I found myself studying her awhile before answering. "You're very brave," I said eventually. "You must be, or you wouldn't be out here offering to help me with only the bare bones of the situation explained to you."

She went quiet awhile, too, as we drove up into the park. "Maybe. Maybe I'm a little stir-crazy, too. I haven't been out hiking in weeks, and I promised Jake we could go out during Christmas break? That's not happening if there's still a psychotic cannibal out there. So that's some of it. And some of it is that the Hollidays never ask for anything. Melinda's incredible, with all those kids and the volunteer time she puts in at the school and the extracurricular activities she helps chaperone…so I thought if I could do this, it would be a good thing?" She made a lot of should-be statements into questions, like she was seeking reassurance about her opinions and commentary, and I wondered if she was even aware of it. I figured it wouldn't go over well if I called her out on it, though, and she went on breathlessly. "Besides, you're cops. Decent people help the police when they can."

"I take it back," I said. "You're not just brave. You're also awesome." Mandy flashed a smile, and I went back to her original question, figuring she'd earned an answer. "I can't promise he'll go after me instead of you, but I can promise he's not going to get his teeth into you, and I'm ninety-nine percent certain he'll lose interest in you once I start my thing."

"Which you're not going to explain?"

"I'd rather not until it's over." And only then if I had to. I didn't want to detail how I could build a shield of my willpower and surround someone else with it, or how in psychic terms I was a much tastier morsel than your average bear. Mandy gave me a careful look, but nodded, and I turned my attention to the park's winter-wonderland cascade of snow and trees. "You know I've never been out here?"

"Too many people haven't. We're going up to the Hurricane Ridge visitor's center and we'll head out from there. Hurricane Hill's all paved, not that you can tell right now? So it shouldn't be too bad a walk. Besides, families will have probably broken the trail already. The parks aren't advertising that outdoorsmen are being slaughtered." The SUV gave a sigh when we reached the visitor's center and settled down into the new snow covering the parking lot. We got out into a wind brisk enough to make my eyes water, and I laughed.

"Can I change my mind now?"

"You'll be fine. You're dressed for it." Mandy took snowshoes from the vehicle's back end and got me into them, then made me stomp around the parking lot like Bigfoot. I felt like a kid borrowing her dad's shoes, and caught myself making crunching noises to accompany the squeak of snow compressing under my feet. In almost no time we were on our way up the hill toward the distant ridge.

The sky had turned gray, then gradually clearer as we'd driven, and some minutes into our hike Mandy turned abruptly and said, "Look."

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.