But, come on. Japanese tourists?

She shook her head, letting the towel unravel and whip around her robed shoulders. Her damp hair tickled her neck and cheeks like seaweed strands. Closing the computer, she unwound off the bed and tossed the apple, now thoroughly denuded to the core, into a wastebasket. She realized she'd been up all night. She needed serious food, seriously soon.

Suddenly, her thoughts snapped back to images of the spooky sunset sighting, and the cold that probed through her that had nothing to do with the increasingly icy wind and falling snow. Unlike poor Alyson Simpson, she was anything but alarmed to find her companions on the dig had packed firearms. It wasn't uncommon, but some of the gun handling on display had been casual enough to disturb her. She wasn't sure guns would have been much use against the creature that had silently and effortlessly flown over them.

Twin voices clashed in her head.

Come on, it was only an eagle, said one.

It'sgood to have a magic sword on call,said the other.

"I'm hungry," she said aloud. She discarded the robe over the back of a chair and walked naked and glorious to the closet to pick out some clothes for dinner.

"There's no such thing as chupacabras," the lean twentysomething eating the Denver omelet said. He wore a scuffed brown bomber jacket over a white shirt with a pocket protector well stuffed with multicolored pens. He had a high, wide forehead and slightly sunken eyes with a tendency to stare. He sat back in his chair with one leg cocked over his knee. "It was a story made up for this Puerto Rican newspaper by a writer guy named Adrian something. El Vocero. That's the paper's name."

His bulkier friend with the backward ball cap grunted over his huevos rancheros. He was hunched forward with elbows propped on the table. "What's that got to do with the price of speed in Singapore?" he asked. With his moon face, black beard and black trenchcoat over T-shirt and jeans, Annja hopedhe was deliberately trying to look like Kevin Smith playing Silent Bob in one of his own movies. Most of all she earnestly hoped he wasn't really Kevin Smith.

The little diner across the highway from the Ramada Inn wasn't a greasy spoon. More a trendy New Age equivalent. A tofu fork, perhaps, Annja thought. More faux adobe – she thought it was faux, anyway – and sand-pink-and-sage decor than the white shoebox with chrome and Formica of the classic American roadside diner. The food was good, portions were plentiful, and they didn't try to foist veganism on the paying customers. Although the customers did pay a tariff appropriate to the famously well-heeled Santa Fe tourist crowd.

Outside, the morning sun shone down on the parking lot and surrounding hills so hard Annja, seated in a booth by the window, half expected it to rattle against the glass. Even though the air was already winter crisp and shot through with the inevitable tang of piñon smoke, the light would sting unprotected skin.

The gloom of the evening before seemed to belong someplace else.

"I mean, we have to maintain a balance as monster hunters," the skinny guy said.

"I prefer the word cryptozoologists," the third musketeer said in a surprisingly high voice. Surprisingly because it emerged from a chest the approximate size and shape of an oil drum, wrapped in a black T-shirt with the publicity photo for a band on it. Their getup ran to black leather and pointy metal bits. Annja guessed they didn't do polka.

The man paused, assiduously stuffing a hamburger piled high with mushrooms, red onion and chopped green chili – at this hour of the morning she was impressed – into his mouth. The anthropologist in Annja made him a South Plains Indian of some kind, probably Kiowa. Or maybe a Pueblo or even Apache with Kiowa thrown in. He had incredibly thick and lustrous black hair drawn into a ponytail hanging down his vast back, and a tiny black ball cap perched sideways on his head.

"Whatever," the first man said with a shrug. Annja was surprised to see the three out at such an early hour. They were clearly science fiction fans, or a closely related genus. She'd always thought the earlier before noon they rose, the more strain it imposed on their nerd metabolisms. Apparently they were dedicated to their mission.

"It's important not to let ourselves get sucked in by every urban legend and showy hoax that comes down the pike. I'm just saying."

"But scientists reported seeing it this time," the bearded man said.

"Maybe. How do you know they were real scientists? Do you know the report was real? And anyway, I read rumors this morning that that Chasing History's Monsterschick was on the dig site. Doesn't that strike you as just a teensy bit suspicious?"

"The chick with the – " The big Indian held his hands cupped an imposing distance in front of his metal band.

"Naw," the David Byrne kid said. "The skinny, flat-chested one. The archaeologist."

The loud tinkthat startled Annja, she suddenly realized, had come from her melon spoon falling to the dish. She hunched her head between her shoulders and concentrated hard on studying the half-eaten cantaloupe.

I am notflat-chested, she thought, looking down at herself surreptitiously.

The three young men, who sat at a table not ten feet away across the maroon-tile floor, paid her no mind. She had her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail and hadn't slept and had huge, round Jackie O sunglasses on to hide the dark shadows under her eyes. On the whole she looked nothing like she did on her occasional television appearances, where a team of people insisted on fussing and painting her heavily with theatrical makeup. She always suspected they felt they were working with a blank canvas when they got their hands on her.

She glanced out the window. Away past the self-conscious Santa Fe – emulating facades of the strip mall across the road, the land sloped to a line of big trees whose gnarled limbs were thronged with tanand-yellow leaves. Ancient cottonwoods, they marked the course of the Rio Grande – the Big River. It was seldom considered that big by eastern standards, and had probably only struck the Spanish explorers as such after they'd been stumbling around the parched Upper Sonoran Desert for a few weeks. It, not the Rockies and their tributaries that ran alongside it, was the state's true spine.

Annja thought she might walk through the brushy wood alongside it for a while this morning. The dig was done for the year. The Pueblos had gotten wind of last night's adventure and wanted things shut down immediately.

The tribal council was maybe spooked, and definitely pissed. Annja wondered who had talked about the sighting.

" – think about the Mayan calendar," the bearded guy was saying when Annja let herself tune in to the conversation again.

"How do you mean?" asked his leaner companion, who had turned sideways in his chair with his legs crossed.

The bearded guy shrugged. "Well, in connection with this holy kid's prophecies. He's always forecasting doom, right?"

"But sometimes the percipients have narrow escapes right after he vanishes," the Kiowa-looking guy said. "Maybe he's just warning them."

The bearded guy shook his head determinedly. "There definitely also seem to be undercurrents of long-term doom."

"So what does this have to do with the Mayan calendar?" the third one wanted to know.

"It runs out in December 2012, right?"

The kid in the bomber jacket nodded. Warily, Annja thought.

"So maybe that's what the holy kid is prophesying. The Mayan calendar runs out – time runs out."