Magic Claims

4

The oppressive feeling grew stronger. We were half a mile into the woods now. The shapeshifters had executed the drifting maneuver with flawless precision. We sort of spontaneously parted, slowly diverging from each other along parallel paths in an entirely natural, casual way. I could no longer see Curran or his group, but I knew they were there, five hundred yards to my right.

The woods around us were still pine and grass. None of the confusion Isaac told me about was happening.

“It’s drawing us in,” Keelan murmured on my left.

“Yep.”

It wanted us far enough from town that help wouldn’t arrive in time, but close enough for our bodies to be easily found.

“Any time now,” I said.

The shapeshifters around me moved like shadows, fast and silent. We kept going.

“We’re being stalked by some sweet shrubs,” Keelan murmured. “They’ve been following us for the last five minutes.”

Last I checked, sweet shrubs didn’t move. They did, however, give off a spicy strong scent that was good enough to drown out other odors. “How many shrubs?”

“At least three.”

Ahead, a couple of trees had fallen to our left, creating a clearing around a massive pine tree. Hakeem, who was slightly in front of us and to the left, stopped and picked up a stick.

“Stop,” Keelan and I ordered at the same time.

Hakeem froze.

I caught up with him. “What is it?”

He pointed with his stick in the direction of the giant pine. Four stone spheres about the size of baseballs were stacked on top of each other in the clearing, about fifteen yards from the big tree. By every law of physics, they should have collapsed. They had to be held together by magic, but nothing emanated from them. From this distance, they looked like rocks. Unnaturally smooth and round rocks.

“Were you going to poke them with a stick?” Keelan growled.

Hakeem looked uncertain. “Yes?”

“When you find freaky shit in the scary woods, you don’t poke it with a stick. It can explode in your face. What do you do instead?”

Hakeem clearly didn’t know the answer to that question. I almost felt sorry for him. He had just turned eighteen this year, and this was likely his first real outing.

“You ask the Consort. The Consort knows everything.”

“Oh,” Hakeem said.

Keelan pivoted to me. “Consort, please tell us what this is.”

“I have no idea.”

Keelan blinked, his teaching moment temporarily derailed. He took a second to recover. “How do we proceed?”

I held my hand out, and Hakeem surrendered his branch. “I’m going to poke it with a stick.”

To my left Troy snickered. Owen cracked a smile.

Keelan looked like he was about to suffer a conniption fit.

“It’s a magic trap,” I told him. “It’s likely primed to go off when something organic makes contact with it. Wood in this case is a good substitute for a human. I’m going to enchant the stick and see if I can get a better sense of what this is.”

I approached the rocks and stopped a couple of feet away. Still nothing. The question wasn’t whether I could handle the trap. The question was how many of my cards would I have to show.

I whispered an incantation under my breath, focusing it on the stick. I’d learned it from my father about five years ago, and he’d learned it from some visiting mages several millennia ago, when he was trying to broaden his horizons. As a diagnostic tool, it was pretty limited. It told you if the magic was there and how much of it, but it revealed nothing about its nature. There were better spells and artifacts out there, but we were short on time and right now it was my best bet.

The magic coated the wood and saturated it, sucked into the dead branch with a snap. I raised my stick and concentrated.

Each of the rocks was a solid knot of magic. A staggering amount of it, compressed into a vessel that was way too small for that amount of power. The moment that containment broke, all of that tightly coiled magic would burst. Simple but devastating.

We had to disarm it. It was too close to town, and if we passed it, someone could trigger it behind us, hitting us in the back.

I backed away, pulled a vial out of my backpack, and looked around. A slight depression curved the forest floor about ten yards away. It would have to do.

“Fall in on me.” I walked over to the depression.

The shapeshifters converged around me.

“Hit the dirt and stay down.”

They dropped to the forest floor.

I uncorked the vial and brushed my thumb over the edge, testing the liquid inside. Magic nipped at me. Still potent. My father’s patented secret recipe, but instead of seven herbs and spices, it used vampire blood mixed with a binding agent and primed with exactly three drops of my blood.

A blood ward was the strongest defensive spell in my arsenal. However, bleeding all over the place weakened me and was inconvenient. It also gave away the nature of my power. The undead blood charged with my magic was almost as good, and it conveniently masked the clear signature of my blood.

I circled the prone shapeshifters, dripping blood from the vial at regular intervals, and stepped into the circle I’d made. The undead blood waited, ready for my magic.

