What day is it?”

I saw fluffy snow on every branch behind me, and on every stone on this long, jumbled beach. The lake’s open and dark waters sat beyond a scrim of snow on ice, a blank white plain extended off the shoreline almost to the horizon. Everything was stupendously quiet, muffled by the snow, the grey clouds above churning but not a flake in the air. My own voice was shockingly loud, making me cringe and shiver, jostling some of the rocks on the beach that weren’t frozen in place.

What was I wearing? Torn clothes. I had no shoes, only rags of my pants. No backpack. My blood diamond ring was still there, though it seemed in danger of sliding off my thinned finger. The hanging rags around my neck were the remains of three shirts that I had killed while travelling. The state of my clothing was a fair representation of what the controlling spirits had been doing to me, for my body felt lacerated and gaunt, every joint dry and stiff. Where was I? Why had I stopped here?

“Hey,” someone said in my head, addressing me by my living name. I was so confused and exhausted that I looked behind me for a voice, forgetting how things worked now. My living name had brought me back.

“It’s after the solstice, that’s all I know. Even the librarian lady lost count.”

It was John Goose. But he wasn’t alone: I sensed that the others were very close in a crowd, standing at attention: and I sensed that John Goose had picked an unlucky short straw when I had started asking questions.

I scanned my surroundings again. Grey sky, the sun somewhere in the west. No motors, no pipes, no roads, no city smells. But it was hard to get back to my undead normal self in terms of senses, which could be the exhaustion, or it could be …

“We’re on the escarpment.” So even when I was knocked out and being puppeteered the older spirits had taken my plan and run with it. They’d gotten out of Georgetown before Belie had completely awakened in the pre-dawn of December 5th and fled to the Niagara Escarpment and run upon it as far north as they could, which meant that I was now somewhere on the Bruce Peninsula, looking into Lake Huron. Along the whole length of the ancient barrier a vampire’s flying head and other tricks would struggle, and the run north had gotten harder and harder because now I was very close to Manitoulin Island, a beacon of crippling pain for all night-kin. I had slowed and slowed, but gone unfollowed from the south, now past December 21st, so the plan had been more than useless.

But now I wasn’t sure that I could even rise to my feet. It was late in the afternoon and I still felt very human.

Just over the dark waters beyond the snow clinging to the shoreline a place called Manidoowaaling – a cave, my onboard crew had once explained – was home to a powerful spirit that wouldn’t care much for me.

Calling on this power from afar was how Daphne had overpowered Deer Woman near Peterborough. Nocome had called upon Akpatok in Georgetown, and in response Belie had called upon some plague-pit dug in Medieval Europe. These magical hotspots might be the start of properly understanding just what we were, us roaming undead, whether we fed on humans or protected them. We were like cellphones wirelessly empowered by these special locations, our service providers. Get a good signal and you could get more data, more juice. Their range was vast, reaching from far up in the Arctic or across the Atlantic. Killing us permanently would be difficult if we were still able to ‘receive’, and reception might be boosted with a bigger ‘antenna’, a huge antenna basically a superweapon. Destroying the body’s ‘receiver’ would be the only way to truly kill us. I guessed that I had at least one in my heart, and maybe a second one in my head that made vampire legends often require decapitation as well as staking.