Chapter 13
We decide to go to my place, because that’s where all my supplies are. Powders, blades, chalk for drawing Baybayin symbols and words, and three different kinds of salt.
Also, because Batibat is probably really, really pissed at me.
I unlock all my wards before unlocking my front door so that Jonah isn’t rended into a thousand pieces.
“Batibat,” I call out. “If you’re still alive, please refrain from murder.”
Jonah steps in behind me, closing the door softly. The second we cross the threshold, the fine hairs on the back of my neck lift.
Batibat is sitting at the end of the hallway.
She’s entirely still and silent. Her tail swishes once, twice. Her eyes are fixed on me with the slow, calculating malice of a creature who has had four uninterrupted days to consider revenge.
I raise both hands. “I come in peace.”
She begins walking toward me. One paw. Then the next. Unhurried and deliberate, head tilted at a slight angle, likely considering the most effective angle at which to gut me from stomach to neck to remove my intestines and wear them as a scarf.
“Batibat,” I say carefully, pulse hammering in my ears. “A lot happened. I was critically injured. There was blood. You would have loved it.”
The temperature in the apartment seems to drop ten degrees.
She’s inches away now.
I hold my breath, brace myself for—
One perfunctory sniff.
Then Batibat turns her back on me with regal disdain, and…
Winds herself around Jonah’s legs.
Purring.
Loudly!
“What in the actual—”
Jonah is delighted. He picks her up (?!) and they nuzzle noses (?!!). “Beautiful little demon cat,” he croons at her, scratching under her chin.
I stare at them, mouth hanging open. “Batibat is a demon?” I finally screech. “Cats can be demons?!”
The two of them look at me like, obviously.
“If she’s a demon,” I demand, “how did she get past my wards? This apartment is a fortress. I layered those protections myself. I triple-bound the thresholds.”
Jonah shrugs lightly, still nuzzling my traitorous familiar. “She’s only about a tenth demon,” he says. “Barely enough to register.”
“That is not how wards work,” I snap.
“Maybe yours don’t discriminate,” he offers mildly. “Maybe they’re calibrated for full demons. Like ones with heavy corruption signatures. She’s… subtle.”
Batibat purrs louder, smug as fuck, and I consider the way her presence has always made my skin tingle.
I drag a hand down my face. There is so much demon lore to unpack. There is so much slayer magic to address. And apparently, I have been living with a fractional demon for years.
The Tribunal is going to have an aneurysm.
We spread out across my living room floor as if we’re preparing for war—which, technically, we are.
Maps of the neighborhood cover every available surface, taped to the coffee table, the hardwood floor, even the lower half of the wall where we ran out of space.
I mark likely entry points in red, my pen pressing hard enough to dent the paper.
Jonah circles alleyways in black, his handwriting precise and elegant as someone who learned penmanship in an era in which it was important.
We argue over elevation advantages, sight lines, possible civilian density. He adds notations in the margins.
We test symbols against Jonah in chalk along my hallway, wipe them clean with damp cloths, and redraw them in salt to see how the lines hold.
I mix my salt with iron filings and powdered eggshell and a little something my lola swore would “make demons itch,” even though she never specified why itching was strategically important.
He watches me while I work. I pretend not to notice.
It would be easier if he weren’t here, if this were just another hunt, another problem to solve alone.
Instead, every time I look up, he’s there—cross-legged on my floor, sleeves shoved up to his elbows, brow furrowed in concentration as he studies the map like he has something to lose.
Because he does. His family, and maybe me.
I try not to think about how quickly that thought arrived. How naturally it settled.
I’m in the middle of sketching containment circles from memory, then redrawing them cleaner and sharper, adjusting for Belvedere’s strength, when Jonah breaks the silence.
“I have no idea how slayer magic works,” he muses.
“What, you mean that thing I do with my tongue?” I ask, waggling my eyebrows.
He laughs low and easy, the sound loosening something in my chest. His eyes soften for a moment before refocusing on the diagram between us. “That’s for later. But could you explain how your slayer magic works? As it relates to demons?”
It takes me a moment to answer, and in that hesitation I realize no one has ever asked me that before. No one in my family ever needed to. Slayer magic was the air we breathed, the language we spoke before we learned any other. It was never something I had to explain. It was something I simply was.