I picked up a pinecone, dripped a drop from the vial on it, corked the vial, put it away, and hefted my improvised grenade.

“Fire in the hole!”

I threw the pinecone at the rocks and dropped, activating the ward with a pulse of magic.

Magic crackled like thunder. The four spheres toppled over and spun in midair at a dizzying speed, expanding into car-sized boulders in a blink. The boulders whipped around each other in a circle like moons that lost their planet.

The magic binding them snapped like a rubber band. The boulders hurtled through the woods like runaway trains, crushing everything in their path.

One rocketed directly toward us, smashed into the ward above our heads, and bounced off, into a pine tree. The three-foot-thick trunk snapped like a toothpick. The ward shattered, its power exhausted. The backlash slapped my brain. Oww.

Wood cracked, trees collapsed in four directions, birds screeched in alarm, then everything went silent.

Hakeem, Troy, and Owen stared at the crossroads of destruction with wild eyes.

“And that’s why we don’t poke random shit we find in the woods with a stick,” Keelan said.

A tree to our left, with a chunk of its trunk sheared off where one of the boulders grazed it, careened and fell. A humanoid figure dropped out of the branches, landing twenty-five feet away. A shapeshifter in warrior form. Huge, almost eight feet tall, with orangish fur splattered with dark rosettes, claws like knives, and giant fangs. A gold collar clasped his thick neck. He snarled and charged.

Keelan leaped. A human started the jump, but a werewolf landed, thrusting the claymore at the charging beast. Keelan was abnormally large for a werewolf. The enemy was bigger. Holy shit.

The collared shapeshifter batted the blade aside with his left hand and raked at Keelan with his right. Keelan danced back, slicing. The collared shapeshifter lunged at him and howled as the pain from the nearly severed wrist finally registered.

The woods came alive.

Shapeshifters closed in on us from all sides, charging through the trees, howling, snarling, a mass of fur, claws, and gleaming teeth, every single one over seven and a half feet tall.

Fear washed over me in a prickly adrenaline rush. I had forgotten what it was like to be scared of shapeshifters, and it all came back in a painful split second. It felt like the wilderness reached deep inside itself and spat these monsters out, designed only to rip and tear into flesh. Human flesh. My flesh. Every instinct shrieked at me that these things would eat me alive while I screamed.

The fear brought the world into crystal clear focus. Another massive orange shapeshifter dappled with rosettes bore down on me, her mouth gaping. Her fangs were enormous, at least nine inches long. Sarrat was already in my hand. I twisted out of the way and sank my saber between her ribs, ripping through her liver. She spun away as I withdrew and leaped on me, trying to pin me with her bulk. I stabbed up as she came down, driving my blade through her upper abdomen, past her sternum into her heart.

Her weight drove me back into a tree. She clamped her huge beast hands on my shoulders. Her heart was impaled by Sarrat’s blade. She should be dead or dying. Even a shapeshifter couldn’t shrug off a ruptured heart.

Claws tore at my shoulders. My bones groaned. She was trying to rip me in half.

I shoved Sarrat deeper, twisting the blade. Her heart had to be a popped balloon at this point. Ruined beyond even the strongest shapeshifter’s ability to repair.

Her jaws gaped open, way beyond the normal point. She bit at me, trying to catch my head and sink her fangs into my skull. I tucked my chin in and headbutted her lower jaw. My blood and her spit wet my face. I hit her with my head again. Teeth scraped my scalp, cutting through the skin. I pulsed magic through my wounds and let it rip.

A forest of blood spikes exploded in the shapeshifter’s mouth, puncturing her tongue, her cheeks, and digging into her sinuses.

She dropped me. I stomped on her knee, kicking her leg out from under her. She went down, and I sliced her head off with a single horizontal cut.

Heal that.

The battlefield blossomed in front of me like a flower. In a fraction of a second, I saw everything.

Keelan to my right, claymore discarded, ripping at his orange opponent, both covered in blood.

Owen, a massive werebison, gripping a werewolf’s head with his hand and pounding it into a tree, while another shapeshifter tore at him from the side. Owen’s back was a raw, bloody mess.

Hakeem and Troy, back-to-back, fighting off three shapeshifters. Hakeem’s stomach was ripped open. Troy’s left arm hung limp.

Every enemy had the same gold collar.

