When sunset died, I got up. The reverberation through my flesh had faded a bit, but not the thirst.

First place to hit was any place with a sign. On a road that was evidently not named after a saint I glided with an ease that was eerie even to myself, as if it were a frozen canal, certainly fast enough to avoid a police chase. Lights at an intersection glowed and swarmed with moths, and I saw a simple set up: Shell pumps, a Voison convenience store, a Tim Hortons across the lot, one eighteen-wheeler getting ready to leave, two grain silos on the horizon marked by the very last of the twilight. Leaping to hunch over the pump’s roof (this was now about as hard jumping three stairs as a human, I judged) I hunched in the darkness and read the bulletins outside the store, and guessed that I was somewhere near a town called Sainte-Croix. This was Catholic country.

I hopped onto the departing eighteen-wheeler’s back and staying on when it turned north, toward the river. The night’s wind in my face forced an involuntary smile, and I looked down eager for deer, rabbits, anything with blood, though nothing came into view just yet. I could smell the river as the truck took me closer, the deep water passing with a great infrasound noise that I could just make out like a seething, sliding serpent of impossible size.

Dismounting my truck and rolling to kill its speed without issue, I came to a stop in Sainte-Croix about forty minutes later and found a nice deep shadow beside an empty carwash with a barren parking lot on the main drive, deciding that this place was too small for much shopping – and what was the point of new shirt and shoes now, if I would be swimming across the St. Lawrence?

Saint Lawrence. Shit.

“C’mon,” I muttered, to fate or Jean-Claude or whoever. “Can’t be that simple. This town isn’t burning me to the touch.” I guessed it was named after the cross and not a guy named Croix, but unless an actual piece of the original cross was nearby to blast me like Chernobyl I didn’t worry because even a Catholic vampire hunter’s cross wasn’t much to me.

I prowled the small town until after midnight, quite certain that no road here was giving me special resistance – a place’s name alone meant nothing. From the intersecting roads I also guessed that an incidental cross would also be powerless against me – like that 9/11 cross made of remnant steel beams standing out of the rubble, at least on its first day. Once enough humans noted and fixated on it, however, it would become something radioactive to my kind, and the encounter with Eddy’s roadside cross earlier in the day told me that a memorial for a large tragedy would definitely be a problem. I’d have to get a map and cross churches and war memorials off, and practically any stretch of public road would have crosses and wreathes to mark fatal crashes.

The town of Sainte-Croix on the southern shore of the St. Lawrence had two churches that could water my eyes a block away, but otherwise the outdoors was all mine. Alighting on rooftops and sliding down walls with minimal creaks, I felt my craving growing more insistent. Once a dumpster rattled on its own, but the other prowler in the night was a raccoon. It looked up at me to where I watched from a rooftop like a gargoyle, and blinked.

“You got through the sainted road,” Raccoon Man called out to me. The creature’s black jaw was stretched, as before, but I noticed that the shout across the street up to where I hunched on the roof didn’t get any notice from a huddle of smokers a block away, just outside a bar that seemed to be obeying the smoking laws for now.

I tried to think back, making eye contact in case that mattered. How long was I stuck on that trip with Nanabozho?

“You went off the map five nights ago, and while the spuds gave up the chase we older kids were curious about where you’d end up – Nanabozho could have dumped you quite far off, just outside any one of his other places, from Minnesota to Ontario to New England.”

No wonder I’m so thirsty. Right now that mattered more than the ability to teleport. Anything nearby that needs to be put out of its misery?

“Well … tell me how you got through that sainted road, and I’ll look around for a bit.”

Jean-Claude, you do it, you might understand it better than me.

I discovered that I could do this, that as I looked at the raccoon in its dumpster across the street a little trickle of something that was not snot or eye-gunk was coming out of my nose and eyes. These three trickles merged, kind of like the smaller lasers in the Death Star to make the primary planet-killing beam, though my face had actually launched what I guessed was sometimes called ectoplasm, full of Jean-Claude’s mind. My shot flew true and landed inside the stretched maw of the raccoon.

“That … I don’t understand why that would work.”

Still, a deal’s a deal. I’ll come back here at midnight.

The raccoon hissed and returned to its rummaging for garbage, released from its guardian’s control.

Chapter 17: The Gift from Africa