She glanced back over her shoulder at the hillside, glad enough to be down off the site. The anger up there had diminished a bit, but it was still a potent force, and she would not want to go up there after dark. And although she had a certain level of calm—after all, she had at least done something—there was also a corresponding level of frustration. Some force was working against both the Little People and her own attempts to discover just who was responsible here. Something was clouding the trail. Yes, this site had been robbed. Yes, it was possible that the relics had been taken from here and cached at Calligan’s development site. But the trail had been broken and muddied past all retracing, and there was no way of knowing for certain unless she could actually get her hands on an artifact from the development.

It was just as possible that whoever had robbed this site had no connection with Calligan at all—even though the vision quest she had undertaken had seemed to imply a connection. Medicine worked the way it wanted to, sometimes, and that vision quest could simply have been telling her, “that job is not important—here is something you should be doing something about.”

There were seldom any black-and-white answers in Medicine, at least as Mooncrow taught it.

It took a while to get the dirt out from under her fingernails, but if there was one thing she hated—and one thing that gave people a really bad impression—it was dirty fingernails. By the time she finished, she was starving.

So she took just long enough to share her lunch with the mule, while she tried to think of something she had left undone, or anything else she could do. Finally she shook her head, and swung herself back up into the mule’s saddle.

It was going to be an uneasy ride home.

CHAPTER NINE

JENNIFER DROVE BACK to Tulsa with the radio off, her thoughts full of thunder, thirsting for revenge, and in no mood to appreciate the lovely weather.

She had put as much back into the vandalized graves as she had been able to find, and at least the bones could no longer be used for Bad Medicine, but most of the resident spirits—and more importantly, the Little People—had not been in any mood to settle. The feeling of the place was as bad as anything she had ever felt on Claremore Mound, and it was as plain to her as the blackjacks on the ridge that the mi-ah-luschka were out for blood, and nothing less would satisfy them. She didn’t blame them, and in fact she would normally be more than pleased to let them have their way.

The trouble was, that wouldn’t get back the medicine objects that had been taken from Watches-Over-The-Land’s grave—and if someone who knew how to use them got hold of them—