A vampire using a Bible to hold back a wendigo would be a ridiculous way to die. I would try it, of course. I’d try everything before those jaws found my throat and my heart, Jesus and Buddha and Nanabozho and Great Cthulhu.

That would be my last ditch tactic, I told myself, slamming the backpack on my back and then slamming my boots on the ground, hitting dirt and then pavement. Beyond tactics, my strategy couldn’t be anything more than what had worked earlier – getting on a boundary between two more powerful forces and hoping that they’d fumble. Those churches crossed off on the map in Trois-Rivieres were old places, a small taste of what Quebec City had in store for any wandering ghoul. But if they could fuck me up, they’d fuck it up too.

Maybe.

As if running to catch a bus I hauled myself down the sidewalks and over a bridge into the city proper, passing small private homes and clipping a few cars at intersections, disappearing into the night before an alarmed driver could turn their head. Running with the backpack was easier in the full night, though getting on to roofs would require some grunting. No, I would stick to the ground. Would the wendigo even dare to enter the city? Taking away its homefield advantage might be worth something. This larger city hummed with so many engines and buzzed with so many live wires, the din rising around me and making it harder to focus, beating at my superhuman eardrums. If wendigos had even sharper senses, all the better.

Through ballparks and over a bridge and next a highway overpass I ran without breaking speed, still too frightened to enjoy my new agility.

Soon I felt the glow of a barrier, the kind that I had struck and then cursed through on the road south of the St. Lawrence, and saw the faint bubble of golden aurora that wrapped around the grounds of the target church, Eglise Baptiste Evangelique. It was recessed into some wooded grounds on the city’s northwest outskirts with a small graveyard inside hedges in the back – I could see the graves clearly as if they were marked by a flash of lightning, my eyes dazzled and tortured by the glow each headstone bore.

I skimmed around this enclave of foreboding power like a moth around a flame, feeling cowardly, but still feeling the dead gaze of Gaston in my mind’s eye and remembering the deep cold in my feet that had planted me to the ground when I had found the poor animal’s remains. Taking that first step away had been hard, as if the freezing had been literal. Now I wanted my feet to burn. I could run and run forever and the pain in my feet would never matter.

The cemetery grounds were denied to me by that shimmering barrier extending over the fence and the sidewalk, into the street with suburbs on the other side, keeping me near those packed homes as I turned a corner and looked behind the church. The roadside fence went on to hold in another wooded property across from more suburbs, what a hasty check of the map said was a golf course. Between them, there was some unprotected forest for me. When I hoped the fence to get inside the property, no alarms or dogs sounded, nor angels with trumpets.

Would a golf course have tutelaries that would come out to club me off the grounds? Well, if it looked like I’d go down that way I’d at least annoy them with terrible impressions from Caddyshack – if only some spit would come back into my mouth as I finally came to a stop and, painfully, waited.

All the jokes and references in my head had never felt so hollow.