Chapter 12
Who am I kidding?
I haven’t exercised with intention in years and subsist primarily on a diet of cheese. I sprint two blocks, almost vomit, and decide to take the subway instead.
Three stops later, I haul myself up the stairs out of the station and power-walk to the soup kitchen.
It’s later than the other night—well past closing. The building is dark, metal gates pulled down, the side entrance locked.
“Shit,” I mutter. Panic starts to bloom in my chest. I don’t have his phone number. I don’t even know his last name. I know his horns and his abs and the way his dick curves u—
Suddenly, my magic stirs. At first, it's only the faintest hum beneath my ribs, a quiet vibration that unfurls through my body like the first note of a familiar song. Recognition blooms before thought can catch up to it, and when it does, it only says one thing.
Mine.
I close my eyes and let it settle into me, warm beneath my skin, every pulse answering the next until I can no longer tell where I end and it begins. It reaches outward, catching on something invisible, a silken thread drawn taut across pavement, through crisp autumn air.
I follow its pull. West.
I walk a block. The vibration strengthens. North one more, stronger still.
I round the corner and see him.
He’s sitting next to a man on a brownstone stoop decorated for Halloween.
To anyone passing by, it looks ordinary—two guys hanging out, maybe sharing a cigarette, maybe talking about football or podcasts or how Robert Moses ruined New York or whatever it is human men talk about.
The man leans slightly into Jonah’s side.
As I get closer, I realize what’s happening.
Jonah’s chest rises and falls in slow, controlled breaths.
His eyes are closed, his brows drawn in concentration, dark curls tumbling down in front of his face.
The man beside him exhales long and shaky, tension draining from his posture inch by inch, slumping more comfortably against Jonah’s shoulder.
Notably absent are cat strangulation noises.
The kris tucked into the waistband of my underwear pulses faintly. My magic hums in my veins, curious and watchful.
I stop at the base of the stoop.
Jonah’s eyes open. The blue is gone, swallowed entirely by black. Even so, when he sees me, when he sees me wearing his clothes, his expression softens. He smiles. “Mayari,” he whispers, with awe, like I’m an enchanting surprise instead of a trained assassin of his kind.
I’m smiling so hard my cheeks hurt. “I was expecting something far less dignified,” I inform him.
He huffs a quiet laugh. “Not ‘dying alley cat’ enough for you?”
“Not nearly,” I say, climbing the steps. I sit on his other side, and the moment our hips brush, my magic brightens, almost preening, content and safe. Fuck what my family says. My magic is discerning. “Who is this victim?”
“Samuel Parker.”
I appreciate that Jonah knows his full name.
“He’s come into the soup kitchen a few times,” he continues. “Each time he’d become increasingly violent. I did some Googling, and… well. A lot about his ‘rot’ made sense.”
“You love a rabbit-hole!”
He laughs. “Not nearly as much as you, probably, but yes. I don’t arbitrarily go hoovering souls left and right, Mayari. I do some research first.”
Ah, the morality of demons.
We sit there for a moment, the city breathing around us, Samuel slumped comfortably against Jonah’s shoulder.
I pick absentmindedly at the decorative gourd and the fake spiderweb on the railing next to me, trying to line up what I’ve been taught with what I’m seeing.
Demons intending to harm. Full feeding. Rot feeding.
Intent as energy. The clean certainty of the blond demon versus the unsettled static that had danced under my skin with Jonah, and the fact that I do have a forte.
And then something else hits me. I never apologized.
“Hey,” I say quietly.
Jonah’s eyes flick to mine, the black receding slowly back into blue.
“I never said I was sorry,” I continue. “For bringing up your wife the other night. That was cruel. I’m sorry she’s gone.” I swallow. I’m sorry that one of us killed her.
His body goes rigid for half a second, a tremor I feel through the point where our thighs touch.
Then he exhales, and some of the tension drains out of him.
“It was forty years ago,” he says, voice even but thinner at the edges.
“I barely think about it anymore.” A faint smile.
“But you—a slayer—bringing her up in the one place we’d managed to keep safe for decades… ”
He shakes his head once. “Anyway,” he adds more gently, “apology accepted. You did save my life. And you’re not like the one who killed her.”
The words land harder than I expect them to.
Grief swells in my chest, uninvited, unwieldy.
Not just for him. For the girl, ten years ago, screaming beside the pile of dust that was her dad.
For the way I hadn’t listened to my magic that night, and for the possibility that I am more like Jonah’s wife’s slayer than I want to be.
“What was her name?” I manage.
He drags a hand down his face, staring out at the street for a long beat before answering.
“Maria,” he says. The name softens him immediately.
“She was a full demon. We’d been together for five, maybe six years.
