Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 74292 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74292 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
“This is what the forest does.”
His expression shifted. The kind, wise sage was gone. An immortal wizard peered at the paper, the full power of his staggering intellect directed at the problem like a laser.
“A precursor?” he murmured. “Or a variation?”
“That’s how it’s suppressing the spores.” The priest-mage’s clawed hand still bothered me. “Father, are we the only ones capable of this?”
“By ‘we,’ you mean our family?”
“Humans.”
“I don’t know.” Roland’s face clouded.
What? “You know everything.”
He smiled at me. “If that was so, I would go mad for there would be nothing left to discover. The family records don’t specify how or when we acquired this power. However, in my lifetime, I have met three outsiders, none of them with our blood, who were capable of it.”
None of this was comforting.
Roland tapped the ink circle. “This and the fact the blood ward stopped the spores makes your course clear. You already know what you must do to save them.”
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!”