According to the official Ouroboros Corporation website, there were thirteen board members, but their bios didn’t tell me anything beyond their names, ages, and experiences in medicine, science, and the corporate world. Nothing overtly helpful, like addresses, or even a general location or neighborhood. I could run a separate search for each of them and see what popped up, but once I started down that very specific and targeted path, it was more and more likely that my search would ping some cyber watchdog programmed to keep an eye out for someone searching for such specific Ouroboros-related information. I told them I’d come after them, right after I burned one of their scientists to death with only the power of my sheut, and I had no doubt that they’d be on the lookout for me, in real life and online.

I decided to hold off on cyber-stalking for a minute or two while I consulted the cards. I shrugged my backpack off and unzipped it, fishing out the velvet drawstring bag containing my tarot deck, then set both bags on the floor while I started shuffling the cards. After three shuffles, I pulled a card and placed it on the desk beside the computer’s mouse.

Queen of Swords, reversed. The image on the card looked much as I’d drawn it a few years ago, with a slender woman sketched in black and gray standing beside a massive claymore, the sword’s nose in the ground and the woman’s fingers wrapped around its hilt. But the image wasn’t exactly as I’d drawn it. Because I’d created this deck with ink and paint, and because the innate magic granted to me through my sheut could give the things I drew a life of their own, their images and general design shifted with the tide of my mood, not to mention with the greater movement of events around me. It made this particular deck of tarot cards incredibly insightful.

Last week, when several dozen kids went missing, abducted by Ouroboros, the children had been incorporated into the cards. Now, the children were gone from the imagery, but the tail-eating snake, the symbol for which Ouroboros was named, was still there. On the Queen of Swords, it was a small, golden circlet, resting on the queen’s head like a crown.

Generally, this card represents intelligence and quick thinking, suggesting a calculated, independent intellect completely devoid of emotion. But reversed, the Queen of Swords represents quite the opposite—emotional investment that clouds decision making, relying too much on the heart and not enough on the mind.

I picked up the card, flipping it over to get a good look at the queen’s face. She appeared middle-aged and stern. And somehow familiar. I held the card up to the computer screen and opened the page containing the board members and their bios.

And there she was at the top of the list—Constance Ward, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the Ouroboros Corporation. Her showing up on this card definitely wasn’t a coincidence. It was a message from the universe. It had to be. Now, I knew exactly who to target—the head of the snake.