Page 46 of Eat, Slay, Love

“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.