Chapter 22
Dimitri grabs the kid by the collar before Knox’s hands have even left his shoulders.
He hauls Newt upright, really upright, feet barely touching the cobblestones, collar twisted in Dimitri’s fist, and the boy weighs about as much as a wet newspaper.
He dangles there, freckled face white, eyes the size of dinner plates, and Dimitri stares into them with years of accumulated fury and thinks about how satisfying it would be to shake him until his teeth rattle.
This is the witch who dragged him across dimensions.
This is the freckled catastrophe who botched a summoning so thoroughly that it ripped a hole in reality and loosed acid-dripping monsters on a city and bound Dimitri’s soul to a nephilim Templar who makes him feel things he has spent a millennium successfully avoiding.
This twenty-year-old boy with his shaking hands and his stolen spellbook is responsible for the worst and best thing that has ever happened to Dimitri, and Dimitri is going to kill him, or thank him, and he hasn’t decided which.
“Dimitri,” Knox says sharply.
Dimitri ignores him.
“Do we look familiar?” he asks.
Newt’s mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. His gaze darts between Dimitri and Knox with the frantic, cornered-animal energy of someone whose worst nightmare has just materialized on a public street and grabbed him by the throat.
“I—I’m sorry—I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—I thought I was summoning a familiar, not a—I didn’t know the spell would—” The words tumble out in a breathless stammering rush, tripping over each other.
“The book said it was a conjuration for a bonded companion, I didn’t know it was a summoning circle for a demon, I swear I didn’t—”
“Did you mean,” Dimitri interrupts, his voice low and precise, “to use blood magic to bind me to a Templar?”
Newt goes a shade of white that Knox probably has a medical term for. The horror on his face is total, not the performative horror of someone caught in a lie, but the genuine gut-deep horror of someone who is only now understanding the full scope of what they’ve done.
“I—bound—” Newt’s voice cracks. “I bound you? To each other? I thought—the spell said it would close the rift and send you back, I didn’t—oh God, I can barely read Old Tongue, I thought the runes meant—”
Knox’s hand closes on Dimitri’s wrist. Firm. Insistent.
“Let him go,” Knox says.
Dimitri’s jaw tightens. Through the bond, he can feel Knox’s calm pressing against his fury, steady and immovable and patient.
Knox doesn’t demand. He doesn’t pull. He just holds Dimitri’s wrist and waits, and the quiet certainty of the touch says I know you’re going to put him down with a confidence that Dimitri finds both insulting and accurate.
He releases Newt.
The kid stumbles backward, nearly falls, catches himself against the bookstore’s brick facade. His hands are shaking. His eyes are wet. He looks exactly like what he is, a twenty-year-old in over his head who broke something he doesn’t know how to fix.
Knox steps forward. He positions himself between Dimitri and Newt, not aggressively, not protectively, just there, and his voice when he speaks is patient but firm, the voice of a man who has spent a long time talking to people who are scared and in trouble and who has learned that steadiness carries further than urgency.
“Newt,” Knox says. “The binding you cast didn’t undo the debt you owe to Dimitri. When you summoned him, you opened a contract. The binding redirected it, but it didn’t cancel it. That debt is still open.”
Newt swallows. His freckles stand out against his ashen skin. “I—okay. Okay. I understand.”
“There’s something else.” Knox pauses. His voice stays steady, but Dimitri can feel the cost of the steadiness through the bond, the effort it takes to discuss this calmly, as though it’s someone else’s problem.
“Because of my heritage, the binding is incompatible with my blood. It’s causing damage.
The longer the bond remains, the worse it gets. ”
Newt’s eyes widen. “It’s hurting you?”
“It’s killing me,” Knox says. Simply. Without drama.
The words land in Dimitri’s chest with a weight they shouldn’t have, because he already knows this, has known it since the first night when Knox lay in bed and the angelic rejection ground through his blood.
