"You stay here, honey," Trish said. "Keep Professor Max from spontaneously combusting."

"I am notspontaneously combusting!" Leland shouted.

"She's a sweet child," Trish said sotto voce to Annja, "but far too innocent for archaeology."

"These Tejanos are all alike," Yvonne muttered darkly. She was still trying to hang back. She reminded Annja of a child balking when a nun was trying to take her somewhere. She was having the same success.

She's like me, Annja thought. She'd always had a problem with authority herself. Growing up under the iron regime of the nuns in an orphanage in New Orleans had hardened rather than softened her resistant nature. Still, in their brief but intense association, she'd never found Leland remotely authoritarian.

Or racist, for that matter.

"Dammit, I'm from West Virginia!" Leland shouted. But he made no move to follow.

Trish marched her little party up to the top of the rise. The clearing went on for ten or fifteen more yards, then rose into some woods of serious pine trees – not the scruffy, hunchbacked piñons that dotted most of the rolling landscape for miles around.

Trish stopped, turned Yvonne to face her, released her arm. "Now, chica,what exactly is your major malfunction?"

"He was trying to say the people who lived in this house knapped flint," Yvonne said sullenly, trying to rub her arm surreptitiously.

"And did he have any evidence to back that up?" Trish asked.

"Well, he dug up some flint flakes. But they couldn't have anything to do with the people who lived here. They must have been from long before!"

"Think, Yvonne," Annja said. "They were found at the same level as artifacts we've definitely dated from the 1850s. We have the land records. The Tejada and then the Dominguín families lived here from 1701 until the house burned down in 1863. How could Indian artifacts from some earlier time period have gotten mixed up with stuff from a century and a half afterthe house was built?"

She had broken herself of the habit, however temporarily, of saying "Native American." Burt Trujillo, a stocky middle-aged Santa Clara Pueblo man working with them as a contract archaeologist for the state, teased her and fellow easterner Alyson mercilessly whenever they used the expression. Alyson had actually gotten indignant with him for calling his people Indians, which only made him laugh louder.

Like the rest of the dig team, he wasn't at the site. Annja and her companions were winding down before the early onset of winter shut them down.

"Maybe kids dug them up," Yvonne said. But she muttered the words so low Annja could barely hear them over the ever present whistle of the wind, which didn't lend them particular conviction.

"The point is," Trish said, "where do you think you get off calling Leland a racist? That's a serious accusation. He could lose his job. Shit, maybe go to jail, the way things are these days."

"But it's like he was saying my people were savages," Yvonne said, at once intent and pleading to be heard. "Just like..."

Her words trailed away as she noticed Annja and Trish both looking fixedly at her. "What?" she asked plaintively.

"Who's being racist now, Yvonne?" Annja asked softly.

Yvonne drew in a deep breath as if preparing to blast the gringafrom back East, then she deflated in a hurry. She wasn't stupid, Annja knew. Far from it. ButAnnja had noticed she did have a tendency to be reactive and defensive. While polite enough, the young Latina had acted wary of Annja since her arrival. She hadn't opened up, but Annja guessed she had some unresolved cultural conflicts going on that made her touchy.

"But," Yvonne began. She let that drop, too. She realized, now the moment's heat had cooled, that she had wandered out of bounds.

"Lighten up, sweetie," Trish said. She caught Yvonne and dragged her into a hug. "It's been a long season. And the clock says it's time to go. We're all a little frazzled. A little weird."

Annja saw Yvonne blinking tears from her eyes. She understood. She hadn't had time to really become part of this crew, yet she, too, felt the camaraderie that arose from long, hard hours spent working to a common purpose. What these women were feeling, she knew from experience, was much more poignant.

Will I ever really know that feeling again? she wondered. She was starting to feel half-misty herself. Or have I lost that part of my life forever?Between her semiregular gig with the hit cable-channel show Chasing History's Monstersand her...destiny...she wasn't really in position to commit herself to a full season in the field.

She saw Yvonne's eyes suddenly go wide. "Oh, my God," the young woman whispered.

Trish's shoulders tensed. Annja felt her own chestnut hair rise at the nape of her neck below her sleek ponytail. Slowly she turned.

There was a figure standing among the trees. It looked like a tall man in a dark cloak. Annja had the sense he was staring at her. She felt intent so malign it made her knees weak.

She shook her head. I am overwrought, she thought. It was the mellow sunset light, she reckoned.

Trish disengaged herself from the smaller woman and turned to face the intruder. Her bulldog jaw squared. "Can we help you?" she asked in a tone that didn't sound all that solicitous to Annja.

The figure said nothing.

"Listen, buster," Trish said.

Annja waved a hand from her hip in a calming gesture. Soft-spoken and generally easygoing though she was, Trish didn't have the longest fuse.

"I don't know what game you think you're playing – "

Two red glows appeared from the stranger's shadowed black head. "¡Jesu Cristo!"exclaimed Yvonne. She crossed herself.

"Yvonne?" Max Leland called from his truck, where he sat on the tailgate swinging his boots and talking to Alyson. "Trish? Are you guys all right?"

"Holy shit," Trish said. Her hand dived inside her dirt-caked coveralls. It came out holding a flat black pistol.

Darkness unfolded from the mystery figure's sides. At first Annja thought it was a cape. Halloween's almost a month away, and this jackass is about to play Dracula to the point of getting shot, she thought disgustedly.

But it wasn't a cape. Black, tapering wings spread wider than the man was tall. Annja felt her right hand start to curl as if to grab something. No, she told herself. It isn't time.

Yvonne had dropped her knapsack off her back and was rummaging furiously inside. Leland emitted a startled yelp and, leaping off the tailgate, ran to the front of the truck and yanked open the door so hard it banged against the stops.

A strange sound keened with the stiff steppe wind. It was like a baby crying. Yvonne pulled a Glock 19 out to the full length of her arms in a two-handed grip. She was trembling so violently the gun's blunt muzzle waved wildly.

The figure rose straight into the air. The black wings never stirred. At twenty feet it leveled out and glided over their heads with silent purpose.

Leland had popped out of the truck cab working the lever action of a .44 Magnum Marlin Model 94 carbine. The huge black creature swooped toward him. It passed ten feet over the top of his and Alyson's heads. Leland's face went so pale it was green behind the red beard and rusty freckles. He had not been able to bring himself to raise the gun.

Again Annja heard the noise like a baby crying. The black figure soared upward to clear a juniper-dotted ridge a hundred yards away and vanished into the lavender dusk.