After a man is stabbed in the back and dies, he wakes up in the Labyrinth with a new body, new power, and another chance.

This story takes place in the same universe as my story Invoker.

After a man is stabbed in the back and dies, he wakes up in the Labyrinth with a new body, new power, and another chance.

This story takes place in the same universe as my story Invoker.

Chapter 1

They say that you can’t choose your parents, and I for one, can heartily agree with that. My own parents, Duke and Daisy Smithers, should have had a better upbringing if there had been any justice in the world. Their own two sets of parents were aging hippies, living in a commune and growing odd plants.

I’m not saying that they were bad people on the few times I had met them, merely spaced out for most of the time. I’m still not sure if my parents had actually married, but the five of us children all bore the surname of Smithers.

Torn from his own world and stuffed into the body of a villainess, facing the end of a doomed route he himself wrote, "Amelia" must navigate a world she really should know - too bad she was never great at worldbuilding.

Stuck in a world she (maybe) created, Amelia quickly finds that reality has filled in the details she failed to describe. The characters who were so flat when she wrote them now have nuance, and motives. The kingdom she wrote into existence is experiencing internal strife she never even thought about. And let's not even get into the complexities of the magic system, or the demon that forced her into this situation to begin with...

Oh, and then there's the fact that she's about to be arrested and executed... but surely she can come up with a way to write herself out of that, right?

...Right?

Keith and I had decided we were going to try to go together into what would be my eighth life and his second. But deciding on another world to make was harder than we thought.

Marcus calls at eight-fifteen — school run done, twenty minutes before he has to be anywhere.

"Wolves lost," he says, before I've finished saying hello.

"I saw."

"You didn't see. You checked the score at midnight and felt nothing."

"I felt something."

"You felt data. It's different." A car door, keys, the acoustics of his kitchen — I know it well enough to place it. "They're going to finish mid-table again. I've made peace with it. Have you made peace with it?"

"I've never not been at peace with it."

CHAPTER 6
That day was one for bimbling. Sunscreen slathered, floaty dresses and floppy hats donned, or shorts and T-shirt in Lil’s case, and it was a slow amble past a wide variety of shops and tourist traps, with the occasional pause for ice cream, or a cold soft drink. We eventually emerged at the seafront, where all the usual sorts of souvenir cabins and eateries lined one side of a broad footpath, the other dropping onto a sort of beach.

After a man is stabbed in the back and dies, he wakes up in the Labyrinth with a new body, new power, and another chance.

This story takes place in the same universe as my story Invoker.

The following morning my mother first picked up the Twins and all our schoolbags from Niamh’s house, then on to Ciara’s. Ciara squeezed in the back while her mother sat in the front passenger seat. As we were about to pull off, Aoife remarked that Ciara didn’t have a seat belt on; there were only three belts in the back of the car. Saoirse unclipped herself from the middle seat belt, yielding it to Ciara, unclipped my belt, snuggled in beside me, and clipped us both into the one belt.

“Sorted!” she announced and my mother pulled off again.

Chapter 2

On Saturday morning, I drove Belinda to her home, about two hours north, where we picked up her guitar, and had lunch with her parents. They were happy that she had found someone to share her first week. We were able to tell them that we would be sharing the next two weeks, as we were helping two other guides, in separate coaches, but following the same general route from London to Rome, where we would be flown back for a week off before our next trip.