“Really, you’ve been working too hard,” he murmured sweetly into Julian’s ear. “The mind plays such tricks. As soon as this is over, you owe yourself a vacation.” Julian nodded to himself. He deserved a vacation as a reward for not going mad when the rest of the world was clearly already in the asylum.

“How did you manage to get yourself into this?” the Trickster wondered. Julian sighed. He’d had it so good. Paid to do nothing but show up and smile. But then he’d started believing in the part he was playing. Naturally writers have odd research interests, and a serial murderer preying on the overlooked underclass of the City made for an excellent topic. No one would guess how close he had been to the action. He could put it out under another name, his own work this time . . . though he’d be unable to claim it. He chuckled at the intricate irony of the layered deception.

“Who are you?” a voice whispered in his head. Existential musings: proof of his growing insanity. An actor, a masked man, a hand puppet. That’s what he’d always been. He did it very well, and in his earlier years a change of location had always solved his problems whenever he had made a mistake. Unless he was in a city. There was never any need to run from a city. Cities were full of stress and haste, a beautiful blurring cocktail of humanity and heat that made it easy to dip in and out of the fractured viewpoint of a hundred thousand heads. You could be many people in the City, and no one would notice.

“Why Miranda?” It was a mere breath, a tiny tickle from the remnants of his sense of decency. He pushed it away. No regrets. Miranda Ecouvo had researched Walther Grey, and that meant she was close to finding out some uncomfortable truths about him. Besides, there had to be one more death, and now Grey was in jail. That meant he had to do it.

“No, really, why Miranda?”

His thoughts choked off in confusion. He frowned at himself. He shook his head. He had a good reason. Wasn’t she already doomed, a crippling accident waiting in her future? It was meant to be a mercy, better than leaving her to suffer. A quick death. That’s what he’d want if he were in a wheelchair and in constant pain, if he ever had the choice.

No. Not true. He didn’t want death at all.

I’m not a superstitious man, he told himself. I don’t need rituals and trinkets. Part of him thought that to kill Miranda would be best for her comfort and his, but another part said that this was an act of pure intent, that last bit of ritual needed to blur the boundary between living and undying.

Someone tut-tutted at him. “Tricksters should never trick themselves.”