"What happened to him?" Sam asked when he spotted Jim flat on the floor.

"Roy's arm and Felicity powered tranq juice."

He spotted the dart in Jim's neck, "Nice shot. How long will he be out for?"

Roy pulled the dart out, capped it with a small piece of plastic he pulled off the bottom of the dart case that was wrapped around his wrist and stuck it in his pocket. "An hour, two at the most."

"Good, gives us time to look around, not that there's much to look at."

"Except the other three autopsy reports," Sam corrected, "Did you make sure no one else was here?"

"Taking care of that now, you read. Roy and I will be right back."

I took the garage and lower floor, Roy took upstairs but the place was clean. The garage had a Ford Focus in it but nothing else, I found the room where Jim had thrown an air mattress on the floor and a pile of clothes along with a laptop and that was it. There was one roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, a tooth brush, toothpaste and that was it. No cleaning supplies, no razors, nothing. None of which made any sense since he was listed as renting the place. I grabbed his laptop,it was on but sitting at the password protected screen. Hopefully Sam could crack it.

"What'd you find?" I asked Roy when we met back up at by Sam.

"Nothing. No clothes, nothing in the bathroom, just empty rooms."

"Even hunters don't live this bare. What the hell?"

"Guys," Sam muttered, "The other three bodies have more tats, none of them good things either. I found more photos, pre photoshopped. Not sure why he printed them out but it looks like these people are probably missing a heart, spleen and either another kidney or something in that area."

"Great. Okay I'll go grab the rope to make sure Jim can't go anywhere when he wakes up and call Coyote. See what she says." I headed out the front door while listening to Coyote's phone ring in my ear. It took four rings and it wasn't her voice that started talking.

"Dean, what's up?" Cougar asked.

"Cougar? Is everything all right?"

"Yes. I'm driving, she's sleeping. Why are you calling?"

That in itself was weird, that vision must have taken a lot out of her. "Oh okay. We got more info on the bodies. They're missing assorted parts that this guy named Jim who was working as the ME seems to have covered up. Jim's Native, we're at his place. He's knocked out for a few hours, his house is a cover, there's barely any furniture in it. The ME before Jim got the job three months ago just up and died in his sleep. Jim got the job, six weeks ago he started working his way towards the worst employee of the month award. He cleaned out the files at the morgue and was about to torch the hard copies but we stopped him. Found more tats on the other corpses, Sam says none of them are anything good. Figured I'd check in with you guys to see where we go next." It took Cougar way too long to reply.

"What's missing?"

"We know at least one kidney for sure, probably a heart, liver and spleen."

"This Jim, tie him up, gag him, cover his eyes." He wasn't suggesting. He was ordering. "Try to keep him from hearing you as well. We will be there as soon as we can."

"Care to fill me in on what's going on? We're kind of flying blind here."

"We won't be sure until she sees him."

"Uh huh, that's why both of you are coming here, not just her. Cougar, I know I haven't been around for a few years but I know she's spooked about something. She's not usually this tight lipped about things."

"You are right, you have not been here and you have no concept of how she does things now." There was a not so subtle hint of disgust in his voice, and I was pretty sure the disgust wasn't aimed at her. "Do not assume you know her anymore. Do what I said and wait."

"Fine. How far out are you?"

"We've been pushing it so about three hours. Fortunately the police haven't been around. We will have to slow down once we get closer."

"We'll try to keep him asleep until then."

"That is probably the safest thing to do." He hung up. Cougar and Coyote went way back, best friends their whole lives. He'd never seemed to have any issues with me before, although I hadn't spent a ton of time with him. He'd come over for dinner a few times when I'd spent time with her but it had always gone well enough. I knew he was a pretty level headed guy so for him to sound like that he had to be pretty damn pissed, which meant I'd hurt her a lot more than I'd wanted to admit. Damn it. It also sounded like whatever she'd had to deal with after Rising Dove died and she became shaman hadn't been easy either. I didn't have any choice back then, Sam and I were dealing with our own crap. I just wish that made me feel like less of a jerk. Nothing I can do about it now. I gathered the rope up, closed Baby's trunk and went back inside.

