Yeah, he knew what the Little People were supposed to look like. And they had to be spirits; for one thing, they were transparent, and for another, no Osage had dressed the way they were dressed for the last hundred years or so. Wearing only gypsum-rubbed deerskin leggings, with roaches of deer-tail hair and turkey-gobbler beard attached to the long roaches of their own hair, which had been shaved in the style that the whites called a “mohawk,” they surrounded him and Jennie, their eyes gleaming with mingled rage and hunger.

Their eyes glowed.

And one other thing told him that they were Little People, and not ordinary spirits.

No feathers. No face paint. Each of them should have been wearing an eagle feather in his roach; either a soft, under-tail covert if he was of the Tzi-sho or a full tail-feather if he was Hunkah. The Little People wore neither, nor were they painted. If they had once been human, they had died in such a way that they had no honor, and must go through a strange afterlife stuck here on earth and not in the Summer Country, existing without paint or eagle feathers. …

Just as old man Talldeer had whispered to them, on those long-ago October nights.

“They are hungry for blood. They search for prey—”

If they had once been human, they could have been killed by his people, in the raids that left no one in an entire village—every man dead, every woman and child made a slave. To die a slave—to die in a sneak attack and rot where you fell, without paint or ceremony—that would leave your spirit wandering.

At any other time than the night of the dark of the moon, you might be able to talk them into sparing you. They might even content themselves with simply pulling a trick on you. But during the dark of the moon, they became pretty single-minded killing machines.

David did not need to scan the sky; he knew it was the dark of the moon. He’d planned on that, when he’d decided to make his little raid tonight.

The Little People were ignoring Jennie for the most part, staring avidly down at him. Whatever was going on, she seemed to have some kind of protection from them. He didn’t.

I’m dead, he thought, his mouth going dry with a terror so profound it couldn’t even be called fear.

Then Jennie pulled something out of the inside of her jacket; a beaded feather—no, two feathers, eagle-tail and eagle-covert bound together with beadwork, like a peyote-fan, but different in a way that felt important. She held it before her like a shield—

He blinked to clear his eyes of the strange triple vision that suddenly came over him, but the vision remained. There was Jennie, legs braced slightly apart, the Jennie he knew, in blue jeans and a beat-up jacket decorated with Osage ribbon-work embroidery and ribbon-weaving—