It crouched, visible only because the distortion in the air lowered: its only two easy markers, tooth and claw, were hidden in mouth and snow respectively. I did a c'mere gesture with my free hand, hoping it'd jump me again, since I already knew which of us was faster. Being on the defensive was just fine with me, when my opponent could cover twenty yards while I blinked.

I still wasn't ready when it sprang at me. It came from up high, which I expected, but it was smarter than I hoped: instead of skewering itself on my raised sword, it twisted at the last second, coiling toward my undefended left side. Well, my semi-defended left side; I snapped the blade around, scoring a point-tip slash across what I thought of as the thing's ribs.

It didn't so much as flinch, though its howl turned aggravated, like it was smart enough to change its line of attack but not smart enough to imagine I might change mine. This time when it hit the snow beyond me it turned with a snarl, but backed away. I swore and tromped after it, earning another one of its low-bellied rumbles.

A crack opened up between me and the thing, and a heavy block of snow slid several yards down the mountain, then edged to a stop. I froze, arms spread wide and eyes even wider, and although I couldn't see the damned critter's face, I got an overwhelming sense of smugness from it. It emitted another low roar, then another, and when the snow began to slide that time, I knew it wasn't going to stop.

I'd been in earthquakes, but they had nothing on the sensation of watching the snow before me collapse and surge as it started an irreversible downward trend. Time dropped into a zone that only happened in emergencies, and I watched chunks of snow break loose and surge forward in slow motion as the packed material in front of it gave way. It was utterly beautiful in a purely chaotic way.

The half-embodied monster was clearly able to stay on top of the havoc it was wreaking, the impressions its claws made gobbled up by rolling snow. I doubted I could manage the same trick, but even if I could, the nasty beast had put me between a metaphorical rock and a hard place. I could try to go after it.

Or I could keep Mandy Tiller from getting killed.

I sucked my gut in, made an apology to my sword, and threw it away so that when the snow fell out from under my feet, I could fling myself forward with it. All I had to do was get to Mandy before her part of the shelf turned to icy dust. The slow-time of heightened awareness helped: even though I knew everything was happening impossibly fast, I could see giant snowballs breaking free, big enough for me to throw my weight onto them as I dashed across a shattering snowfield. The avalanche's momentum helped, driving me forward faster than humanly possible. I belly flopped on Mandy, my arms spread wide, just as the snow beneath her collapsed.

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?"