"So?" Sam asked.

"Tie him up, gag him, cover his eyes, keep him knocked out and wait. Coyote was sleeping, talked to Cougar. He said they won't know more till she looks at him."

"We can send her a picture," Roy pointed out.

I rolled Jim over and stacked his wrists on top of each other. "I have a feeling the way she needs to see him has nothing to do with how he physically looks. I think she needs to see his spirit, or aura, or whatever."

"What?"

I suddenly understood how Coyote must feel trying to explain being a Shaman to white people. "She can see all that. They call it seeing your Warrior Spirit, Asians call it your chi others call it prana or your soul. Whatever energy it is that psychics can see, it's that."

"Oh." He didn't look all that convinced.

"Trust us, souls are real things," Sam said, "And you should do everything you can to keep yours where it is."

"Uh, wasn't planning to give it away."

"Good. Don't." I'd tied Jim's hands and feet so I rolled him back over and wrapped a bandanna around his eyes and another one across his mouth. "Let's shove him into a closet just in case. Roy, dose him up again in ninety minutes. They should be here in three hours or so. Guess we may as well get some food in the meantime. I have a feeling we may not get to once she gets here."

"I'll go pick something up," Roy offered. "I want to change out of this anyway if things are going to get more serious."

"Good idea. Hate to make you the pack mule again but.."

"Yeah, I'll grab your bags. What do you want for food?"

"Thanks." I pulled some cash out of my wallet. "Sam?"

"Burger, fries, Coke. The usual."

"Cool. Same here. You fly I buy."

He took the cash, took his keys from Sam and walked out.

"He thinks fast on his feet. I didn't tell him to knock Jim out, he just moved."

"He wouldn't have made it this long teamed up with Oliver if he didn't."

"True. Anything else in this pile of stuff that's useful?"

"Not sure yet. Grab some papers and start looking."

I sorted through some of the papers, "Probably be easier if they were written in English. Here's Jim's laptop by the way."

"You try to translate the papers, I'll crack Jim's laptop.

"Fun." I pulled Sam's laptop closer and went to work. Roy showed back up some time later with food, I put him in charge of keeping an eye on Jim and then spent the next few hours trying working through the papers. About two hours in Sam threw his hands up in frustration. "I got in but everything on here is written in the same language the papers are."

"It's Navajo I think." I told him. "Only language that seems to make sense. What I have translated is pretty disturbing."

"Why?"

"Looks like Jim here was part of a group that seems to think it's time the Natives got revenge on us white folk. Which Coyote already told me but the creepy part is how they're planning to do it. In theory they want to resurrect all the souls of the Natives that were killed since we started trying to wipe them out and send them at us. An undead army but not zombies. We're talking vengeful spirits on steroids, thousands of them."

Roy looked at me like I was slightly nuts, "People can do that?"

"Yes, they can."

"Who the hell is that strong to summon that many spirits?" Sam asked.

"I'm getting the feeling it's not so much a summoning as it is shredding whatever veil the Natives believe in and just letting the spirits come through."

"Oh. Yeah, that would make more sense."

"I'm sorry, how does that make more sense?"

"You didn't go over ghosts with him? Seriously Sam?"

"We thought we were hunting vamps remember?"

"Vamps are a five second explanation. If something comes at you hissing with rows of teeth, cut it's head off. Not complicated."

"Uh huh...okay I'll just ignore all the other important stuff you just jumped over. Topic at hand." He closed Jim's laptop and looked at Roy, "There are multiple other realms out there, divided by veils or walls or whatever metaphor works for you. Summoning spirits requires some serious focus on who you are summoning, you have to pull them out through the veil to you that's assuming you have the psychic energy to get through the veil to them in the first place. However, ripping the veil takes a different kind of thought process. You're not trying to contact one specific thing, you're just opening a hole. Think about it like this, instead of shooting an arrow through a hole in the wall you just use one of Oliver's exploding arrowheads and blow the wall up."

