Either way, before Ishmael can get us into a whole heap of trouble, I grab his hand and pull the angel away from the charging bull creature. Luckily, we seem to fly faster than he can run. Then again, the creature is making good use of magical shortcuts through the earth, somehow homing in on us. But for now, it races behind us, though we seem to be pulling away.

  Why isn’t it trying to cut as off again?

  Ah, crap. I see we why.

  Dead end.

  ***

  Clearly, it knew of the dead end and only kept pace behind us.

  As the sound of its running turns into slower footfalls, it emits the guttural infrasound, the same noise tigers use to paralyze their prey. Though I’m not feeling paralyzed, I am fearful of another cave-in. By the way Ishmael spins and faces the minotaur behind us, I’m certain a second cave-in is imminent.

  As I spin around, the minotaur comes to a complete stop, chest heaving. Pretty sure its wide-set eyes are staring at me. It blinks, cocks its head. Ah, there it is.

  I put a hand on my angel’s shoulder. “Stay here, Ishmael. Please.”

  “I cannot allow harm to come to you, Samantha.”

  “I think he recognizes me.”

  “Samantha...”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  He reluctantly steps aside as I slip past him, but I feel him looming behind me, ready to pounce if and when needed.

  I hold out my open hands to either side. “We are sorry for trespassing in your home. We should have asked permission. Please accept my apology.”

  As the creature cocks its head in the other direction, either listening, thinking, or deciding which horn it’s going to gore me with, light explodes next to me. Oh great, Ishmael has drawn his own fiery sword. It’s reminiscent of the Fire Warrior’s sword, though much smaller. I guess his angel bosses didn’t strip him of everything.

  “You recognize me, don’t you?” I ask, and gesture behind me for Ishmael to put his damn sword away. The angel does as requested, and it disappears back into his hand. Right. No interdimensional pouch. No sheath along his back. Right into his hand. How did it not burn his now very human flesh?

  I’ll worry about that later.

  “My name is Samantha Moon.”

  The subtle rattling in my bones suggests the creature is still emitting the infrasound frequency. The beast takes me in, turning his head this way and that. I can’t imagine he gets many visitors. Surely he can count on one hoof how many people have wandered in here. Does that mean they all meet an unfortunate end? Perhaps. Any human walking through here would be an easy target. I’m hoping the territorial minotaur just put the fear of God into them. Or the fear of Zeus.

  Speaking of hooves: he sports two of them on his feet. Big, round cloven hooves that can smash a fellow’s skull in without a second thought. They are dirty and chipped, evidence of a life roaming (and creating) tunnels underground. Doesn’t seem like much of a life to me. Then again, what’s fulfilling to one person (or creature) is monotonous to another. I’ll never forget the story of the AI robot literally killing itself after performing a menial job for just fifteen minutes.

  The creature’s head just misses the dirt ceiling, probably close to eight feet tall. Hard to judge great heights when you only stand five foot three inches. Luckily, I can eyeball with the best of them.

  And just like that, the rattling in my bones stops. Guess it doesn’t see me as a threat. Undoubtedly, it’s wondering what the hell I’m doing back here with yet another imposing figure. Pretty sure the thing can’t speak, so I pipe up. “You’re a shifter, correct? Or are you permanently this shape?”

  It shakes his head, but not as an answer. It’s shaking off the rest of the dirt. Wow, those horns look sharp. How they stay so pointy after having carved out what is surely hundreds of miles of tunnels, I haven’t a clue. Undoubtedly, paranormal related.

  “If you’re like my werewolf friend, is there any chance we can see your human side? We don’t mean you harm.” My plea doesn’t seem to move the needle. I try another tactic. “I think we need your help. You see, we need to travel to the Underworld, and I have it on good authority you might have already tunneled there. Seems a weird thing for you to do, but that’s what I heard.”

  As the minotaur stares at me, it begins... shrinking. After a whole lot of weird shapeshifting, a man in his mid-thirties stands naked before me.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I avert my eyes out of politeness, though he certainly doesn’t seem to care that he stands before me butt naked. Dirt clods that had matted the fur at his chest in his bullman state, now fall free.

