When I had given Nocome enough control to allow her to make a desecration spell with the sundog’s blood, this sealed the fate 617 animals across Toronto and Mississauga. That was the big headline on the tutelary ‘newspaper’ flapping around the city. In their sudden fit of madness the dogs had given me more reason to never take a whiff of advise from the wendigo bitch ever again: 42 people maimed, one man in critical condition, one of the maimed victims a girl of nine. An accident near the university had been caused by cars swerving to avoid one of the crazed beasts, though no one was hurt there.

There was an entire gang of Movember men calling for my head. It was their month of power, and there were a lot of the unshaven fuckers. The tutelary that Nocome and I had tossed off a skyscraper onto University Avenue wasn’t dead because he had already been dead like the rest of us – but he was unavailable for interviews, apparently shaken up by the whole experience, and he’d need a new mortal guise. They way they spoke of this made it sound like a mortal appearance for a tutelary was very expensive.

The Lambton knight was just one of 14 different mid-ranking tutelaries in the city who were being castigated for roaming out of their neighbourhoods after supposedly getting my scent, causing property damage or startling the mortals in their frantic searching. Two unnamed spirits had come to a brawl at Casa Loma over the trespassing and some personal history that was being kept hushed, further distracting the hunters. It seemed that there were a multitude of false sightings and alarms happening in and outside of Toronto, with hunters still wasting their time in Milton and the fish-gnomes in a few other lakes boiling up to swarm the land and need knocking back. In Sudbury there was a burning building that the Christian and Algonquin tutelaries blamed on each other.

The Movember men’s most vocal complainer, a hatchet-faced spirit who looked like the middle guy in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, accused the hospital tutelaries of consorting with night-kin, and stated that the ‘student’ night-kin given free passage and extra hours for hunting their vogelfrei were the ones causing all the false alarms among the other tutelaries. ‘Night-kin’ was a catch-all for vampires, wendigos, skinwalkers, and anything else unpleasant. This detail made my skin crawl, because I had had zero sense of anyone like myself being nearby. But now I knew what Belie and those two mortals had been talking about in the room with the mastiff: of course Belie wouldn’t stoop to finishing me off himself.

I was a school assignment.

The tutelaries didn’t call me ‘vogelfrei’, or they didn’t anymore: for them I was the Angry Son. Cursing out Dr. Best in Gravenhurst, calling the fish-gnomes ‘kermit cocksuckers’ in Lake Simcoe, cunt-punting Anne Shirley, lacerating the faith of the spuds in southern Quebec and clobbering Deer Woman in our first encounter seemed to add up to a justified reputation – though everything had felt somewhat justified on my end. I noticed that the tutelaries outside the Land of No Trees often called me ‘Son of the Angry’, but there were fewer of them talking in Toronto.

There was nothing about Elder Mother, and nothing more direct about this Belie.

Down in the smaller articles of gossip, a tutelary named Mr. Thomson claimed to have spotted me in Algonquin Park. Odds were that he was Tom Thomson, the drowned painter. He suggested that I wasn’t actually a furious psychopath, though he noted that I had been rather crazy with the exercise. There were a lot of derisive comments about me trying to get stronger ‘like a human’. If I ended up dead in the next few hours, my epitaph would be something like this quip from a tutelary:

“He’s a reclusive incel who’s idea of fun is to go into the wilderness and lift shit. That’s why he is so hard to find!”