It didn't whisper.

He released the lamp pole and eased forward, keeping low, freezing when he had a sudden image of a woman about to open a door everyone in the theater knew hid the monster. They called her stupid, they yelled at her not to do it, they threw things at the screen to get her attention, but she opened it anyway.

And she was always wrong.

And what, he asked himself, does that make you?

Hissing, climbing to a higher pitch that puz-zled him because the pitch was still quite low.

It reminded him of something.

It definitely reminded him of something.

He took a step back, snapping his head around when something splashed to his left. No ripples that he could see, not even when he heard another splash, farther across the water. He could have turned then, but he didn't want to show his back to whatever was out there. He wanted to see it if he could, just in case it came into the open and could see him, too.

Then something struck the pole, taking a chip from the edge.

He didn't wait to see if it had been a shot; he fired one of his own into the dark, whirled and began to run, slipping once on the gra.s.s, fling-ing a hand out to stop him from falling on his chest.

When he reached the bench, he turned, trotting backward, staring at something he could finally see down by the lamps.

He never had a chance to see it clearly.

He heard a voice, heard a popping sound, and all the lamps turned red.Dugan Velador was tired of being old. He didn't want to die, that would be a waste of his life. What he wanted, however, was for people to stop coming to him with questions whose answers they already knew if they would only stop to think. What he wanted was a little peace, and he didn't think that was too selfish a wish. Not at his age. Not after all he had done for his people.

He also wanted the killing to stop. It should have ended the other night, the last night in the kiva.

For as long as he could remember, and for all that he had been taught and told, the last night should have meant the end, for it had always been before.

Not this time.

This time, from what he had heard on the portable radio he kept by his bed, another one had died. A woman. The name was familiar. He couldn't place the face or the occasion of the meeting, so he knew she wasn't Konochine frastera, one of those who had left.

Still, the name was familiar, and he worried at it while he ate breakfast, worried at it while, with a sitting blanket over one shoulder, he walked from his place to sleep by the Tribal Center to the Wall that overlooked the road that pointed west. When he was younger, but not young by any cal-culation, he used to sit there every dawn and stare at the unseen place where he knew Annie lived.

He tried to will her to return.

He prayed for her to leave the ranch and move back to her rightful home.

When that didn't work, he figured he had either really garbled the prayers so badly that the spirits hadn't recognized them, or he wasn't half as strong as he thought he was. Velador was a practical man.

When one thing didn't work, there was always something else. If the spirits wouldn't listen, someone else would.

As Nick would say, what the h.e.l.l.

The only thing he hadn't done, and would not do, was visit her in person. That would insult her, and demean him.

Practical, however, sometimes meant taking a bite out of pride, swallowing it, and hoping it wasn't poison.

He would have to think about it hard today. The killing of the woman he could not remember was too important. Annie would know that; maybe she already did. Maybe she would take a bite, too, and at least meet him halfway.

If she didn't, he'd be sitting in the sun for nothing.

Practical didn't always mean that what he did was smart.

When Mulder opened his eyes, he instantly allowed as how he fully deserved the booming explosion whose echoes rebounded through his skull for what seemed like forever. And when for-ever arrived, he still had a splitting headache.

At least he was still in his room, or would be as soon as the walls stopped shifting.

Last night, when he'd regained consciousness, he had thought he was in a hospital. A beautiful hospital with soft lights and attractive, natural decorations complete with all the appropriate scents and aromas.

The bed was too hard, though, and the air conditioning had been turned up way too high. They hadn't even bothered to cover him with a blanket.

When his vision cleared an eyeblink later, he realized someone had stretched him out on one of the benches in the motel's back garden.Scully knelt beside him, urging him to stop hid-ing and come all the way out. When he did, she scolded him for doing whatever he had done to get him clunked like this.

"Clunked?"

He had tried to sit up, but his head wouldn't let him; neither would his stomach. A rolling nausea engulfed him briefly, and he tightened his jaw, clenched his fits until the urge to vomit had pa.s.sed.

Sparrow leaned into sight then, and between thumb and forefinger held up a stone that would fit perfectly in his palm. He turned it so Mulder could see the fresh bloodstain.

"What were you doing, Mulder?" Scully's expres-sion was stern, but her voice was pure concern.

Again he tried to sit up, and again the dizzi-ness was too strong. He accepted the order her hand on his shoulder gave him. "Someone was out there." He pointed vaguely, not sure of the right direction.

"Maybe more than one. Definitely more than one." His eyes closed as he tried to remember.

While he did, the sheriff said, "And they knocked you out with a rock? Agent Scully said she heard a shot."

Voices had interrupted them, for which he had been grateful He needed time for all parts of him to get back together, and when they did, reluc-tantly, he said, "No, never mind. I don't think it was a person."

The sheriff grunted. "Then you're the first man on record to get himself beaned by a coyote."

"Not an animal either."

"He's delirious." Sparrow sounded disgusted. "Such a little scratch, too. I'll be back in the morn-ing, folks. There's nothing out there, Agent Scully. And if there was, he's long gone by now. Long gone."

More voices, footsteps, murmuring, then silence.

He opened his eyes.

Scully was still there, patient. "What did you shoot at, Mulder?"

"Little scratch? I thought a boulder hit me."

"Mulder, pay attention. What did you shoot at?"

He hadn't known then, and he didn't know now. Not that he could think very straight yet anyway, even if he did know. Fingers touched his forehead gingerly, skated over it until they reached the lump of a square bandage just above his left temple. He pressed, it protested, and he let the hand fall away.

What the h.e.l.l was it?

Sleep on it, he ordered, and no one argued.

