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now.] {I’m Paula Kiri with Channel Four News.} (What the hell is Hex up to? Why did he have two of his people kill each other?) [No, I don’t know which hospital yet. I’ll call you when I find out.] {I’m live in Oakland with an update of the multiple slayings.} (I’m not sure if he owns them both—I think the boy might be one of us.)”
    Ukiah frowned at the last statement. He was one of whose? The police? Who was talking? He untangled the conversation from the rest, using direction and volume to find both parts of the conversation.
    â€œSo?” This an adult female, slightly breathless, as if she had just raced to the scene. Ukiah backtracked and caught her entrance. She had run almost silently up to the scene and stopped twenty or thirty feet off, in the darkness. The storm-whipped wind brought him the smell of her breath and musky scent, tainted slightly by car exhaust, cigarette smoke, and gin.
    â€œThey’ve killed each other, for the time being.” A man stood beside the woman. He had been standing there from the moment Ukiah woke, silent, watching. A shiver went down Ukiah’s spine. Had the watcher been in the woods the whole time, somehow missed?
    â€œWhat the hell is Hex up to? Why did he have two of his people kill each other?” The woman shifted in surprise and there was the faint creak of leather. He caught the smell of large cured hide, like Max’s bomber jacket.
    â€œI’m not sure if he owns them both—I think the boy might be one of us.”
    There was a long silence that the other background noise threatened to wash into. He held it back, focusing tightly on the strange watchers in the wood.
    â€œYou’re right,” the woman stated at last, breaking the silence. “He’s one of ours.”
    â€œI didn’t get a chance to get real close, but I don’t recognize him.”
    â€œI can sense him from here.” Another pause. During this one, Ukiah felt something, like a weak electrical current. It set the hair on the back of his neck on end. He flipped back and found that moments earlier, the same sensation had crawled over him. “I don’t know, he has the right smell, but something’s weird about him, Rennie.”
    â€œEverything is weird about this,” the man named Rennie answered. “You should hear what his name is.”
    His name? It was somehow frightening to think they might know his name. As the object of a police manhunt, it wouldn’t be totally surprising though.
    â€œHis name? I heard them call him Ukiah.”
    â€œOregon.” Rennie supplied his last. “Ukiah Oregon.”
    â€œUkiah, Oregon?” Unlike most people, the woman obviously had heard of the town where Ukiah had been found. “Coyote will want to hear about this.”
    They moved off, not at a walk in the rain-slick night woods, but at an easy run that was as silent as it was quick.
    Ukiah scanned through the conversation again, wondering. Who were these people? Why were they watching silently in the dark? Who was Hex? How did he own Dr. Janet Haze? Ukiah found no answers in the short cryptic conversation. It was only as he started for the third time, from the very beginning, that he realized something amazing.
    The conversation hadn’t been in English.
    With his odd-photographic memory, he could recognize and name many languages: Spanish, German,French, Japanese, Chinese. It wasn’t any of these. It had been so familiar to him that he had translated it unconsciously. Odder yet, he could find no instance when he had heard it spoken. The knowledge was there, deeply buried, lost but not forgotten.
    The only time in his life he could not recall with complete clarity was his early childhood. Who were his real parents? Where had they gone? How had he ended up running with the wolves? The answers had always been lost behind a veil of unremembering darkness.
    He sat up in the hospital bed to stare out