Chapter 2
Here is a list of things Newt Hargrove has successfully cast in his twenty years of life, prior to three days ago:
Nothing.
Here is a list of things Newt Hargrove has successfully cast in the three days since his demonic familiar tackled him to the floor: one amulet (accident), four spoons transmuted into forks (intentional, mostly), six candles lit in sequence from a foot away (intentional, fully, and he's still riding that high), one doorknob turned briefly into a small brass bird that flew around the kitchen for eleven seconds before reverting (unclear if intentional, but Malik had looked at him with both eyebrows raised, which Newt is choosing to interpret as impressed).
The common variable in all of these successes is Malik's hands on his shoulders.
Newt is sitting on the windowseat of his townhouse, knees pulled up to his chest, a cup of mint tea going cold between his palms, and he is making mental notes.
He does this. He has always done this, kept a running catalogue of observations in his head because writing things down feels too permanent and too vulnerable, because if someone found a journal full of Newt's private thoughts he would simply have to walk into the sea.
So instead he thinks, and he catalogues, and he organizes the chaos of his life into something he can hold and examine.
Mental note one: things started out dismal.
This should not have been surprising, because things in Newt's life always start out dismal, but he'd been hopeful.
He'd been so hopeful it embarrasses him now to remember it.
When the coven assigned Malik as his familiar, when the contract was sealed and that thin tether of magic settled between them, Newt had thought: this is it.
This is the thing that finally works. Someone is finally going to help me and I'm going to get better and I'm going to stop being the witch who can't do anything right.
And then they'd sat across from each other on the floor and Newt had tried to channel magic into a brass disc smaller than his thumbnail and instead had nearly collapsed his own house.
Mental note two: the amulet incident. He doesn't love thinking about this one, because the memory comes in layers and some of those layers make his face hot and his stomach do complicated things.
There's the layer where he'd been drowning, pulled under by his own power, unable to hear Malik's voice through the roar of it.
That part is terrifying in retrospect. He hadn't known that could happen.
He hadn't known his magic could swallow him whole and just keep going, that it could reach out past the walls of his house and into the street and keep reaching.
Then there's the layer where Malik crossed the circle and grabbed him and took them both to the floor, and that layer is.
.. a lot. Malik's hands on his shoulders, Malik's knee pressed into the boards beside him, Malik's silver hair falling around them and blocking out everything else in the world, and Newt pinned beneath him with his mouth open and his heart trying to claw its way out of his ribcage.
And the magic had just stopped. Gone quiet for the first time in Newt's memory, calmed by nothing more than the weight and warmth of the demon braced above him.
And then the amulet had chimed, perfect and flawless, and Malik had looked at it and then looked back down at Newt, and Newt had felt his gaze drop to Malik's mouth before he could catch it and yank it back up and he is going to be mortified about that for the rest of his natural life.
Mental note three: Malik had told him he did good.
He'd pulled Newt to his feet and stepped back and put some modicum of distance between them, and then he'd said, "That was good, Newt.
" And nobody has ever said those words together in a sentence directed at Newt.
Not about his magic. Not about anything.
His mother hadn't stayed long enough to say much of anything at all, and Mathilde's idea of positive reinforcement is a slight narrowing of her eyes that means she's chosen not to punish him today, and the coven witches look at him with a mixture of wariness and pity that makes his skin crawl.
Good. Malik had said good, and Newt’s eyes had gotten a little watery, and that is so pathetic he could scream.
Mental note four, the important one, the one he keeps coming back to: it's working.
With Malik's hands on his shoulders, standing a foot behind him and guiding him through the process, Newt's magic behaves.
It listens. It goes where he tells it to go and does what he asks it to do and the feeling of that, after twenty years of being the broken thing that nobody could fix, is so overwhelming that sometimes in the middle of a casting he has to blink very fast and breathe very carefully and focus very hard on the task at hand because otherwise he's going to embarrass himself.
Malik seems hesitant to try anything larger than the spoons and the candles, and Newt understands his concern.
He does. He is well aware that he's a ticking timebomb, that the gap between "lit six candles in a row" and "collapsed the ceiling" is precisely one lapse in concentration, and that the only thing standing between those two outcomes is the demon behind him.
It would be irresponsible to push too fast. It would be reckless.
Newt has been reckless enough for one lifetime.
But with Malik's hands on his shoulders, firm and steady, his thumbs resting against the ridge of Newt's spine, his body a warm, solid presence at Newt's back, Newt feels capable.
He feels capable in a way he never has, and the wanting of it, the desperate, greedy wanting of more, is something he has to press down and keep pressing down because it has no place here.
This is a professional arrangement. A contract.
Malik is his familiar, not his friend, not his anything else, and the fact that Newt's body responds to his touch the way it does is Newt's problem to manage.
Malik is a lot.
Newt takes a sip of his cold tea and stares out the window at the street below and thinks about this, because he's been thinking about it constantly and he might as well do it deliberately rather than letting it ambush him at inconvenient moments. Which it does. Frequently.
Malik is very tall. This is the first thing, and it shouldn't matter, because height is just a measurement and has nothing to do with anything, but Malik is tall in a way that takes up space, that changes the shape of a room when he enters it, that makes Newt feel small in a way that is not entirely unpleasant and that realization alone has cost him at least two nights of sleep.
He has horns. They curve back from his temples, dark and smooth, and Newt has caught himself wondering what they feel like more than once and has had to physically redirect his attention elsewhere.
His silver hair is long, past his shoulders, and it catches the light in a way that makes it look liquid, and when he'd been braced over Newt on the floor it had fallen around them and Newt had been able to smell him, and that brings Newt to the next thing.
Malik smells incredible. He smells like the last wisp of an amber candle that's burned down to the wick, warm and dark and faintly sweet, and the scent of him lingers.
It lingers on Newt's shoulders after their sessions, on the back of his neck where Malik's breath lands, and Newt has pressed his nose into his own collar after Malik has left the room and then immediately felt so creepy about it that he'd changed his shirt.
And his hands. His hands are large, and warm, and so reassuringly firm on Newt's shoulders that sometimes Newt forgets he's casting a spell.
Sometimes he forgets what he's supposed to be doing entirely and just stands there, eyes half-closed, feeling the press of Malik's thumbs against his spine, the curl of his fingers over the tops of his shoulders, the steadiness of him, and the magic drifts unattended because Newt's entire brain has vacated the premises.
Which is, obviously, really not good. Very dangerous.
He should absolutely be more focused on the spellwork.
That's the point of all of this, isn't it?
That's why Malik is here. If Newt is so distracted by his familiar that he's turning forks into daggers and candles into sconces then they've got bigger problems on their hands and most of those problems are Newt's and his catastrophically inconvenient inability to exist near an attractive person without short-circuiting.
Except Malik doesn't seem to think it's a problem.
When the fork becomes a dagger, Malik doesn't pull away.
He doesn't sigh, doesn't click his tongue in disapproval, doesn't look at Newt the way Mathilde looks at him.
He adjusts his grip on Newt's shoulders, his thumbs pressing a little firmer, and says, "Again.
" And when Newt manages it, when the spoon becomes a fork and stays a fork, Malik makes a sound in the back of his throat that is low and pleased and says, "Very good, Newt. "