A thunderclap seemed to have sounded one second before I left the McCabe house still thirsty, the street and air above suddenly silenced. I didn’t slam the door, but I noticed that I had to physically open and close it on the way out. The yard outside the house was rustling in a circular fashion as if a crop circle were about to be written.

“You know,” a new voice said, “you already have a nickname in your community.”

“Oh?”

“You’re this decade’s vogelfrei. It can be translated as ‘vagabond’.”

The new spirit finished arriving, stepping out of the grass crop-circle. It was a clean-shaven man in an old-fashion suit and tie with hands folded on his stomach, hair jet black and rigidly combed.

“Sounds German,” I said. “I thought the vampires would be Romanians. Or wandering Romani.”

“Many of them are gypsies,” the spirit confirmed. “But the curse jumps around a lot, as you know. You can call me Dr. Best.”

I raised an eyebrow, and he looked like he was suppressing a smile.

“Between the three of you, I’m the least unhappy with you,” Dr. Best said.

I digested that for a few seconds.

“You can think of me as middle-management,” Dr. Best continued, not drawing closer. “Paradis and Peck were looking over their shoulder in case we found out and disapproved, and we do not approve of this assisted launching. I’m here to discourage your trip to Toronto without a fight.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.” The voice stayed calm. “If you had killed Mrs. McCabe we would have just let you come to Toronto so we could incinerate you at first knock.”

I sighed and strolled closer, gathering my words, suspecting that Dr. ‘Best’ could just read my mind anyway. But he let me speak.

“I’ve developed the idea that I need to collect people to avoid trouble come winter.”

“Trouble? That’s not a great translation of ‘wendigo’, sir. You should be going north in your condition,” Dr. Best said, straightening and sounding absolute. Sounding like he was making an announcement like a train conductor, actually, which was the start of my annoyance with the guy. “Like the dove said, like the movie M: Toronto’s day and night side will not tolerate the cannibal spirit.”

“And the guardians in the north want me to go south, into the Land with No Trees,” I countered, feeling my face tighten with a smile I didn’t mean.

This particular phrase broke the look of routine command on the doctor’s face, for just a second. He was surprised that I had survived encounters with the kinds of beings who call cities by that name. And I suddenly knew: he had just been told to say that I should not go to Toronto. This wasn’t his own thinking.

On his own he thought practically nothing of me at all.

“As I see it, I either work this out by collecting people for internal defense or someone somewhere will be cleaning up this mess. And shoving me north or south onto someone else’s lawn is just what a bunch of humans would do. A very human lack of care. I’ve been disappointed by how damn ordinary this afterlife seems to be.” I grinned hard, suddenly fearless despite all the powers that ‘middle-management’ could have against me. “So let’s be nice and selfish like our mortal days, Dr. ‘Best’. If I have the permission of the ready-to-launch, I care nothing for whoever is standing in my way. Everyone’s a human, so they get no special regard – I don’t have to waste my time respecting religious fools anymore. I’ve met too many dead people not in heaven or hell, so the holy people can all shut up, living or dead. And if you do incinerate me in Toronto, you’ll be doing it when I arrive: in winter after collecting a bit more up here. You’ll be letting Nocome out there at her strongest to latch on to someone.”

The doctor’s raised palm pointed toward me, his face grown cold, and I felt myself to be in the crosshairs of something at least as powerful as a tank cannon. There was a tattoo on that palm, and it moved with two coiling snakes. This was similar to the Old Christian’s power.

“You will not bring that monster into our domain! And certainly not during winter!”

I snarled against this emanation. It had a hypocritical core that gleamed like a blood diamond under deep water, some flaw I could use.

“Are you a protector?” I asked. “If your domain is not everywhere you are still just a bunch of apes, drawing lines on the map! You are middle-management, trying to rule in both directions!” Insights were flowing into my consciousness and my mouth – from Allan and Simon primarily, who had worked under middle-management types for decades. It was getting a little easier to stand in the face of that tattooed palm, and Dr. Best seemed to be concentrating with greater effort. Maybe even starting to sweat.

“You decided all by yourself to spare me, and later on you’d concoct some report to your boss saying that I was not a problem, that I’d been handled and can be taken off your department’s to-do list, because I’d be heading back north. Let the spuds take care of him, the Micmacs said. Let the cats, let the palefaces in the Land of No Trees, let the north take him back, he’s just some vagabond pinball who can be bumped along. FUCK ALL THAT! TAKE RESPONSIBILITY AND KILL ME – IF YOU CAN!” 

I was as unbothered by the dwindling power of that tattoo as by a slight breeze now, and Dr. Best suddenly sank to his knees. Blood was trickling out of one ear and one nostril – ghost-light that was blood from a true body. The entwined snakes on his palm were barely moving at all.

But he maintained eye contact and gave me a promise.

“You’re right, this is just my job.” The face and body had changed, losing colour to become black and white like an old photograph, the only kind of photograph of the living man you could find. But the strained face still managed to smile firmly. “Okay, clever boy. You learned that you can undermine an authority’s power with its flaws, a little trick. But the power of hating ‘just doing my job’ thinking won’t work next time. We’ll find someone who lives to take down creatures like you.”

There was a popping sound, then a whump of collapsing air. A second whorl of disturbed grass was centered on the spot where Dr. Best had disappeared. He’d gone back to Toronto to make his report, underlining how he’d tried his best but the vagabond vampire was just so unreasonable, they’d have to be ready to squash him come winter.