C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

I snapped a quicksilver shield up around us as the snowslide threw us down the mountain. Mandy rolled over beneath me and wrapped her arms and legs around me, face buried in my shoulder. I knotted my arms around her shoulders and drew my legs up as far as I could with her in my lap, so we made a ball that bounced smoothly—for some value of smoothly—down the thundering wash of snow. I felt like a giant bruise inside about six seconds, and caught myself muttering, "Shock absorbers, shock absorbers," into Mandy's ear as the world spun by in a roar of white and rock and trees.

I'd always worked best with car metaphors, and after another couple of bounces the shielding seemed to soften, taking some of our impact against hard snow and harder debris. Mandy made the first sound I'd heard since her earlier screams: a tiny whimper that sounded like relief. I squeezed her a little harder, then closed my eyes against the cyclone of white around us and waited for it to be over.

We thumped and rolled and bumped to a stop about a million years later, still utterly buried in white. There was room around us, enough to breath, but not enough to untangle from each other. I lifted my head a few inches and Mandy loosened her grip to say, "We're never going to be able to tell which way is up. People die digging the wrong direction."

I whispered, "Actually, not a problem," and, perhaps genuinely grateful for it for the first time, turned the Sight onto the world around me.

The torn-up mountain lay at an oblique angle to us, off to my left. It was no longer sleeping, but half awakened through shock and wounds. I could feel fresh gashes in its face all the way down the path the avalanche had taken, and sent out a pulse of sympathetic healing magic, the same way I'd done with Gary after his heart attack, toward the earth's surface. My, "Sorry," was murmured aloud, the confines of my mind seeming too small for an apology to an entire mountain I'd disrupted.

Mandy let out a moan, clearly interpreting the apology as meaning I couldn't find our way out of there, but the mountain itself gave a shuddering groan, like I'd soothed an injury. I said, "No, it's okay," to Mandy, and turned my head the other way, nearly bumping noses with her as I did. I hadn't been this intimate with someone in weeks.

The calm sky was up there, waiting for us to emerge. I gave a tentative push with the shield, wondering if it would move packed snow, then shoved harder and was rewarded with a sudden increase in breathing room. Heartened, I leaned into it, and seconds later snow burst upward and sunlight rained down on us. Mandy shouted in disbelief and scrambled up the ridged snow with me a few crawling steps behind her.

When I got to the top she was lying on her back, arms spread as she gasped at the sky. Not from a lack of air, I thought, but just sheer gladness at being alive. Somehow our snowshoes had survived the tumble, so their narrow backs were poked into the snow, making her legs arc peculiarly as they rose to her bound feet. I smiled and looked up the mountain, at the hideous score of broken trees and boulder-sized snowballs littering the path we'd taken.

My sword was somewhere in there. It was an incongruous thought in face of wonder at being alive, but surviving certain death was familiar, and the rapier was important. I put out my hand and whispered a welcome to the blade, inviting it back to me without the strength of panic behind the offer.

I was a little surprised when it materialized, bright and undamaged. Mandy, behind me, said, "What the hell?" I turned to face her, twisting the sword behind my back guiltily, like I could pretend it wasn't there. She demanded, "Where did that come from?" anyway.

"Um. You ever see those movies with the sword-fighting immortals?" At Mandy's slow nod, I perked up a little. "My sword comes from the same places theirs do."

"In other words," she said after a moment, "don't ask." She was still lying on her back with her snowshod feet in the air. "Just like I probably shouldn't ask how we survived that?"

"Pretty much." I waited a long moment, wondering if she would accept that. Eventually she gave one tight nod and put a hand into the air. I caught it and pulled her to her feet. "Come on. Let's see if we can get out of here."

Because there was no one to tell us nay, I told the park officials that we'd been on our way back down when the avalanche struck, and that it had passed behind us offering no more than a thrill. Mandy nodded silent agreement to my version of events, and we both agreed we'd been very lucky when the rangers said, repeatedly, how fortunate we'd been. One of their paramedics even looked us over before they were willing to send us back to Seattle while daylight lasted.

My phone, buried deep in a pocket, buzzed a voice mail warning as we came back into full satellite coverage. Mandy glanced at me as I dug the phone out. "If you answer that, is it going to throw you back into something like what just happened?"

"There probably won't be an avalanche involved, but…" The missed call was from Billy. "But yeah, it's likely."

"Then do me a favor," Mandy said. "Don't answer until you're out of my car."

I closed my phone and leaned my head against the window, feeling the rift between myself and the rest of the world all the way back into town.

Wednesday, December 21, 4:55 P.M.

I didn't even bother to listen to Billy's message, just went straight to the station after returning Mandy's hiking gear to her. Billy wasn't technically at work today, not any more than I was, but if something new and horrible had gone wrong, he'd almost certainly be at the precinct building to tell me.

I ran into Ray just inside the doors, more literally than I would've liked. He stayed planted where he was, like a fireplug, and I bounced off with a grunt. "Ow. What do you do, eat hubcaps for breakfast?"

"Plate mail," he said unexpectedly, and looked pleased when I laughed. "That woman yesterday, she's okay. Even agreed to go into a sponsored dry-out program. Guess getting her balls busted with a busted bottle showed her the light."

I spent way too long working out the busted bottle balls, then shook myself all over and smiled. "That's great. Sorry for siccing Corvallis on you. How'd that go? I swear, that woman's a betta." I was doing it again, comparing her to vicious fish. At least bettas, like Corvallis, were pretty. Cold and scaly, but pretty.

Surprise dug deep wrinkles into Ray's forehead. "You think? I always liked her on the television, the way she doesn't take crap from anybody. A real reporter, not like most of 'em on TV now. Anyway, it went great. We're going out to dinner tonight."

I scraped my jaw off the floor soon enough to stutter, "Have fun," before he stumped out the doors, and stood there in the blast of cold air marveling at philosophies undreamed of.

A cynical worm crept into my thoughts, wondering if Corvallis had only agreed to go out with Ray as a way to gain inside information into the department and, by proxy, me. Then the worm began eating its own tail until it disappeared into a plonk of nothingness inside my brain, because Ray could most certainly handle himself. I didn't envy Corvallis trying to pump him for information he didn't plan to share.

That brought an unfortunately suggestive image to mind. I clutched my head, trying to shake it—both head and image—loose, and went upstairs to see if Billy was around, or if anybody had details on what else had gone wrong.

To my dismay, Billy was there, which meant something had gone wrong. I sat on the edge of his desk and waited silently for him to look up, but I wasn't expecting the haggardness in his face when he did. I slid off the edge of the desk into the chair beside it, ice forming inside my stomach. "What happened?"