I decided that after I replanted at my grandmother’s house I would make for the Niagara Escarpment. If I got that far I’d probably have a more complete plan by then. But I needed to calm the fuck down before running like an idiot toward the nearest subway station. I’d used them twice already and even with the copper on my side someone had probably noticed.

There are two tall towers of apartments on Bay Street near Queen’s park. I got to the base of the closet one, flexed my legs, and shattered the sidewalk beneath my feet, flying upward. As my jump started to slow I reached out and clambered up the balcony railings as if they were rungs on a ladder, reaching the roof in about twelve seconds. Then I jumped again to the second, taller tower, possibly creating a crack in the ceiling of an unlucky tenant in the first.

Hunching over the city, feeling a bit like a gargoyle, I listened hard, looking for movement that was too fast to be human. My flying head stirred, and I made it spin around this building in widening circles.

Not silence, but too much noise to tell me anything important. So many babbling tutelaries were twittering in the night, and I heard the ohdows as more than drummers for the first time. They were incredibly loud and quick, and if they were insulted as ‘redskin urchins’ by Elder Mother they merrily insulted everyone else in turn: mocking the new tutelaries for falling for my doppelganger as blind bats, cursing Nocome for her desecration of the copper, chuckling at the expense of the thunderbirds and iron spiders, and heaping some terrible scorn upon the ‘turnips’. The native tutelaries seemed to enjoy their fruit and vegetable insults, with ‘spuds’ and ‘turnips’ for Catholics and night-kind of the Bram Stoker variety respectively, and ‘apples’ for members of their own kind who screwed up royally.

I sensed that a lot was being lost in translation. Half of it was just singing:

Rumpelstiltskin overseas, Nanabozho oversees!

Torngat north! Nocome flees! Chupacabra sucks on fleas!

Yee naaldlooshii disagrees! Turnip strigoi with disease!

Deep Ones rising from the seas! Jersey Horseman – you he’ll seize!

I stopped listening once I realized that it was a contest that could go on forever.

For me, or about me, no one seemed to be talking in the aether. My hearing with mere sound wasn’t getting anything interesting from the surrounding blocks … except for the sound suddenly by my side.

I rolled one eye over. This apartment building’s tutelary was literally disguised as a gargoyle (an odd coincidental match to my earlier thought of looking across the city, but I’d just had an even bigger coincidence with numbers of dead dogs and live seeds). It was a stone thing with a long unrolling tongue and two blank white eyes, belonging more on a churchtop than a tower of modern condominiums. Had it read my mind and complied?

“I’m going, relax.” I pulled away to the opposite corner of the rooftop, one palm on the concrete feeling the pulse of water in pipes whenever someone turned on the faucet. This vantage point had given me too much information, and I wasn’t going to stay long enough for the search engine. “Just wanted to look around.”

After a single blink, the gargoyle statue left over on the other side of the roof was by my side again, its features flexed from the first posture, baring its teeth, raising spines on its back. What would the next blink show?

“Right. You mean business. Bye.”

I leaped off the tower’s roof where the gargoyle shifted positions with each blink, falling across the street to the roof of an espresso bar, killing most of my weight and the impact’s sound with a bit of my mass and solidity control. A bit farther than most falls from the trees, but a full fall from most of these buildings to the street would be harmless.

I was on the brink of getting cocky: silver-knuckles and sword, each with a vampire behind them, had done nothing. Maybe the third vampire would stop to help the others, or call in a warning, or get second thoughts.

“No chance of that,” someone in my head answered, as I hoped down to Charles Street and walked out of an alleyway. I was thinking of getting on Bloor-Yonge, switching subway lines from green to yellow then back to green for the quick trip to grandma’s.

“Who’s this?” I frowned. I was among pedestrians now and I pretended to have a cellphone, walking quickly. The voice in my ear was speaking a slow and clumsy English, the accent Mexican. But it would have been odd to a Mexican human because it was old, very old.

“Call me Brujo, Angry Son. I escaped the wetiko’s camp when your dream-men came. I’m one of what the Deer Women was.”

Hm, an honest skinwalker. I refrained from asking Brujo how he had acquired his power of dark magic and transformation, though I was instantly curious. He got me properly focused in a hurry though:

“We just had something skim by from outside in here, trying to pick up stuff. Someone who knew what they were doing with taking thoughts from a mind, an old one like us. It was very fast and quiet.”

“And how much did they get?” I hunched my shoulders against a sudden gust of wet wind that made Bloor Street feel like a wind tunnel, acting all weak and wimpy like an human. The metro station was close.

“We cut them off, so nothing. But now they know to try harder.”

I paused, waiting for a light at the final intersection before the stairs underground, just one of the crowd. Students were vaping or chatting on their own phones at my sides, maybe one or two noticing that I had a lot of dirt on my pants from rummaging through those uprooted elderberries. I crossed Yonge Street and was underground thirty seconds later, only half focusing on what tutelaries might be ready to attack at Toronto’s busiest subway station, even in the early morning – because now I was thinking about Belie.

The two vampires I’d met and curb-stomped had been young, the third was probably another ‘student’ who couldn’t be very different. Belie wasn’t on the streets himself, since I’d made it this far. Surely I was beneath his direct attention. I was an assignment – he wouldn’t interfere with his students’ lesson, but he’d want to know things about me just in case.

Like my name, and where my living family was.

“Okay Brujo, thanks for the news. See how much cooperation you can get with Daphne and the others from Nocome who know some of the old mind-defense stuff, and see if Bergmann’s got anything you can use with more modern methods. We have to block the next probe. From her or him.” And if they could probe back, even better.

I put my imaginary cellphone in my pocket, stepping quickly through the Bloor-Yonge station. There was one tutelary sitting in a corner on the opposite end of the platform who hurried me along without getting up, just by turning his head and giving me a powerful stare with a scrunched nose and fierce eyes in two caves on his skull. It was Mr. Bloor himself, who had had quite the frightful portrait in life.

I quickly got onto the train heading west from Bloor-Yonge under the sidewalk. Mr. Bloor’s two eyes stopped drilling into my back as we picked up speed.

In the background of all his, the skinwalker agreed and signed off. I worried for a few seconds about trusting him as the train rushed down this dark tunnel, then decided that he couldn’t be an idiot – and any idiot could see that Nocome and Belie were the ones to plot against right now. If we couldn’t be united by those enemies I had no hope of getting these new old guys in line.