She did not answer him. She would not bother to repeat the obvious, that he did not have his brother’s degree of power.

Then it hit him. “Wait a minute. What doctors? What painkillers? This is all your crafting, not reality!”

“Ah,” she said, shifting her feet to one side with a graceful lean and twist, her face and poise showing both amusement and gentle mockery, “you admit that you were beginning to forget what is real?”

He took her cue and settled himself on the hard ground before he answered. “It’s a very big labyrinth, as you said. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a bit of reality leaking in. Is it true, my Lady, that out of all of us, you are the only one who can see the parallel lines?”

She leaned forward and traced a net crisscross in the dust. “Lines? Or orphaned threads, cut and trailing from the main fabric?”

The Trickster shook his head, disbelieving. “Who has the power to cut a thread?”

“We do, when we travel in unexpected places.” She slashed a hand across her net, cutting not mere threads but the knots where warp and weft combined. “I will help you.”

The last was said abruptly. The Trickster blinked, wondering what he had missed.

She clarified. “I’ll help you catch the murderer. Miranda cannot find him, not in a labyrinth that is, for the most part, not real.”

“And once we have him, then what?” he asked eagerly. “Do we crush the amulet, yank the binding cord, and reel in the undying on the other end?”

“You will not. That one would destroy you, as he almost did before you called my name. Chance can deal with him. It was very good, what you did for your brother. It may make all the difference.”

She leaned forward and touched a hand to his cheek. Substance and strength flowed to him from that contact, restoring a little of what he had given away, but she drew back too quickly, leaving him once more blinking in confusion.

“Go back to Miranda before she begins to think you were only a dream.”

He turned to the labyrinth, randomly chose a nearby loop in the path, and stepped in.

—

Miranda had walked far ahead. Within the labyrinth, as expected, medical staff weaned her off the painkillers, and her thinking sharpened until she began to doubt, then deny. She made herself forget seeing the Trickster, imagined that the entire mad encounter with angels and undying ones and murder victims had been some kind of hallucination induced by the blow to her head, the stress of the accident, and the cocktail of narcotics she’d been given. Certainly it must have been a coping mechanism dreamed up by her brain to deal with the mental trauma of an upsetting case followed immediately by the physical trauma of a near-fatal accident. There was enough to worry about without adding insanity to her troubles.