Page 7 of Eat, Slay, Love

A thick, dark eyebrow raises. “And what’s your magic telling you now?”

I don’t even have to look inward, because my magic is buzzing up and down my skin and down to my fingertips, crackling and distracting and confusing and vibrating. I ignore the question. “And you’re here, at a soup kitchen, ready to feed on all these souls who just need a fucking break!”

“I’m begging you to let me expla—” but he doesn’t finish. His eyes flick to something to my left.

“Yo! What is this? Salt? Is it supposed to snow?”

I turn just in time to see an elderly woman kick at my circle, breaking the seal with a pop.

Fuck.

I whirl back towards Jonah.

He grins, and it’s a beautiful sort of smile, deadly and wicked in the way that a blade catching the light can be.

I take one step back, assuming a defensive stance.

“A little early for Halloween, don’t you think, Catwoman?” the lady asks me, walking directly between us towards the door, entirely unbothered in the way only New Yorkers can be during a stand off between the most gorgeous demon alive and a woman in a catsuit holding a glowing silver dagger. She pulls out a set of keys and unlocks the door. “Coming, Jonah?” she calls back before going inside.

She’s… inviting him in?

We lock eyes again, my brown meeting his ice-blue. I brace myself for the attack as he moves towards me, but my own feet won’t move, my heart pounding in my ears.

His arm brushes mine as he walks—nay, ambles—right past me and through the door.

Warm. He’s so, so warm.

4

The door locks behind them with a decisive click. For a fleeting, cinematic second, I consider kicking it down, but then I realize that it’s a thick steel door that looks like it was designed to withstand nuclear fallout. My boot, along with my quads, tragically, is not qualified for this, especially at this stage of my failed-slayer journey.

“Hey,” I yell, employing sixty-seven years of elite slayer training by banging my fist against the door. “Open up.”

The door stares back at me, indifferent, as if to echo Jonah’s words from last night. You’ve got to be kidding me.

Grumbling, I walk through the front door the moment the soup kitchen opens. Betty—the take-no-shit woman who let herself in earlier—is the one unlocking it, her massive ring of keys jangling. I immediately scan her from head to toe, and… she seems okay. Her soul is entirely intact. She nods and smiles at me when I enter, giving me a warm, “Welcome in, Catwoman.”

I settle into a chair in the far, far corner of the room, watching, telling myself I’m here to protect these people from Jonah and not because I’m nursing a strange, inconvenient curiosity about him.

I don’t see him once, but my magic insists he’s close. Somewhere in the building. It hums under my skin, unsettled and unfocused, as if it can’t quite decide what it’s sensing. I can’t afford to notice the way it hums wrong. I can’t afford a moment of hesitation.

But it becomes impossible to ignore after a few uneventful hours in the corner of the room, and now, irritated by the magic rippling up and down my neck, I can’t stop thinking about it. Other anomalies pop up, demanding to be seen. Jonah’s blood. His warmth. And a wife? Since when do demons participate in vows of holy matrimony?

I’m aware that demons are highly sexual creatures, preferring trysts to long-term partnerships. It’s probably the only thing slayers have in common with them. Certainly me. I’ll fuck all night, a month, even a decade if the chemistry holds, but being tied to someone for the extended lifespan of a slayer? Not in a million years. Or centuries, rather.

I reach for my phone and open the worldwide slayer forum, the one place where decades of post-internet collective experience live in a chaotic scroll of bad usernames and questionable punctuation. I send out a blast: Has anyone ever encountered a demon who bled?

No, never

A few times. Didn’t think twice about it. Was very toxic sludge-y.

I think about the metallic smell that permeated the air each time I sliced his arm. And it certainly didn’t flow like toxic sludge.

My forte lets me identify kill viability. Some demons don’t have blood at all. Some have thicker blood. Some, even thinner. The ones with no blood or thicker blood are harder to destabilize.

I lean forward.

My forte tells me how long they’ll hold physical form after injury. Non-bleeders linger longer.