Our priority is to get to your grandmother’s home in Toronto to plant that elderberry,” the ex-Mossad analyst said calmly. “The longer we wait, the more chance they have of determining your human identity and then posting a watch on that house. I know you wanted to get stronger beforehand and recruit more souls for the task force, but with all this fleeing distraction you won’t get significantly stronger in the next few weeks, or get that many more people.

“You also wanted to wait until winter to make a more credible threat with Nocome – a bit of a nuclear option – but I do not think we can wait much longer. While these hunting groups don’t seem terribly organized with their jurisdictions and bickering they will eventually trace your path back to Quebec and Sherbrooke, and identify the tutelary of the student residence who first evicted you and disappeared your mortal possessions. I’m surprised that she hasn’t been found and questioned already.”

Mr. Bergmann’s words made me almost as fearful as my first look at Belie, for all the calm sense he was making.

“The expanding net of population centres that have been prepared to receive you without cooperating has now reached Peterborough – and the ambush there involved spirits of the ‘old world’ in the hospital, as Mrs. Laframbois put it. So they are starting to cooperate. The hunting net will probably reach Kingston in a matter of days at most.”

Being mortal so soon after the dawn, I was now struggling to breathe steadily.

“If there is any record among the cooperative tutelaries of living humans being mentally manipulated into forgetting about a relative who suddenly disappeared, that record will have your family members’s names,” Mr. Bergmann continued, his frightening analysis making me wring my hands together. “That’s two clear ways they could learn your human identity. The third and fourth ways are through Dr. Best or through Anne at Uxbridge, who have both seen your face. Dr. Best is obviously a part of the organization that is now hunting you, and Anne is possibly related to the bikers and this chief-vampire Belie, even if she seemed a bit estranged and homeless. Suppose the image of your face can be ‘downloaded’ and given to others, among the tutelaries or the vampiric hunters. They might even share with each other. We know that a select few mortal humans have been given knowledge of this strange afterlife to consort with both groups, and their power to hunt you must also be considered. Even in the 1990s we had ways of quickly finding a person just by their face if we really wanted them.”

I tried to jest. “Were you in the Illuminati?”

“Sir,” Mr. Bergmann said gravely, “I learned things back then more surprising than anything I have learned since you ended my life.”

That shut me up.

Bergmann then made the case for me leaving Toronto as soon as my elderberry was planted, before the winter, heading west past the Niagara Escarpment so that all the vampiric hunters over here would struggle to find me. Afterward I had to avoid any place associated with my human life for the rest of my undead existence, assuming that watchers were ready for my return.

“Hmm,” I said.

“I sense that you want to stay in Toronto,” Bergmann said, losing most of his dry delivery and sounding a bit sympathetic. “You want to make a stand somewhere. I admit that the region beyond the Niagara Escarpment is a gamble, but over here we have nothing but certain death in the long-term. Think of how powerful you have grown since you were bitten in May, and where you might be in ten years, or a hundred. This ‘Belie’ could be very old. I studied accents and speech patterns during my service, and I think he is Jewish like myself. His accent was faintly Yiddish. But his voice and even his dress reminded me of my grandfather, who was old and then dead before the Shoah. And this ‘Belie’ is in Toronto. In person he could surely destroy you with ease. Our greatest hope is that he might not yet know that you must come to Toronto, and he will think ‘the vagabond won’t be so stupid as to come through here now that we are tightening the net, he will hide in the woods because he knows we watch the cities’. So we must be in and out as fast as possible, and hope that he is surprised.”

“… yes,” I said, holding my head in my hands. The cascade of realizations was heavy on my mind for a long moment, but eventually I found me breath, and then my feet. Peterborough would have the bus I needed, and the drummer spirits should only guard the hospital. I needed to do this like Sudbury: in and out in one day, keeping the sun over my head. And no mind games – I’d buy a ticket like a normal human.