Sloane saw something unsteady in him that she hadn’t seen when she knew him only as Mox. A kind of agitation that would have been frightening if she had not known it so well herself. He was afraid, and for him—for both of them—fear was always anger and demand.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t ask you for your name. I asked you who you are. Are you the Dark One? In some kind of disguise?”
“The what?” Mox said, and his confusion didn’t clear up anything. Sloane was trying to keep her breaths steady, but they kept coming out in little bursts. She didn’t know. She didn’t know if she was standing across from the Dark One or someone just as bad. A murderer, a psychopath, an evil sorcerer—she had no idea what Mox was.
“I had an enemy,” she said. “I thought I killed him, but he came here instead. And I want to know—I need to know if you’re him.”
“If I tell you that I’m not,” he said, “you won’t believe me. And I’m not giving you anything else until you make good on our trade.”
She had trusted her gut before. When she had just gone through puberty and her body had taken a new shape, she had known when there were eyes on her, when a man’s kindness was a threat. When Katy McKinney had offered her a red cup of something at the one party she had gone to before leaving town, she had known not to drink it because there was spit in it. And at the end of the struggle with the Dark One, she had known to use the Dark One’s interest in her against him.
I would know, she thought. I would know if I was standing in front of the Dark One. I would feel it.
“They’re coming for you. Nero and my friends,” she said. “I was supposed to lure you out to Congress Parkway. I came here instead.”
His eyes widened. “Nero? He’s with them? You’re sure?”
“Um, yes?”
He grabbed the siphon he had set on the desk and pressed it roughly to his face, covering his nose and mouth. Then he bent over to pick up the wrist siphons Sloane had let fall to the floor.
“Hey! We are not done with this conversation!”
Mox looked up at her from where he was crouched, reattaching one of his wrist siphons. He whistled and waved a bare hand at her, and the knife crumbled in her hands like a snowball. The pieces scattered on the worn carpeting.
“Fuck!” Sloane snapped. “Really?”
“We can continue this discussion,” he said, voice tinny again. “But I can’t let Nero get anywhere near this building while I’m still in it.”
“What?” She thought of Nero’s workshop, packed with books, and of his floppy blond hair. He must be highly skilled with magic or he wouldn’t have been able to orchestrate their summoning from another universe. But he didn’t seem nearly as threatening as the Resurrectionist.
Mox stood and attached the eye siphons, transforming again into the creature he had been. “I will tell you,” he said, offering her a metal-plated hand. “But you’ll have to come with me.”
And though Sloane knew it was madness to choose this man, this masked murderer who kept company with the dead, over Matt and Esther—over Nero and Aelia, even—she also knew that it was already decided and had been since she broke into this building.
She put her hand in his. If she died because of this, well, at least it was a death she chose.
31
MOX LED HER down the hall with the checkerboard-tile floor and the tall, boarded windows she had seen when she had first regained consciousness. It was as crowded with soldiers now as it had been then. They walked past a group of them crouched around a few scattered dice and a pair stitching each other’s fingers back on with a needle and thread.
The woman with the hole in her jaw marched toward them. Her stringy hair was in two braids now, a girlish style that was at odds with her discolored skin. She stared at Sloane. “Sir,” the woman said, “what—”
“She came to warn us,” Mox interrupted. “We need to leave. Get everyone up and to the safe house.”
The woman leaned in closer to Sloane, her teeth clicking together as she clenched her jaw. Sloane watched her tongue work behind them before she spoke in the same raspy, strained voice Sloane remembered. “Are you sure she’s not setting a trap?”