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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.
This was infinitely more unpredictable than witch magic. This was wild magic, a raw power with unknown limits. It disturbed my father to his core. It disturbed me, too.
“Can you walk away from this?” he asked.
“No. I gave them my word. Curran gave them his word.”
He covered his face with his hands. “Of course you did. The two of you blundered into this with no idea of what you were facing.”
