The tutelary got me with the old flashlight trick as I peered into the dark glass, where of course I had no reflection. An old woman’s wrinkled face popped into existence nose to nose with me.

“Ah,” I said.

“Ha,” she said, grinning with oddly small teeth. And a trinket was snatched up to hold me back, pressing against the window and shining with its own firefly light. My blurring vision saw a wooden hoop supporting a net of fine strings with dangling beads below.

It was not a hit, not as strong as Jean-Claude’s icons; this was a more relentless wind, yanking back at my tattered clothes and knots of unkempt hair. Peering ahead through squinting eyes, my vision was being drawn and funneled, luring me into …

“Oh, dreamcatcher.” I recognized the strands in the wooden hoop from my earlier encounter with the Micmac hunters, and tore my eyes away. The thickening of the air that I remembered from the point of that trap had also started, the air turning to molasses and then crawling down my throat, but this effect also vanished away once I was able to take my eyes out of the dreamcatcher’s center. As before, the weapon wasn’t delivering its proper punch. As if it were made for a slightly different target.

The old woman with a flashlight under her face frowned, and the dreamcatcher’s glow dimmed. I had retreated a pace but the repulsive effect was spent for now, though I held my position, staring back.

Finally, she said, “Tu n’es pas un windeego?” 

Of course. The wards used by Micmacs and other tribes had another monster in mind. Raccoon Man had not liked me using the name, and I suddenly I had another reason to be looking over my shoulder in this wilderness. Wendigos … damn. I’d rather tussle with werewolves.

“Ah, je suis un … vampire.”

“Anglais,” she scoffed, and this seemed to upset her more than my unclean nature. “Anglais et jeune.” 

“Pantalons … chemise … all clothes, I guess. Boots?”

“Bottes,” she corrected, stuffing away her dreamcatcher. “Patienter!” 

“And a backpack,” I added.

A few minutes later the shop’s wooden door unlocked, and the screen door in front opened. The crone peered out and wagged a summoning finger.

“Pick sizes.”

I stayed put for a while, noticing that there was an unused cross hanging around the spirit’s neck. She seemed to be a proper ghost as I studied her in full, interacting with objects like the door but having a misty complexion, with all the details save her face somewhat blurred. But what I gathered suggested that she was old, for I’ve only seem Amish people in similar clothes. I guessed that she was both a Christian and a native, perhaps an old Metis woman who had died long ago and continued her labors at this store.

“Is this out of the kindness of your own heart, or is there some magical clause about clothing the naked and feeding the hungry?” If so, I’d be hitting thrift stores more frequently than my hoarder mom.

“Not a windeego. Long time since anyone come, white or black in spirit, and guests are guests. Come in. Only backpack is pink.”

Standing in the cramped vestibule of the silent shop, a dim place even in the day that was now dark and dusty and lined with old photographs on the walls and filled with the smell of indoor smokers, I obediently let her bring out stacks for me to search through. I decided not to cross a fine line that I perceived as a ghostly cut in the floorboards past the cash register, where the aisles of shelves and racks of discount clothing began. I had only been invited so far in.

The pink backpack was still big enough for an adult; several pairs of jeans were just long enough for my legs, and she even dug out some boots that had steel toes, nice and tough for the paces I would put them through. She turned away and hummed when I changed, finally removing the tatters of the clothes I had last worn as a human, which could now only go in the trash. I picked out shirts and underwear without much thought, cramming them in the backpack.

Also without much thought, I took the diamond ring off my pinky and held it out to the apparition. She actually hissed at it.

“Tabernac!” 

“Sorry. Actually, while I have someone to spot me … I’m going to bounce this off my palm, and let it fall to the floor. Can you count how long I’m out for?”

The Metis woman’s ghost now put her hands on her hips and looked ready to scold me, one hip passing through the corner of the table that held the cash register. “Pick it up afterward,” she finally said.

I took another hit off the blood diamond. Someone spun the room around me and smacked the floor up into my face.