Chapter 20 #2
Silence. Dimitri processes this. Beside him, Knox tilts his head, his tell, the thing he does when he’s thinking, and Dimitri knows his tells now, knows all of them, knows the way he tilts his head and the way he sets his jaw and the way his left hand drifts toward his mace when he’s nervous, and this accumulation of intimate knowledge is deeply inconvenient and entirely Knox’s fault.
“The Hargrove Coven,” Dimitri repeats flatly.
“The oldest coven in Haven,” Xela confirms. She picks up a glass from the bar that Sidney has silently placed in front of her, something clear and faintly luminous, and takes a sip.
“Founded six generations ago by Mathilde Hargrove, who still runs it, because Mathilde Hargrove is too mean to die and too stubborn to let anyone else be in charge. She runs it as a dynasty. Blood in, blood out. Every Hargrove witch for the last hundred and fifty years has trained under her, and God help the ones who don’t meet her standards. ”
“And the boy?” Knox asks.
“Newt is her great-grandson.” Xela smiles again, and this time it is edged with something that might be pity.
“Obscenely powerful. Staggeringly incompetent. He has more raw magical potential than the rest of the coven combined, and he can’t control any of it.
Every spell he tries to cast comes out sideways.
Mathilde has been trying to train him for years and he keeps blowing things up.
Literally. He blew up the east wing of the Hargrove mansion last spring.
And the greenhouse. And, I’m told, a car, although no one will confirm that one on the record. ”
“He blew up a car?” Knox says, with something between concern and bewilderment.
“It’s unclear if it was intentional.” Xela shrugs one shoulder. “With Newt, it rarely is.”
Dimitri pinches the bridge of his nose. Of course.
Of course the witch who dragged him across dimensions, botched the summoning, opened a rift, loosed a pack of demon dogs on Haven, and accidentally soulbound a demon to a nephilim Templar is a Hargrove witch who can’t aim a spell if you give him a compass and a map.
Why would anything about this situation be simple.
Why would the universe, which has been making Dimitri’s life difficult for a millennium, suddenly decide to cut him a break.
“The coven,” Dimitri says, keeping his voice level through an act of will that deserves some kind of commendation. “Where do I find them?”
“The Violet Corridor.” Xela takes another sip of her drink.
“Thornfield Row, specifically. They own most of the block. The mansion is at the end, you can’t miss it, it’s the one that looks as though it has been there since before the city was built, because it has.
” She sets the glass down and looks at him with those reflective silver eyes, and her voice shifts.
Drops. Loses its idle cadence and takes on the resonance that banshees use when they are telling you something they want you to remember.
“But Dimitri. I’m telling you this because I want you to understand what you’re walking into. ”
Dimitri’s jaw tightens. “Meaning?”
“Meaning the Hargrove Coven is not a warm environment.” Xela’s gaze is steady.
“Mathilde runs it as a dynasty, and dynasties are built on control. Every witch in that coven exists because Mathilde allows them to exist. They serve at her pleasure. They practice the magic she approves. They marry the people she chooses, and they produce the heirs she demands, and the ones who don’t comply are cut off.
Excommunicated. Erased. Newt is caught between being the most valuable thing the coven has produced in a generation and being the greatest threat to Mathilde’s control.
He is powerful enough to be worth keeping and dangerous enough to be worth destroying, and the only reason he’s still alive is because Mathilde hasn’t decided which yet. ”
The silence that follows is not comfortable.
Dimitri feels something move through the bond.
Not hope this time. Something heavier. Sadder.
He glances at Knox and finds him looking at the bar with a slight furrow between his brows, his expression carefully neutral in the way that means it is anything but.
Knox is thinking about the boy in the warehouse.
The scared, shaking kid with the freckles and the stolen spellbook who stumbled through a summoning he couldn’t control.
Knox is recontextualizing. Fitting new information into old impressions.
Seeing the full picture where before there were only pieces.
Dimitri knows this because he can feel it happening.
The bond shows him Knox’s mind the way light through a window shows the interior of a room, not every detail, but the shape of things.