When he next woke up, the ache had lessened considerably, and he felt well enough to stumbleinto the bathroom before his bladder exploded. A double palmful of water scattered the rest of the cobwebs, allowing him to check his reflection without wanting to break the mirror.

All in all, he looked a lot better than he felt. The bandage was small, and someone, probably Scully, had already washed the blood from his face. Other than his hair poking out in all direc-tions, he figured he looked pretty human.

A few minutes of washing, holding onto the basin while ripples of nausea and dizziness set-tled, and getting that hair back into place, and he felt even better. Hungry, even. He was about to give Scully a call to meet him for a late breakfast when he spotted a note taped to the mirror over the low dressing table in the front room. It was a reminder that she had an autopsy to perform, and a warning not to do anything on his own. She hoped to be back by noon, or shortly after.

Taking care to move without jarring anything loose inside his skull, he finished dressing and stepped outside.

The sky was blindingly blue, the sun simply blinding, and the heat hadn't changed, although it might have been, relatively, a bit cooler than yesterday. None of it did his head any good, and he hurried to the restaurant and the safety of the indoors.

A simple breakfast eaten in solitude allowed him to get past the muted throbbing behind his brow, to go over what had happened the night before.

Not that he needed much reminding. The humiliation of the lump was bad enough.

What had happened was, he had ignored all his instincts and had opened that d.a.m.n door. What had made him do it, he couldn't figure out. It had been more than simple curiosity, and until the end of theepisode, he didn't recall feeling all that threatened.

So... why?

He ordered a second tall gla.s.s of orange juice and sipped it while he watched the other guests come and go, wind through the courtyard, take pictures of each other beneath the cottonwood. In the white sun they had no idea what he had seen yesterday in that weed-infested yard; or if they did, they weren't going to let it ruin their day. A tale to tell when they got home, nothing more, a whole lot less.

The gla.s.s was empty when he remembered something else-that the noise he had heard by the river had reminded him of something. He concentrated, and scowled in defeat when he couldn't give it a name.

He did bring back the feeling, however, and it made him put the gla.s.s down and take a deep calming breath.

Above and in that hissing was the whispering.

she is special, mr. mulder.

His spine stiffened.

she hears the wind.

He was on his feet before he realized he had even left his seat, and that he hadn't yet received his check. Luckily, the waiter spotted him and came right over. Mulder signed it, added a large Hp and an effusive verbal thanks that startled the young man, and did his best not to run from the room to the lobby reception desk. There were no messages from Scully, and none from Sheriff Sparrow, who had said, Mulder recalled, that he would be back sometime this morning to ask some questions about last night.

He wondered if he could convince the man that he hadn't been delirious at all.

The wind.

Not wanting to confine himself to his room again, he strolled deliberately slowly around the courtyard, for all the world like a tourist who couldn't think of a d.a.m.n thing to do. When he couldn't stand it anymore, he veered into the pas-sageway to the back garden. Except for a woman standing near the center, he was alone.

The wind.

As he pa.s.sed her, heading for the place where he'd been struck, he heard a noise. A familiar noise.

One that made him stop, that made his headache return.

"Are you all right?"

The woman, a short Hispanic woman in a maid's uniform, looked up at him, not really con- cerned; she was only being polite because she had to. Behind her he saw a wheeled cart stacked with fresh linens and towels.

He nodded, and stared at her hands when the noise started again.

"Hey," she said, both a question and a warning.

"I'm sorry." He added a smile to the apology and moved on, forcing himself not to look back. A moment later he heard the cart's wheels roll quickly across the stone. Obviously she thought he was nuts.

Maybe he was. The sound he had just heard was an emery board being drawn across her nail. Almost like sandpaper.

At the bench where he had been last night, he looked toward the spot where he had heard the hissing, the whispers.

He didn't have to go there now to know what he would find, but he went anyway. A justifica-tion, a confirmation. He hadn't seen it on the riverbank where Paulie Deven had been killed, but he had seen it yesterday, in Donna Falkner's backyard. He just hadn't known what he had been looking at.

It didn't take long.

At the place where the gra.s.s met the under-brush, he stopped and rose up slightly on his toes. The growth wasn't so dense that he couldn't get in there; he didn't need to. He could see well enough from where he stood.

About ten feet away was an open spot, a scar.

The branches of the brush at its rim were either snapped off or had their bark worn through. Stretching his neck allowed him a glimpse of the ground, and the debris that covered it.

He grinned."Agent Mulder!"

Sheriff Sparrow came into the garden, and Mulder answered him with a gesture that he'd be there in a second. One more scan of the area showed him everything he needed to see, and he rubbed his hands briskly as he returned to the garden path.

"Sheriff, do you think you can get hold of Nick Lanaya?"

"I suppose so. What do you need?"

Scully, he thought as he headed for the sheriff, you're going to hate what I know.

You're going to hate it a lot.

There were no chairs in the lobby. The only place to sit was a thick wood bench beside the fountain.

Mulder waited while Sparrow used the desk phone to reach Lanaya, hoping that Scully would return soon. He didn't want to leave without her, but he felt a need to move fast, before someone else died.

After last night, he had more than an unpleas-ant feeling that he knew who that target was.

Sparrow sat beside him, hat and sungla.s.ses off, rubbing his eyes, "I left a message. There's only a couple of phones out there. Portable jobs like you have. Half the time they're left behind." He leaned back against the fountain's broad lip. "So you want to tell me what's going on, or is this going to be one of those need-to-know bulls.h.i.t things?"

Mulder shook his head. "No need-to-know, Sheriff. Scully and I are going to need all the help we can get." He checked the time, wondering aloud how long his partner would be.

"She's done, and on her way," the man said wryly.

"How do you know that?"