"In? Something that will work itself out, or something that needs removed?" Max asked.

As if his body took it as a suggestion or perhaps a threat, Ukiah started to cough. Each cough wasan explosion of pain, and he doubled over, trying to ease it. Something was forced up and out. He covered his mouth and coughed the wet, bloody mass into his hand. Immediately, he could breathe, and gasped in a huge sweet lungful of air. He slumped back in the seat, still cupping the mess, just enjoying the deep, unhindered breathing.

Max got some Kleenex and lifted Ukiah's cupped hand. "Here. Is this all-dead?"

Ukiah considered. "No. Something's alive in there."

Max carefully cleaned away dead tissue from living. The mass resolved down to a black cocoon, which shuddered open as the air hit it. An insect, looking like a cross between a wasp and a butterfly with too many legs crawled from the thin black silk.

Max gave him a look that clearly asked, What the hell?

"It's a v'vrex." Ukiah let Rennie coax the alien into inspecting a clean, empty Gatorade bottle. "It's from Prime's home."

"That's new." Max tucked the bloody tissue of dead-cells into the plastic wrapped around Ukiah.

Zoey darted to Ukiah's side and laced her fingers through his. "I know you're going to be okay.

You're Magic Boy-even if you don't think you are. It's just that the scientist in me is at odds with the granddaughter of a medicine man. But that's nothing unusual. I think this time I better listen to the granddaughter."

"I'll be fine." Ukiah was glad that he could reassure at least one person. "You take care of Cassidy.

She actually needs you more."

"Here, take this." Zoey slipped a small beaded bag on a thong of rawhide over his neck and kissed his cheek. "It wards off evil spirits."

"Evil spirits," Rennie said, as his big motorcycle rumbled to life, "are the least of our worries."

The Lyrids were falling the last time he really talked to Alicia. He had been doing a surveillance stakeout as the meteors streaked the April night sky in a rain of wishes. Since it was a matter of just sitting, and watching, it made sense that he and Max took turns.

Alicia came to him quietly, dressed all in tight black, shivering with cold and excitement.

"What are you doing here?" His breath smoked in the freezing night air. Alicia had not worked for them for nearly a year now, despite her frequent visits.

"I dropped by the office for a shoulder to cry on, or an ear to bitch into." She pressed a tall thermos into his hands. "Max said I could bring you something to eat."

He cracked open the thermos and found it filled with Max's beef stew, steaming hot. "What's wrong?"

"Oh, same old, same old." Alicia peered through his telescope at the storage yard he had under surveillance while he juggled cap, lid, and spoon to gulp down the first cupful. "I really should learn not to think with my hormones. Wild and crazy guys might be oh-so-hot, and great for messing around with, but they're not cut out for stable relationships."

He wasn't sure what to say to that. He was too new to civilization to understand the complex social dance everyone else breezed through. He wasn't even sure what "messing around with"

entailed. "I'm sorry if you're hurt."

"I'm not hurt, just-pissed off-and mostly at myself." She wrapped her arms about herself and rubbed at her arms. "Damn, is it cold!"

"Where's your coat?" He finished the stew and screwed the lid back on."It's screaming yellow. I didn't think I should wear it up here. I might give you away."

"Here." He started to unbutton his coat.

"I can't take your coat! " she protested.

He stood with his coat hanging open, unsure what to do, then said, "We could share it."

So she snuggled into his chest and he hugged her close. His coat barely covering her sides, he rubbed her back to warm her.

"You always smell so good," she murmured.

"It's the stew," Ukiah told her. "Max makes it with light cream and cashew paste, kind of like Indian korma."

She laughed into his chest. She smelled of arousal, but he had lots of practice around his mothers at ignoring the scent.

"How do you feel?" he asked, steering his mind and body away from her pheromones.

She looked into his eyes. "Safe."

He had expected "warmer" or "still cold" or something other answer. He puzzled over it. He supposed she felt that way because he wouldn't let anything hurt her.

"Look!"

Ukiah glanced up and saw another meteor streaking groundward. "Falling star, make a wish."

She laughed. "Don't tempt me."

"What would you wish for?"

She touched his face, tracing his smooth chin, and ran fingers over his mouth. "I wish you were older."

"Me? Why?"

