She certainly had been! She hadn't even used any useful fowl words, because she knew he was still technically a juvenile. A real harpy would have delivered a barrage of obscenities that might have represented an intriguing education. She had been teasing him on two levels, as was her delight.

"Get out of here, spook!" he yelled, swinging the stick at her. Naturally it passed right through her torso without resistance. But she obligingly disappeared. What was the point in her remaining, once he had discovered her identity? He was no fun, by her definition, unless she was fooling him in some demonic way.

He turned back to the river. What was the best fish form to assume here, where it was so small? He worried that a minnow might be snapped up by some unseen predator. Of course he would immediately change to some larger form and chomp the predator right back, but still it was an inconvenience. Maybe he could be a small water snake and become a larger one as the river got larger.

"Meow."

Dolph looked. It was a cat, an orange fluff ball, lying on the ground. What was it doing here? Xanth hardly had any straight cats—just odd variants—but Dolph recognized the type because he had seen pictures of the mundane breeds.

Oh—the demoness was still having her sport, trying to see if he could be fooled again. "Quit with the games, Metria," he snapped. "I'm not going to give you the satisfaction."

The cat merely looked at him, not moving. He knew it was the demoness, but somehow he had just a bit of doubt. So he called her bluff by assuming the form of another cat: a big black one. "Say something in cat talk," he meowed, suspecting that she couldn't. He was a Magician, and could speak and understand the language of any form he assumed, but she was a demoness, who merely imitated the forms.

"Something," the cat meowed clearly in cat talk, swishing his cat tail.

That surprised Dolph. But it occurred to him that Metria might have learned just a few feline terms to fool him. Maybe she had just imitated his last word. Well, he would require the cat to say something that wasn't that.

"What is your name?"

"Sammy."

Dolph was impressed. But still, he had asked an obvious question, so it could still be the demoness, bluffing. "Where are you from?"

"Home."

"You aren't much for dialogue, are you!"

Sammy merely shrugged, hardly moving.

"Why are you here?"

"Help."

"You're here to help me?"

"No."

"You want my help?"

"Yes." It seemed that the laconic animal refused to expend any more than the minimum energy on anything. This was not Metria's way. Dolph was becoming convinced that Sammy was real. But that only made a new mystery.

"Well, I have to go help someone else right now, so it will have to wait."