Chapter 3
Malik is a sex demon.
This is not a euphemism. It's not a personality trait or a metaphor or a poetic description of his proclivities.
It is a biological fact, as fundamental to his existence as breathing is to a human's.
He is an incubus. He feeds on sexual pleasure, both his own and his partner's, ideally mutual, and without it he weakens, dims, eventually fades into nothing.
Eight hundred years of existence sustained by one simple, reliable constant: find a partner, give them the best night of their life, take what he needs, and leave before morning.
It is a clean arrangement. Efficient. Malik has always appreciated efficiency.
Usually the feeding comes from whoever has summoned him.
That's the standard arrangement, the expected transaction.
A witch summons an incubus, the incubus becomes their familiar, and the witch provides sustenance in exchange for magical service.
It's symbiotic. Practical. Both parties benefit, and both parties understand what they're getting into, and there are no hurt feelings when the contract ends and the incubus moves on because that's how contracts work. You fulfill the terms and you leave.
But there have been cases where the summoner was not a viable source.
Mathilde Hargrove is a fine example. Newt's great-grandmother had been willing, certainly.
Mathilde was willing to do just about anything if it served her interests, and she had a cold-blooded pragmatism about the arrangement that Malik respected, in the way one respects a snake for being efficient at what it does.
But the body, as it were, was no longer capable.
Over a hundred years old when she summoned him, sustained by blood magic and sheer force of will, and while Malik has certainly fucked things worse than a century-old witch, the energy exchange was negligible.
A trickle where he needed a river. So he'd gone elsewhere, with her blessing, because Mathilde didn't care where he stuck his cock as long as he came home and did his job, and that had been that.
Malik isn't exactly choosy. He never has been.
Eight hundred years of existence does not lend itself to pickiness when the alternative is starvation.
He is open to any configuration, any body, any preference, as long as everyone involved is consenting, of a capable age for their species, and aware of the terms. Those terms being: the best night of their life comes with a catch.
Namely that they are not going to be physically capable of getting out of bed for the next two days and hopefully they have someone who can bring them takeout, because Malik will be long gone by then.
He doesn't stay. He has never stayed. Staying implies an obligation beyond the exchange and Malik does not do obligations.
Not once since being summoned has he considered Newt a viable source.
He tries not to think about it too heavily.
He tries to keep it in the periphery, a thing he knows but doesn't examine, because he's fairly certain that if he examines it he'll develop something inconvenient.
A conscience, maybe. A sense of responsibility toward a person he's contractually bound to but not emotionally invested in, and those are different things, and Malik needs them to stay different.
But the knowledge is there, lodged in the back of his mind, stubborn and immovable.
He knows what the Hargrove Coven is doing to Newt.
He's been around long enough to recognize cultivation when he sees it, and what the coven is doing is not training.
It's farming. They keep Newt available because they know he is powerful.
They know he is useful. They know that the bloodline magic running through his veins is the culmination of six generations of careful, deliberate breeding, each generation stronger than the last, and Newt is the product of all that work. The final yield.
And they want no part in helping him cultivate his abilities into something he can actually use.
They are waiting. Patient and still. Waiting for Newt to either destroy himself or master his abilities on his own, and then they will descend, and they will take what they want, and Newt will have served his purpose.
Malik has seen it before. Not with the Hargroves, specifically, but with covens that operate the same way, covens that view their members as assets to be managed rather than people to be cared for.
He recognizes the pattern. He recognizes the resigned way Newt flinches when someone from the coven speaks to him, the way he makes himself smaller, the way he absorbs their indifference as though it's something he's earned.
No one has ever cared for Newt Hargrove.
Malik is not naive enough to think he's equipped to be the one who starts.
He's an incubus. He takes and he leaves and he has been doing it for centuries and the machinery of his existence is not built for tenderness.
But he doesn't have to make it worse. He doesn't have to be another name on the list of things that used Newt and discarded him, another creature that took what it wanted and left him emptier than before.
So he doesn't touch him. Not beyond what the sessions require. He keeps his hands on Newt's shoulders and nowhere else, and when the spell is done he pulls away, and when the session is over he puts distance between them, and he tells himself this is the right thing to do.
Instead, Malik has been enjoying the Haven nightlife.
Haven is a city built on the intersection of mundane and supernatural, layered atop itself, and the nightlife reflects that.
There are bars where humans drink cheap beer under fluorescent lights and bars where vampires sip blood cocktails in velvet booths and bars that serve both and don't ask questions.
Malik gravitates toward the latter. He is what he is, and there's no point pretending otherwise.
He walks into a room and people notice. They notice the height and the horns and the silver hair and the eyes, and then they notice the way the air around him changes, the way it thickens, the way their pulse kicks and their skin warms and their body responds to his presence without their permission.
That's the lure. That's what incubi are built for.
Attraction that bypasses the rational brain and speaks directly to something older and deeper and harder to resist.
He never has to try very hard.
A vampiress one night, dark-haired and sharp-toothed, who wants to be the one bitten and drained.
Malik can't drink her blood, but draining he can certainly do.
She comes three times before she stops counting and falls asleep in her own sheets with a smile that will last until tomorrow and a fatigue that will last until the day after.
Malik dresses in the dark and lets himself out and doesn't look back.
A minotaur the next night. Enormous, broad, meticulous about his preferences.
He brings his own leash and harness and Malik is more than happy to accommodate.
The energy from him is heavy, dense, earth-toned.
It fills Malik's chest and settles in his bones and sustains him for two solid days. He doesn't stay for breakfast.
A human the night after that. An officer, uniformed, who has never been with a non-mundane but who sees Malik across the bar and whose pupils blow wide and whose resolve crumbles in the time it takes Malik to cross the room and ask his name.
Humans are the easiest. They always have been.
They taste of adrenaline and wonder and the sharp, bright edge of doing something they know they shouldn't, and Malik has always liked that flavor.
The officer asks if it's true what they say about incubi and Malik shows him, and the man doesn't stop shaking for an hour afterward, and Malik leaves him with a glass of water on the nightstand and a body that won't cooperate until Thursday.
It's fun. Of course it's fun. Malik is good at this.
He has years of practice and instinct refined into something that operates flawlessly, a machine that gives pleasure and takes energy and walks away clean.
Every encounter is satisfying. Every partner is willing. Every exchange serves its purpose.
They're food.
That's the word for it, the honest one, the one Malik doesn't flinch from because he's had a long time to make peace with what he is.
They're food. He needs them the way humans need bread and water.
He is grateful for them and he treats them well and he makes sure they enjoy themselves thoroughly, because Malik believes in a fair exchange if nothing else, but they are food.
They sustain him. They keep him alive. They don't mean anything beyond that.
Nothing has ever meant anything beyond that.
He comes back to the townhouse.
It's late. Well past midnight. The street is quiet and the windows of the townhouse are dark except for the one on the second floor where the windowseat is, that faint warm glow behind the glass, and Malik knows what he's going to find before he opens the door.
Newt is curled up on the windowseat. He's in pajama pants and a too-large sweater that's falling off one shoulder, and his long red hair is down for once, loose around his face, and he's reading a book on incantations that isn't going to help him in the slightest. He's too smart for it.
He could have written the damned thing himself and then taught the author better.
Malik had seen the title three days ago and almost said something, almost told Newt to put it down and pick up something worth his time, but the image of Newt curled up with a book, concentrating, his lips moving slightly as he reads, had been disarming enough that Malik kept his mouth shut.
Newt looks up when the door opens. And he smiles.