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even the Tulpa. Not when it came to the Light. I just couldn’t count my former allies as enemies yet. Not all of them, anyway.
    “We know nothing of the Light in this valley,” said one of the newcomers, who called himself Joseph. I didn’t need super senses to know he’d been a Shadow. There was a look to all of them, something that lurked like a shark beneath still water. Everyone here, save Carlos and the late Neal, possessed it. Even me. Maybe that’s why he held the manual he’d been hiding out my way. “But we have this . . . it’s how we found you. It shows the Shadows relinquishing their conduits at the feet of their leader.”
    I crossed the room and took it from him, secure enough with my troop of grays—especially Carlos, next to him—to risk getting close. I then dropped it on the room’s center table, and waited for the others to draw close.
    “It’s why Harrison was so bitter,” Carlos said, as I turned the page.
    Panels that would have previously flared to life in my hands remained flat, the action one-dimensional. I’d once been able to elicit an air-popping “Pow!” or “Bang!” from these pages, along with echoing battle cries, agonized death howls, and colorful bursts of furious action. Yet compared to everything else I’d lost, it was a small thing, so what caught my attention was the accompanying text. “Holy hell. The Tulpa is making his own agents cross into Midheaven.”
    “According to this,” Joseph said, having joined us, “the Tulpa has sent three agents to Midheaven already. None have returned.”
    “Men rarely do,” I muttered. I knew because I’d escaped twice. Midheaven was a woman’s world, entirely separate from our own, and fueled by the soul energy of the men trapped there. “It’s a pocket of distended reality. It requires a third of your soul in return for passage. It changes you at the cellular level.”
    My throat closed up on me after that, and though Joseph looked at me funny, the other grays were used to it. It was a cosmic law: I couldn’t speak of what happened in Midheaven to anyone who hadn’t been there.
    “Then what does the Tulpa want over there?” Foxx asked, hands on his hips. “Why weaken his dominant position against the Light by sending his agents to a place from which they never return?”
    “The child,” I said, because everyone knew about that. The new Kairos.
    The only one, I thought with a heated flush. Because although I might still possess the required divided lineage, I no longer had any power. That meant I couldn’t be this world’s “chosen one.” Fine with me. The designation had put a bull’s-eye the size of the state on my chest. Still, I felt the newfound lack like it was a personal failure. “He’s trying to get to Solange and Hunter’s child.”
    My throat wanted to close up again, but this time it was only because I hated putting that woman’s—that goddess’s—name next to that of the man I loved. Yet it was the realization that their non-love child was the Tulpa’s, and probably Warren’s, true objective that had us all exchanging wary glances.
    “Control the Kairos and he could easily rule three distinct realms,” Carlos said thoughtfully. The mortal world, the supernatural one, and the twisted, hidden underworld as well.
    “Forget risking his agents’ souls,” said Fletcher, shaking his head. “What wouldn’t he risk for that?”
    “That’s why he wants us out of here. Less competition. Less . . .”
    “You,” Carlos said softly. Because as a woman, one who’d been to Midheaven before, I was the one most likely to beat him to it.
    If in the meantime the Shadow agents didn’t understand how Midheaven stripped a man bare from the inside out, they were discovering it pretty quickly . . . and too late. Few men could enter and survive that woman’s world. Question was, did the Tulpa know that? Or even care? After all, as a soulless being, he had nothing to risk, lose, or barter for