Chapter 4
The door locks behind them with a decisive click.
For a fleeting, cinematic second, I consider kicking it down, but then I realize that it’s a thick steel door that looks like it was designed to withstand nuclear fallout.
My boot, along with my quads, tragically, is not qualified for this, especially at this stage of my failed-slayer journey.
“Hey,” I yell, employing sixty-seven years of elite slayer training by banging my fist against the door. “Open up.”
The door stares back at me, indifferent, as if to echo Jonah’s words from last night. You’ve got to be kidding me.
Grumbling, I walk through the front door the moment the soup kitchen opens.
Betty—the take-no-shit woman who let herself in earlier—is the one unlocking it, her massive ring of keys jangling.
I immediately scan her from head to toe, and…
she seems okay. Her soul is entirely intact.
She nods and smiles at me when I enter, giving me a warm, “Welcome in, Catwoman.”
I settle into a chair in the far, far corner of the room, watching, telling myself I’m here to protect these people from Jonah and not because I’m nursing a strange, inconvenient curiosity about him.
I don’t see him once, but my magic insists he’s close. Somewhere in the building. It hums under my skin, unsettled and unfocused, as if it can’t quite decide what it’s sensing. I can’t afford to notice the way it hums wrong. I can’t afford a moment of hesitation.
But it becomes impossible to ignore after a few uneventful hours in the corner of the room, and now, irritated by the magic rippling up and down my neck, I can’t stop thinking about it.
Other anomalies pop up, demanding to be seen.
Jonah’s blood. His warmth. And a wife? Since when do demons participate in vows of holy matrimony?
I’m aware that demons are highly sexual creatures, preferring trysts to long-term partnerships.
It’s probably the only thing slayers have in common with them.
Certainly me. I’ll fuck all night, a month, even a decade if the chemistry holds, but being tied to someone for the extended lifespan of a slayer?
Not in a million years. Or centuries, rather.
I reach for my phone and open the worldwide slayer forum, the one place where decades of post-internet collective experience live in a chaotic scroll of bad usernames and questionable punctuation. I send out a blast: Has anyone ever encountered a demon who bled?
No, never
A few times. Didn’t think twice about it. Was very toxic sludge-y.
I think about the metallic smell that permeated the air each time I sliced his arm. And it certainly didn’t flow like toxic sludge.
My forte lets me identify kill viability. Some demons don’t have blood at all. Some have thicker blood. Some, even thinner. The ones with no blood or thicker blood are harder to destabilize.
I lean forward.
My forte tells me how long they’ll hold physical form after injury. Non-bleeders linger longer.
So, bleeders do exist. How about a demon who was warm? I ask the chat.
Why, thinking of banging one?
Never in my 131 years of life have I encountered a warm, bleeding demon
Same for me, in my 67 years.
I fucked one once. it was like fucking a popsicle. He didn’t bleed when I killed him afterwards
I had more of a popsicle experience. At least it was a huge popsicle
Jeez. At least Jonah would be warm. Wait, what?
Temperature difference helps me identify them in crowds, and it’s always cold
My forte lets me confirm manifestation state. Fully manifested demons run cold. Always.
I frown at the second iteration of forte, brushing aside the old sting the word still manages to summon. There’s no way this could be mine. Forte is a word—and a possibility—I gave up on a long time ago.
Every slayer family inherits a foundational discipline, the basic structure that governs what their magic can do.
The Magdangal line’s is energy. We sense the supernatural energy demons give off.
We can manipulate energy, shape it into containment, and, when necessary, force it into something lethal.
But a forte is different. Sometimes, a slayer develops a specialized refinement of that same inherited magic, something uniquely theirs.
My mother, for example, can gauge a demon’s raw magnitude the moment she encounters it, instinctively knowing how powerful it is.
My brother Rafael can feel how long a demon has existed.
Mine never came.
Neither did Gabriel’s, but somehow that never seemed to bother him the way it bothered me.
I spent years waiting for mine to surface.
Every strange flicker of magic, every new sensation, every birthday—I wondered if this would finally be it, if this would be the year.
If I would finally have the thing that made my magic distinctly, uniquely mine.
Eventually, my family stopped wondering. Then they stopped asking. And sometime after that, so did I. And after sixty-seven years, I learned not to think about it at all. I learned not to hope for one. Until, maybe, now.
I type again. Has anyone ever sensed something different from demons? Energy patterns? Not in terms of magnitude, like weaker or stronger. Just… different.
The replies slow.
Different how?
Clarify.
My magic hadn’t reacted to Jonah the way it was supposed to.
I could sense him—there’s no mistaking the signature of a demon—but beneath that recognition, something had felt wrong.
Or maybe different really was the better word.
It hadn’t surged with the clean, righteous clarity it always did when facing something that needed to die.
