Chapter 16
“We’re here to celebrate your first kill in ten—” Gabriel’s voice trails off mid-sentence.
The air changes.
It isn’t subtle—it never is when Magdangal magic flares. The entryway tightens and compresses, charged and electric, like the moment before lightning strikes. The wards along the ceiling pulse awake in response to my brothers’ magic, and every hair on my body stands on end.
Jonah goes still beside me.
“Guys,” I start, hands lifted, palms open in the universal gesture of please fucking relax.
My brothers move first, fanning out in the instinctive, practiced way they’ve done a million times in alleyways and across rooftops, protecting their queen and their king.
“Mayari,” Raf says mildly, as if we’re discussing grocery lists. “Why is there a demon in your apartment?”
Jonah gives a small, awkward wave. “Hello.”
Everyone ignores him.
“And where are your pants?” Leo adds on lightly.
I look down. Must have missed those. “I need to explain something before you all lose your shit, okay?”
Andres’s expression hardens. “It doesn’t seem complicated. You’re fucking something you’ve trained your whole life to kill.”
I may as well have been slapped in the face.
I look to Gabriel, desperate. “Remember the conversation in the kitchen,” I plead. “About our magic. About how it feels different sometimes? This is proof. This is—”
“Enough.” My mother’s voice detonates the room. She steps forward, emerging through the line of my brothers, and the energy in the entryway snaps to attention. “This is hesitation in its most bastard form, Mayari. This demon must be ended. Now.”
I move instinctively to stand in front of Jonah, but pause when I catch a glimpse of him.
Of the tight, defensive posture he’s assumed.
He’s no longer the soft, disheveled man in my bed from just a few minutes ago.
He is entirely carved from stone. Cold. Demon-like.
The color drains from his face. I watch emotion flit through his eyes—recognition, devastation, horror, pain, and then…
Rage.
“You,” Jonah says, and it isn’t loud, but it shakes the room with the weight behind it. His finger lifts, steady, accusatory, and aimed directly at my mother. “You’re the slayer who killed my wife.”
Silence swallows us whole.
My heart drops so violently it feels like I’ve fallen through the floor. “Oh, no.”
Jonah steps forward. Every muscle in his body draws tight, coiled and trembling. Dark claws slide from the tips of his fingers, gleaming and terrible.
“Jonah,” I whisper. “Jonah, no!” I grab his arm, but it’s like grabbing a boulder tumbling in the other direction. He doesn’t even feel me.
My mother advances. “I suppose,” she says coldly, “it’s time for you to meet her.”
“HEY!” I plant myself between them, arms outstretched.
Jonah presses forward against my hand, heat radiating off him. “I’ve been dreaming of killing you for forty years.”
Forty. The number detonates in my chest. The bench. Ten seconds.
My mother doesn’t waste breath. She lunges.
I react before I think. Both hands fling outward—one toward Jonah, one toward my mother—and my magic tears through the room in a violent surge of pure force.
Jonah is thrown backward, slamming into the wall hard enough to shatter my television in a rain of glass. My brothers catch my mother mid-flight, their boots screeching against the hardwood as they brace.
“Stop!” I scream, my voice breaking. “Listen to me! I have information that changes everything—”
Jonah is already on his feet.
He doesn’t look at me.
He doesn’t look at the broken television.
He doesn’t look at anything except my mother.
“I’m out,” he says, and the hurt in his voice is worse than the rage. “Goodbye.”
“Jonah—”
He doesn’t even grant me a glance.
“The only reason I’m not tearing you apart,” he tells my mother, voice shaking with the effort of restraint, “is because your daughter showed me more empathy in seven days than I’ve seen from your kind in eighty-seven years.”
The words gut me. My chest feels like it’s being torn apart.
“I’m walking out of here,” he continues, deadly calm now. “Unharmed. If you have any modicum of respect for your daughter, you will let me.”
My brothers stare him down. Tension vibrates between them, a live wire stretched too tight.
For one terrible second, I think they’ll attack, anyway.
Then, slowly, they part.
Jonah clenches his jaw and strides past them. Past me. His hand twitches, just once, as if every instinct in his body is screaming at him to reach for me.
But he curls it into a fist instead, and then he’s gone.
