Magic Claims (Kate Daniels: Wilmington Years, #2; Kate Daniels, #10.6)

“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.

The teenage guard manning the tower handed me a pair of binoculars. I leveled them at the group waiting on the edge of the woods.

Ten people total. Eight looked like the woman in the sketch, tall and dressed in light brown tunics, cinched at the waist by belts. If you drew a horizontal line about two inches above their elbows, everything below it was relatively human skin, a kind of light ochre touched by the sun. The skin tone seemed uneven, but it could’ve been dirt.

Everything above the line was smeared in a thick coat of bluish clay: the top halves of their chests, their necks, their faces, and the first three inches of their hair starting at the scalp. The clay had dried, forming hairline cracks on their skin and stiffening their brown hair up and away from their faces.

The eight clay-covered people held spears, each exactly as tall as its owner and tipped by a spearhead made of some light-colored material. They looked like a group of hunters. The two people they clustered around definitely didn’t.

The central pair, a man and a woman judging by the outlines of their bodies, were also tall. The woman wore a long robe dress, brown with a broad strip of white in the front and thin red symbols woven into it. The man had a matching outfit, although his robe was more square-cut. They wore identical overcoats, a kind of half-jacket, solid over their chests but which split toward the bottom into long ribbons of white fabric that fell below their knees. Each ribbon bore more red symbols and ended in an amulet of golden metal. If they spun, the ribbons would fly around them, forming perfect circles.

A two-inch-wide band of braided cloth crossed the woman’s forehead. A fringe of thin fabric strips, each ending in a large gold bead, dripped from the band all the way to her nose, obscuring her eyes. The man wore a human skull over the top half of his face, studded with fangs from some sort of huge predator. All visible skin was smeared with the same bluish clay, but their hair was clean and pulled back from their faces into tight horse tails. Both held staves, and the brown stains on their shafts looked suspiciously like blood.

“What are they?” Troy murmured.

“Mages or priests,” I said. “The ruling caste. No collars.”

The two mages stood still. They were probably staring at us, but it was hard to tell. At five hundred yards, they were well outside of bow range.

Humans liked to see each other’s eyes. Hiding them was usually done for three reasons: to protect someone’s face, to obscure their identity, or to be seen as a personification of something greater than themselves. A conduit for the spirits, an embodiment of justice, a force rather than an individual.

“Nice skull.” Troy’s face was a harsh mask.

“I feel like he’s trying to tell us something,” I said. “Not sure what it is. He’s so subtle about it.”

Owen chuckled.

The skull mage raised his staff and tapped it on the ground. Two hunters stepped forward and unfolded another tapestry between them. Twenty red figures.

“They doubled their ask,” Troy said.

“Punishment,” I told them.

The skull mage pointed his staff at me and then at the tapestry.

Ah. It was my doing so I had to atone by being one of the twenty.

I crossed my arms on my chest. That should be clear enough.

The fringe mage stepped forward and spun, twirling her staff. She did it in complete silence. The creep factor was high.

The mage turned and twisted. There was a definite pattern to her dance. I couldn’t feel her magic from this distance, but she was cooking something nasty.

“Troy,” I said, “Go get my husband, please.”

Troy turned and took off down the stairs at top speed.

The skull mage stepped aside and spun as well. His staff work was less fluid, more abrupt, as if he was trying to rip through the air. The two mages whirled, but not in unison. Their movements weren’t coordinated. Whatever they were doing was similar but separate.

“You can ring the bell now,” I told the guard.

The kid grabbed the rope attached to the clapper and shook it hard. The bell rang out in a hysterical frenzy.