  So that I can at least look at the guy, I gesture for Ishmael’s absurd poncho. He sweeps it off with a slightly confused look on his face, gives it to me, and I present it to the naked man—also with a confused look on his face.

  “Would you mind wearing this?” I ask. Apparently, I am the only one who gives a rip about the guy’s frontal parts hanging free.

  “Oh, right. My apologies.” He accepts the cloak, pulls it over his head.

  Ah, I can see again.

  Not that the guy has a bad body. He is muscular enough, though on the skinny side. Meanwhile, now that Ishmael is bare-chested again, it’s kind of obvious why I had him wear something in the first place.

  Holy sweet mama. Ripped city. The small glow coming off his skin makes him look like a Renaissance statue come to life, complete with carefully staged lights. Sorry, Kingsley!

  Mercifully, the poncho hangs down to the new guy’s knobby knees. I can once again focus on the task at hand. Call me a prude, but I am who I am.

  “I want to thank you, Samantha Moon,” says the man.

  “How so?”

  “I’ve been, for lack of a better word, stuck as the bull beast for many years.”

  “Years?”

  “Yes, and you are right. I am a shifter, as you can see. But unlike your wolf friend, I do not shift one night a month. I shift for years. It’s always been a challenge to snap out of it, so to speak. The beast within takes over completely and totally, and I am lost for god knows how long. I eventually find my way back. Being addressed by you directly helps me find my way back from the darkness.”

  “So you didn’t really want to attack us?” I ask.

  “Not me, no. But the thing that I had become, oh yes. He very much wanted to stomp you into the dirt for trespassing.”

  “Okay, wow.” I pause, thinking. “The man I was with last time, the wolfman, had a theory that the entity within you might be an original dark master. That in, fact, you were never bitten or turned.”

  “Tis a good theory, and not quite true. Only one minotaur exists at a time. Should I perish, another would come into existence, to fulfill a role... at least for the foreseeable future.”

  “There are people in the world that believe minotaurs really exist?”

  “Not so much believe deep in their hearts, but believe what they read or saw. The legend of the bullman is everywhere. In every Greek history course. In movies and books.”

  “You have a dark master?”

  “I am aware of the concept, and the answer is no.”

  “Most shape-shifters have dark masters.”

  “Most, but not me. Just like there are some werewolves and vampires among you—you are a vampire, are you not? I don’t see an aura. Perhaps you’re an angel of some sort. The wings...”

  “Long story,” I say. “You are correct on both counts.”

  “Very well. Regarding this dark master business...”

  He tells us he’d been a classical archaeologist back when he was mortal. He’d been in Crete on an excavation, when he and a colleague, Andrew, had stumbled upon a series of passageways. Could the legend of the minotaur be true? They followed the tunnels for what seemed like days, until finally, they heard a terrifying growl. It was then that a half-bull/half-man appeared out of the shadows.

  It charged. They ran. He was faster than poor Andrew, who got trampled into oblivion. By that time, he had a gun out. He emptied it into the chest of the beast. Little did he know the bullets he’d purchased from a small arms dealer in Crete had made his bullets with a mixture of silver. The creature died, and something terrible happened next. Something that he can only describe as an inky blackness emerged from the deceased creature... and entered him.

  “Weirdly, I immediately knew how to exit the twisty labyrinth,” he says. “I got on a plane and left the country. I lived in nearby Chino Hills and tried to forget the crazy events that took the life of my colleague, who I had reported only as missing in the field. Yes, I had been questioned but, without a body, the authorities let me go.”

  He tried returning to teaching, where he taught archaeology at the University of Riverside, but felt an undeniable pull underground. Sunlight suddenly seemed painful. Open spaces gave him the jitters. He felt he would only feel comfortable underground, in small, safe spaces.

  Like tunnels.

