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reminder of just whose daughter I was. So I opened the darkness in my heart, locked in the middle of the light one, and lifted my lids to reveal a gaze as smoldering and bright as the sun’s flashing core. I let my cheekbones rise to press at my skin, and felt it pull tight across my forehead. I imagined my skull gleaming, almost glowing white against my skin, while the rising pressure and the smoke from my pores brought to life a pounding headache. I ignored that until I knew my dark eyes—the only thing visible beneath my mask—had completed their transition into glowing red coals. When Harrison shuddered involuntarily, violently, I smiled sweetly and let the demonic mask fade.
    Yet he recovered quickly…and came back for more. “That’s just a parlor trick. We’ve no real use for you.”
    “Then why do you want her so badly?” Hunter piped up, arms folded over his chest. His expression was shuttered, like he was observing events that didn’t involve him, but I knew better. Hunter was a tactician and warrior, and wasn’t so much at rest right now as he was coiled and waiting.
    Meanwhile, Felix was finally sitting up, head hanging forward and mouth open, like his power was pouring from his throat.
    “
I
don’t.” Harrison began idly picking through the pastry case, lifting and considering a good half-dozen sweet buns before replacing them, leaving a trail of Vanessa’s blood on each one. He turned his attention back to me. “But your daddy does, and he’s been doing everything in his power to get to you.”
    I thought of what I knew about the Tulpa’s power: the ability to touch people in their dreams, take over his agents’ bodies and turn them inside out, and how he could stud the sky with black holes, insert someone inside them, and make it all disappear. And those were only the homicidal abilities I’d seen firsthand. He’d been at rest for much of the time I’d known him, trying to court me into joining his troop, and abandon the Light for the Shadow. He was beyond that now, and as lethal as his wrath had been in the past, it was nothing compared to the complete, unbridled hatred he felt for me since our last encounter. Great.
    “Then what do
you
want?”
    “Right now?” He stuffed a moon cake in his mouth and spoke around it. “A cappuccino.”
    Felix struggled to his feet but didn’t move forward. “You prick—”
    “Shhh…” Harrison put a bloody finger to his lips. “He’s coming…”
    And in a strange unspoken harmony, agents of both Shadow and Light turned toward the wall of windows to watch the Shadow leader, the Tulpa, drop as if from the heavens, landing onto the false pagoda patio like a descending UFO . Of course, a living being that had been created rather than birthed really
was
as otherworldly as all that. I swallowed hard and stepped forward to face him because he was also my opposite on the Zodiac. The Shadow Archer. Their troop leader.
    My birth father.

    A tulpa was a thought-form; a being so vividly imagined it became an actual person. Tibetan monks had honed this skill for centuries through visualization, meditation, and extreme discipline, though this tulpa had been birthed from the mind of a westerner…and a twisted one at that. Once actualized, the Tulpa had become unnaturally powerful. There was no known way to kill him. In fact, if we attempted to do so with one of our conduits, the energy put behind the attempt actually funneled more power into him. So we battled his agents, while searching hopefully for his invisible Achilles’ heel, but steered clear of direct battle with him whenever possible.
    Yet we’d recently discovered that the nature of his birth was also his weakness. His creator had been killed before he could gift the Tulpa with a name, so his title
was
his name. His ability to alter his appearance entirely was a power, but it was also a sign that he lacked permanence in the world, and
that
was a weakness.
    His appearance today was a cross