Some five or six graves had been looted; from the grass sprouting in the turned earth, and the amount washed back into the holes, it looked as if it had happened right around April.

Damn, damn, damn.

This was more than Kestrel could handle easily; she wanted to start a mourning keen right here and now. But a mourning keen would not help, not now. So she put on her Jennifer mask and persona, invoked her experience as a P.I., and began collecting what little evidence there was. She had two cameras with her; a Polaroid and a 35-mm. Clinically, dispassionately, she began to fire off Polaroids, then took a full roll of 35-mm film for later development.

Meanwhile, she went mentally through all the possibilities for some sort of official investigation. I could call in the cops, but this is the county, and they’re overworked. The only way they’ll catch whoever did this is if they come back, or start boasting. Even if they caught whoever did this, what could they do? If we were lucky, the perps would get the standard slap-on-the-wrist for graveyard desecration. Lucky, because this isn’t a registered, official county graveyard, which might mean that the law wouldn’t even allow us that much. What is the law about graveyards on private land? I don’t even know that; it’s never come up before.

She hung both cameras over the saddle horn by their neck straps once she had all the evidence there was to get. Then, biting her lip a little in apprehension, she went farther up the ridge, to the very top. Right where the sun lingered the longest, and the view was the best.

Right where the remains of a cairn were the most obvious to someone who knew what to look for. And where a hastily-dug hole in the ground was equally obvious, once you got past the bushes that screened the place from below.

Oh, shit.

Watches-Over-The-Land’s resting place was as empty as the other six graves.

The strictly physical was easy to take care of, so long as she kept her Jennifer persona in place. There was absolutely no point in trying to sort out whose bits belonged to whom, and really, even for the medicine it didn’t much matter. The spirits of those left here had long since gone into the West, and what had happened here would not materially affect that.

Unless, of course, the person who had taken the bones had been some kind of magician or medicine person himself. Then he could use the relics to draw those spirits back, against their will … imprisoning them in this world, making mi-ah-luschka out of them.

Which might very well be why the feeling of dark anger lay over this hillside, dimming the sunlight.