  “Or mines,” he says. “Not a lot of people know there was some, not a lot, of mining going on out here. With a little searching, it wasn’t so hard to find an opening—and I felt immediately at home. It was as if a great pressure had been released the moment I stepped into the first tunnel. I could breathe again, which I thought was weird, because most people feel the weight of the earth on top of them. I felt the same claustrophobia when I first ventured into the labyrinth in Crete. But not this time. No, this time, it was exactly what I needed to calm my nerves.”

  Days passed. He hadn’t brought food or water, yet felt no need to eat or drink or to seek out light. Although he shouldn’t be able to see underground, he was beginning to make out shapes and hints of more. A beam here. Old mining carts there. More days passed. He had classes to teach. Students to meet. A girlfriend he should be missing, but didn’t, not really. Thankfully, he had no pets. He lived in a small apartment near campus. A simple life of academia, filled with lectures and symposiums and meetings and original research. Soon, he was to lead a dig in Greece, but as the days and weeks passed, he cared less and less about anything in the surface world.

  “And I still don’t, quite frankly,” he says, shrugging in the oversized poncho.

  “May I ask your name?” I ask.

  “Call me Reggie.”

  “Is that your real name?”

  “Sure,” he says, which doesn’t sound very convincing. Then again, I suspect he—or the beast inside—has done some objectionable stuff down here, stuff that “Reggie” isn’t very proud of. Like, you know, trampling trespassers to death.

  He continues with his narrative. After about a month (or so, he guessed) of being down here, he felt something awakening inside him, something yearning to break free. He next spent a few days in considerable pain, wondering what in the hell was happening to him, wondering if he would die in these tunnels, when the image of the beast appeared in his thoughts: the very same he had seen in the tunnels in Crete. At first, he thought he’d been hallucinating. Surely, that creature wasn’t real. Surely, he had hallucinated the beast. Perhaps he had even hallucinated the entire trip.

  Minotaurs weren’t real.

  And yet, he was underground for days on end without food or drink or company, somehow surviving and also seeing in the dark.

  The beast appeared over and over in his mind. It seemed to demand his full attention, seemed to demand something from him. Reggie found himself tormented by its unceasing visage until, at last, he did the only thing he could think of: he gave into it.

  “Take me,” he said, and meant it. “Anything to end the torment.”

  His first transition occurred shortly after—a terrible, painful, frightening experience that seemed to last for hours. His bones stretched and reformed. He watched his bare feet turn into hooves, his legs morph into that of a bull’s hindquarters. More than anything, he felt his head shifting and moving and growing, including sprouting horns. Surely, he had gone mad.

  Sitting up against an old mining wall, gasping and shaking and thinking thoughts he had never thought before (Where can I dig next? And how far?), he reached out and touched the tip of one of his massive horns. He still could hardly believe it; then again, the beast didn’t care what he believed, for it had stepped forward into his body and head, taking him over completely and thoroughly.

  Truly, it wasn’t his body anymore.

  It was the beast’s.

  And so he would spend many more weeks carving his first tunnels, relishing his great strength, even if he didn’t quite understand who and what he had become. He enjoyed prowling the passageways and creating new ones. He enjoyed having simple thoughts, his needs met in ways that were clearly supernatural. He enjoyed being part of the role he helped fulfill. He had a sense that he could leave if he truly wanted to. He also had a sense he would long for the underground again, and would simply find his way back here, so why bother leaving? A strange thought, certainly. Most people do not long for the world under, especially a world that consisted of little more than endless tunnels, many of which he had created in those early months. After all, what did these tunnels have to offer him?

  “Nothing really,” says Reggie. “Except the satisfaction of fulfilling my—our—reason for being. There is nothing quite like that, Miss Moon. Certainly, I never experienced that in my mortal life. Teaching should have done it for me, but it didn’t. Not like this.”

  “I think I get it,” I say. “I mean, what better purpose for fleeing than to have complete clarity about one’s existence?”

  “I hadn’t known what I was missing out on, Samantha.”

  “May I ask how long you’ve been down here?”

  “My best guess is just over forty years.”

