David stared at the old man, his own face going pale, and Jennie wondered if he, too, had a dream like hers, of a poisoned earth, and dead eagles lying in the ashes.

“I had a dream, the night of my vision-quest,” he said slowly. “I was in a place like Tulsa, but with absolutely no people, completely virgin wilderness. Everything was great—and then this—this monster came, and it was like you just described, it wasn’t animal or bird, but it had pieces of all kinds of things, only twisted and distorted. Wherever it went, things just died as it passed. I was really afraid, and I hid from it.”

Mooncrow nodded, listening closely, and clenched his jaw. “You are new in your Medicine, and should not have seen this spirit-thing, unless it had gotten a great deal of power. And it should not have been able to kill things in the spirit-world unless it was as powerful now as it was in our ancestor’s time.” Jennie felt her heart sink at his words; he saw her expression, and nodded, confirming that her feelings of danger and dread were not misplaced. The warm sunlight seemed to thin, and a chill crept over her.

“This is a bad thing, David,” Mooncrow said then. “This is a very terrible thing. Somehow, we must find whoever has this spirit-bundle; we must take it away from him, and we must do what our ancestor did, so long ago.”

He looked out over the creek, and his face was a mask that hid every emotion but determination. “We must catch the beast, David. Then we must take its power, and cage it. Somehow.”

Rod Calligan doodled idly on the pad on his desk, and weighed out his options.

He had hoped that he’d seen the last of the Talldeer girl, when he hadn’t heard or seen anything at all from her. The cops had gone off to pretend they were investigating, but there were no real leads, and he and they both knew it. The P.I. herself hadn’t even set foot on the property once that he could prove. Maybe, he thought, she had taken the presence of the trap he’d left as evidence that her people were involved, after all, and had told the insurance company so. Or at least, she had told them she could not disprove the allegation. But it seemed that she was not going to give up, after all; Smith had just called with the bad news that she’d been put on indefinite retainer by his company. Sleighbow was higher up than Smith; there was nothing Smith could do to get her dropped.

If she’d been put on retainer, it meant that she had found something suspicious, and she’d convinced Sleighbow that more work needed to be done. Probably by telling him her suspicions, possibly by giving him her evidence. Very bad news.