But hearing Knox say it out loud, flat and factual, to a stranger on a street, makes it real in a way Dimitri’s private awareness of it never quite achieved.
It’s killing me. Three words. Knox says them the way he’d say the weather is cold.
Dimitri’s hands curl into fists at his sides.
Newt looks as though he’s going to be sick. His gaze drops to the ground, then comes back up, and his jaw sets with the same stubborn determination Dimitri remembers from the warehouse, the chin coming up, the refusal to buckle.
“I’ll fix it,” Newt says. “I’ll undo it. I swear. Whatever I have to do.”
“You’ll also need to come to terms with Dimitri about what you owe him.” Knox glances over his shoulder and gives Dimitri a pointed look, the kind that says reasonable terms and we’ve discussed this and I will make your life very difficult if you don’t behave. “Reasonable terms.”
Dimitri smiles. It is not a reassuring smile. Knox’s look sharpens.
Newt glances between them. “We should—can we get off the street? Please? We’re right outside my great-grandmother’s shop and if anyone from the coven sees me talking to a—” His gaze flicks to Dimitri and he doesn’t finish the sentence. “My casting supplies are at my house. It’s not far.”
He leads them. He keeps his distance from Dimitri, a wide deliberate berth that he maintains with the careful attention of someone navigating around an off-leash predator, and drifts instead toward Knox’s side, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushes the Templar’s arm.
Dimitri watches the kid walk.
Newt moves with the quick nervous gait of someone who has spent his whole life trying to take up as little space as possible.
Shoulders hunched. Hands in his pockets.
Eyes on the ground. He flinches when a door opens on the street ahead of them.
He flinches when a voice calls out from a window above.
He makes himself small the way animals make themselves small in the presence of something bigger than them, not just Dimitri but the street itself, the neighborhood, the weight of the coven name carved into the buildings around them.
This is a boy who lives in a flinch. Who grew up in the shadow of a dynasty that views him as an asset to be controlled or a threat to be eliminated, and who was desperate enough to summon a demon because the people who should have helped him wouldn’t.
Dimitri does not want to feel sympathy for the person who ruined his life.
He does not want to look at this shaking freckled kid and see anything other than the architect of his current predicament.
He does not want to notice the way Newt’s shoulders relax fractionally the farther they get from the bookstore, or the way he keeps glancing at Knox with the wary hope of someone who has found an adult who seems trustworthy and is afraid to believe it.
He does not want to care. He is very tired of not wanting to care and caring anyway.
Knox has ruined him for indifference. Before Knox, Dimitri could walk past a thousand desperate mortals and feel nothing, and now he is watching an amateur witch hunch his shoulders against his own last name and something in his chest is doing something inconvenient, and this is Knox’s fault.
All of it. The caring, the sympathy, the creeping suspicion that people are more than the sum of their worst decisions.
Knox and his steady green eyes and his patient voice and his terrible, contagious goodness have infected Dimitri with the disease of giving a shit, and there is no cure, and Dimitri is going to add it to the long and growing list of things Knox owes him.
Newt’s house is a narrow, eclectic townhouse tucked at the end of a dead-end street.
Ivy crawls up the facade. The windows are crowded with plants and crystals and what appears to be a small herb garden growing on the windowsill in defiance of the season.
The front door is painted a color that was probably blue once and is now something more philosophical.
It is messy and overgrown and nothing at all like the precision of the Hargrove compound visible at the end of Thornfield Row, and Dimitri suspects that is the point.
Newt lets them in. The interior is exactly what the exterior promises, cluttered and warm, every surface covered in books and botanical specimens and half-finished projects that suggest a mind running in twelve directions at once.
It smells of dried herbs and candle wax and the faint ozone tinge of ambient magic.
Knox enters with the calm curiosity he brings to everything.
Dimitri enters with the guarded wariness of a creature walking into an unknown witch’s home, because the last time he entered a witch’s workspace he was set on fire, and once is enough to establish a pattern.