Chapter 17
Isend Raf and Andres to New York-Presbyterian, to their emergency room on the Upper East Side.
I give them a name. A name that I’ve rabbit-holed over, checking week after week, for the last ten years.
I make them swear, over Lola’s soul, that they would not kill anyone or anything until we rejoined.
I take Leo and Gabriel, and we head south to Lower Manhattan. We’re going to high school.
“This isn’t problematic at all,” Leo says lightly.
“You’ll watch teenagers across the street from a high school, but killing demons is where you draw the line,” Gabriel would like me to clarify.
“Hush,” I tell them. “School will be out in a minute. Listen to your magic.”
A minute later, the front doors of Stuyvesant High School swing open, and a flood of students pours onto the sidewalk.
It’s a riot of Halloween costumes and overachieving energy—superheroes arguing about calculus, pirates comparing college applications, an inflatable T-Rex trying not to body-check a kid dressed as Marie Curie.
They spill down the steps laughing, shoving, filming videos and taking pictures, embodying that specific brand of harmless chaos unique to teenagers who believe they are immortal and mildly inconvenienced by authority. Demon-like, one might say.
We feel her before we see her. The shift in the air, the prickle along my arms. My brothers move as one—automatic, instinctive—sliding into the attack stance we’ve drilled since childhood, hands dropping to their weapons before thought can catch up.
“Stop,” I mutter under my breath, cognizant of the students walking around us. “Relax. These are kids. Just listen to your magic. What is it telling you?”
They stay like that for a long moment, eyes unfocused, attention turned inward instead of outward.
Gabriel is the first to shift. His shoulders lower a fraction. “It’s… yeah,” he admits slowly. “The demon signature is the same. But there’s something underneath it. It’s not sharp or pushing outward. It’s…” His brow furrows as he searches for the words. “Moving. Changing.”
“Like there’s a second current beneath the first,” I say quietly. “That’s what I feel.”
Leo hasn’t budged. His jaw is set, his gaze still scanning the crowd. “Mine feels the same as it always does,” he says flatly.
I sniff. “That’s because it’s not your forte.”
He shoots me a look.
“But look,” I add quickly, pointing.
They all know which one she is. We can feel her in our own ways, like a note that doesn’t quite harmonize with the rest of the chord.
Amara Greene.
She’s weaving through the crowd with some friends, backpack slung over one shoulder, textbooks hugged to her chest. She’s tall in that awkward, still-growing way, limbs a little too long for her frame, laughter breaking free in bursts she tries to stifle with the palm of her hand.
She leans in to look at something on one of their phones, groans at whatever video they’re watching, then digs through her bag for lip gloss and hands it to her friend.
Leo finally leaves the Rah! Attack! stance, but his body is still tense. “She’s a demon,” he says, but it’s spoken with little conviction.
“She’s a kid,” I fire back.
They watch her for another few seconds as she pushes one of her friends playfully and nearly trips over her own boots. “So she looks like a regular kid,” Leo says, slightly strangled. “That doesn’t mean she’s not feeding on souls when no one is around to see.”
Amara peels away from the group, heading towards the subway, while her friends continue their way towards us.
I scrub my face with my hands. “What will it take to get you to believe me?”
He swallows. “I want to track her and make sure.”
“I see we’re pushing that ‘appropriate’ line further and further away,” Gabriel remarks.
By this point, we’ve lost visual on her, but her group approaches: two identical twins and another girl.
“Hey,” I say, because I have apparently forgotten all of my social cues. “Where does your friend Amara live?” I blurt out, and immediately regret it.
At my periphery, I see Gabriel jamming two fingers into his eyelids.
One of the twins stares at me in stunned silence. Her gaze flicks from my face to my brothers, then back again as the full picture settles into place.
And then, she—well. The only accurate word for what happens next is that she detonates.
“What is this, Filipino Black Panther?” she hisses, waving at our skintight, full-body leather. “Why are a bunch of grown-ass adults in matching catsuits asking where a teenage girl lives?”
We all wince.
She steps forward, growing at least seven inches taller in sheer fury. “Are you fucking insane? Do you hear yourselves? ‘Hi, children, where does your minor girlfriend reside?’ What’s next, you want her social security number too?”
Leo opens his mouth.
She rounds on him before he gets anything out. “No, actually. Don’t speak, Temu T’Challa.”
Gabriel coughs into his fist.
She pivots. “Is this some kind of weird cosplay cult? Because if so, I promise you, the city already has enough.”
Leo mutters, “We’re not a cult.”
She gasps theatrically. “Oh good, that clears it up completely. Just three leather-clad adults stalking a high schooler for wholesome reasons.”
I attempt damage control. “It’s not like that—”
“Oh, is it not like that?” she fires back. “Because from where I’m standing, it’s giving true crime podcast.”
“It’s giving ‘last seen near the mall,’” her friend growls.
“It’s giving felony,” the other twin says with a solemn nod.
The scary twin folds her arms and looks us up and down with devastating precision. “Here’s a thought,” she says coolly. “Maybe don’t roll up in coordinated pleather and start fishing for addresses. What kind of deranged Scooby-Doo villain behavior is this?”
Gabriel makes a strangled sound that might be laughter.
She steps closer, chin lifted. “I think it would be wonderful if you fucked right off.” She gives us one final withering look. “And maybe unpack why you thought this was a normal question.” Then she turns on her heel and storms away, her twin and her friend gliding after her.
We watch as she knocks into some kid who looks too big for his body. “Watch it, you illiterate gorilla,” she snarls at him.
The kid shakes his head and mutters something that sounds like “worst fuckin’ nightmare” under his breath.
“Fuck, she’s terrifying,” Leo says, awestruck.