I charged at Owen’s group. The power word burst from my lips, packing a wallop of magic. “Aarh Saar!” All Stop.

My power splayed out in a wide semicircle.

The shapeshifters froze, petrified by my magic. Five seconds.

One. I beheaded the one attacking Owen from the side.

Two. I drove Sarrat across Keelan’s opponent’s spine, severing the spinal cord in two places with a crunch.

Three and four. I reached Hakeem and Troy.

Five. I decapitated a shapeshifter to my left.

Time restarted.

The two remaining collared shapeshifters in front of me spun away from Hakeem and Troy and lunged at me.

I opened my mouth for another power word.

A gray werelion tore out of the woods, his eyes filled with golden fire, and roared. The blast of sound hit me like thunder.

Curran grabbed the shapeshifter to his left and snapped his spine like a twig. Leonine jaws gaped open. Curran bit down on the shapeshifter’s neck just above the collar. Blood poured. The remaining shapeshifter turned to flee. My husband tore his opponent’s head off and hurled it at the escaping enemy. The bloody head smashed into the shapeshifter between his shoulder blades. He stumbled and then Curran was on him. The shapeshifter collapsed with Curran on top of him. Bones crunched. An arm flew by me.

Across the clearing Keelan pulled handfuls of entrails out of his opponent’s stomach and dug up, into the collared shapeshifter’s chest. The air was a mist of blood and bile.

Owen dropped the bloody stump of a body to the ground.

It was over.

We walked through the woods smeared in blood and carrying seven bodies. The dead had reverted to their human form, but my team was too beat up, so Curran’s shapeshifters got the hauling duty. Except for Owen, who carried one in spite of everyone’s advice, and Keelan, who insisted on dragging the biggest shapeshifter, the one he had killed, all by himself. My husband, the overachiever, was carrying two, one on each shoulder.

I had insisted on decapitating every corpse, just in case. Originally, the shapeshifters planned on impaling the heads on sticks and transporting them that way; however, I pointed out that approaching Penderton waving around gory, blood-dripping skull sticks was not the best idea. Curran and I had both brought our backpacks with waterproof bags in each, and now Da-Eun carried two sacks filled with shapeshifter heads. At eleven pounds each head, she was hauling seventy-seven pounds and she did it with a pep in her step.

It was good to be a shapeshifter.

Clotting my blood on command was one of the first skills my aunt had taught me, so I’d sealed the cuts and wounds, but the injuries were still there. My shoulders hurt, the flesh raw where the claws had pierced the muscle. Those claws hadn’t looked that clean. I’d pushed some blood out to purge the contamination, but I would need a visit to the medmage before some enterprising infection decided to make itself at home. My head hurt less than my shoulders, but I felt it.

The rest of our crew fared about as well. Keelan was hurt, but he stoically kept it to himself. Owen’s back had been sliced to ribbons. His wounds knitted themselves closed, but the muscle fibers would take longer to fix themselves, so right now his back looked strangely bumpy and uneven. We had to reset Troy’s broken arm on the spot, or it would heal badly and would need to be rebroken. Hakeem got the worst of it. His stomach was a mess, and Troy had chanted over him for a good twenty minutes, pushing the body into regeneration past the typical shapeshifter healing.

I glanced at Hakeem. He looked a little green, and he was walking in that slow deliberate way that meant every step was sending a fresh stab of pain through his body. A lacerated liver was a bitch.

The fight kept replaying in my mind, all thirty gory seconds of it. The shapeshifter’s momentum as she drove me back, the pressure against Sarrat as it pierced her heart, the fangs scraping my skull as she gnawed on my head, the hedgehog of my blood spikes in her mouth, her head falling off her shoulders, the power word, the mad dash of the pressurized five seconds, the slicing, the stabbing, the blood...

Ahead the trees thinned, hinting at the sunlit killing ground around Penderton.

I’d do it again. In a heartbeat. It had made me feel alive. More, it had made me feel…like myself.

I was a killer. Magic provided a barrier between me and the enemy. It insulated me from the visceral immediacy of direct violence, but in the end, I lived or died by my sword. I’d been taught to kill, encouraged to do it, praised when I did it well, and in the end, I liked it. It was in my nature, like breathing.

I’d all but given it up for the past seven years. I had focused on being a mother, on building a safe life, and now… Now I had some things to think about, and I wasn’t sure where I stood.

