“Dom, can I ask you something?”

  “What’s up?” I mumble, packing crawler legs into the pocket that doesn’t hold glolives.

  “A favor?”

  “Sure, what do you need?”

  “A while back, you skilled up in some new things, and I get we have been real busy running around, fighting the Siren, losing and regaining Baco, learning to life siphon and…”

  “Sadie. What’s up?”

  She looks down. I would say sheepishly, but I guess it’s kind of goatishly. “Summon Satyr Level 2?”

  “Oh!” I had totally forgotten my power to upgrade her. “I’m so sorry. Yeah, let’s do this.”

  She smiles, throws her shoulders back and chin up.

  “Is this going to hurt me?” I ask. “I have the crawler leg mush.”

  She shakes her head. “You might feel a little sick from the sudden drop in your vitality.”

  Summoning as a concept is fun. Summoning as a feeling is not. Deep breath. In the nose, out through the mouth. I concentrate on Summon Satyr. Extending my hand, I feel my throat move to a strange position, nearly choking, but not painfully. I close my eyes and make a noise that might be a word.

  “Advance,” I say in a voice that is clearly not my own.

  Sadie’s eyes go wide. She looks down as her hooves turn into a collection of whirling particles, like she’s standing on a model galaxy. A ring of dematerializing and rematerializing crawls up her body. Hooves reform and her legs become whirling marbles. Her hips disassemble and recombine, then her chest and so on. She holds out her hand and watches it scramble and reform before her entire head becomes a whirl of sprinkles and then settles back.

  “Oh,” she gasps, staring at her reformed hand. “This is something new.”

  “Is that a good, oh, wow?”

  She flexes her fist. A blazing ball of fire encases it, and she laughs. “It’s good.”

  “How do you feel?”

  She paws the ground, getting ready to charge. “Stronger. Faster.”

  We have to move on, so we set off walking. For some reason, it feels incredibly dangerous to stay in any spot too long. It’s not impossible that satyrs and war boars patrol the area. I would much rather stumble onto them than they stumble onto us. But we’ve been wandering without direction. The Siren called us to her lake. The whole time leading up to that is a blurry memory, and if I wanted to backtrack, I don’t think I could even remotely recall any of the places we passed.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  The labyrinth itself is incredibly repetitive. Sure, there are smooth and rough halls, chambers and junctions, but in the end, it’s tunnel after tunnel of glowing crystal moss ceilings. There have been few landmarks. We pass another chamber that looks a lot like the small underground black sand beach and lake chamber of the Siren.

  A lot.

  I stop our meandering and check on Sadie, a stride behind me.

  “You’ve had an idea,” Sadie says.

  “I’d call it a concern more than anything at this point,” I say, heading back a few meters to the chamber off the side of our passage.

  I turn into the lake chamber.

  Is this the same place? Calf deep pool, dark sand beach, a rocky outcropping, about the same size and shape.

  “Look familiar?” I ask.

  She steps into the pond and examines at the glowing moss on the ceiling. “I guess it all kind of looks the same around here, doesn’t it?”

  I make my way across the pond to the rocks and start examining the passage that leads out.

  Damn my growing perception skill. Sometimes there are things you would rather not notice. There are small burn marks on the wall around the exit path—where Sadie chucked her fire and missed.

  She’s standing next to me, following my eyeline.

  “Oh,” she says. “That’s not good.”

  “If we spend hours getting nowhere, we are never getting out of this maze.”

  Over the sound of the water lapping around us, a gentle distant singing reaches us.

  “Shit! Plug your ears!”

  “With what?” she bleats, searching around furiously. “I didn’t keep the cloth. I don’t know where I dropped it.”

  Sometimes, the best solutions aren’t the most pleasant. I pull a glolive from my pocket, half chew it, spit it in my palm and, you guessed it, stuff it in my ear.

  Sadie makes a face but follows suit.

  I give the Sit, Stay commands to Baco.

  Baco’s ears are way grosser than half chewed glolives. Sadie takes one side, I do the other. I lean close to Sadie so she can hear.

  “We need to go the opposite way. We have to get far from the songs and out of this area. We’ll start using the chalk to leave ourselves marks on the wall. If one of us starts heading toward the Siren song, the other has to stop them, got it? I’m fully giving you permission to do what you have to stop me if the song charms me. I think I’m more resistant, but if something goes wrong, we do what we have to to keep each other uncharmed.”

  Her hand ignites and she shoves me aside with her other hand, nearly dipping me in the pool. Before I can say ‘what the hell’, she’s hurling fire past me into a Siren that was not there a minute ago. The Siren warps into an S shape and the fire whooshes past.

  I think the words ‘spin into action’, looking at the Siren rearing over my shoulder. As soon as I conceive it, I’m whirling around, swiping my spear behind me to clear my path, passing it behind my back, one hand to the next as I step into my new facing, catching it around my waist without hesitation, slicing the air to back up the Siren, then spinning the weapon over my head to parry incoming attacks before landing it back in my ready position, feet splashing.

  To turn a mythological phrase, what in Zeus’s name was that? I turned into Jackie Chan.

  “Looks like you’re getting the hang of it,” Sadie smiles, throwing more fire to imbalance the Siren. She’s far more accurate than she was earlier.

  I give the charge command to the glolive stuffed Baco. The calf high water explodes when he goes past me in missile mode.

  I see the pattern Sadie is throwing at the Siren. Left, right, left, a steady stream of fireballs, but they’re getting smaller. She’s using all of her magic energy. The winged serpent with the woman’s face is backing up in opposite pattern from the fireballs. It shrieks at the incoming hog missile.

  I see where Baco is charging. I see the pattern of Sadie’s fading attacks. I know where the Siren will be. There’s a synergy we haven’t had before.

  Right… HERE.

  I lunge forward, spear tip catching the monster in the soft underside of her jaw. I thrust up as the thing screams with a hundred voices, a quivering flag on the end of my spear. The body thuds as I splash her to the pool, Baco making sure her vitality has dropped well below zero at the moment of bloody impact.