Niko was shaking so hard that it took him two attempts to take his key from Chance’s fingers and many more tries to get it into the lock of the shackle. Chance leaned over the side of the boat and rinsed the stickiness from his hand, taking his time until he heard the shackle click open. Niko dived over the opposite side in haste. Chance paused to pick up the bloodstained key, glanced once at the shackle, and skimmed the key far away into deep ocean, out of temptation’s reach.

He looked toward the beach again and made an effort to calm himself. The Trickster veneer had cracked and strained in the heat of his frustration, but with a few deep breaths it cooled, coalesced, and once more encompassed him smoothly. He could have walked on water—it was his labyrinth, after all—but he dived fully into the waves and made himself struggle the last few meters like any other human.

At last he grasped the sand with fingers and toes; at last he stood slowly while his guides looked back at him, some fearful, some only curious, and the Mermaid, as always, judging his very presence with her steady gaze.

“We’re all here,” Xandre prompted, impatient.

“Now what?” asked Galina, as anxious as any actor with a changing script.

Chance shook his head, sending saltwater droplets flying, and carefully wiped his eyes and brow with his fingertips. He was so deep within himself that he could be excused for being oblivious to the rest of existence, but from the moment he had read the files in Miranda’s briefcase, he had kept his fingers on certain threads, waiting for the signal that their weaving was finished and their patterning done. One key thread remained, and it was no accident that his coming to the center of his labyrinth should coincide with that thread’s completion.

“Now we wait for the last guide, the man who really caused your deaths.”

He did not tell them that it was a statement of hope, not fact.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Now go do what you have to do,” said the Trickster sadly.

Julian stood still for a moment. There was no more room for self-deception now, not with the humming and tugging of undying essence coiling around his wrists and hands and fingers. He turned in the direction he was to go and walked until the hard surface of the driveway became the fine, ankle-turning sand of the desert. He cringed under a bright sky, suddenly naked and exposed.

“I didn’t hurt her—I never touched her,” he babbled, keeping his head down and hands raised protectively.