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struggle to his feet. We were somehow connected; I breathed because he breathed. The implication would’ve had me wincing just moments before. Now I found it a relief. He couldn’t kill me without committing suicide…at least not that way. It bolstered my confidence.
    “Is this where you try to convince me to come to the Shadow side or die in an airless, soundless vacuum?” I asked, grasping my conduit between both hands. It still hung limply from my tingling fingertips, not that it mattered. The Tulpa couldn’t be killed even with magical weaponry. No one knew exactly how to kill him yet…which helped make these confrontations all the more disconcerting.
    “No, because then this would also be where you deny me. Again.”
    I stepped out from behind the pallet. It wasn’t helping against the Tulpa anyway. “Wow. Psychic in addition to being evil incarnate.”
    “Flattery will get you nowhere.” His eyes narrowed, “Fast.”
    But bravado was the only weapon I had left. Almost every time I’d met this fucker I’d ended up beaten, bloodied, and broken. But he wanted something this time, and it was clear he wouldn’t kill me until he got it. So could I figure out how to kill him before that?
    Yet I’d have to be careful not to project my intention, or expend any excess energy in doing so. The Tulpa had a way of prevailing over, and gaining power from, the people who tried to kill him. Like Yoda, there was no
try
. You either succeeded or failed, and so far…well, the Tulpa had just grown more and more powerful. He wasn’t anyone’s imaginary friend anymore…and he had a fuse as short as a third-world dictator.
    “Sit down.” He waited until I found an upended bucket before settling across from me. Even crouching, he was over five and a half feet tall. A fine mist draped his lower stomach, where I assumed he kept his valuables, and I found myself uncommonly grateful for his discretion. I let my gaze fall to his barbed toes and wondered if the name of my pedicurist would be enough to let me live. “We need to have a little talk about vibrational resonance.”
    “I forgot to bring my notebook.”
    “I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version.”
    “Okay, but my tutor won’t approve.”
    A growl rumbled through his body, and the platform shook beneath me. “It’s time for the third sign of the Zodiac to come to pass. The first sign was the revelation of the Kairos—the chosen one—
my
daughter.” There was a note of pride in his voice, but the multiple attempts on my life rather blunted the charm. “The second was a cursed battlefield, which you not only managed to survive, but brought most of your current troop through in fighting form.”
    His emphasis of the word
most
wasn’t lost on me. I gave him a look he probably recognized from his own mirror, because he chuckled again.
    “Which brings us to the third sign. The reawakening of the Kairos’s Shadow side.”
    I held up a hand to stop him cold. “I don’t believe that’s what it means.”
    See, these signs of the Zodiac had nothing to do with the astrological wheel, as one might initially believe. No, the signs were
portents
instead, indications that one side in the fight between good and evil was finally gaining dominance over the other, and doing it with my help. So while my willingness to switch to the Shadow side was theoretically feasible—with the gift of free will and a serious breakdown in my personal mores—what the latest portent actually said was that the Kairos’s
dormant
side would soon reawaken. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I was pretty certain I wasn’t going to start acting against humanity any time soon.
    Obviously the Tulpa disagreed. “Our mythology tells us that under Pluto’s influence the woman born of the Archer sign will have a death, a rebirth, and a transformation into that which she once would have killed. Even though she begins her journey with the spirit of a dilettante, her light is soon