I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. I wanted to snap off her horns and punch her face into a red pulp like I'd done to that vampire. It was all such a tangle of shock, hurt, and rage inside me that my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and I said nothing. My card. She wants my card. Again.

"Fight past all that useless human emotion and think," Mother said, sinking into an ornate couch in what I assumed were the quarters she'd claimed. The rooms were beyond opulent, and their location, directly off the grand staircase in close proximity to the throne room, made me suspect that they either belonged to Hestorus or the Queen. Half a second's thought told me which. Of course my mother would move into the Queen's quarters. It was the position she'd wanted all those years before, and in a way, now she had it. She jabbed a finger at me. "How else am I ever going to know what's special about you if I can't observe you after losing your soul card? Yes, yes, it's very impressive that you've cobbled together a new one, I'm very proud and all that. But I need to see what happens when your card is taken. If there's something unique to you, I should be able to see it very quickly."

"Should have kept me around the first time," I mumbled, feeling dazed by my own anger.

She barked a rueful laugh. "Tell me something I haven't already thought a thousand times."

I rallied, pulling my thoughts together. "Why would I ever –"

"Because I'll let you see your old card," she interrupted.

That stopped me cold. "What?"

"I can't let you try to put it back in your soul – that'd ruin the whole experiment – but I can let you put it in your Mind Home. Summon him. Talk to him." She gave me a breezy little smile. "I think you'll find you two have a lot in common."

It was as if some old wound tore open inside me. "You bitch," I whispered. "You can't do this."

"Obviously I can, and I am," she said, unbothered. "Let's set some ground rules. I won't let you die. Call me sentimental, but I like having you around. Or, if that rings false to you, let's remember that when you die I stop finding out new and interesting things."

"What's to say I won't die immediately?" I asked, my voice thick. "I saw Gale after you… had your way with him, and he looked like he'd been in a sickbed for a month."

"Even your general what's-his-name lasted more than a week," she said dismissively, "and he was old. It might feel like you're going to die, but you won't. Not for a while, and I'm hoping not at all. I've tracked the decay extensively in others, but I need to see if and how it's different in you."

Can I trust her? What a stupid question. I knew I couldn't. But the thought of seeing my old card, of holding it, of interacting with it, pulled at me every bit as strongly as Xemris had, if in a totally different way. Would she really keep me from dying? That felt like a solid maybe, which was not a word I liked in the slightest when it came to my survival. But… "You have to give me the card," I blurted before I even thought it through. "To keep."

"Hmm," she said, considering. "That's a tough one; he's a good card. I'd hate to lose him." She lifted a finger. "Given or not, I won't allow you to put him into your soul once your new card is gone. Being cardless is the whole point. While I'm fascinated to find out what might happen if you tried it, that curiosity must wait its turn. In fact, I think I'd best hold onto the card except for a limited time each day. I check your wellness, have you do some simple tasks and exercises, and then once I'm done you get, say, an hour to summon him."

It was ridiculous. No was the only reasonable answer. "You return my new card in two days."

"A week," she countered.

"Four days," I shot back. "By then you'll know whether I'm sickening or not." I had no idea if that was true, but it sounded good.

"Five," she said. "And then you get them both for good."

Reason and desire warred within me, each advocating very different courses of action. "Why are you doing this?" I asked, throwing myself into a chair soft enough to be a bed. "Why do you do the worst thing in every possible situation?"

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"A lady's got to keep her best interests in mind if she doesn't want to get trampled," she said, shrugging. "And if you stop to be brutally honest with yourself about it – always something I will encourage – there's lots of worse things I could have done to you at nearly every step. Look at you. Stop moaning about your poor, sad life and look. You're strong. You're healthy. You've got one of the best decks in the city, and even at Uncommon you've got Mythics taking notice of you and stepping carefully. I must have done something right with you."

My fists clenched. The idea that she took even a shred of responsibility for my success made me want to tear her face off. But that was all just a distraction from the real problem of the moment: was I going to make the deal? "How can I know you won't betray me again?" The words burned in my throat as I said them. For all that I'd turned my back on my mother and tried to make a clean break, here I was again, still hurting, still waiting for an apology I'd never receive.

