Greece, 7382 BCE

Acheron felt a presence behind him. He spun around, staff ready to strike, expecting it to be another Daimon attacking him.

It wasn’t.

Instead, he found Simi hanging upside down in a tree, her long, burgundy bat-like wings folded in against her child-like body. She wore a loose black chiton and himation that rippled gently with the night’s breeze. Her blood red eyes glowed eerily in the darkness while her long black braid dangled from her head, down to the ground.

Acheron relaxed and set one end of his staff against the damp grass as he watched her.

“Where have you been, Simi?” he asked sharply. He’d been calling for the Charonte demon for the last half an hour.

“Oh just hanging about, akri,” she said, smiling as she swung herself back and forth on the limb. “Did akri miss me?”

Acheron sighed. He liked Simi a great deal, but he wished he had a mature demon as his companion. Not one that even at three thousand years old functioned on the level of a five year old child.

It would be centuries before Simi was fully grown.

“Did you deliver my message?” he asked.

“Yes, akri,” she said, using the Atlantean term for ‘my lord and master.’ “I delivered it just as you said, akri.”

The skin on the back of Acheron’s neck crawled. There was something in her tone that concerned him. “What did you do, Simi?”

“The Simi did nothing, akri. But…”

He waited as she looked about nervously.

“But?” he prompted.

“The Simi was hungry on her way back.”

He went cold with dread. “Who did you eat this time?”

“It wasn’t a who, akri. It was something that had hornies on its head like me. There were a bunch of them actually. All of them had hornies and they made a strange moo moo sound.”