The Chosen

"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 A

"These Tejanos are all alike," Yvo

She's like me, A

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 Yvo

"He was trying to say the people who lived in this house knapped flint," Yvo

"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, Yvo

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. A

"Maybe kids dug them up," Yvo

"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," Yvo

Her words trailed away as she noticed A

"Who's being racist now, Yvo

Yvo

"But," Yvo

"Lighten up, sweetie," Trish said. She caught Yvo

A

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-cha

She saw Yvo

Trish's shoulders tensed. A

There was a figure standing among the trees. It looked like a tall man in a dark cloak. A

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 A

The figure said nothing.

"Listen, buster," Trish said.

A

"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 Yvo

"Yvo

"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 A

But it wasn't a cape. Black, tapering wings spread wider than the man was tall. A

Yvo

A strange sound keened with the stiff steppe wind. It was like a baby crying. Yvo

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 A