“I didn’t see everything. We need your full memory of the event, not my fractured retelling of it. Besides”—he looked at Miranda, and his features softened for the first time—“besides, it will give me a moment to get acquainted with this lovely lady.”

Miranda looked startled. Chance raised his eyes heavenward. “Very well, I’ll walk the labyrinth. Don’t say anything you shouldn’t, and don’t shock her. I’m responsible for her here, and Uriel will also be watching you.”

“I’m not worried about Uriel,” said the Trickster, but the way his voice hushed when he spoke the name betrayed him.

“I feel as if I know you too,” said Miranda in a soft, uncertain tone.

“You certainly will.” The Trickster grinned, recovering full irreverence.

Chance frowned, too preoccupied to rebuke his brother. “Can we hurry up and get this out of the way? I’m dying of curiosity, metaphorically speaking.”

There was a moment, just a mere second, when it looked as if a flash of satisfaction crossed Miranda’s face to see him standing on the first few bricks of the labyrinth. He couldn’t blame her, but at the same time, she had no idea what this was like for a being like him. It was akin to a memory of dying, of stagnation. It was taking a fair bit of his courage to walk smoothly ahead with an apparent lack of concern. He tried to motivate himself. He was only going where he had already gone before. There was nothing to fret about; this was simply an exercise in traveling the same thread twice.

And what happens when all the threads of the tapestry have been traveled? Do you then go over them again and again in an attempt to relive the best parts? Because nothing will be like that first experience. Nothing.

Chance walked on.

CHAPTER SIX

His emotions were layered in this strange state. At one level there was the sulky, smoldering anger of a person forced to perform an unwanted duty; at another level there was a lighter, somewhat sorrowful acceptance born of the wisdom of hindsight. He whirled into a darkness of night and close walls and low ceilings, hovered and sat cross-legged with remembered elegance, then raised his head to see who had been so foolhardy as to summon him.

Two boys crouched before him around a low, fat candle with a sheltered flame, their poses suggesting that they had not yet decided whether to stay or flee. The smaller, younger boy, barely recognizable in the shadows, was Lukas, and Chance suspected that the other boy bore a name that would soon feature in a pathologist’s report. He froze them in place with a glare.

“You bring me to this miserable hovel. You do not speak the right words or present the required offering. Explain yourselves.”