We cleared the tree line. I squinted against the sunlight.

The bell on the closest guard tower began to ring, striking a rapid, almost hysterical rhythm.

“Game faces on,” Curran said.

Everyone walked a little straighter. On my left, Jynx adjusted a collared shapeshifter’s body on her shoulders and raised her chin. This was our victory parade. The town didn’t need to know just how badly we got our asses kicked.

It wasn’t that Curran’s plan was bad or his tactics had been unsound. A team of four shapeshifters—one render, two renders-in-training, and one experienced alpha—should’ve cut their way through seven ordinary shapeshifters like they were butter, even without my or Curran’s help. It was just that the caliber of our enemy was far beyond what we expected and there was no way to know that until we fought them. Now we knew. We won but it was expensive. We’d need to adjust.

We kept walking.

The gates of Penderton swung out, and the first responders spilled into the open, two teams of three people each. Archers flooded the wall above the gate. The archers and the wall looked medieval, while the paramedics and EMTs looked decidedly modern in their reflective orange vests, and the contrast was jarring.

“Consort,” Hakeem said, his voice a little hoarse.

“Yes?” This was the first time he had called me Consort.

“Thank you.”

“No need. We’re a pack. You are one of ours, and you would do the same for me.”

He swallowed.

“Who are we?” Keelan asked.

“Wilmington Pack,” a chorus answered.

“Goddamn right we are.”

“Pack,” Curran said.

“Pack,” I answered with the rest of them.

Unity. Chosen family. There was strength in that.

We picked up the pace, falling into the familiar formation, Curran and I at the head, Keelan behind, and the rest of the shapeshifters forming a loose oval behind us. I remembered this from my time as the Consort. Ten years had passed, but some things left a lasting impression.

The first responders started toward us at a jog, and I caught the moment the leading team realized that we weren’t carrying our injured. The dark-haired medic in front braked and stopped, her face uncertain. She looked almost scared.

The same uncertainty spread from person to person, as if contagious. Bewilderment and surprise mixed with jittery nervousness.

This had never happened before. Nobody had ever gone into the woods and brought the bodies of the enemy out. The enemy was always invisible and invulnerable, watching and waiting. Now they were suddenly solid flesh. The residents of Penderton weren’t sure how to process it.

We reached them.

“I need full containment for seven bodies,” I told the leading medic. “Do you have loup cages?”

She blinked at me.

“Loup cages,” I repeated.

The medic’s brain restarted. “No loup cages, but we have cells. In the old prison.”

“That will work.” Magic was known to do all sorts of creative things to the dead bodies, but I’d never seen a shapeshifter survive decapitation. Even they had limits. Still, nobody ever regretted an abundance of caution when it came to magic’s ability to spawn weird crap.

“Lead the way,” Curran prompted.

“Follow me.” The medic strode down the street and we followed her, flanked by the EMTs and paramedics.

Heather, the wall guard captain, ran up to us.

“It will retaliate,” Curran told her. “Probably before the magic wave ends.”

“You might want to ease up on having your people walk the wall,” I added. “It will try to punish us, and the guards are an obvious target.”

Heather spun on her foot without a word and ran back the way she had come.

We walked down the street. People came out of their homes and businesses. They didn’t say anything. They just watched us go by with that same mix of excitement and apprehension on their faces.

The medic turned to look at us. “Can we help you in any way?”

“We’ll need food,” I said. “Meat. A lot of it. And we could use a coroner if you have one to help us examine the bodies. Our medmage has a broken left arm and regaining his dexterity will take some time.”

“My wife needs a medmage,” Curran said. “She will tell you that she is fine, and she doesn’t need help. She isn’t and she does.”

“You made your point,” I told him.

His eyes flashed gold. “I did. And I’m going to stand over you and watch you get treatment.”

As a married woman, I had learned that some fights weren’t worth fighting. “Your lack of trust is very disappointing.”

“I trust you with my life, not with yours,” my husband said.

I sat in a rocking chair on the top-floor balcony and sipped my iced tea. On my left, Owen rested on a blanket in the lotus pose. His eyes were closed. He said meditation helped him with the bison rage.

It was the golden hour, that magical sixty minutes before sunset when the light turned soft and warm, and the first hints of red and yellow tinted the sky. The world was beautiful, and the tree line at the end of the kill zone turned lovely enough to frame, the tall pines spreading their fluffy branches as if trying to hold on to sunlight.