“What a positive experience,” Gabriel says. “We’ve all learned so much.”
I start heading in the direction Amara walked in. “Shut up. Let’s go. And do not engage.”
We get a text that Raf and Andres are following their target home, too.
By the time we reconvene on a quiet stretch of the far West Side, the sky has turned that bruised violet that belongs only to October.
The Hudson glints a dull steel beyond the high-rises, and the wind carries the faint smell of salt and exhaust.
The five of us stand down the street as Amara rounds the corner at a jog and nearly collides with her mother.
Tasha Greene is still in scrubs, her hospital ID badge swinging against her chest. She drops her bag, pulls her daughter into a tight embrace, and presses a kiss to the top of Amara’s head.
They linger there for a moment, wrapped up in each other, before heading toward their townhouse.
Tasha glances over her shoulder once, scanning the block in that way people do when they’ve learned to expect danger.
Gabriel exhales slowly, his eyes never leaving the house. “She’s just a kid,” he says finally.
No one answers him.
His brow furrows, something troubled settling over his face. “We followed her after school. She tripped over the last two steps out of the station at 86th Street and then went to the bodega. She watched makeup tutorials on her phone. There was nothing.”
Raf doesn’t answer immediately. He’s still staring at the front door that just shut behind Tasha and Amara. “Mayari had us following a trauma surgeon,” he says finally.
“Convenient,” Leo huffs. “So she has faster access to souls once she gets their chest cavity ripped open?”
Neither Raf nor Andres respond for a while.
Finally, Andres shakes his head slightly.
“We watched her all day at Presbyterian. Emergency surgery after emergency surgery. Car crash, stabbing, collapsed lung. She operated and didn’t feed once, and she saved everyone who came through that room.
” He huffs a laugh. “She even stayed past her shift.”
“And we researched her using our database,” Raf adds on. “She’s been a trauma surgeon for years. She changes her name and switches hospitals every decade or so, probably to avoid questions about why she doesn’t age.”
“And she’s responsible for saving hundreds, maybe thousands of lives,” Andres adds quietly.
“Human lives,” I correct.
They all look at me.
“They’re why you haven’t killed in ten years.” Gabriel says it as a fact.
“I wasn’t certain,” I admit. “I tracked her online for years. I kept waiting for the moment it turned, or proof that she was the exception, not the rule. And then Jonah…” My voice falters at his name. I swallow and force myself to keep going. “Jonah confirmed what I was already afraid of.”
The wind lifts a strand of my hair across my face. I don’t brush it away.
“I killed Tasha’s husband,” I say, and the words scrape their way out of my throat. “Amara’s father. That was the catalyst, actually.”
The memory hits hard and fast, the way it always does, with the force of a bullet train. The way they ran from me afterward. Because I was the monster.
My eyes burn. I let them.
“My magic—my forte, it felt the same then, too,” I admit. “And I have carried that grief for a decade. Jonah just gave it a name.”
A heavy silence settles over the block.
Gabriel looks at the townhouse. “So Tasha’s husband wasn’t an exception.”
“No.”
His jaw tightens. “And Amara isn’t, either.”
“No.”
He looks down, all of them look down. Gabriel scuffs the toe of his boot against the pavement. For once, there’s no joke waiting behind his expression. “Fuck,” he says quietly.
No one answers because we’ve all been doing the same terrible math. Demons we hunted because they were demons, families we’ve destroyed, children we never considered to be children at all.
Andres exhales slowly. Raf looks away. Leo’s face has gone tight.
“We didn’t know,” Gabriel says, voice lanced with pain.
“No,” I say. “We didn’t.” I swipe at my eyes. “But what matters now is what you choose to do after you’ve accepted what you’ve done.”
I take a deep, cleansing breath, then make a decision. I cross the street before any of them can stop me.
The closer I get to the townhouse, the more I feel it.
It’s a ward humming beneath the brick and mortar, calibrated specifically against something like me.
It repels gently, insistently, as if it recognizes the signature of the slayer who shattered this family.
Tasha learned to protect her home from my kind, and the realization lands heavier than any accusation.
I step back, walk to the nearest tree, and reach into the hidden pocket of my catsuit. The letters are creased from years of being folded and unfolded. Apologies written and rewritten, confessions I never had the courage to deliver.
I spear them into the bark with the tip of my dagger.
I look up at the house one last time, memorizing the windows lit warm against the dark.
Then I turn and walk back to my brothers, something settling into place inside me.
“Gabriel and Andres,” I say, and my voice is steady now, sharp. “Go get everything from my apartment. All the prep. Every Baybayin design. Every powder.”
They nod without argument.
“Leo. Raf. Call our generation from the borough families. Not the parents. Us.”
They exchange a glance and then nod.
“Where are you going?” Leo asks.
“Where you all will be meeting me,” I say. “To the soup kitchen. To Jonah. I’m going now, just in case.” It’s not as if Belvedere sent us an invitation with a detailed schedule outlining soul sucking cocktail hour followed by a sit-down dinner of corpse with blood pairing.
I pat my catsuit pockets. “Hey, someone give me some salt and more weapons and shit. This is my spare catsuit.”
My brothers load me up with more weapons and wards than any reasonable person should be able to carry without tipping sideways.
Gabriel watches me adjust the straps, eyes narrowing slightly like he’s trying to solve a math problem.
“What happened to ‘single for life’?” he asks.
“Last month you declared the only reliable companions in this world were Batibat and a well-aged Roquefort.”
I adjust the strap digging into my shoulder and glance up at him. “I found a demon who feeds me all sorts of French cheese,” I say calmly. “So now, he’s mine.”
Whether I’m still his or not.