Page 44 of Eat, Slay, Love

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.”

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.