She was the first demon I’d ever met who refused to do a complete feeding. She only took rot.”
His jaw tightens, but he keeps going. “Before her, I didn’t discriminate.
Hunger is loud when you don’t know how to manage it.
She taught me how. More importantly, she taught me why.
” A faint, sad smile curves his mouth. “I’ve always been alone, Mayari.
There’s no place in this world for someone like me.
My parents died young, and I’ve never had community on either side, so when I met Maria…
” He shakes his head. “We worked together at the soup kitchen. She’d been there for decades.
It was… ours. A family neither of us had ever had.
But it’s a deeply vulnerable place that attracts the kind of demons who don’t bother with restraint. We kept it safe. I still do.”
I remember something. “You bought everyone that formal wear for the prom party.”
Some light returns to his eyes. “Yes. Why not? I’m unreasonably wealthy, and they’re my family.”
I smile, thinking of the suited young man and his joyous celebration, the woman and her son.
He swallows. “Anyway, with Maria. I wish I could tell you it was some grand battle, that she went down fighting. But it wasn’t like that at all.” His voice roughens. “I was meeting her in Central Park. She was sitting on a bench reading. I saw the circle form before she did.”
My stomach drops.
“Ten seconds,” he says quietly. “Circle. Containment. Blade,” he lists, as if reciting a to-do list. “She disintegrated before I could reach her. And then I had to run.”
He watched it happen. He watched a slayer execute his wife with clinical precision, and then he ran for his own survival.
Tears sting behind my eyes. I slide my hand over his and squeeze. “I’m so sorry,” I say, because there is no other sentence that’s appropriate.
Jonah turns his hand and threads his fingers back through mine, grip warm and steady.
“You hung back,” he says softly. “In the alley. You held back. That was enough.” He leans over and presses a kiss to my hair, lingering there for a second.
“You are not her killer,” he murmurs. “And you are not the kind of slayer who would have been.”
My throat tightens around a thousand unsaid things, but I open my mouth to say them anyway—
And then my magic screams. One sharp, sustained note rips through me, so clean and violent there’s no mistaking it, every current of his energy pointing in the same direction: danger.
Beside me, Jonah goes rigid.
We look at each other for half a moment, and there is no confusion in either of us.
He’s on his feet in a blink. Samuel, who had been half-dozing against Jonah’s shoulder, tips sideways and collapses heavily into my lap.
“Goddamnit, Samuel,” I mutter, shoving him gently back onto the step before scrambling up.
I kick over the gourd and somehow get tangled in the fake spiderweb in the process.
“This shit is so fucking bad for the environment,” I growl, tearing it off.
“Jonah, no!” I shout out as he bounds down the stoop two at a time. “Stop!”
He does—barely. He turns sharply, jaw locked, eyes already darkening at the edges.
“You can’t do this alone,” I say, breathless, still covered in planet-killing plastic webbing. “We’re not prepared.”
“There is no ‘we’ in this, Mayari.”
“I know him,” I fire back. “I know Belvedere.”
That makes him pause.
I speak quickly, the words tripping over each other. “He’s old. Undefeated. He severed my mother’s arm once. My mother—the strongest slayer in Manhattan—has never been able to kill him. He runs, he regroups, and he picks his moments. You cannot just sprint into this.”
Jonah’s hands open and close at his sides, fists flexing like he’s physically restraining himself from running across the city. “I have a plan,” he says eventually.
I stare at him. “You know about Belvedere.”
A muscle tics in his jaw.
“You know about Belvedere and you still think you’re going to take him alone?”
“I know about Belvedere,” he snaps, stepping toward me, “and I do not want you within a hundred feet of him.” His chest is rising hard now, anger and fear twisted together.
“You’ve known me for seventy-two hours,” I remind him.
“You almost died trying to save me after twenty-four.”
I purse my lips. Fair. “Jonah. We need a better plan. I’m going to help you—”
“—but you’re a shit slayer—”
“—and because I’m a shit slayer, I’ve learned to compensate in other ways,” I yell, trying to drive the words through his thick demon skull.
“I’ve spent my whole life being a slayer with defensive magic, Jonah.
Do you know what that means? It makes me cautious.
I am very, very good at being prepared.”
He waits, and that’s all I need.
“I am not the strongest,” I continue, stepping closer. “I am not the fastest. But I make a hell of a contingency plan. And you cannot do this alone. We have one whole day to prepare. He’s hunting tomorrow night.”
He exhales sharply through his nose.
“Let me help you,” I say more quietly. “Let me help you protect your family.”
That one lands. His shoulders drop just a fraction. The rage bleeds out of his expression, replaced by something more vulnerable. After a long moment, he nods once. “Fine.”