Page 54 of Eat, Slay, Love

“Gabriel.” My voice cracks, splintering around his name. “Was. He. Alive.”

He studies me for a long moment, something softening behind his eyes, something that looks dangerously like pity. Then he nods once. “Barely.”

Barely is not dead. Barely still breathes. Barely still fights. Barely means we may both still exist in this world together.

Alive.

That is all I need.

I run.

20

Itake a cab.

Because I’m still healing, can’t run anyway, and don’t trust my legs to carry me the entire way without collapsing under the weight of what-ifs. The driver barely glances at me when I slam the door behind me and choke out the address, his eyes already back on the river of traffic ahead. The city moves around us in indifferent currents: pedestrians drifting between crosswalks, cyclists weaving through impossible gaps, storefronts opening their mouths to the morning.

I sit in the back seat and try not to break apart. My hands won’t stop shaking. My ribs ache with every breath, a deep structural soreness that reminds me how close I came to dying. I press my palms flat against my thighs and close my eyes.

Listen.

My magic responds immediately, rising from wherever it sleeps inside me, unfurling like something alive. It reaches outward, threading itself through concrete and steel and bodies and distance. It searches with purpose, with urgency. It calls. It pulls. It begs. Please, it says. Listen to me. Please.

I ignore the pounding of my heart, the way my lungs keep catching on the edge of panic. I let the sensation guide me, let it stretch beyond the limits of my physical body. Somewhere in this city, there is a shape my magic recognizes as its counterpart, the place it settles, the place it belongs.

For one long, horrible second, there is nothing.

And then⁠—

There.

Faint, but unmistakable.

Familiar. Mine.

My eyes fly open.

Relief hits so hard it makes me nauseous. It floods through my bloodstream, dissolving the tight knot of dread that’s been choking me since I woke up. My magic surges toward the feeling, wrapping itself around that distant presence like hands grasping for hands. The pull strengthens, warm and certain, and I feel it like the hum of a tuning fork, a gentle, vibrating caress that surrounds every atom, muscle, limb of my body, in my heart and in my bones.

He’s there. He’s alive.

I laugh, the sound breaking free, a noise halfway between a sob and something hysterical. Tears blur my vision, spilling freely down my face as the cab lurches to a stop.

“Here,” the driver says.

I shove cash into his hand without counting it and stumble out onto the curb, my boots hitting pavement already warm with the late morning sun.

My magic pulls hard toward the side entrance.

I run.

My lungs burn, my sides protest, but I don’t slow. The familiar brick of the soup kitchen rises in front of me, the alley pavement torn like a wasted battlefield, littered with leaves and candy wrappers and the faint chalk scars of old containment circles. The metal door sits closed, quiet, ordinary.

For half a second, terror whispers that I imagined it.

Then the door slams open.

He steps out.