C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

I spun around in time to watch the sun break over the horizon, a bright ball of white fire in a pale sky. There weren't enough clouds to turn pink; it was just pure light spreading above and below us. A chime rang out behind me, and I looked back in astonishment to see Mandy swinging a tiny silver-capped bell. "You should always greet the sun with music on the winter solstice," she explained. "It gives it a reason to come back."

"You didn't tell me to bring a bell!" To my utter surprise, I kind of wished she had. Greeting the sunrise hardly seemed like a me thing to do, but with the clean light spilling toward us and the music of Mandy's bell shimmering in the air, I wanted to take part. Not to be outdone, I reached for a Christmas carol, skipping straight to the chorus: "Star of wonder, star of night, star with royal beauty bright!"

Mandy, sounding as happy as I felt, picked up the tune, and we stood there on the mountainside, singing in the solstice.

When the sun had reached a hand's breadth above the horizon, we tore ourselves away from watching it, and Mandy tucked her bell back into a pocket. I was in too high spirits to let the feeling go and threw the opening line from my favorite carol toward Mandy: "Said the night wind to the little lamb."

She gave, "Do you see what I see?" back, and we traded off lines increasingly breathlessly as we tromped up the hill. I fell over laughing and winded when we were finished, and she stood above me with a grin. "You've got a really nice voice."

"So do you. We should start a choir." I let her pull me back to my feet and accepted the ski poles she'd packed across her back. "I didn't know snowshoeing was this hard!"

"This is nothing. If you're not wiped out when we get to the top I'll take you out on the ridge and make you wish you'd never been born."

"You might want to work on your sales pitch." We scrambled farther up the hill, exchanging mutters and jokes until Mandy said, "Almost there," and ran a few steps ahead of me so she could turn back and offer her hand. I took it and she pulled me up over the top of the ridge.

Half the world spread out below us, sunlight bouncing hard off snow and sending blue-white flares through my vision. I turned in a slow circle, delight and awe spreading through me. It turned to laughter as I caught Mandy's smug expression, and I put it into words sheerly for her benefit: "This is incredible."

"Yeah, I know." She grinned back, broadly, and a shapeless blur of nothing came out of the snow to knock her off the top of the mountain.

The world filled up with sound: Mandy's scream, my shout, and below those, a bone-rattling roar that came from everywhere and nowhere at once. Its depth made my heartbeat do funny things and upset my stomach, like I'd swallowed a stone. My first reaction was to drop to my hands and knees and breathe carefully so I wouldn't throw up, but once there I had a vividly clear thought: this was a hell of a defense mechanism on the monster's part. If its voice could make people sick and rubber-kneed, it would rarely have to fight more than one opponent at a time.

Pity for it that I was uniquely well-equipped to fight off sickness. I buried my mittened fingers in the snow and reached past a wobbly heart and sloshing stomach for the healing power that imbued me.

Nausea burned away as cool, welcome magic rose up in me. The world went dark with winter, snow rendered invisible through the Sight, which looked into the mountain sleeping beneath it. Sleeping, not dead; winter was a time of rest and renewal up here on the mountain, a time of hibernation. Even the pale blue sky had that same sense of waiting: waiting for spring and warmth that would return birds and insects to it. It was comforting in its quiet way, and I thought that someday I would like to come here to sit at the top of the world when there was nothing more pressing to do than admire it. Fleeting observations, filling my mind and replacing the beast's roar.

Peculiarly serene, I sat back on my heels—more of a trick than usual, since I was wearing snowshoes—and reached down the mountain with my power. The real world came back into focus, underlying what I saw with the Sight. The morning sun made pockets of gold in the snow, overruling blue shadows, rich colors tangling with the winter calm of the earth.

Mandy was fiery against that calm, both in real vision and with the Sight. Half buried in snow, she poured off heat and life and fury and fear, her aura as vivid as the red coat and black snowpants she wore. Everything she had was being poured into fighting, but the way she flailed told me she couldn't see her opponent.

I could barely see it, even with the Sight. It was a massive blur, hardly even a shape. It had tooth and claw, but even those were translucent, like someone was shining light through packed snow. There were no eyes, no visible edges to its body, although it had a sense of weight to it. It had to: it kept pressing Mandy farther into the snow, and I caught an impression of talons lifting to strike.

When they fell, it was to reverberate off the glittering hard shell of my magic.

I had gotten pretty good at shielding both myself and others over the past year. It was easier, in fact, to protect someone else. My own demons tended to get inside the deepest part of me and work their way out from there, making shields less useful than they might have been. But my friends tended to just face external threats when I was around, and that I could handle.

The picture before me could've been an expensive special effect, a give-and-take of power flowing from me to the pair thirty feet down the mountain. Mandy looked like a superhero, wrapped in silver-blue shielding that glowed even in the sunlight. Her scream became a squeak of astonishment, and the creature's dull roar ricocheted into a pained howl.

For just a second I felt proud of myself.

Mandy won my admiration forever by slamming the mittened heel of her hand upward, straight-arming her invisible assailant. Its head, for lack of a better term—that's where the teeth seemed to be, anyway—cracked backward, briefly illuminated by the power wrapping Mandy. I had a glimpse, nothing more, of a human face badly distorted, and tried frantically to rewind my memory and remember if its teeth had been manlike or more predatory. The idea they'd been both popped up, then retreated again as the infuriated blur of nothing tumbled ass over teakettle down the mountain.

Trying to see it—or See it—was giving me a headache. It changed shape and size like it was struggling to figure out what it was. It landed on all fours, facing me, and slid yards before coming to a stop. Claw marks marred the snow, five surprisingly delicate lines from barely-visible paws. Ten seconds earlier it'd had enough weight to drive Mandy into the snow. Now it barely broke the crusted surface, and the gut-clenching low rumble of its roar rolled over me again. I let go a shout of my own, feeble in comparison.

The snow under my feet compacted alarmingly, like it was suddenly bored with its current location. I had a vivid realization that I was standing on top of a mountain, and that deep noises could start avalanches. There was a tree line that might help mitigate disaster, but if a good snow slide started, the trees would break like twigs. And so would I.

Mandy flinched upward, escaping the worst of the snow's grasp in a sudden poof of color. Snow crunched and cracked beneath her, but she rolled carefully, edging her way toward the ridge at an oblique angle, away from the divots she and the monster had made as they'd rolled down the mountainside. She still shone with the protective glitter of my shielding, but I had no way to reduce gravity within that shield.

Maybe I didn't have to. The idea hit me with the same dazzling clarity as sun on snow. I'd made all kinds of shapes with my shields in the past, and it didn't seem impossible that a flattened oval could help spread her body weight over a greater distance. Trusting that the formless monster couldn't move fast enough to eviscerate me in the time it took to rearrange my concept of the shield and Mandy's weight within it, I turned my attention to her alone.