She laughed, burrowing her face into his neck, and tightening her hold on him. "Oh, no reason. I'm just being selfish. There's time enough for you to join the cruel realities of the world. But when you do, I'll be waiting."

At the time, he didn't understand. Looking back, now he did. She was in love with him.

Ukiah woke in the stillness of late night, with the sense of Alicia all around him.

While mostly a blur to Ukiah, their retreat had actually been quick and orderly. Max paused at the garage where Kraynak's van was still under repair. Rennie broke in and confiscated Alicia's camping gear, and they headed out into the wilderness. The Umatilla National Forest covered 1.4 million acres land-even if the Ontongard knew it well, it would take them a while to search it all.

Ukiah now lay wrapped in Alicia's blankets, wreathed by her ghostly scent. What happened, he wondered with despair, to those that the Ontongard took over? Did their souls break free of the bodies no longer theirs to control-able to pass on to heaven? Or did they stay trapped-to be soiled by sins they had no power to prevent-doomed to hell if somehow the Ontongard died? Or were they somewhere halfway between? Pushed out of their bodies by the alien DNA and yet unable to pass on, did they cling like ghosts to the hair still caught in combs and the dead cells shed onto favorite clothing, the only DNA still solely their own?

Surely God wouldn't let such cruelty exist. There was, however, overwhelming evidence that theuniverse was full of such evil. Tortured by such thoughts, Ukiah slipped out of the tent and discovered the world beyond.

The campsite was high in the mountains, open to the stars. The campfire burned in a ring of stones, a low red eye in the darkness, scenting the air with wood smoke. Overhead the Milky Way crossed. The Big Dipper. The Little Dipper. Ursa Major. Ursa Minor. He gazed at the stars, homesick for Pittsburgh, Indigo, and his moms.

The campfire suddenly roared to life. It shot up as if feeding on gasoline, the flames shooting up as high as his chest. He backed away from it, looking for water or sand. A movement caught his eye, and he turned around.

A male grizzly bear towered over him.

It roared, a sound that filled his ears and senses. He saw the huge mouth open, the yellowed canines, the deep cavern of its throat, red rim of gums and the drool. The hot breath blasted over his upraised face. The carnivore smell of old meat. The spittle touched him with information on the huge beast before him, the ancient link with all bears and the twisting path down to this giant creature before him. The sound rippled over his skin, felt as well as heard.

It stood there, real in all his senses. But its eyes-its eyes were great pools of blackness filled with stars. And into his mind he felt the firm impression of something unreal, something huge and unknowable, something beyond anything he and any of his ancestral memories stretching back eons-had ever experienced. The bear, he somehow knew, wasn't truly there. And so, where he should feel fear jazzing over his nerves like electricity, he felt only serene awe.

Threading through his mind, quiet and elusive as the whisper of wind through pines, was a thought.

Protect your people. This is why you were born.

A rustle of fabric, and Max came out of the tent behind him. "Ukiah?"

Ukiah blinked. He stood with his back to the fire, gazing up at the stars. The bear was gone, vanished completely except for a ghost heat of its breath.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes." Ukiah glanced down at the ground. Dew covered the grass evenly with no mark of the bear's passing. The memory remained, perfect as always, filling him with peace. "I'm fine."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Pendleton, Oregon.

Wednesday, September 1, 2004.

If one thought about it, the Boy Scouts, with their "be prepared" motto, worked well with Max's paranoia. Every morning Ukiah and Max had stripped the hotel room of all their costly, high-tech equipment, loading it into the two cars in Max's belief that the cars were far more secure. They had left only suitcases, clothing, and toiletries behind.

Max decided that they would abandon everything at the hotel; while the police still searched for the Brodys and their known accomplices, unidentified Ontongard would be looking for Ukiah. If Ukiah and Max were lucky, they could slip out of Oregon unnoticed. If they were unlucky, the entire world might suffer.After they woke at dawn, ate, and Ukiah absorbed back all his blood mice, Max made arrangements over the Internet, using his cover identity of John Schmid, buying five tickets instead of a telltale three in order to confuse anyone checking passenger lists at the Pendleton airport. Disconnecting his laptop from the Taurus's power, Max packed it away and scanned the campsite to make sure they were leaving nothing behind.

