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.
5
I got down from the third-floor balcony and to the top of the wall in under six seconds. It had to be some sort of a record.
Troy and Owen still beat me to it. Unlike them, I didn’t fancy dramatically jumping off the top floor balcony onto the street. I’d break my legs.