The door slams behind him, and the silence that follows is the final dagger in my chest.
For a few long seconds, no one moves. My television crackles faintly, a thin curl of smoke rising from behind the fractured screen. The air still smells of ozone from the burst of my magic.
I’m still standing exactly where I threw it, chest heaving, palms tingling, every nerve in my body lit up and frayed and devastated.
“Well,” Leo says at last, staring at the ruined television with mild interest, “that escalated.”
“Mayari.” My mother’s voice slices through the room. “Explain.”
My mouth tastes like metal. I swallow it down. “I will,” I say, forcing steadiness into my tone. “But you’re not going to like it.”
Before my mother can respond, my father steps forward.
His gaze moves past me, taking in the rest of the apartment.
The maps taped across the hardwood. The chalked runes spidering out across the floor.
The bowls of powders arranged with obsessive precision.
The red circles and black Xs. The reinforced salt lines threaded with iron.
The diagram of the soup kitchen block marked with civilian density by time of night, three evacuation paths drawn in careful blue.
His expression shifts. “Alunsina,” he says quietly. “Look.”
My mother follows his line of sight. For a moment, she just looks at the room. Then she looks at me. Calculation flickers across her face.
“We will discuss this later,” my father says, and there’s no arguing with the finality in his voice. He takes my mother’s arm.
She resists for half a second. Then she allows herself to be led out.
The door closes again, softer this time.
I let out a long, slow, painful breath.
My brothers remain. All four of them drift fully into the living room now, their attention turning from me to the mock battlefield I’ve built across my floor.
Gabriel crouches near the largest map, fingertips hovering over the block grid. “You marked civilian density.”
Raf picks up one of the bowls and brings it to his nose. “Salt. Iron. Eggshell.”
“And something that smells like Lola’s spice cabinet from 1948,” Leo adds, wrinkling his nose.
Andres nudges one of the chalk symbols with the toe of his boot. “You were preparing for something.”
“Both of us were,” I say, defending my demon. My poor, devastated demon, whose wife was slain by my mother. “We were preparing to destroy Belvedere.”
All four of them look up at once, and the temperature in the room seems to drop.
“He’s coming tonight. Halloween night,” I continue, pointing to the map at my feet. “To that soup kitchen.”
Raf straightens slowly. “How do you know?”
“One of his lieutenants told me before I killed him. And Jonah has been tracking rot patterns in that neighborhood for decades.”
Gabriel’s jaw tightens at the name. “Mayari,” he says carefully, like he’s trying not to step on a landmine. “You’re not thinking clearly.”
“I have never been clearer,” I shoot back. “And you’re going to hear me out. Sit down.”
They don’t sit, obviously, so I keep going.
“You all know how our magic works. Demon registers as demon. We sense the signature, and from the time we’re children, we’re taught what that signature means.”
“Corruption,” my father had called it.
“Danger,” I say now. “Something that needs to die.”
No one argues.
“But our magic has never actually told us any of that. It only tells us if there’s a demon. Everything after that is what we were taught.”
Raf’s expression shifts.
I tap my sternum. “My forte senses something more.”
The room goes still.
“I’m not sensing thoughts. I’m not reading minds or souls or deciding whether someone is good or evil. I still sense the same demonic signature all of you do. But there’s another pattern underneath it. Intent. I can feel when that energy is directed toward harm.”
Gabriel looks down.
“And sometimes,” I say, watching him, “you feel something different too.”
His jaw flexes, but he doesn’t deny it.
“That static. That shift you told me about. I think you have the same forte.”
His head lifts sharply. “No.”
“You said it yourself.”
“I said sometimes the current feels different.”
“So does mine.”
“That doesn’t mean we have the same forte.”
“Well,” I concede, “at the very least, it means we should figure it out.”
Silence stretches between us.
Raf breaks it first. “Difference doesn’t mean good.”
“No,” I agree. “It doesn’t. My forte doesn’t tell me good. It tells me intent. And Jonah’s is different from Belvedere’s.”
Leo scoffs. “You’re basing all of this on a feeling?”
“I’m basing it on my magic. The same magic we’ve trusted our entire lives when it tells us a demon is standing in front of us.