It buzzed and skipped beneath my skin instead, an insistent warning I didn’t know how to interpret.
Like it is right now, and almost exactly how it did a decade ago.
I set the phone down slowly, because even I’m not sure what I’m asking anymore.
Could it be related to my forte? Could my magic be trying to tell me something?
What is wrong with it? Could it really be my forte surfacing after all this time?
And if so, what specifically is it reading?
I make a note to call my brothers after—
“Yo, Lara Croft,” someone to my right calls. “Our Halloween party ain’t ’til next week.”
I look down, forgetting that I am, in fact, wearing a skin-tight leather catsuit at three in the afternoon. “Just… breaking it in.”
“Mom,” a little kid whispers loudly. “Is she a supervillain?”
I’m actually the superhero in this story. I flash him a smile that shows all my teeth.
“Hey, Catwoman,” Betty calls from the serving line. “You gonna sit there lookin’ pretty all day, or you wanna help?”
“I—” I glance around, suddenly hyperaware that I’ve been sitting in the corner for hours, looking like someone trying to rob the place. “I’ll help. Of course, I’ll help.”
Betty jerks her chin toward a plastic bin near the sink. “Grab an apron and a hairnet from over there.”
I pull the dull white apron over my leathered torso and stretch a translucent hairnet over my hair, and then I instinctively brace myself.
Someone whistles.
“It’s like if a dominatrix got lost on the way to a bake sale,” a man half-shouts.
“Nah,” someone else chimes in. “Like the Black Widow suddenly switched to non-profit work.”
“Gotham’s community service program is wild.”
I remember quite quickly that nothing humbles you faster than a room full of New Yorkers. Thankfully, the roasting is interrupted when the side door bursts open and a young man strides in wearing a well-cut suit.
“I got the job!” he announces.
The room explodes.
Betty’s banging a serving spoon on the metal counter; the little kid is jumping up and down on his table, and the young man is suddenly surrounded by people giving him claps on the back and fist bumps and hugs.
“It was the suit!” someone declares. “It screams, I’m a professional—hire me!”
“Didn’t that suit get whiskey all over it last night?”
“Nah, that was my suit!”
“And my gown!”
“It was vodka, so it was clear—”
I dip my head towards Betty, who’s grinning ear-to-ear. “What’s going on?”
“It was Tommy’s birthday yesterday,” she says, gesturing towards the newly employed man. “He never got to go to his prom, so we wanted to throw him a prom birthday party. Then we realized none of us exactly had formal wear lying around.”
“The next day we got an enormous donation of suits and dresses and shoes,” she says.
“Just found it sitting in the foyer in garbage bags.
They all still had tags on ‘em.” She sweeps her arm across the room, towards the men, women, teens, and kids filling it.
“We got enough for each and every one of us to get all snazzy for a prom party.”
I watch as Tommy good-naturedly pushes everyone off him and smooths his suit down. He’s clearly proud of it.
“Now I guess the clothes can pull double duty. Interviews. Court dates. Regular dates. Whatever,” she says, radiating warmth.
Suits. “The party was last night, you said?” I ask Betty.
She nods, scooping some (delicious-looking) roasted chicken onto an outstretched plate. Now that I look down the line… all of this food looks incredible. “Yeah,” she tells me. “Party went pretty late.”
Skin prickling, I look back out towards the room. The energy in the room is buoyant, easy. People are laughing, talking over plates of food that look restaurant-level good. This feels less like a charity and more like a family reunion.
“Catwoman,” Betty suddenly barks. “Go grab empty plates.”
I’ve got no choice but to obey. I move from table to table, smiling as I pick up plates and silverware. The warmth is infectious in here, contagious and real. Why would Jonah feed here?
“Whatcha doin’ here, Trinity?” a jovial older man asks me. “Neo’s back in the Matrix.”
“What Malik means,” the mother of the little boy says, smiling more gently, “is welcome. We don’t ask too many questions here.”
I shrug, feeling light. “It’s okay. Thank you.”
“Sorry ‘bout that. I think I’m funny sometimes. But welcome. Haven’t seen you before,” Malik amends.
“Well, I’m—I’m looking for someone,” I decide to share. I decide this sounds better than hunting.
However.
The effect is immediate.
The room suddenly grows quiet and still, the energy heavy and tense. Approximately thirty heads swivel in my direction, faces suddenly aggressive or closed like shutters. The mother wraps her arm around her little boy and turns him away from me.
I’m confused. Did I say hunting?
“Who you looking for?” Malik asks, and his voice has lost all humor.
“We don’t disclose that sort of information here,” someone says sharply.
“Whoever it is,” another adds, “you won’t find them here.”
I blink. “I—”
Again, I feel him before I see him. My magic jumps and skitters a moment before I feel a warm, heavy arm drape around my shoulders.
“It’s okay, everyone,” Jonah says. “She’s here for me.”