Sloane was moving, now without meaning to, toward the double doors across the room. Her body was burning, and as she drew closer, she smelled something sulfurous and chemical and familiar. Her hands had smelled that way after she did magic. With the artifact. The Needle of Koschei. She hadn’t known when she went with a crew of ARIS agents to the middle of the Pacific Ocean how much the Needle would cost her. In the end, she had been so desperate to get rid of it that she had chewed it out of her own hand.
