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Stheno cursed and Coco groaned.

“I vote for dropping where we are and sleeping,” Coco said.

“Wait.” Bracken pointed. “We never turned down this tunnel. This may be a way out.”

How could we have missed that one? Then again, we appeared to have been stumbling around in circles for hours, so I suppose it made sense.

Nodding, I led the way. “Let’s try to get out of this loop and then we can sleep.”

This tunnel felt more claustrophobic than the others. It didn’t branch off into other tunnels, but it did twist and turn a lot. Shit. We should have slept where Coco suggested. This tunnel was too narrow for us to spread out comfortably.

When I went around another corner, I ended up in what looked to be the entrance to a cave. I paused, waiting for one of Bracken’s lights to catch up with me.

When it did, my heart stopped.

Standing before me was a gigantic beast. I stumbled back, bouncing off Stheno. It had to be eight feet tall with the head and horns of a bull and the body of a fur-covered man. Sharp teeth snapped at me. I should have already attacked, but clearly my brain was too sluggish to initiate the shift.

Coco had opened her mouth, a fireball on her tongue, when Stheno pushed her off balance and away from the Minotaur.

“Everybody, relax,” she said. “Mio is a friend and we don’t firebomb friends.”

The Minotaur buried his muzzle into Stheno’s snakes. They nuzzled him as he wrapped his arms around her. She hugged him back and he lifted her off the ground, taking her deep into his cave.

Coco, Bracken, and I stared at each other a moment. Was this something we needed to do anything about? It didn’t seem like it. She’d said friend and there was hugging.

“Are we in the labyrinth?” I whispered.

“Don’t just stand there,” Stheno called. “Come in.”

Bracken’s balls of light entered cautiously, which cracked me up. It was a large cave, with a nest of blankets against the far wall that seemed to serve as a bed. The Minotaur sat on his nest, with Stheno on his lap.

“When did they move you from Crete down here?” she asked him.

He snorted in anger. “Too long ago to count.” His voice was guttural and slurred. A bull’s mouth wasn’t made for speech.

I caught a confused look between Coco and Bracken. “English?” Bracken asked.

Coco nodded. “Yes, please speak English.”

I translated, in case it wasn’t the Minotaur’s pronunciation that was the problem. I had no idea which languages people were speaking. Bracken knew Greek but was having trouble now, so perhaps this was an older dialect.

Stheno introduced us and explained why we were here. The Minotaur pulled on the ring in his nose in thought.

“Megaera? I haven’t seen her since time was young.”

“Lucky you,” she snarked.

“If you’re trapped in here, though,” I began, “you probably wouldn’t. Right?” I felt weird standing when they were sitting, so I moved down to the ground too. Bracken and Coco followed suit.

When he didn’t answer right away, in my head I went over the question I’d just asked, worried it had come out rude.

“I hear things,” he said, not sounding the least bit offended. If anything, he seemed quite pleased to have visitors. “I didn’t know who you were, but I’ve been listening to you four drag your feet through the tunnels for hours.”

Stheno laughed. There was a strange hissing noise under the laughter I hadn’t heard before. Her glamour must have included an auditory mask as well. “Did you know Scylla and Charybdis were down here?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “Where?”

Stheno explained what had happened. As Bracken and Coco looked lost, I waited for one to say something to me so I could translate the conversation. Once she’d finished relating our latest adventures, they moved on to sharing gossip about the people they knew. I stopped translating, as it seemed like none of our business.