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behind me. I wondered briefly whether a camera would be able to capture these images, but if they could see it, that meant I was manipulating visible light. As long as she didn’t use a flash, they should turn out.
    The creature who staggered into the clearing looked nothing like the withered body Lena had retrieved. The blocky pattern of broken ice armoring its body reminded me a little of The Thing from the Fantastic Four. All told, it probably weighed half a ton. It was digging at a wound in its shoulder, black claws the size of my fingers gouging through ice and fur.
    The wendigo jerked, then toppled onto its back. It continued to claw at itself for a time, before curling into a ball. Once it stopped moving, two other figures appeared at the edge of the clearing.
    “They’re blurry,” said Lena. “Can you zoom in on their faces?”
    “It’s not that simple.” One of the men moved forward, but his face remained stubbornly out of focus. Other details were horrifyingly clear, like the ice ax he used to hammer away at the wendigo’s frozen hide, and the skinning knife he pulled out next.
    “Jumalauta,” whispered Helen. I heard the meaning in my head, both a curse and a prayer, somewhere between “God dammit” and “God help us.” Both were appropriate for what followed.
    “Is he wearing metal?” asked Nidhi.
    I had noticed the same thing. The gleam of sunlight on polished metal, pebbled like oversized scales. Armor, maybe? Though it looked nothing like any historical mail I had ever seen.
    The man’s companion held back at the edge of the clearing. I studied him instead, trying to determine if he was in charge of this butchery, or merely the guard.
    Darkness flowed over both men, as if someone had moved to block our view. I looked more closely, focusing not on the men, but whatever hid them from us. Static danced over the rest of the scene, but the shadow remained. “Am I crazy, or does that look like a woman?”
    “I see it, too,” said Lena. “Isaac, look at the man in back. His left hand.”
    The shadow moved to one side as if it had heard, but not before I spied the book the second man clutched in his hands. It was far larger than the paperback I had used.
    “Is that another libriomancer?” Helen breathed.
    The shadow continued to grow—no, it was moving toward us. “I think she’s reacting to my spell.”
    “How?” asked Lena. “I thought we were looking at the past.”
    No, we were looking at a magical recreation of the past. The spell itself existed in the present, which suggested that whoever or whatever this woman was, she was here with us now, working within the spell to block my efforts.
    “You need to end this,” Nidhi said sharply.
    I had come to the same conclusion. How long had I been standing here? Ten minutes? Fifteen? My arm was numb, and my eyes were so dry I could barely see anything beyond the chronoscope’s window.
    A flicker of red light told me Smudge had reacted to the threat in his usual way. Lena had moved him onto the trunk of a tree, presumably to keep him away from the Moly’s effects. Hopefully he wouldn’t set anything on fire.
    I tried to collapse the spell, but whoever or whatever this was, she was fighting me. The images stretched and distorted, and black fingers reached toward us.
    “Move,” snapped Lena.
    I ducked aside as Lena snatched
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from Nidhi and hurled it directly through the center of the chronoscope’s image. A pained scream stabbed my mind, and I stumbled backward. The spell collapsed to a single point of silver light, then disappeared.
    Lena caught me by the arms. I forgot sometimes how strong she was. I started to pull away, but the world had gotten much more wobbly, and I thought better of it. “Give me five minutes to rest. I’ll be fine.” Then I could try to figure out what the hell we were up against, and exactly how much trouble we were in. “Nice throw.”
    Lena grimaced. “Touching that stuff makes me