But when she said the words "black Lincoln," he went berserk.
He leapt up out of his chair, his face suffused with rage-
And his hand clenched around something, something that pulsed with an evil dark power, power that oozed thick and blackly poisonous as crude oil. A power she had sensed before.
The Evil One!
Now it all made sense; the grave-robbing, the bomb, and her visions! Now the pieces all fell together and she saw the shape of what she had been facing!
She had only just enough time to recognize the fetish-bundle for what it was, and to make that sudden realization, when Calligan lunged at her.
She backpedaled, frantic to avoid the touch of that bundle; he came up over the desk at her, equally determined to touch her with it. There was no room to escape; he body-slammed her into the filing cabinets behind her, and as she flailed to avoid further contact, she did the very last thing she wanted to do-
She accidentally touched the hand holding the spirit-bundle.
This time, there was no gradual transition; something seized her, shook her like a dog shook a rag, and flung her away.
She was-not in the Waking World.
Not any longer.
_CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
kestrel stood in the heart of the Spirit World, but in a part of it she did not recognize, at least, not at first. This was a bleak and barren landscape, where nothing grew and nothing lived. The sky was the color of ashes, the ground under her feet cracked and lifeless. Nothing broke the arid horizon but the occasional dead stick of what had once been a tree, now withered and sere. A thin and bitter wind sighed mournfully across this land, full of acrid, burning stenches and the sick-sweet smell of decay.
She wore her human form, in her full regalia as Hunkah and Tzi-sho, as Warrior and Medicine Person.
Before her stood another human; someone she did not recognize at all. By his costume, he was Osage of long ago; his hair was cut in the Warrior's roach, and he wore the deerskin leggings of a hunter, but he had no eagle feathers in his hair, and no shell torque about his neck. Instead, he had the feathers of some sooty black bird braided into his hair; a soft down plume on the right side, and the hard tail-feather on the left. The very opposite positioning of the two eagle plumes she wore. Around his neck, he had a collar of hard black talons, of no bird or animal that she could recognize, centered with a disk of shiny black flint. And his face was painted, not with war-paint, nor with bluff-paint, but with jagged lightning bolts of ebony-black.
And he was one with this terrible landscape she found herself in. He stood here with the full confidence and comfort of one who belonged to this place, was familiar with it. The predator in the heart of his territory. . . .
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. . . .
Like I have the leisure for a psychological review right now! What should I do, ask him to wait for a minute while I bring in my analyst?
His smile widened, just a little more, while the bitter wind of his place, called by his power, whipped her hair around her face, stinging her eyes and calling up tears of pain and pure unadulterated fear. He licked his lips, as if he tasted and relished those tears.
David was not prepared for Calligan to come lunging over the desk; he stepped back, instinctively. That was a mistake; he cleared the way for the man to body-slam Jennie into the wall of filing cabinets opposite the desk.
Then he reacted, leaping to Jennie's defense, but it was too late; Jennie was out cold, and Calligan was backing away, toward the door. Quickly, he positioned himself between Jennie and Calligan, taking a defensive stance over her prone body. He glanced down briefly, desperate to determine how badly she was hurt, but afraid to take his eyes off Calligan for long.
But Calligan relaxed, and gifted David with the nastiest smile he'd ever seen. David tensed. If something made Calligan smile, he had a pretty good idea that he wasn't going to like it.
Then the contractor reached around behind his own back and locked the door of his office.
"I told Romulus, I told Sleighbow, over and over, that they couldn't trust you savages," he said, pulling a clasp knife from his pocket. "Now-let's see if I can come up with a good story." His eyes focused just past David's shoulder for a moment. "Got it. That primitive little tart must have decided to use you as her way to bring me down." Calligan eyed David as if he were some kind of lower form of life, a bug or a worm. "I can see why; you must make a lot of money as a gigolo. So. First you seduce and steal my wife, then persuade her to file against me; then you use serving those papers on me as an excuse to get in here to try and murder me." He shook his head and tsked. "Barbarians. There isn't a judge and jury in Oklahoma who'd blame me for killing you and your bimbo. Temporary insanity, that's what they'd say."
Strange, Calligan spoke as if he was reciting something; as if someone were coaching him with a hidden mike. But his eyes were alert enough, so he wasn't on drugs or anything.
David tensed, his eyes on Calligan's, regretting profoundly that he had left his gun at home and his knives in the car with Mooncrow. But Jennie had sworn that he couldn't risk going armed when he was serving legal papers. And he really hadn't thought that Calligan would try anything stupid in a place as public as his office.
Calligan handled that knife as if he knew how to use it. A very bad sign.
Calligan saw his eyes flick briefly to the knife, and his smile widened. "I was a Navy SEAL, did you know that?" he asked conversationally. "They train the SEALs right. Missed 'Nam, though. I always felt kind of cheated. I'd have enjoyed it."
He circled a little, and made a brief feint to the right. David saw immediately what he was up to; he wanted to get David away from Jennie.
So instead of moving, he simply pivoted, watching Calligan's eyes, and trying to think if there was anything within reach that he could use for a weapon.
Kestrel backed up another pace, but she didn't think a simple tactic like that was going to work for much longer. It might look as if she could back up forever across this wasteland, but this was his wasteland, and he could manipulate it in any way he chose. Sooner or later he was going to get tired of this.
Oh, Ancestor, if only I could call you back to me!
"Daughter-" said a deep voice just behind her, suddenly; so suddenly that it made her jump. Something materialized at her side, a bright presence in the darkness.