Page 32 of Eat, Slay, Love

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.”