“I’m all right. I’m okay.”

“Take a hit.” Riley pushed the glass back in her hand. “I saved it when it started to tip out of your hand.”

Sasha shook her head, let out a breath. “Give me a second.”

“The water’s too hot, and you’re pale. Come, cool off in the pool.”

“Good thinking.” With a nod to Annika, Riley put the glass aside, pulled Sasha to her feet. “Out and in, pal.”

She obeyed, as she did feel too hot, and somehow too . . . loose. The cooler water of the pool helped offset the dizziness so she was able to climb out again on her own.

“Do you remember what you said?” Riley asked her.

“Yes. About a mirror, about the truth in it. I’m not sure what it means.”

“We should go in,” Annika decided. “Out of the sun.”

Yes, Sasha thought. She’d get out of her wet bathing suit, take a moment or two to settle. “One good thing.” She rolled her shoulders before wrapping herself in a towel. “I don’t ache anymore.”

Though she brushed off the offers to help her change, she realized they’d gone straight to Bran when he walked in before she’d buttoned up a dry shirt.

“Let me look at you.”

“I’m all right. They didn’t have to interrupt you for this.”

He simply put his hands on her shoulders, took a long study of her face. “No headache?”

“No. I didn’t try to block it. It comes on in a wave—and it leaves me a little shaky, but it didn’t hurt. You were right about that.”

“Describe what happened.”

“Riley and I were in the hot tub—Annika put your potion in the water. Wonderful, by the way. I was relaxed, and we were just talking about . . .” She adjusted here. She certainly wasn’t going to bring up Riley’s suggestion he’d come live with her in North Carolina.

“Talking about what?”

“How I knew myself better since all this started, and knew what it was to be part of something. Then it was that wave again. It’s like being pulled by an undertow. But this time, I tried to go with it instead of fighting to stay up.”

“What did you see?”

“I—” She broke off at the knock on her door.

“Are you okay in there?” Sawyer called out.

“Yes. I’m coming down. I need to organize my thoughts,” she said to Bran.

“All right.” He ran his hand over her damp hair. “We’ll go down.”

They’d already gathered on the terrace, so she sat, took a breath. “I’m sorry because I don’t really understand what I meant, what I saw. It might have been a room, it might have been a cave. Everything was gold and silver and shining. Like a really elegant house of mirrors. It was like I was standing there in it, but I couldn’t see myself. Then I picked up a mirror—but it wasn’t my hand. I think it was hers. Nerezza. She picked up this jeweled mirror, but when she looked in it, what looked back was not just old. Ancient. Gray and withered. Sunken eyes, thin gray hair. Hardly more than a skull. Nothing else reflected. The glass around that image was pure black.

“The glass shattered, and that face was in all the shards, hundreds of shards. And the shards went to smoke, and it all went dark.”

“You said the mirror sees the truth,” Riley reminded her.

“I know.”

“An allegory?” Sawyer suggested. “She’s ancient, being a god—but the mirror sees her soul or heart or whatever you want to call it as withered and dark?”

“We don’t need a seer to know that,” Doyle pointed out. “Maybe she’s got a Dorian Gray thing going.”

Struck, Riley pointed a finger at him. “And the mirror reflects what she really is. It ages, shows her sins and all that while she stays young and beautiful.”

“It’s a theory.”

“A good one. If there actually is a mirror, and we destroyed it—there lies her end.”

“I don’t know. What I saw . . . She destroyed the mirror. She’d hardly end herself.”

“Another mirror, another glass,” Bran suggested.

“I’ll do some digging on it.” Riley picked up her margarita again. “You said only the stars could change it. We can speculate that’s another reason she wants them so bad. There’s a way to end her—not just stop her, but end her. And if she gets the stars, the way’s done.”

“I’ll do some checking on mirror spells,” Bran added. “The stars remain first priority. Have you two chosen where we dive tomorrow?”

Doyle nodded. “We mapped out routes to three caves. We should be able to do all three, but we can hit two for certain. You’ll want to get a meal in before sunset,” he said to Riley, “so—”

“Before we get into that,” Sawyer interrupted. “And whatever else is on today’s agenda, I’ve got something I need to explain. I needed to talk to my family first. My grandfather especially.”

“Regarding the compass,” Bran said.

“Yeah, that. There’s a little more to it.” He took it out of his pocket. “Using it with a map can show you where you should go, for what you need or want. But it can do more than show you. Even without a map.”

“Like what?” Riley demanded.

“Well. Like this.” Sawyer held the compass out in his palm.

And vanished.

“What the holy fuck!”

As Riley swore, Annika jumped to her feet. “Where did he go? Where is he?”

“Up here.” Sawyer called from the terrace, waved. Then vanished only to reappear in his seat at the table.

“You’re a magician, too!”

“No. It’s the compass,” he told Annika. “It’s linked to me, yeah, but it’s the compass. I just gave it where I wanted to go—an easy one—to the terrace up there, and back here.”

“That’s more than a little.” Doyle held out a hand, examined the compass when Sawyer gave it to him. “How is it linked to you?”

“Whoever holds it can pass it to another. Not like I just did to you. It’s a formal deal. It’s mine until I pass it to the next. Traditionally a son or daughter.”

“You really save on airfare,” Riley commented.

“Ha. Yeah, it’s handy there. There’s actually a little more.” He took it back from Doyle, turned it over, ran his finger around the circumference.

A second lid opened to reveal a clockface.

“Man! You are not going to tell me it’s like a time machine.”

Sawyer gave Riley a weak smile. “Sort of.”

She leaped up, did a dance. “Oh, my Jesus, the places I could go, see. Mayans, Aztecs, Celts. The land bridge, the freaking pyramids. Where— When have you been?”

“Not that far back. Look, you’ve got to take a lot of care when you use it to time or place shift. A lot of care. Say you get an urge to watch the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. First, you’re dressed all wrong, and somebody’s going to notice. More, what if you drop down in the middle of the road and a wagon runs over you? Or you get hit by a stray bullet? Even if you live through it, you’ve changed something. And that can change something else, so when you come back it’s not exactly the way you left it. Now you’ve got to go back and fix it.”

“Space-time continuum. Got that, but you went there, right? Got a look at the Earps and Doc Holliday.”

“Yeah, and let me say it was fast and ugly—the gunfight. Time shifting’s tricky, and you learn really fast—because you’re taught and trained, but you have to learn by mucking up—not to use it for entertainment.”

“How far?” Doyle asked. “How far back can you go?”

“I don’t know if there’s a limit. I’ve heard stories—I was weaned on them—of people who didn’t come back. The compass always comes back, but some of the ones who held it haven’t. Because maybe they went too far, or they ended up miscalculating time or place just enough to end up in the ocean or in the middle of a battlefield, an earthquake.”

“And forward?” Bran asked him. “Is that part of it?”

“Even trickier. You want to see how things are going a hundred years from now? What if eighty years from now things went really bad? You figure to hit in Times Square, but instead there’s nothing. Or you drop down in the middle of a war, a plague. Even something as basic as that forest meadow is now a five-lane superhighway and you’re pancaked. You can calculate pretty well going back, but forward? You can’t calculate what hasn’t happened.”