  “Why, you don’t look a day over thirty-five.”

  “Good guess,” he says. “I was thirty-six when I returned from Crete.”

  “And you’ve never been above ground in all this time?”

  “Occasionally. Mostly to get a lay of the land. I’m conscious of maintaining the integrity of the surface above.”

  I recalled the young man who’d hired me to investigate the monster he had seen... a monster who had been using various entry points into and out of his cave system.

  “But you do wish to sometimes transition back to human?” I ask.

  “Yes, of course. I miss this body. I miss having my own thoughts. I miss these hands and feet. I don’t need to be human, but I don’t want to forget that I am human. Sometimes, I barely remember who I am. Lately, I have been trying to come forward more often. Never for very long. He’s quite impatient, the bull.”

  “I imagine so,” I say, for lack of anything else. “You have not eaten in forty years. Or had anything to drink? Even immortals need subsistence.”

  The medium-sized man, whose build is hidden under festive colors, nods eagerly. Surely, he hasn’t had too many conversations in four decades. Weirdly, you would never know. His social cues are all spot on, his voice clear and sharp.

  “Remember, Miss Moon. The beast is part god. As such, he gets by with very little sustenance indeed. What little he needs is provided in the River of Souls. Just a few sips every now and then, maybe once or twice a year, and he is sustained. We are sustained.”

  “River of Souls?” I ask.

  “Ah, sorry. You might know it as the River Styx, which encircles the Underworld. Some claim it meanders through, but they would be wrong.”

  “I’m happy to hear you say that. The underworld part, that is.”

  “Why’s that, Samantha?”

  I look back at the half-man/half-angel behind me, then back at the half-bull/half-man in front of me. A man, I suspect, who once wore glasses based on the fact that he keeps pushing at a spot between his eyes. As an immortal, his vision would have cleared to perfection.

  “I have a proposal for you.”

  “A proposal?”

  “Yes.”

  He nods. “Fascinating. I’m all ears.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  When I finish my pitch, he rubs his chin, considering my offer.

  That the man before me hasn’t eaten in four decades is shocking. Then again, he doesn’t have a true dark master; rather, he and a demigod have merged. This strange, supernatural world of ours works best when entities, both organic and summoned from the ether, merge with mortals. Not always, such as the case of gods and the uber-powerful (the devil comes to mind), but for the most part, yes.

  “I do enjoy my time away from the beast,” he says. “Unfortunately, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve been free of him. Speaking of which, he’s in my head now, impatient, literally pacing. Well, he can keep waiting. I’m enjoying this interaction.”

  “That bodes well for my offer,” I say.

  He smiles. “It’s a good one.”

  Never one to push in a negotiation, I come at it from another angle. “When you say free of him, are you suggesting free of him forever?”

  “Oh, no, no. I quite like it down here. I really enjoy turning off my brain and running free. Most humans should try it.”

  “Most humans would get eaten by a bear if they ran free.”

  He chuckles at this. Not so much Ishmael, who frowns. He doesn’t like that observation. After all, as a one-time guardian angel, it would have been his job to keep a human from being eaten alive in a forest. One observable fact about the fallen angel, he hasn’t given up his tendencies to protect—and probably never will. It’s literally built into him and has been for eons.

  “Your proposal to visit with me is a good one. On my own, I am often so deep in the shadows of his brain that I have a difficult time stepping forward. But seeing you again had an interesting effect on him. He remembers you helping him—even if your wolf friend helped cause some of the problem. He is not a total brute. Strong as a tank, temperamental, and territorial, yes. But he understands right from wrong.”

  “Even when he’s stomping trespassers to death?”

  “Oh, that’s just him having a little fun. We get so few visitors. I try to get him to stop, but once he scents someone, it’s over for them. That said, he did pause upon recognizing you. And in that, ah, small window where the rage subsided, I was able to step through and shift back to what you see before you. So, yes. I will accept your offer, Samantha Moon. You’ll visit me twice a year. In exchange, I will lead you to the Underworld.”