The blond demon I killed?” I continue. “My magic was sharp around him. The demonic signature was there, and beneath it, so was the intent to hurt me. No static. No hesitation. Everything aligned.” I take a breath. “Jonah doesn’t feel like that.”
Andres stares at me. “Because you’re sleeping with him.”
“I felt it before I was sleeping with him. I felt it when I was trying to kill him.”
Another silence.
“And this isn’t just about Jonah,” I continue. “Demons feed differently. We were taught that feeding means consuming a soul, but that isn’t always what happens.”
Leo’s expression hardens. “What the hell does that mean?”
“There’s a core to a soul—identity, memory, will. The things that make someone who they are. A full feeding destroys that. But Jonah doesn’t touch the core. He feeds from the outer layers.”
“Outer layers,” Raf repeats.
“Things that accumulate around it. Rot. Violence. Rage. Jonah feeds on what’s poisoning someone and leaves the person intact.”
Andres stares at me like I’ve suggested we adopt a demon as a pet. Which I suppose I’ve done with Batibat. Or did she adopt me?
“That’s insane,” he says.
“I watched him do it.”
Gabriel finally speaks. “You’re telling us the demon you’re fucking doesn’t consume souls.”
“I’m telling you he doesn’t consume the core. I watched him feed from a man who walked away alive, conscious, and calmer than he was before.”
“Calmer,” Raf repeats skeptically.
“He was spiraling and violent. Jonah chose him because of it. He does research. He doesn’t hunt indiscriminately.”
Their gazes drift toward the maps again. The reinforced containment zones. The evacuation routes. Every detail Jonah and I spent hours planning.
“At minimum,” Gabriel says slowly, “he’s planning something.”
“Yes, to protect his soup kitchen. The blond demon confirmed Belvedere is targeting it,” I continue. “Tonight, on Halloween.”
“And you believed a demon?” Leo asks.
“I believed my magic.” I look at Gabriel. “I believe my forte.”
“You’re asking us to accept that killing shouldn’t be automatic,” Raf says.
“Yes.”
“That is not how we were raised,” Andres says.
“I know.” My voice catches despite myself. “But what if we were wrong?”
They look at me as though I’ve just proposed dismantling the foundation of the house we grew up in.
“You think Mom killed a good demon,” Leo says quietly.
I swallow. “I think Mom killed a demon who wasn’t trying to hurt anyone.”
“Belvedere is real,” I continue. “He is coming. And Jonah and I were going to stop him with preparation and strategy, not just brute force.”
Gabriel studies the evacuation routes again. “You were going to defend the soup kitchen.”
“Yes.”
“With a demon.”
“Yes.”
“From a demon.”
I resist the urge to growl. “Yes.”
They exchange a look that carries decades of shared training.
“You cannot seriously believe your magic can tell you which demons are good,” Raf says.
“That’s not what I said.” My frustration spikes. “It tells me intent. Demons still make choices. I’m saying we should be discerning enough to recognize those choices before we put a blade through someone’s heart.”
“That’s not how this works,” Andres insists.
“Fuck!” I tear my hands through my hair.
“We’re not getting anywhere.” Of course we aren’t.
I can stand here all night describing patterns and signatures and the difference my forte feels between Jonah and Belvedere, but none of them can feel what I feel.
To them, it’s still just my word against everything we’ve been taught since birth.
I need them to understand.
I need them to see.
See.
I go still.
There is one thing I can show them. One piece of evidence that doesn’t depend on my magic or Jonah’s word. Something I’ve spent ten years avoiding because I was too afraid to face what it might mean.
A decade-long decision crystallizes in an instant.
I take a deep breath. “Come with me.”
They only stare at me.
“We’re going out.” I stride into my room and snatch the spare catsuit from the back of my closet. I peel off my shirt, pull the suit on, and zip it up. “You want proof? Fine. I’ll give you proof.”
Gabriel’s eyes narrow. “Proof of what, exactly?”
“That demon doesn’t automatically mean monster.” I grab one last thing from my desk drawer.
“And how,” Leo asks dryly, “are you planning to accomplish that?”
I head for the door, adrenaline rising again, but this time it’s a sharp, focused thing.
“By showing you.”