C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

Her eyes cleared for an instant. Triumph shot through me, sharp enough that I didn't care about her stench. "You're in there! Come on, let me—"

The dusty yellow earth turned white beneath her, and the broiling Lower World sun fled behind sudden thick clouds. Wind howled up around us, cutting through my flimsy summertime clothes and icing my skin. My nose hairs froze, and my eyebrows went stiff inside a single breath, the air colder than I'd ever felt. The wendigo's human shape warped, twisting under my hands to become the monster once again, as loose-jointed and dangerous as it had been when I'd entered the cold universe searching for Mandy's soul.

This time, though, its face was stretched in agony, and its voice was that of the storm's. It had been the predator, then; now it was something else, not even prey. It needed protecting, rescuing from the cold threatening to tear us both apart. I hauled myself closer to its face to shout, "Let me take you out of here! Let me take you away from the—"

From the storm was how that was supposed to end, but the last few words were already shouted into silence. Even without the wind, the cold intensified to a killing temperature so extreme it seemed malicious. My exposed skin went numb, and the breath I drew through an open mouth hurt my lungs, like cold lead had been poured down my throat.

I let the wendigo go and shoved to my feet. The storm still raged around us at a distance as great as the circle I'd made in the Middle World, but it was quiet now, its screams pushed away.

Loneliness crashed over me, a feeling of isolation that expanded beyond my most melodramatic childhood moments. There was no way free from the circle of silent snow, and its featureless blur made my gaze unfocus. Disoriented, I reeled around, bewildered at how the silence and lack of wind could be worse than the battering storm itself. I wanted to escape, but my body was failing me, thick icy limbs refusing to respond, frozen thoughts running evermore sluggishly.

Someone stepped through the storm, joining me in the relentless white circle.

The wendigo gave a gleeful shriek and rose up out of the snow, racing for the distant sky.

I tried to follow, and failed.

I was too cold to be afraid. Too cold to be surprised, even, like the oncoming storm had taken away my capacity for emotion. There were things I should be able to do. Command my healing aspect to heat my blood, to shake off the malaise of ice. Imagine myself in warmer clothes and have them appear. I'd done them, or things like them, in the past, but my thoughts were sluggish and my magic frozen, just a solid lump inside me where it should have been reassuringly alive.

If this was what the wendigo had experienced, then I had a hideous bleak appreciation for the sheer willpower that had brought her back into the mortal world to feed. I was lost and too numb to care. My rattlesnake friend could do nothing for me here; he would freeze even more quickly than I did, cold blood turning to slush in his veins. Maybe that was how the wendigo had survived, if her claws had been a bear's. Maybe she had the gift of hibernation, of holing up and storing energy until she'd conserved enough to break free. It wasn't how hibernation worked in the Middle World, but this place was something else entirely.

Someone else was here. Someone else had crossed into the circle. It was something to focus on, a way to force myself to move. My own safety, apparently, wasn't quite enough, but if someone else had wandered into the storm, they needed rescuing, and there was nobody but me to do the job.

"Here." My voice cracked in the cold like I'd been without water for a week. "Here, can you hear me? Can you see me?" The wendigo had left a dent in the snow when she'd fled. I tripped on it, my legs too heavy to move properly, and I splayed facedown in the ice.

It almost felt warm. That was wrong, dangerously wrong; my dull mind recognized that much. It meant I'd lost too much of my own heat. It meant, in fact, that I was dying, and while I had plenty of experience at dying, it was usually accompanied by a certain amount of anger which sparked me through the unpleasant parts and back out the other side.

This was not a place for fire of any kind. I was willing to let mine fade, just to evade the terrible cold. I sighed into the snow, my breath not even warm enough to melt it, and my eyes drifted shut as sound finally broke through the silence: squeaking, coming ever closer. My curiosity sputtered, then died again, frozen out of existence.

Hot hands rolled me over like a giant rag doll, and Laurie Corvallis put her face close to mine to whisper, "Detective? Is that you?"

Ice cracked at the back of my mind, like amazement had the strength to punch through cold. Of all the people I might have dreamed up to accompany me into a frozen hell, Corvallis was about the bottom of the list. It suggested she was real, which was both good and bad. Good because she was substantial, something to focus on. Bad because I was quite certain her physical body had crossed to this plane, just like mine had, and it was a short dash to death from where we currently stood.

At least she was still dressed for the weather. Her cheeks were reddened by cold, but her eyes were bright, and her face was framed by the soft fur of her expensive coat. It was fitted, but not so snugly she couldn't wear layers under it, and from the way her breath steamed warmly I figured she probably was. Her hands were mittened, which told me a lot about both the amount of heat she was putting out and how very cold I was: even through the mittens they'd been hot on my skin. She muttered, "Where'd your coat go?" and started to shrug hers off.

"No, don't." I was surprised I could talk, then relieved that I could be surprised. It was like her presence offered enough warmth and life to reawaken me. Given my peculiar talents, that seemed fairly probable. She stopped mid-action, her coat still on, and I shook my head against the snow. "It wouldn't fit anyway. Just stay close to me, okay? I'll get you out of here."

"Where's here? I was following you through the forest when it all went twisty and I got dumped in this field."

It all went twisty sounded like something I would say. I started to say so, then shoved up on my elbows, suddenly actually awake. Herne had said some were closer, others were farther away and would take longer to guide to the power circle. It hadn't occurred to me that he'd meant there were other people out there besides Gary and Sara. "You were following me? You were supposed to be asleep!"

"I woke up." Three little words shouldn't sound like portents of doom, but somehow they did. Well, there'd be time for a reckoning later, if we were lucky. I resisted the urge to hug her—for warmth, although I was kind of happy to see her, too—and instead blew into my hands, trying to get some feeling back.

"Did you see the others? Coyote and—" She was shaking her head no, and I echoed the motion, then said, "Shit. I wonder if that means you just got dropped directly between."

"Between what?"

"Between here and there. Between life and death. Between the cold." I sounded like an idiot. I felt like an idiot. "Don't worry about it. All right, look—"

"Don't worry about it? Don't worry about the fact that a minute ago I was in a snowy forest under a clear night and now I'm in a field someplace in the eye of a blizzard? Fine. I won't worry about it. I'll just figure out how to get out of here, since you're no use at all." She stood up, a small figure full of fire. Admiration, which was not an emotion I wanted to associate with Corvallis, bloomed in me. She wasn't a woman who would get trapped by the cold universe. She'd build a flameth-rower out of snow and blast her way free.