“I think it’s about time we woke Conlan up,” I said.
Roland sighed. The veil slid aside.
I cleared my throat. My son’s eyes snapped open.
“Mom!” Conlan bolted upright.
“Your father told you to stay in the safe house. Why are you here?”
“Mom, Mom, don’t get mad!”
I took a deep breath. A smile curved Roland’s lips.
Conlan dug into his backpack. “It’s a Cuvieronius hyodon.”
I looked at Roland. He shook his head slightly.
“The picture.” Conlan pulled a large book out of the pack and scrambled to me. “Look!”
He opened the book and thrust it at me. On the page, Isaac’s strange pachyderm posed on a rock slope next to what looked like a weird armadillo. A silhouette of a person was drawn to the side for scale. The armadillo was the size of a VW Beetle. The Cuvieronius was three times larger.
Conlan read nonstop, absorbing all sorts of random knowledge like a sponge, especially anything to do with animals, and prehistoric animals were his favorite. Luiza must’ve shown him Isaac’s sketch as I asked, and he put two and two together.
“Someone saw this creature? In person, recently?” Roland asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“In the area you’re trying to protect?”
I nodded.
Roland raised his hand. A stone pillar thrust itself from below into our view. Rock flowed like molten wax and hardened into a colossal creature. It had four tusks, small ears, and a thick, muscular trunk, and it towered above us. I had seen an elephant before. This animal dwarfed it. Its ears were proportionally smaller, its trunk shorter, its legs longer. The resemblance to Cuvieronius was unmistakable. These giants were monstrous cousins to Isaac’s creature, closer to it than to a modern elephant.
“The four-blade elephant,” Roland said. “They had gone extinct in our part of the world long before I was born, but their statues remained. The ancients worshipped them as gods. Once, when I was young, I saw one. It was brought from the Eastern Plains as a gift to my great-aunt for her wedding.”
I took the book from Conlan and flipped it over to the cover. Extinct Giants of the Ice Age.
Ice Age.
Wow. I landed on a couch. Sitting down seemed like a good idea.
Conlan bounced around me, talking too fast. “You know how we have all these round lakes? They’re called Carolina Bays, but they’re not bays at all, they are old thermokarst depressions, like the ones they have in Alaska. That’s because twenty thousand years ago this area was all permafrost, and it had mega fauna, and it had Cuvieronius, which evolved in North America, then went to South America to escape the ice, but the ice began to melt, so they migrated back up. And there were other mega species, mastodons, giant camels, dire wolves, sabertooth cats, and lions like me and Dad...”
The shapeshifter that had attacked me flashed in my mind. Reddish spotted fur and nine-inch fangs.
Oh my God. I had killed a were-Smilodon.
“…and Luiza said there was a hill. And look, I found an old picture of it. I put it in the book. In the front. It’s a conical hill and it looks like a pingo. They have them in Alaska. They have a core of ice, and then the ice melts, and the hill collapses. The hill collapsed, Mom! It had Ice Age animals inside!”
He stopped to take a breath.
I looked at the book in my hands. “This says Cuvieronius became extinct twelve thousand years ago.”
“Yes!” my son confirmed.
I turned to Roland. “So whatever it is must have slept with all its people and animals for at least twelve thousand years. Is it even possible? Could something from the Ice Age pop up in our time and somehow be alive?”
“In theory, yes,” Roland said. “If the enchanted sleep was deep enough. I slept for over two millennia, and when I woke, it felt like I’d gone to bed the day before. Deep sleep of this kind is complete stasis. So it is possible that a human had accomplished such an achievement, but only in theory. There have been cases of ancient animals reappearing but never a human who has slept for that long.”
“That’s right. You had mammoths that one time,” I said. “When you attacked the Pack Keep during the first war with Atlanta.”
He nodded. “A herd had walked out of the snowstorm in Alaska. I bought a few. They were hideously expensive and finicky to take care of, and they did badly in that battle. A complete waste of money.”
It wasn’t the mammoths who lost that battle. My father had accomplished that feat all on his own. Despite his unbearable academic brilliance, he had a questionable grasp of military tactics. His battle plan consisted of arranging his troops into a phalanx and sending them against the fortress of the Keep while he rode behind his army in a gold chariot. Because chariots made of soft and incredibly heavy metal were both durable and very mobile.
“It’s a poor workman who blames his tools, Father.”
He waved his hand at me dismissively. “An animal lacks the awareness necessary to comprehend the passage of time, but a human doesn’t. Ten millennia is a great deal of time. In fact, before I had gone into my sleep, our greatest scholars begged me to reconsider. They were afraid that when I woke, the world would be so different, it would drive me mad.”
I flipped through the book. Smilodon. Keelan’s shapeshifter had looked like mine. If I was right, and we had fought were-Smilodons, his head would explode. I turned the pages. Mastodon. Nope, don’t want to fight that. Giant beaver. That might explain the weird animals Isaac saw in the swamp. North American camel. Wow, bigger than the modern version.
I turned the page and stopped.
A massive lion looked back at me, its fur splattered with ghostly stripes. Huge paws, powerful frame, nearly eight hundred pounds. The African lion positioned next to it for scale looked like a skinny adolescent in comparison. Panthera atrox. North American lion.
Nobody knew for sure how shapeshifting had started, but the legend said that ages ago, far back in prehistory, when fierce predators ruled the planet, humans worshipped them as gods. Eventually they made a bargain, giving up a little of their humanity for the gifts of their animal deities. They then passed that gift onto others, diluting and weakening it in the process.
The descendants of those original Lyc-V carriers, those whose ancestors had made the bargain, were called the Firsts. They were exceedingly rare, and their power and control were off the scale. Other shapeshifters sensed them somehow and gathered around them, viewing them as natural leaders. Curran was a First and a Panthera atrox. And so was our son.
Conlan was looking at me, his eyes opened wide, trying to see if I understood what that image of the lion meant to him. I did. This was how he and Curran came to be. This was why they were different.
“I’m so proud of you,” I told him. “You did very well.”
Conlan grinned.
Roland’s expression turned grave. “If he’s correct, you are fighting something from our pre-history. I have no frame of reference. No one does. The magic you and I wield has been tamed and refined. It is a force that we have harnessed and bent to our will. What your opponent has is something completely different. It is wild and unchanged. It’s chaos.”
I looked into his eyes and saw genuine concern. To him, magic was a force defined by laws and rules. It was something he studied and used as a tool. It behaved in predicable ways that he fundamentally understood. He never liked witch magic or shapeshifter magic because it tapped into that primordial unpredictability that he sought to define and limit. It defied him, and so he rejected it.