Magic Claims by Ilona Andrews

I looked at the beautiful vista spreading before us. He was right, but that solution was the absolute last thing I wanted to do.

“Why, Blossom? Why do you push away your birthright?”

Because accepting it would mean taking a big step toward being like you. Because when I blundered into it the first time, it came close to altering who I was, and I will never allow that again.

“It is the art of your family. It is a part of who you are and where you come from. Every one of us has a right to learn our roots, for that’s how we understand ourselves.”

I didn’t want to get into this discussion.

“Think of your ancestors, who dedicated their lives to perfecting this magic in the hopes that future generations would use it to keep us and our people safe. Think of how they would feel if they were to witness your squandering it.”

“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.