Chapter 2
By the time I get home, my adrenaline has nowhere to go, which means it reroutes directly into spite. And cheese.
I kick off my boots, drop my coat on the chair I never sit in because it’s for coats only, and pull my laptop onto the kitchen counter. Midnight online rabbit-holes are my specialty. Midnight cheese, too. Demon slaying, less so.
I peel open the wrapper covering the brie and take a bite right out of the wheel as I pull up a map of the side street where the demon—where Jonah—slipped away from me. I zoom out and in, taking note of cross streets and foot traffic patterns, proximity to bars, clubs, and bodegas.
Meow.
The hair on the back of my neck stands up, the way it always does when my giant black cat pads into the room.
She fixes me with a look that suggests she is my landlord and I am several months behind on rent.
This is ironic, considering she appeared in my apartment one day under circumstances I refuse to examine too closely—somehow entering the building, operating the elevator, and unlocking my door and breaking through my wards while I slept.
All without opposable thumbs or any sort of visible agility.
She weighs twenty-five pounds and moves like a creature who resents gravity.
Less lithe panther, more furious, sentient ottoman.
She’s terrifying.
“What do you want, Batibat?”
Her gaze drops pointedly to my cheese.
“The vet said no more human food for you,” I remind her. “Only your special diet.”
Batibat holds eye contact as she retches a monstrous hairball onto the rug.
“Goddamnit, Batibat,” I shout, lunging for the paper towel roll. “Not on porous surfaces.”
By the time I’m back, the hairball is still there, but both Batibat and the cheese are gone.
I take a moment to cover my face with both hands and take deep breaths. I manage to get everything cleaned up without dry heaving (I hate that it’s warm) and clamber back up to my laptop.
I open a new tab and type demon sightings manhattan october and immediately regret it. Reddit is not a research tool, Mayari. Reddit is a place where neckbeards named HexLord666 post blurry photos of trash bags stretched across trash cans and call them portals.
I refine. I try again. Unexplained assaults alley Manhattan October—nope. Manhattan late night soul feeding—nope, although I make a note to stop by Melba’s soon. I finally get somewhere with mysterious fainting Manhattan halloween nyc.
There’s a cluster of reports, and as I drop pins onto the online map, I realize they’re all within the same handful of blocks.
No deaths though, just people found shaken, disoriented, and exhausted.
Always late at night, year after year for decades, and always there, in that area.
I pull up the alley where Jonah and I had our showdown.
Same area, down to the cross streets. I think of the man from whom Jonah had tried to feed, who was very much alive, yet shaken.
“Okay,” I mutter. “Weird—no deaths, but okay.” I rifle around in my bag for the Roquefort, use my blessed dagger to cut it into pieces, spear one with the tip and shove it into my mouth.
Demons, as a rule, don’t wander aimlessly. They choose familiarity. They return to places where people pass through in predictable ways, where being tired, distracted, or alone is common enough not to draw attention if something goes wrong.
I open another tab. community services. I always have to start a hunt with the most vulnerable of places.
A list populates: Clinics. Shelters. Food pantries. Soup kitchen.
I pull up the map and start noting the addresses. There’s a soup kitchen on the exact block I fought with Jonah. I click on the details.
“Kind staff.” “Saved me.” “Warm food.” “No questions asked.”
My jaw tightens.
Slayer doctrine says demons look for moments of lowered guard, for people navigating exhaustion, grief, hunger, or isolation—times when someone might not have the energy to fight back or the luxury of being cautious.
Still, something twists uncomfortably in my chest, the same way it did earlier, when my magic refused to settle around him.
The same shuddering, staticky feeling I’d had with my last kill, right before everything went horribly wrong.
I shove the thought away. Coincidence is just another word for hesitation.
I open the soup kitchen’s website. It’s clean and unassuming. There are donation links and volunteer sign-ups, and a calendar that’s full of… Halloween programming.
Halloween.
Peak season.
October is peak season for demons for the same reason it’s peak season for humans: longer nights, crowded streets, lowered inhibitions, and costumes that make it nearly impossible to tell who—or what—you’re looking at.
For slayers, that means October is spent on high alert. Because when we aren’t, November begins with cleanup.
People disappear on Halloween. A twenty-three-year-old last seen leaving a party in a pair of angel wings, found dead three days later in an alley.
A man dressed as Dracula crumpled on a subway platform.
Children vanishing between one brownstone and the next while trick-or-treating, their plastic pumpkins found abandoned on the sidewalk, still full of candy.
The costumes are always the worst part.
Fairy wings soaked through in gutters. Superhero capes pulled over bodies.
Fake blood smeared together with the real thing, plastic vampire fangs still wedged between the teeth of corpses drained of everything that once made them human.
Families putting up missing-person flyers beneath plastic skeletons and fake cobwebs while the rest of the city wakes up on November first and takes down its decorations.
That’s what happens when slayers miss something. That’s what demons leave behind.
October means patrols and salt and blades and nights without sleep.
It means my family spread across Manhattan, following every disturbance our magic catches before it can become another costume on the pavement.
Because if we aren’t there in time to hunt the monsters, we’re there afterward to clean up what they’ve done.
Shivering, I scroll past photos of a serving line on the soup kitchen’s website, extended hands and plates and wide smiles.
I scroll past photos of a serving line, extended hands and plates and wide smiles.
“Fuck,” I whisper. It clicks into place too neatly. He feeds late. He knows the neighborhood. He was there when I found him. And where else would you find people moving through the night, already tired, already carrying more than they should have to?
I sit back in my stool.
“This is why you hesitate,” my mother’s voice says in my head. “You see what you want to see.”
No. I see what he is, I do. I type his name into the search bar, even though I know it’s useless. Jonah demon. Jonah Manhattan. Jonah slayer alley. Jonah soup kitchen.
Nothing.
But soup kitchens keep records, like volunteer lists and schedules. If he’s local, if he’s feeding there, he has to be embedded. I grab my notebook and jot it down. Soup kitchen. Halloween proximity. Feeding ground. I underline it once. Then twice. Then close the laptop and exhale.
I need to find you. The thought echoes in chorus with my family’s, the most powerful demon slayer family in Manhattan. You need to find him.
Ten years without a kill is unforgivable for slayer royalty. Never mind that those ten years began with a tragedy I still can't bear to think about, that grief has haunted me ever since. It doesn’t matter that fear has become something I carry instead of the blades at my hips.
My family doesn't care about reasons. Only results. It's our duty to keep Manhattan safe.
I glance back at my notes.
Feeding ground.
“I guess my reign will have to start again with you,” I whisper.