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A phoenix,said Nero.

The girl with the gun threw it down. Then she touched her hand to the phoenix girl’s chest—and transformed into her.

A changeling,Nero said.

The real phoenix picked up the gun and shot the girl who’d stolen her face. The changeling must have succeeded in mimicking her powers because after a few moments of being dead, she too rose from the ground.

There were others training on that sports field: mermaids and genies, phantoms and unicorns. On the sidelines, a few elves were crafting magical artifacts.

Grace watched them all for a few minutes, then she turned and went back through the invisible magic mirror.

Back on her own world, she ran out of the jungle. She rushed into a palatial house with white walls that sparkled like diamonds and tall towers that looked like they’d come out of a fairytale. The young demon’s castle even had a moat, where tamed miniature sea dragons splashed in crystal waters.

Grace didn’t stop running until she found her sisters in a grand ballroom with marble floors and high walls accented with real gold. Her identical twin Ava was dismembering animated suits of armor, while a teenage Sonja battled a giant she must have assembled from numerous large statues. Its horselike head nearly scraped the domed ceiling.

“Ava, Sonja,” Grace said breathlessly. “I have discovered something incredible.”

Then she told them all about it.

“An unexplored world, you say? And new kinds of magic?” Sonja hacked off the statue giant’s legs, and it fell motionless to the floor. “We must check it out. I need a new challenge.”

And so Grace led her sisters back to the jungle, through the invisible magic mirror, and onward to the undiscovered world.

“This is strange magic indeed,” Sonja declared, looking down upon the training field. “And very rare magic where we come from. The Immortals had all of these powers.”

The three demon sisters watched the passive magic students train their magic until Sonja, obviously bored of only watching, got up and marched out of the snowy woods.

“Sonja, where are you going?” Ava asked her.

“To find my next challenge,” Sonja said. “I’m going to challenge one of these peculiar…beings to battle.”

Twenty bucks says the passive magic kids totally kick Sonja’s ass,I said to Nero.

But the three demon sisters never made it to the training arena. Between one step and the next, they were whisked away to…well, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. The sisters appeared to be inside a small log cabin, but all the windows showed in any direction was sky. Lots and lots of open sky. Grace went over to one of the windows to take a peek, and that’s when I saw that they were way up in the clouds. The ground wasn’t even visible from here.

Two youthful women sat on rocking chairs. Their eyes were wise, their hair wild. And their clothes, made from various animal skins, were hand-stitched.

“Where are we?” Grace asked them.

The woman with the crystals growing in her hair said, “This world is called the Sphere, young demon. How did you find your way here?”

“I followed the memories through the magic mirror,” Grace told her.

“Her telepathic powers are strong for a demon,” said the other woman, the one with the silver bracelets.

Crystal looked Grace over. “Yes. They are.”

“You know what we are, but what are you?” Ava asked them. “You aren’t demons or gods.”

“No, we’re not,” Silver chuckled. “We are another kind of deity.”

“There is no other kind of deity. Unless…” Sonja looked them over closely, but she didn’t seem impressed by what she saw in them or their shabby cabin. She shook her head. “No, you’re not them.”

“Who?” Ava asked.

Sonja opened her mouth, but Grace answered first. “Immortals. Sonja doesn’t believe they are Immortals.”

“I’ve told you to stop digging around in my head,” Sonja growled at Grace.