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.

I'd never thought about the mass I was protecting when I'd created a shield before. Now I could feel her weight like the shielding was a hammock, drawing down toward the buried earth where her body touched it. But that drop-point could be eliminated by increasing the hammock's tension, pulling its corners farther apart until it was a smooth, stretched-out expanse still capable of bearing the same weight. All the change was in the hammock, rendering its burden unchanged, yet perfectly safe on a taut surface.

Mandy's shield popped out wide and thin, just like my image of the hammock. The wind carried her gasp of relieved bewilderment to me as she got free of breaking snow and lay atop it. She went preternaturally still, lying with her arms and legs spread out like she was on thin ice and, intentionally or not, reducing my need to pay attention to her shielding's form.

I had exactly enough time to look back toward the featureless monster before it bashed into me.

Up close it smelled like carrion. I gagged, choking for breath, and aspirated snow. I coughed it out, vision blurring, though I couldn't tell if it was tears or just that the world itself had gone white and cold, with no sense of up or down. I wasn't hurt—the shielding I'd wrapped around Mandy surrounded me, too—but the thing rolled me in the snow, disorienting me further. I grabbed at it, fingers clawed uselessly inside my mittens, and it pulled away without effort.

I got a glimpse of it, an outline against the pale blue sky. Its eyes were white, or transparency's closest brother to white, and its mouth was a tear across its head. The teeth, more visible than anything but the claws, were a skull's grin, but the head stretched wider than a human head should have. There was no way this thing had eaten the people we'd found so far.

Or, if it had, it was becoming more and more wild, losing any vestiges of humanity that it had once had. I caught a downward strike with my mittened hand, and felt myself sink deeper into the snow. I didn't want to think too hard about how far it might be to the mountain rock below; the idea made me feel like I was drowning in snow, just as I had in my vision the day before.

Snow collapsed on my head, which didn't help at all. I gasped for air and got a lungful of rotted meat stench. For something that had landed on the snow crust light as a feather, it certainly was strong and stinky. I tried Mandy's trick, straight-arming it, and caught it solidly in the chest to no dramatic effect except fueling another roar.

That time I felt it in the ground, the way it shivered and dislodged a bit of the packed snow it held in place. One more howl like that and the whole mountainside was going to go, which might be okay from my monster buddy's point of view, but which would be a world of hurts for me and Mandy. I reached for a psychic net, an idea that had worked for me in the past. A blue-white mesh burst out of my fingertips and stuck against the monster's mutating form.

It reared back, clawing at the net, then simply dissipated like it had never existed. My net collapsed, partly because it had nothing to hold and partly because I was too surprised to keep its idea in mind.

Barely a heartbeat later the creature reappeared and clobbered me with a mallet-sized fist. Stars burst in my vision, and right about then I started wondering why I'd been trying to capture instead of kill it. I slammed a hand out to the side, grabbing a fistful of snow and willing it to become my weapon of choice, the silver rapier I'd taken from a god.

Power surged, and I held the blade like it had always been there. In a way it had been: it made up part of psychic armor and weaponry grown from gifts I'd been given and tokens I'd won. The first time I'd drawn it had been in a dreamscape plane, but since then I'd learned I could pull it across the real world from its usual hiding place under my bed into my hand when I needed it. It was more convenient than carrying a rapier around in day-to-day life, though its lack of physical presence tended to make me forget about it until I really, really needed it.

Like now.

Technically it was a stabbing weapon, not a slashing one, but it had an edge and that that was enough for me. I swung wildly, pouring power into the blade. I'd overloaded monsters before, essentially exploding them with magic, but the invisible snowman only squealed and scampered backward. I lurched forward, trying to follow the path it broke in the snow, but a sword in one hand and snowshoes on the feet did not make for easy movement.

I burst out of the snow like a bit of a fool, powder spraying everywhere. The critter was out of reach and in arrest, making it almost impossible to see. It shimmered slightly, a miragelike distortion of light, and I couldn't take my eyes off it for fear I'd never locate it again. It was on top of the snow now, no longer breaking it, but the path it had made while escaping me gave me an angle to run up, in so far as I could run while wearing snowshoes. Nothing about the carnivorous beast had suggested it had a sense of humor, or I might've slain it with laughter at my blundering.