We were overdue for the forest’s counterpunch. It would come. I had no doubt about it. The unseen force in the forest had ground Penderton under its heel for years, so long that it took compliance for granted. Now the town suddenly dared to fight back. It would try to stomp that resistance out, hard and fast, before hope took root.

I glanced at the closest tower. The guard hunkering down under that roof was a teenager. A boy, with short dark hair and glasses. Sixteen tops. On the surface it seemed like an easy enough way to keep teens employed: sit on the wall, watch the woods, ring the bell if you see anything. Except when the trouble started, they would be on the front line.

The door to my left swung open, and Troy padded out onto the balcony carrying a notebook and a small plastic cooler.

“Consort.”

“Did you escape?”

He nodded. “Went out the back door when I heard them coming.”

After the initial medical treatment was administered—Curran did stand over me while Nereda, the town’s leading medic, patched me up—Penderton delivered food by the truckload. Literally. Our crew ate and went to sleep.

Changing shape took a lot of energy. Most shapeshifters could do it once every twenty-four hours with no problems, but after the second shift, they’d need mandatory rest. Under siege like this, the shapeshifters would eat and sleep every chance they got to stave off the shifting fatigue.

Troy had stayed behind in the former prison to examine the bodies. About twenty minutes ago Mayor Gene, Ned, and the entire town council knocked on our door. They wanted to view the bodies and ask questions. Keelan and Curran went with the town delegation to the prison. I conveniently excused myself due to my injuries. I didn’t want to lie to the Penderton town council, and there were questions I didn’t want to answer, so avoiding community outreach seemed like the best strategy. I had a feeling Troy was in the same boat.

Troy sat in the other rocking chair and put the cooler by his feet. His left arm seemed to be functional, but he was moving it carefully.

“Did you eat?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

I got up, went inside, went downstairs to the kitchen, and grabbed a tray. Penderton generously provided barbecue, so I loaded a plate with brisket and smoked chicken, added a beef rib with about a pound of meat on it, a chunk of cheddar, and some fresh, crusty bread, and carried it back up to Troy.

He stared at the tray.

“Pledge of loyalty not required,” I told him.

He looked even more uncomfortable. “Thank you. I didn’t mean to inconvenience you, Consort.”

Ah. It was the fact that an alpha got up and fetched the food that was the problem. “I won’t tell anyone about it if you eat your food.”

“Yes, Consort.”

He set his notebook down and tore into his dinner.

I sat back in my chair.

When shapeshifters ate, they focused on the food completely. They didn’t talk, they didn’t socialize. They ate. Even their formal dinners, like Pack Thanksgiving, went totally silent for the first few minutes.

It took Troy about a quarter of an hour to finish devouring the barbecue. Once his plate was empty, he sat back, a small, contented smile on his face.

“I know all this stuff is weird and exciting, but you have to take care of yourself,” I told him.

He nodded. “Yes, because if I die, nobody in Wilmington would have any idea how to treat a wounded shapeshifter.”

“No, because if you die, you will be dead. And all of us will be very sad.”

He blinked.

“Things just didn’t go your way today,” Owen rumbled from his blanket, his eyes still closed. “First, you got your arm broken. Then the Consort had to bring you food. Now you are getting a lecture. It’s hard to be Troy today.”

“Don’t make me come over there,” Troy growled.

Owen opened his eyes. “And do what?”

Troy showed him his teeth.

“Stay where you are, and you’ll get to keep all of those.” Owen closed his eyes.

Hmm. When Nereda had treated me, she found a tip of the shapeshifter claw in one of my wounds. I reopened it and dislodged the claw through forced bleeding, and it broke her brain. I told her that it was similar to a shapeshifter pushing silver out of their body, and that shocked her even more. In her ten years as a field medic, she’d never treated a shapeshifter. She’d asked a lot of follow-up questions, some of which went beyond me so Curran had to answer.

Shapeshifter regeneration was off the charts. They walked off most wounds that would put a non-shapeshifter human into a hospital for a week. They were mostly impervious to infection, they treated blood loss as a joke, and it was said that if a shapeshifter was breathing by the end of the fight, they would live.

Unfortunately, shapeshifters also often fought enemies that inflicted catastrophic damage. Their lives were much more violent, which was why the Pack Keep in Atlanta had a first-rate hospital within it.

“I take it the guidance to avoid human medmages is still in effect?” I asked.

