head carved of stone. "The whole concept of diffusionism strikes many of my colleagues as nothing more than Northern Hemisphere patronization."

Her escort through the capital's expansive Museo de Antropología was young and tall, his lean, long-legged body swinging along beneath a white lab coat hung from wide shoulders. His dark face was round, from bone structure rather than fat, of which he seemed to carry little. Beneath an unruly hank of thick hair, black as a raven's wing, he had a prominent jut of nose and piercing black eyes sunk in deep sockets. They seemed connected by a dark band, giving him a slight resemblance to a raccoon. Actually, Annja thought, he would have looked sinister had his manner not been so relentlessly cheerful.