"I'm going to need at least a shirt," Ukiah said, fingering the holes in his shirt, crusted with dead blood cells, reluctant to put it back on.

"We'll see if Sam has something." Max handed his multi-pocketed vest to Ukiah.

Ukiah put on the vest and zipped it up against the morning chill. "We're going to see her?"

Max fished out the Blazer's keys and tossed them to Ukiah. "I'll get us down to the main road, and you can lead us to her place."

Ukiah caught the keyring. They had discussed Ukiah saying good-bye to his newfound family and decided it would be too dangerous. It had become common knowledge that Ukiah was somehow related to the Kicking Deers and the Ontongard could be watching them. "Isn't it risky to see her? Everyone knows we've been working together."

"You said that her place is fairly secure."

"She said."

Max allowed that difference with a lift of his shoulder. "I need to talk to her one last time. I'm trusting that she can shake anyone watching her."

Although his voice was low, he said it with an intensity that surprised Ukiah, as if his need equaled something much greater than simple talk. Ukiah considered the times he had seen Max and Sam together, and realized, between the moments of desperation, Max had been happier than he had been for a long time.

It was possible, while Ukiah wasn't paying attention, Max had fallen in love.

If that were the case, then there was no way Max would leave Pendleton without Sam. Perhaps the five tickets weren't all a ruse.

"Are you going to ask her to come back to Pittsburgh with us?"

"I think I want to marry her."

"Really?"

Max laughed at his reaction and cuffed him. "Maybe. I don't know. Hell, I've known her for, what, a week? And I'm nearly ten years older than her. Indigo has nothing on me for cradle robbing."

Ukiah wasn't sure what to say. He and Max worked well as partners. During the last few days, there had been moments where he felt he was the one that was intruding, not Sam. Ukiah hadn't dwelled on it, because in the back of his mind he knew that he and Max would go home, and things would go back to normal.

But if Sam moved to Pittsburgh, then he and Max might never be the same again. "She would be a full partner?"

Max shook his head. "I'll offer her a job and moving expenses. I can't expect her to come to Pittsburgh without at least a job. No strings attached. No expectations. If she and I don't work out-well, we need another investigator anyhow." Max paused, and then looked anxiously to Ukiah. "That is, if you agree to it. You're full partner, you have an equal say in her working at the agency."

For years, he'd seen Max quietly grieve for his wife. Kraynak spoke honestly of a time, before Ukiah knew Max, when Max walked a suicidal edge. Ukiah couldn't say no, not to Max. "We need someone. There won't be any surprises with Sam."

"It might mean a lot of changes for you, kid.""I plan on getting married to Indigo; I'm slated for changes already." Ukiah squinted as he considered additional ramifications. "Do you think Sam and Indigo will like each other?"

"Indigo and Sam?" Max shuddered. "God, one hopes that they can at least stand one another! Life could be hell if they can't."

"What are we are doing here?" Rennie's thoughts touched Ukiah's mind as they climbed the driveway to Sam's small, A-frame cabin. The Blazer's dashboard clock showed it was ten to five, and no lights were on.

Rennie trailed Max and Ukiah at a discreet distance on his motorcycle, watching to see if they were followed. When they turned off the main road, however, he closed in on them. Ukiah could sense Rennie's faint concern.

"This is Sam's place," he told Rennie, parking next to Sam's Jeep. Her Harley was tucked into a small half-filled woodshed. "Max needs to talk to her."

"All this madness, and still we have proclamations of love. Ah, humans are amazing."

Under the sarcasm, Ukiah felt Rennie's fondness for his birth race.

Max scowled at Rennie as he stopped his motorcycle beside the Taurus. "Could you give us a little privacy?" Rennie's eyes slid over to Ukiah and asked a silent question. "He's my partner. He's part of the deal."

Rennie grinned but swallowed down any snide remark that flitted through his mind, just out of Ukiah's reach. "Go pitch your woo. I'll check the main road."

He walked his bike backward until he could pull in a tight circle and head back down the steep driveway.

Max knocked on the door. "Sam?" He knocked again and glanced to Ukiah, who was on the other side of the doorway.

Ukiah listened carefully. "Someone's coming. Sounds like Sam."