“Yes, Consort,” Troy said. “It has been a matter of concern to Pack medical staff for a while now.”

The thinking behind it was simple. If human medmages knew how to heal shapeshifters, they would better understand how to hurt them as well. Except that knowing how to injure shapeshifters didn’t require a medical degree. Every merc in the Guild knew that silver was toxic to them, and wolfsbane was widely available at herbal markets and pharmacies.

That policy accomplished nothing except to delay treatment until a shapeshifter could get to a Pack medic.

“Have you discussed your concerns with the Beast Lord?”

“Yes, Consort. We were told that this policy was put in place by the previous Beast Lord and the current Beast Lord sees no reason to change it.”

Shots fired.

My husband had a complicated childhood. His parents had taken him and his sister to live in the woods, trying to avoid shapeshifter politics. Eventually they were attacked by loups. Only Curran survived. He was rescued by Mahon, the Alpha of Clan Heavy, the Bear of Atlanta, who pushed Curran to become the Beast Lord when he was fifteen. A lot of my husband’s early policies were shaped by Mahon, who didn’t trust humans. Curran altered most of them, once he had started thinking for himself, but that particular one apparently didn’t get an overhaul before we retired, and Jim had chosen to leave it in place.

“Would you refuse to treat a non-shapeshifter patient, Troy?”

Green fire rolled over Troy’s irises. “I took an oath to apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures that are required. The oath didn’t specify which sick.”

“I assume Nereda took the same oath?”

“Yes.”

“Good. From this moment, the avoidance guidelines do not apply to Wilmington. You have my permission to share whatever medical knowledge you find necessary with her and other medmages. We need to make sure that if a shapeshifter is hurt, they can access emergency medical care. And if Curran says anything to you about it, tell him that I ordered you to do it.”

I couldn’t imagine that Curran would have an issue with it, but if he did, pointing out that our son could require emergency medical care and that Troy might not be in range to administer it would shut that down real fast.

Troy smiled. “Yes, Consort.”

“How did the examination of the bodies go? Did you learn anything?”

Troy looked at his notebook, then looked at me. “‘Learn’ is a strong word. I have questions. Right now, what I don’t know is significantly greater than what I do.”

That lined up with my own feelings. As soon as the first body reverted to humanoid form and I had a chance to look at it, I knew we were in the weeds.

The body was hairy. Excessively so. Hair on the back protruding in a ridge over the spines; hair on the chest for males that looked like something you might see on a Maine Coon cat; longer hair on the backs of the arms, ranging in color from almost black on some corpses to a muddy brown on others. The skin under all that hair was light brown and had an odd, slightly purple tint, as if their blood vessels lay very close to the surface.

Everyone was muscled like an Olympic athlete. Visible definition on the arms, back, and stomach on each one and almost no fat. Everyone was short, five and a half feet tall at most. You would anticipate some variation in height, and there were three or four inches here or there, but statistically I would have expected at least one of them to be closer to six feet.

The shapeshifter Keelan had fought was almost eight feet in a warrior form, and the rest of them weren’t much smaller. The differential between their human and warrior form was huge. Although their increased body mass compensated somewhat, their transformations would have required a lot of magic.

And then there were the faces. Their teeth and ears were human enough, but all seven had massive, heavy jaws and wide mouths with very narrow lips. Their profiles were unnaturally elongated. Instead of forehead and chin being close to the same vertical line, their chins, jaws, and noses jutted forward beyond anything typical of a human.

All that alone would’ve marked them as drastically different from us, but there was one detail that left absolutely no doubt they were not human. They had horns. All seven of them. The horns were short and pointed straight up, as if someone had taken deer antlers and cut them off at the first branching.

Troy flipped through his notebook. “My best guess is that they are human. Just not our kind of human.”

What did that mean?

“Could they be a splinter group of some sort? A shapeshifter family that went off after the Shift?” Owen asked.

Troy shook his head. “I counted three wolves, one probable hyena, something that might have been a cheetah, and two of them, like the one who’d attacked the Consort, don’t track as anything I’d ever seen before. All of that in a single family?”

A good point. A splinter group wouldn’t have such variety.

Troy shook his head. “Some of them might be related to each other, but overall, they are not a single family but representatives of a specific hominin group. A specific phenotype.”

“Hominin? Not Homo sapiens?” I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway.

