He looked back at me. “Not when you were first here; you were resistant to the truth. But today, you could see it all if you allowed the true power within you to rise up.”

“Part of me is still weakened by my wolf side, isn’t it?”

We’d never spoke explicitly about it, but I’d pieced it together from what Dannie had said, and what I also felt inside. I was a hybrid—that much was true—but I could be so much more than. I could be like Dannie; I just didn’t know how to take that step to becoming that Nexus-born being. I wondered if I might have to figure it out to before this battle was done.

“No part of you is weak,” Shadow said gruffly, “and your potential knows no limits. Continue to evolve, and you’ll be the strongest of us all.”

I couldn’t imagine that ever happening, but it was a nice thought.

Shadow picked up his pace, and I noted that the waterfalls around us seemed to stream from above the clouds. The way the light sparkled off the teal-tinted water made it look so damn enticing. Right up until a few unfamiliar creatures splashed through the strands, looking like a hybrid of a unicorn and shark, with a sparkling gold-tinted horn, pearlescent skin, and very sharp fangs.

“The cogarish,” Shadow told me. “They’re native to this world. Their horns are used to reinforce a lot of the armor the transcendents wear—when the cogarish dies, of course, since they’re revered and protected here.”

“How many different creatures live in this world?”

Shadow shrugged. “There’s no way to tell. The layers hide everything, but as far as I’m aware, the only true sentient beings are the transcendents. Otherwise, it’s just these smaller creatures.”

“Do the different families here fight with each other?”

Shadow considered my question. “Again, their secrets are their own, but I don’t believe petty squabbles are part of their makeup these days. Their evolution is old and near flawless.”

Flawless. I liked that. Maybe there was a chance one day, if humans and shifters got their shit together, that we, too, might one day be perfect.

Shadow continued on, only stopping when he reached a particular sparkle of light, and as he had done before, he cut through the layer, taking us from the cloudland into one of water. Huge bodies of water that we used our power to walk above.

“Angel can live in any of these levels?” I asked. “Are they all real?”

He looked around, seeing and smelling everything I did. “Is anything truly real? Or is it all a product of our imagination?” Before he bent my brain further with his philosophical questions, he continued. “But as far as I know, each layer here is as real as the one before.”