It took Roy a minute or two but he got it, "It makes sense as to it being easier. How does whoever is ripping the veil know they'll get vengeful Native spirits and not just some random spirits that happen to be in the area?"

"Good question," Sam said. "They usually have something that will lure the spirits they need. A focal point to attract them."

"And a bunch of dead white people would attract vengeful Native American spirits. Wait..." I dug through the papers and found one that listed a bunch of names, it was one of the few that was in English. "Especially if the white people are distant relatives of the people that massacred them back in the day. Look."

"Custer?"

"Oh yeah," Cecilia Cartwright, girl with no heart now was apparently a great, great, great, grand niece of Custer's and Simon was related to a James Forstyth, the guy in charge of the calvary that pulled off the Wounded Knee Massacre. I knew that one because of Coyote. There were others I didn't recognize the names of but Sam and Roy seemed to.

Sam's face hit that mode he gets when the crap we were in reached monumentally catastrophic instead of just our everyday disasters. "I really hope Coyote knows how to stop this. I don't even know if our usual stuff would work on these spirits if they got out. Different beliefs usually mean different weaknesses."

"I know." My phone rang, it was her. "Hi. So your evil shaman wants to release a bunch of pissed off spirits of your people to take out mine using distant relatives of Custer and others as a focus. And the reason you didn't tell us that was?" I have a habit of getting a bit short tempered when faced with things like this.

Sam had smacked his forehead with his palm before I even finished talking, "Dude, c'mon!"

"The reason, jackass," she snapped back," Was because I didn't know all the damn details. Visions don't come with a table of contents, references and a genealogy section. Care to start this conversation over?"

Well that hadn't changed, she still spoke her mind. That made me feel better in a weird way. "Sorry, we just put it together. Shouldn't have snapped at you. Okay, starting over. Hi, what's up?"

"That's better," she replied. "We need your address. Cougar tells me you're at some guy's place that's involved in this."

"Yeah. I'll text it to you. You said dinner's on me. Want me to get you something now or later?"

"We ate already, thanks for asking. We're about thirty minutes away from Carbondale. Text the address. See you soon." She hung up.

I was getting a little tired of being hung up on without any warning. I texted her the address. "They'll be here in thirty. Let's organize this crap so she can look through it when she gets here."

We sorted everything into piles and about fifteen minutes in I started getting this weird feeling, my palms were all sweaty and I kept looking at my watch. I was nervous, of all the damn things to be nervous about I was nervous about seeing her again. What am I? Sixteen. There was a knock at the door, "I'll get it." If I was walking faster than usual it was just because we needed to stop the evil shaman, really. I pulled the door open and two things jumped out at me, the first was Cougar was damn near hovering over her and the second was the sense of power that hit me, and it was coming from her. I've been around a lot of powerful things, angels, witches, demons ,whatever and have developed sort of Spidey sense about it. Psychics would say I was a "sensitive", I just call it a survival skill. Either way, when I'm around things or people that have supernatural power I tend to pick up on it and she'd never felt like this before. She had shaman blood in her, that I knew, but not even Rising Dove had hit me like this and he was an experienced shaman, she was still pretty new to the gig. "Uh hi." I'm sure that covered my reaction perfectly.

She smiled, "Hi."

We stood there for a second, "You look good." Yeah, I was winning tons of points back.

"Thanks, you too." She took a step forward, making me move to the side and walked past me, Cougar followed on her heels. "Hey Sam, you must be Roy."

Which left me at the door, feeling like an idiot. I shut the door and watched her walk right up to Sam and give him a huge hug. He shot me an apologetic look over her shoulder as he hugged her back. He couldn't really refuse her hug but he knew how I felt. I couldn't be mad at him or her, but damn did it hurt like hell.