The furniture. The architecture. And right now, the architecture of Knox’s thoughts is rearranging itself around a twenty-year-old witch who risked everything to summon help because the people who were supposed to help him wouldn’t.
Dimitri does not want to care about this.
He has not asked to care about this. He has a very carefully maintained policy of not caring about things, especially things involving mortals and their desperately tedious emotional landscapes, and the fact that Knox’s quiet empathy is bleeding through the bond and settling into his chest is not Dimitri’s problem.
Except it is. Because Knox is his. And the things Knox cares about have a way of becoming Dimitri’s problems whether he wants them to or not, and this is one of the many profoundly irritating consequences of falling for a man whose defining characteristic is giving a shit about everything.
He has not said falling. He has not thought falling. That word has not occurred. Moving on.
“Right,” Dimitri says. “Violet Corridor. Thornfield Row. Terrifying coven matriarch with a penchant for controlling her descendants. Got it.”
Xela looks at him for a moment longer than is strictly necessary. Then her gaze slides to Knox, lingers, and comes back to Dimitri with something in it that Dimitri does not like.
“Take care of him,” she says.
Dimitri bristles. “He’s a Templar. He can take care of himself.”
“That’s not what I said.”
They look at each other. Then Dimitri turns away, because he is not going to have a sincere emotional moment with a banshee in a bar that smells of elderflower, and he still has some standards, however diminished.
“Let’s go,” he says to Knox.
Knox straightens. He looks at Xela and inclines his head in a small, genuine gesture of gratitude that is so quintessentially Knox that Dimitri feels it pressed against a bruise. “Thank you,” Knox says. “For your help.”
Xela regards him. “You’re welcome, Templar.” A pause. Then: “He’s always been terrible at saying thank you. Don’t take it personally.”
“I don’t,” Knox says, and there is warmth in his voice that makes Dimitri want to grab him by the ponytail and drag him out of the bar, and not for the reason he would have claimed.
***
They leave Willow’s. The night air is cool and sharp after the warmth of the bar, and the Old City spreads around them in its usual state of atmospheric decay, narrow streets, flickering lights, the smell of rain on old stone and something underneath it that is sweeter and stranger, the smell of magic accumulating in the cracks.
Dimitri walks and Knox falls into step beside him, close enough that their arms brush, and the contact sends a small persistent spark of warmth through the bond that Dimitri elects to ignore.
They are halfway down the block when Knox speaks.
“He must have been desperate,” Knox says quietly.
His tone is thoughtful. Not pitying, Knox doesn’t do pity, which is one of the things about him that Dimitri can actually tolerate, but something more careful.
More considered. “To summon a demon. If his coven is like that. If Mathilde is like that.” He pauses.
“He wasn’t looking for power. He was looking for help. ”
“They’re always desperate when they call a demon,” Dimitri says.
He means it to sound dismissive. Callous.
The kind of thing he would have said a month ago without a second thought, because a month ago it would have been true.
Mortals summon demons because they are desperate, and Dimitri has never once cared about the desperation, only the opportunity it presents.
That is how the world works. Desperate people call, and demons answer, and the transaction that follows is never, ever fair.
But the words come out differently than he intends. Flatter. Quieter. Less a dismissal and more an observation, the kind a person makes when they are seeing something familiar from an unfamiliar angle and the new perspective bothers them more than they would like.
Knox looks at him. Those green eyes, steady and warm and far too perceptive for Dimitri’s comfort, reading him the way they always do, finding things Dimitri is not offering and taking them anyway.
Knox does not say anything. He does not need to.
The bond says it for him, a quiet complicated pulse of understanding and sadness and something underneath both that is aimed squarely at Dimitri, as though Knox can see the shape of what Dimitri is not saying and has decided to hold it carefully instead of forcing it into the light.
Dimitri looks away. Shoves his hands in his pockets. Keeps walking.
Mine, the bond says.
Shut up, Dimitri tells it.
The bond, as always, does not listen.