Hominin included modern humans, extinct human species and ancestors, and weird variations resulting from magic exposure.

“We’re talking about some fundamental deviations. The hair pattern is completely different. They grow hair along their spines. I’ve never seen that. They have chins like us, but their facial structure is strange. And they have horns.”

The horns were the sticking point. There were mythical humanoids who had horns, like satyrs, but we were a long way from Greece and the bodies didn’t fit the satyr pattern. The horns were wrong, and the legs weren’t goat-like.

Besides, I had never seen or heard of anyone encountering a satyr. It didn’t mean they didn’t exist. When we travelled to the Black Sea, I’d encountered an atsany, a tiny human only eighteen inches tall and capable of shockingly powerful magic. He was part of a whole tribe of people who had lived in the Caucasus Mountains for they alone knew how long and even built small towns. And yet if someone had asked me before that trip if tiny humans existed, I would’ve said the same thing I was thinking now—I had never seen or heard of anyone encountering one.

There were other humanoids out there. Some of them apparently had horns. Or antlers. Horns were herbivore weapons. These guys transformed into meat-eating predators. What the hell did we stumble into?

“This isn’t a matter of some superficial differences,” Troy was saying. “This isn’t a different race or a close relative. This is a different species. Hakeem asked me if they are human. He meant it in a cultural sense.”

“What did you tell him?” I asked.

“Depends on your definition of ‘human,’” Troy said.

They looked human to me.

“Do they use names?” Owen said from his corner of the balcony. “If they use names, they are people.”

Troy frowned. “That’s a weird criterion.”

“If they name themselves, they have a language and a sense of self,” Owen said. “It means they recognize that each one of them is unique and unlike the others, so they must have a separate name. That means they know that life is valuable.”

Unexpected werebison wisdom.

“Where did they come from?” I muttered.

“Could there be a portal?” Owen asked.

“Yes, could it be a pocket realm?” Troy asked. “Maybe they existed in it for an extended period of time, separate from us?”

“Portals have a very specific power signature,” I explained. “This entire area is flooded with the magic from the forest. Right now, we’re ankle-deep in it.”

Troy glanced down.

“Nothing about this magic indicates a portal. It’s completely different.”

It felt like something else entirely, and I wasn’t ready to go there yet.

Not only were these shapeshifters different from us, but they also didn’t look at all like the people with the human tribute tapestries. That meant not just one group of enemies, but two. Possibly more.

“If I had to design a human adapted to shapeshifting, I would make something similar to them,” Troy said. “A ton of dense body mass to work with, a skull structure that makes muzzle formation a breeze, expanded lung capacity, and a large heart. Their noses are longer, and their ears are larger and pointed. Not only are they stronger than an average shapeshifter in human form, but their olfactory and auditory senses are likely better than ours. From a shapeshifter point of view, they are better adapted.”

Now there was a disturbing thought.

“I’ve recorded my findings.” Troy patted his notebook. “As soon as the tech hits, I’m going to take some pictures and send them and some blood and tissue samples down to Atlanta.”

“A second opinion?” I asked.

“The more eyes on this, the better.”

Doolittle would be fascinated by this. If we weren’t careful, he’d be up here within a day of those samples arriving to his lab.

“What about the collars?” I asked.

“Oh! Almost forgot.” Troy jumped up and brought the plastic cooler over to me. I opened it. Inside lay a golden collar.

I held my hand above it. Inert.

I took it out, holding it carefully by the edges. The metal felt cold under my fingertips. Two rows of rectangles, one inner, one outer, similar to antique expansion bracelets. I carefully stretched the collar. The segments slid apart under the pressure of my fingers, enough to accommodate the shift from a human neck to an animal one.

“It has gold in it,” Troy said. “It stings a bit.”

Silver was toxic to shapeshifters, but they had trouble with all noble metals. Gold was second on the toxicity level. Wearing it would irritate the skin. Curran once described it as having a constant mild burn. The shapeshifters wearing these would feel them every second of the day. A constant reminder, but of what? Was this a badge of honor or a slave collar? If it hurt them, why hadn’t they ripped them off?

There were thin glyphs etched into the inside of the collar. I turned it to get a better look.

“Company!” Troy barked.

At the tree line, a group of people walked out into the clearing.

The guard in the tower reached for the bell.

“Don’t touch that!” I yelled.

The boy dropped his hand, and I tossed the collar back into the cooler and took off running.