door was standing open.
Nothing should have been able to get in or out of the circle he had built, but as he looked around, he realized that several of the stones on one side had fractured before being pushed aside.
What on earth had he just released?
CHAPTER 12
WHATEVER HAD JUST spoken to him in the shapeshifter’s mind, then thrown him out and fractured his circle, had left him so fried that he kept spacing out as he attempted to gather his tools back into their bag. At one point, he jumped when he spaced out for a moment and suddenly found Jeremy standing in front of him, holding a large book titled Ancient Elavie Cultures. The human was looking from the note on the door, to Jay, to the empty bed.
“It’s okay to come in now,” Jay said, trying to focus on the human’s mind but unable to glean anything more than static.
“Did you magic her away somewhere?” Jeremy asked.
“I woke her up, and the next thing I knew, she was gone.”
He wasn’t ready to go into further details, such as promises to destroy Midnight. Maybe he should have asked a little more about that—like How? or When?
Instead, he asked Jeremy, “Are you still awake, or already awake?”
“A combination of the two,” Jeremy admitted. “Having trouble sleeping. Nerves. I thought I’d try to solve our mystery, but I guess it’s a moot point now.”
“What’s the book?” he asked Jeremy. Elavie was SingleEarth’s scientific term for shapeshifters.
Jeremy plopped down to sit on the floor next to Jay.
“The way her power reacted to yours made me think about the way some of the older Elavie, especially the ones from cultures with additional magic, can live hundreds of years or more. When I started looking at the older cultures, I found a reference to the Shantel.”
“You’re on the right track with the age thing. Who are the Shantel?”
“I found them in a book about language, actually. Many of the older shapeshifter cultures make reference to something or someone called a sakkri. The serpiente use the word now to describe a kind of dance, but their myths say that dance is the remnant of an ancient magical ritual. The Mistari use it to mean something said or done to mislead. And the Shantel used the term to refer to the magic that kept them protected, and to the witch who controlled that power.”
Jeremy paused with a self-satisfied smile, obviously finding that little fact interesting enough that it took him a moment to realize he hadn’t yet answered Jay’s question.
“Right,” he said, continuing on. He flipped pages as he spoke. “It took me a while to find anything more about the Shantel, since they were incredibly isolationist, and seem to have entirely disappeared in the last couple centuries. They were shapeshifters—leopards and mountain lions—and were considered one of the great magical powers of the last millennium, up there with the shm’Ahnmik and the Azteka.”
Both of the other cultures Jeremy referenced were mostly gone. There were pockets of Azteka left, but none of their famous bloodwitches, and some believed that the entire falcon civilization—known as the shm’Ahnmik—might have been no more than part of serpiente myth, like the humans’ Atlantis.
“You think the shapeshifter I found was some kind of Shantel witch?”
“The Shantel describe their spirit-witch as white and silver in her leopard form, but ink-black in human form, with white markings to make her power clear to all who see her. Sound familiar?”
The description fit, including the fact that Jay had been given a cougar form with which to seek her.
“She didn’t have a name,” Jay said, recalling that fact from his sojourn within her power. “There was something about her remaining nameless, to—”
“Yes!” Jeremy interrupted, flipping to another page. “It says here the Shantel believed that ‘only by remaining nameless and unclaimed by family or lover could the sakkri commune with and command the immortal powers of nature.’ I don’t have a clue what that means, but any magic-user put in a group with falcons and Azteka has to be scary powerful.”
“I think she’s on our side,” Jay answered uneasily. At least, he hoped she was. The fact that she had disappeared without speaking to anyone didn’t bode well.
“The Shantel were never warlike,” Jeremy continued, still looking down at his book. “Even during Midnight’s reign, they just used their magic to keep their people safe. They never fought back. They’re one of the only shapeshifter cultures we know of that no one ever went to war