That was when she recognized it as the place of her dream, before this all began. The terrible place where the eagles died.

The man before her was neither old nor young, and his expression was so completely blank that he might have been a department-store mannequin. But his eyes held an evil and a hatred so intense that she instinctively stepped back a pace or two from him.

He reached toward her, and she backed up again; she sensed that if she let him touch her—

He’ll drain me, she thought with growing horror. He’ll take everything worth having from me. I’ll still be alive, but there won’t be anything left of what makes me what I am. No spirit, no heart, no energy, no laughter, no creativity, no hope. No love. That’s what he did here. …

And that was what made him so horrifying. This was why Watches-Over-The-Land had to stop him! He devoured people, things, from within, and left nothing behind but the dregs.

He makes them into something worse than nothing, worse than killing them outright, because they know what he’s done to them, and he’s left them despair. Despair is all his victims have left.

And now, with no physical body to limit him, nothing to confine him, and all the protections that had been put around his spirit-bundle gone, he was more dangerous than he had ever been in her ancestor’s time.

He reached toward her again; slowly, as if he was toying with her. She evaded him, but not easily. It felt as if she were moving through mud; was he mustering the resources of this place against her? She tried to summon up some sort of protection, and failed.

He laughed at her, his voice ringing with scorn.

“You may have conquered my Black Birds, Little Hawk,” he told her, sneering, “but now you meet the Devourer. I am Hunger, and you cannot escape me.”

She didn’t reply; she could only wish, desperately and profoundly, that there was some way to invoke Watches-Over-The-Land, to bring him back from the Summerlands. He defeated this Evil One before; her ancestor Moh-shon-ah-ke-ta was the one who knew how to deal with him, what worked against him the first time—

But she was on her own.

She was more frightened now than when she had been struggling to keep from drowning; more frightened than a few hours ago, facing her murderers for a second time. That had only been a physical death that she risked. This was more—the death of all that made her whole.

She had never, ever, felt so helpless in all of her life.

What was worse, she watched the Evil One’s eyes, and knew that he knew all of this by the sly smile creeping onto his thin lips; knew that he read her every thought, and could play on all her weaknesses and exploit them.

You have to deal with the enemy inside yourself before you can take on the enemy that faces you. …