"A good question," she admitted. "You can trust me to be self-interested. I want to study you, and I'm willing to give quite a lot to achieve that. I have less than zero long-term use for your piddling Uncommon card, and as much as I'll miss my little boy, I mostly took him to counter your father's damage-reflect ability, and that particular ship has sailed. Giving him back to you puts me in your good graces, and I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to want that particular resource in the years to come. This is a good deal for me."

"Good graces," I sneered. She was making sense, but was it all a smokescreen for her true intentions? I would never know. Her mention of my father sparked a thought, though. "His card isn't breaking down like it's supposed to, is it?"

Her grimace – flickering like lightning across her face and then gone – was answer enough. "Let's keep to the point. Do we have an agreement?"

I scrubbed my face with my hands. "Twins help me. Yes."

"Oh good," she chirped, leaping to her feet. "Hold still." She crossed the space between us in two steps and laid one hand on my chest.

My heart thudded painfully. "Wait–" I said.

She didn't.

A tearing deep inside me wrenched a scream from my lips. It was as if she'd reached in and wedged her fingers into my heart muscle, ripping it in half with bare hands. I couldn't breathe. My eyes felt like they were bulging out of my face, and I stared wild-eyed at my chest, expecting to see a gaping, bloody hole. Nothing. Just her sharp-nailed hand resting over my shirt. The tearing deepened, worsened, and I heard my scream rise into a shrill, panicked shriek. If I'd felt this pain in an arm, I'd expect to look over and see it torn free, a bloody stump of bone the only thing left. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. Then it got worse again, and my vision went black. I swam in a sea of pain, not sure if I was still screaming. What have I done? She's killing me. All that talk was just to get my guard down. Shit, I'm not ready to die!

When I could see again, I was stretched out flat on the floor atop a furred rug. Mother sat in the chair where I'd been, staring at me with clinical curiosity, my card between her fingers.

I reached for it unthinkingly, and she twitched it away from me. My hand was trembling and quickly fell back to the floor.

"Everyone does that," she assured me. "How do you feel?"

A part of me wanted to howl in laughter at the question, but nothing passed my lips. I felt… dead. Weak as a kitten, aching all over, and numb in my soul as if someone had used a burning poker and cauterized the spot where my heart used to be. I was dead even though I was still breathing. "Your ability… is evil," I murmured. I should have shouted it at her, raged about it, but I couldn't muster the emotion.

"Also a common reaction," she said, waving it away. She leaned forward and used a thumb to push back my eyelids, peering with interest at the hidden whites. Then she laid her fingers against my throat, feeling the beat of my heart. "Good physical response," she noted. "And your emotions?"

I was a wasteland inside, a barren expanse of cracked earth and bleached bones. I opened my mouth to pour forth all the bleakness I felt, to tell her to do me the favor of a knife in my heart… but then my eyes fell again on my stolen card – my second stolen card – held up and away where I couldn't reach it. From there my gaze traveled back to her face. That look of detached interest set the dry lands of my soul rumbling, and the cracks deepened, showing the dull red of a fire deep beneath. I still had one thing left. I still had hate. Instinctively I reached for my Nether Sources, and instead of the usual seven, I counted eight. This was how I had so much Nether. It was because of her.

"I'm going to kill you," I said, voice gravelly from all my screaming. "I swear it by the Twins. I swear it by everything."

An eyebrow quirked. "Interesting. There's no numbness? A desire to die?"

I climbed to my feet, ignoring my body's painful protests and hiding how much it cost me. "Give me the fucking card, woman, and leave me alone."

She pouted, but I could tell her heart wasn't in it. She was so excited by this little project of hers that she didn't even complain. "We'll spend more time exploring what's happening to you once the loss settles in. No point in getting ahead of ourselves. Stafford will be expecting you at his little fete soon anyway. Regardless," she said with a genuine smile, "a deal's a deal." She reached into her pouch and held something out to me.

"Hull, allow me to introduce you to… Hull."

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