Page 31 of Eat, Slay, Love

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.