The Needle pieces hummed in her hands, reacting to Nero or Mox or perhaps both. She felt as she had once, growing up, when her fingertip slipped into the socket of a Christmas light as she clipped the strand to the tree—the energy traveling through her entire body, unpleasant but as benign as an electric shock could be.
“What’s going on, Nero?” Matt said, stepping forward. His tone was one of forced calm, an act that Nero surely wouldn’t believe.
Nero looked at Matt with only vague familiarity, as if he had seen him once but couldn’t recall where. Sloane took advantage of his silence.
“Mox.” Her tone was pleading, even though she hadn’t meant it to be. Mox was bent over a little, clutching his side. “Are you hurt?”
“No. Just—uncomfortable.”
“Mox?” Nero looked almost fondly at him. “Oh, I see. Micah Oliver Kent Shepherd. M-O-K-S. It suits you better than Chosen One.”
Sloane spared a thought for the name Micah, best left behind, a name for a normal boy and not the man marred by magic who stood across from her, sweaty and hunched, unused to the draining of his power.
“Chosen One?” Matt said, wide-eyed, to Mox.
“The first,” Mox replied, terse. “You—whichever one of you it is—would be the fifth.”
“But . . . you killed the others?” Matt didn’t sound accusatory, just confused. “Why?”
“I didn’t know what they were,” Mox said. “And I didn’t want to die.”
Matt gave Mox a sympathetic look with just a hint of condescension. Sloane felt the familiar, almost comforting urge to smack him.
Nero waved, humming. His voice was reedy, not rich like Mox’s. A natural tenor. But the note was steady. Mox flinched again, and Matt screamed as his siphon crumpled into his hand, the metal plates crushed into his flesh. Blood ran down his fingers and dripped on the concrete. Esther’s siphon, too, pulled taut around her throat, and she choked, clawing at the chain that held it in place at the back of her neck. She managed to break it, and the siphon clattered to the ground, out of her reach.
Ziva’s mouth siphon was last; it wrenched free of her face, a chunk of rotting flesh coming away with it. The hole in her jaw was even larger now, showing more of her gritted teeth.
“Sloane,” Nero said, “if you would please put the pieces of that Needle back together?”
He sounded almost . . . tired. The rich sunlight glowed through his fine hair, making it look like golden thread.
“No,” Sloane replied automatically. She thought about hurling one of the two fragments into the river. But she wasn’t sure she would be able to release it. That charge still hummed through both pieces, and though she couldn’t say why, she felt certain that if she opened her fists and tried to tip the Needle’s pieces out of her hands, they would stay put as if magnetized.
“You are needlessly defiant,” Nero said to her, flicking a lock of hair away from his forehead. “I will not ask politely again.”
“I don’t have many rules to live by,” Sloane said, “but ‘When a murderous psychopath tells you to do something, don’t do it’ is absolutely one of them.”
“Fine,” Nero said, and he whistled, light and high as a finch song.
Mox drew up straight again, and Sloane could see the strain in his face, in his entire body.
Both pieces of Needle started wriggling in Sloane’s hands, their sharp ends jabbing her as they fought to escape her grasp. She struggled to keep hold of them, but when one of them plunged deep into her fingertip, she yelled and shook out her hand, and suddenly the two pieces were hovering in the air in front of her face.
But she still felt them, burning, buzzing, stinging. Felt the acid of them in her veins. They wanted to be hers, not his. And all she had to do was want them.
Go on, then, she thought, and she turned her palms over, as if beckoning them.
There was a sharp and horrible pain in both of her hands as the two pieces burrowed into her, one half into each hand, into her index fingers, so her nails separated from her skin. The pieces worked their way down her hands, and she could see them moving, like worms wriggling beneath soft earth. With horror, she watched as the skin on the back of her scarred hand lifted away to accommodate the foreign but familiar object.