It hissed through those ice teeth and knew its tricks had arrived. They were here, standing there in the tunnel mouth, just as his audience had been the last time. How easy man was to play. Then it hesitated for a moment. What had happened the last time?

The diseased mind struggled to recall the failure.

It had failed. But why? Why? The shits, the stinking shits and the whore were here. They were always here. It was all in place. The swirl of malice cancelled its own doubt and began its campaign.

Sam was a sack of sorrow in his bubble. His soul shed tears for the evil that was flooding into the space he had made with his magic. But he was strong. He was pure. There was only love in his heart.

And then it spoke to him.

‘Your new family are here, Kinchuinick. See? The white man gets everything the white man wants.’

The words came from the depth of the thing’s filthy black body. The thing that was no longer Sam halted its feeding as if it had been given a signal. He looked with the eyes of his spirit to the place the monster was indicating with its thoughts and he saw them.

Standing in the tunnel mouth, the light making them silhouettes against the frenzied snow.

Katie. Billy. The policeman. The white policeman.

He was holding Sam’s wife by the shoulders and the boy was between them.

There was a sickly, torturous twist in a part of him he had been unaware of. Like the deep internal agony of a cancer. Impossible to locate, impossible to escape from its searing agony. It was his thick bubble starting to tear. He felt a dark shard of hate enter his world of love. It was cutting at him, slicing at him, making that space in his soul the thing he had become needed.

And he wanted to die then. To let go of this tenuous life and float away into oblivion where this stench of horror would be powerless to sicken him further.

The voice of the Trickster was a knife turning in his pain.

‘Her house, not your house. Her son, now his son. You, who are nothing and nobody. A stinking shit of an Indian who kills like a madman and whom she hates as an enemy. She fucks him. And she fucks him and thinks of how she would like to see you die.’

The spiritual membrane that was holding the shaman in his body was tearing again. Sam wailed in his agony and spun in a dark circle of failure. It was over. There was no trick to be played on this nightmare. The trick was on him. He was a human sacrifice. That was the reason that no Kinchuinick knew the secret of the Isksaksin. Who would be the keeper in the knowledge that to be called upon meant certain death?