Magic Claims by Ilona Andrews

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.