I sit back on my heels, shaking loose the cobwebs from that long-neglected corner of memory.
“Every slayer family inherits a foundation,” I say slowly, reaching for words I haven’t spoken out loud in decades.
“The basic structure of what their magic can interact with. Some bloodlines work with blood, others with shadow or metal. The Magdangal line is energy. We sense supernatural energy, gather it, redirect it, shape it. That’s how I knew what you were in the alley. ”
“You sensed me.”
“Your energy. Demons have a distinct signature.” I gesture between us. “I can’t sense every demon in Manhattan. I have to be close enough to pick up the disturbance, and stronger demons are easier to feel. But once I’m close enough, demon registers as demon.”
His gaze drops to the circles scattered across the floor. “And these?”
“Same foundation, just a different application. Defensive, mostly. I can shape energy into containment—circles, wards, barriers. I can also concentrate it and force it outward as a strike, although I’m not so great at that.
Energy has to come from somewhere, and my body can only channel so much at once. ”
“So no unlimited demon-killing lightning.”
“Tragically.”
He smiles. “And everyone in your family can do that?”
“More or less. Same foundation, different strengths. But sometimes,” I say, “a slayer develops something more specialized—a refinement of that inherited magic that can do or sense something the rest of us can’t.” I pause. “We call that a forte.”
He studies me for a moment, mouth twitching. “Let me guess. Yours is awful one-liners.”
I smack his arm. “You’re an awful one-liner.”
Jonah laughs, leaning back on his hands, and I feel the warmth of his amusement ripple through my magic like sunlight through water.
I’ve started noticing that here in my apartment—the way my magic responds to him.
Soft around the edges. Reaching instead of recoiling.
Something that makes me want to move closer and stay there.
“I didn’t have a forte,” I say.
His laughter fades. “Didn’t?”
“I think mine manifested very late,” I admit. “And I didn’t realize what I was sensing.”
“Until?”
I can’t stop the smile that rises to my mouth. I feel absurdly proud of it, of this piece of myself I’d spent most of my life believing simply wasn’t there.
“Until seven days ago.”
He tilts his head, waiting.
“I think my forte lets me sense a demon’s intent.”
His brows draw together. “Intent?”
“Not thoughts. I can’t get inside your head, and it doesn’t tell me whether a demon is good or bad.
” I pause, searching for words for something I’m only beginning to understand myself.
“Every slayer can recognize a demon’s magical signature.
But I think intent changes the way that energy behaves.
It shifts depending on what the demon means to do—where the energy is reaching, what it’s preparing for.
Most slayers only feel demon.” I touch my sternum.
“Apparently, I can feel what comes next.”
Jonah stares at me.
“At least, that’s what I think I’m doing,” I add quickly. “There’s not exactly literature on this.”
His reaction isn’t resentment or rage or anything I’ve been trained my whole life to expect from demons.
It’s wonder and joy, something warmer and more dangerous than either of those.
He reaches for me with open arms, and I step into them instinctively, reflexively.
His hands settle at my waist as if this is the most natural thing in the world, a demon holding a slayer who saved his life after trying to kill him twice.
“I guess I’m one lucky motherfucker,” he says quietly, almost reverently, “if your forte decided to manifest when you met me.”
My heart drops, then plummets to the ground from the high it was just riding. Because he’s so very, very wrong.
Every instinct I had, every reflex carved into me by decades of training, told me I should have recognized him as an enemy immediately. Instead, my magic stalled. It waited. It chose him.
But it wasn’t the first time.
He feels the shift in me instantly, his hands tightening slightly. “What?”
I pull away before I lose my nerve.
“Mayari?”
I stare down at the map between us, at the red lines and black circles that suddenly feel like artifacts from another life. There is no careful way to say this. There is only truth, and I owe him that much.
“I realized seven days ago,” I whisper. “But I think it actually manifested ten years ago.”
He goes very still, sensing something in my tone. Eventually, he simply sits down and draws me gently into his lap, his arms wrapping around me like something precious, something breakable. “Tell me,” he murmurs.
I settle further into his body, wondering if this will be the last time.
