Not wanting to start anything like Rambo, I hid from the first car to roll by, which carried an officer and his cup of coffee and croissant. I guessed that I looked more like a hobo than a monster, once stupidly trying to check in a puddle, with my hair grown surprisingly long and my face in need of a shave. But an observant cop might have wondered how a man barefoot out here could have such unmarked feet.

I followed the road in hopes of coming to a sign, something that I might recognize … but not long after the patrol car passed by, moving through empty fields with nothing but cows to watch me, I got stuck. There was a white cross on the north side of the road, with a blue cap on its top and the name EDDY written in black letters now faded to grey. Eddy had died some time ago, but this was still enough to crumple my nose when I tried one step too many.

This was as strong as the wide river before the water cure; this second cross to stand against me was much, much more powerful than the generic, mass-produced silver trinket Jean-Claude had matched with his locket.

So I stopped for a while, sitting in the southern ditch with my back to the cross, wondering what this really meant. Was I stopped because I was evil? I would have just walked past Eddy’s cross without this repulsive effect, so it wasn’t evil intent to the cross or Eddy’s memory that made this happen. Was there such a thing as generic evil? That didn’t make much sense to me, since evil had to mean doing a particular bad thing to a particular person (though many a Catholic might disagree with the notion of a victimless crime because God is everywhere, blah blah, et cetera).

Was it evil potential, since Jean-Claude thought I would eventually degenerate into a perverse crack addict for human blood? But all the supposed power in holy symbols couldn’t keep the clergy of multiple faiths from being infested with some terrible humans.

Thinking of that damn rabbit, I didn’t fool myself with an answer. If the faith that made the magic was paradoxical or incomplete there might not actually be a clear rule-set for the magic, so even one tradition’s wizardry could be a fickle beast. And juggling multiple faiths in a patchwork of jurisdictions would just make everything crazy. I’d keep thinking about these weird rules, but it might all just be a mental isometric exercise: trying to get stronger by pushing a wall that will never budge.

I hopped a rusty fence and jogged to the treeline to the north, managing to escape the notice of any farm dogs. It was hot enough to make them lazy, and I heard no barking. Manure was a very powerful smell for my new nose, but the ridiculousness of this situation – smelling shit with canine precision – gave me a barking laugh.

Under the trees in the deep shade I put the Frenchman’s trinkets over my chest again, and resumed my jog with regular punch-backs. This stretch of woods proved to be thin, for I was soon breaking out of the trees to another farm, and this looked like a step in the right direction because this was a long thin stretch of field, a typical ribbon farm of the kind that lines the St. Lawrence on both shores.

I had to tread a bit more carefully, lurking and jumping between bunches of smaller trees that lined the properties, a copse and the occasional holt giving me the shade I needed to stop panting, for my back got hot very quickly under the unclouded sun. That manure smell was overpowering at times when the wind puffed, so I’d have to listen for anyone who might be too close. A running tractor was easy to avoid more than a mile off, and the grass was high enough in many places for me to be nothing more than a rustling.

Passing through one layer of ribbon farms to the connecting roadway, I looked down the gentle slope of the land from one bump in the land to see a blue line that was darker than the sky. That would be the big river itself, looking fairly wide here. How far up did the salt go? Salt water would be different that fresh water. Jean-Claude slipped that detail in, that my water cure wouldn’t let me surpass Dracula: he had still needed people to carry him over the channel into England, and if the water here was brackish enough I’d be stuck.

But I smashed into a closer problem on the next layer of farms, the next road running parallel to the river which was still miles off. Jogging up out the ditch to cross the cracked pavement my nose suddenly crumpled, and my neck creaked as my head was twisted to look left, threatening to crack. I felt my left wrist twist and break.

For a clear moment I was floating in the air, smashed and posed like a bug on a windshield, and the pain in my wrist and nose and neck distracted me enough to make me realize late that my right eye had just exploded like a grape.

I tumbled back into the ditch.

“Ugh … ow.”

Hm, that’s odd.

“Oh, laugh it up altar boy.”