“There was a demon,” I begin, my voice trembling despite my effort to steady it.
“He was powerful and old. I could feel his signature immediately. There was no question what he was.” I swallow hard.
“But my magic…” My fingers curl into the fabric of Jonah’s shirt.
“There was something underneath it. Something I’d never felt before. ”
I close my eyes, trying to remember the sensation. “Before him, sensing a demon had always been like hearing a single, sustained note. With him, the note was still there—but something moved beneath it, irregular and discordant, like someone striking keys I hadn’t known the piano possessed.”
His arms tighten around me, just slightly.
“He barely fought back,” I continue, forcing the words out past the tightness in my throat. “And his wife and his daughter were outside my circle. Begging. On their knees.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, the memory surging forward. The way his wife had screamed his name.
No, she’d begged, slamming her hands against the barrier. You don’t understand. Please. Listen to me, please!
I hadn’t.
“I told myself hesitation was weakness,” I say, my voice tightening. “That I was losing my edge. That I was embarrassing our family.”
Jonah closes his eyes briefly.
“So I overrode it,” I finish. My voice breaks, brittle like glass, when I do. “I forced the strike.”
I still remember the resistance of his chest against the blade, the way his body disintegrated into ash before it even hit the ground, the sound that tore out of his wife’s throat as she collapsed to her knees.
Their daughter, clutching her mother’s arm and screaming like the world itself had split open.
My vision blurs.
“I killed her husband,” I choke out. “I killed her father.” The words hang between us, heavy and irreversible.
“I know now,” I whisper, barely able to breathe around the grief.
“My magic wasn’t broken or wrong. It wasn’t failing.
It was trying to tell me something. I just…
I didn’t listen.” My hands are shaking where they clutch his shirt.
“I know the same thing happened to your wife,” I manage, my voice splintering completely.
“And I am so sorry, Jonah. I am so, so sorry. I wish I had understood. I wish I had listened.”
Silence settles, thick and viscous.
Jonah doesn’t move, but he doesn’t pull away either. He just holds me there, his heartbeat steady against my back, while I wait to find out whether I’ve finally told him the truth too late.
“I told you, that afternoon in my kitchen, that I was only half,” he finally says. “And you wanted me to clarify… half of what. And I did.” His voice roughens. “Half evil.”
I turn in his arms, searching his face. The ice-blue of his eyes has dimmed, grief threading through the lines of his expression.
“I spent decades feeding on souls,” he continues, the words coming slowly, as if each one cost him something. “I wasn’t selective or careful. I didn’t ask who they were or whether they deserved it. I was hungry, and hunger was enough.”
My chest tightens painfully.
“We can’t go back and change our histories,” he says, his gaze steady on mine, “but we can make amends.”
I swallow.
“What matters now, I think, is what you choose to do after you've accepted what you’ve done. The life you build from there, and who you decide to become. You saved my life, Nightmare,” he says, tracing the side of my face with his thumb.
“And what you’re doing here, with me, against Belvedere…
it’s only the first few steps on the path towards redemption. ”
He takes a deep inhale, exhaling slowly through his nose, parsing through his own thoughts.
“It’s not my apology to accept,” he continues gently.
“That belongs to them. But know that I hear you. And I understand.” His other hand brushes absently along my arm, grounding me.
“If we can’t accept our pasts, how do we move forward towards any future at all? ”
I nod, letting the truth of that settle into my bones.
He exhales slowly, something vulnerable flickering across his face.
“It’s terribly selfish—dare I say evil—to say this,” he admits, “but… I’m happy your forte is for me.
” Because he understands what that means, I realize.
That out of every demon in the world, I learned to trust my magic for him.
That I chose him over everything I was taught to be.
I rest my forehead against his chest, listening to the steady rhythm beneath it, the warmth that proves he’s here and mine and real and safe. My magic settles around him instinctively, the way water settles into its basin, the way a moon finds its orbit.
I have hunted demons for my entire life. I have never wanted to protect one before. The realization arrives quietly, without ceremony, without warning.
I am falling for him.
And for the first time in my life, the feeling doesn’t frighten me.
It feels like recognition.
“You are my magic,” I whisper.