Chapter 8
Newt is a total disaster, but he doesn't have to be.
Maybe. Possibly. If he squints and tilts his head and approaches the concept from a very specific angle and doesn't think too hard about the incubus living in his house, he can almost see a version of his life where things are okay.
Not perfect. Not even good, necessarily.
But okay. Functional. A version where he has his magic and his books and his jars of components in the right order and a place in the coven that isn't "the one we don't talk about.
" A version where someone, anyone, looks at him and doesn't see the greatest disappointment they've ever witnessed.
He's not asking for the world here. Just a foothold.
Step one of the plan involves getting a grip on this horrifying crush.
That's what he's calling it. A crush. That's the box it goes in and that's where it stays.
It is not love, because falling in love with a demon would be terrifying and the most ill-advised thing he's ever done and it's not like that's a short list. What Newt has is a one-sided chemical malfunction triggered from sharing a space with a creature who is literally designed to make people want him.
Factor one: Malik is attractive in a way that is functionally unfair, because he is a supernatural entity engineered for seduction, and resenting himself for the attraction is about as productive as resenting himself for needing to breathe.
Factor two, which is the worse one: Malik is the most patient, understanding being Newt has ever known.
The person who has never once gotten frustrated with him should not be a demon. That's messed up.
A crush. Hormonal. Harmless. It will pass.
He almost believes this.
Step two: focus on the magic. Step three: build a life that stands on its own.
Step four, in the immediate: restock the component shelf, because after weeks of spell sessions and accidental detonations they are out of nearly everything.
No moonstone dust. No dried yarrow. The quartz is half empty.
The thistle root is gone entirely, because Newt has been brewing it into tea at an alarming rate, and the chalk supply is so depleted from drawing circles on the hardwood that Newt has been breaking sticks in half to make them last.
He needs to go to the apothecary. And he is not going alone, because going alone means leaving Malik in the townhouse to sit in the armchair and do nothing for another three hours, and Newt is starting to develop a theory that Malik might actually be fused to the furniture.
He announces his intentions over breakfast. "I'm going to the apothecary today," he says, setting down his tea with purpose. "And you're coming with me."
Malik raises an eyebrow over the rim of his cup. "No."
"Yes."
"Why would I do that?"
"Because we're out of everything. Because I need someone to carry the heavy things. Because you haven't left this townhouse in daylight in three weeks and I'm starting to think you're allergic to sunlight."
Malik's expression doesn't change. "I'm not allergic to sunlight."
"Prove it."
"I don't need to prove it."
"You're afraid of the sun."
"I am immortal. I am not afraid of the sun."
"Then come to the apothecary."
Malik looks at him across the table. His tea is halfway to his mouth. Newt holds his gaze. He doesn't blink. He has been stared down by Mathilde Hargrove and survived and he is not going to lose a standoff with a demon over a shopping trip.
"Fine," Malik says, in a tone that implies the word has been extracted from him surgically.
Newt smiles into his tea and doesn't try to hide it.
Getting Malik out the front door is its own small production.
Malik puts on his coat with the deliberate, unhurried movements of someone who wants it known that he is doing this under protest. He adjusts his collar.
He adjusts his sleeves. He tucks his silver hair behind his ears and then untucks it and then tucks it again.
Newt stands by the door with his cloak on and his bag over his shoulder and watches this performance with the patience of someone who has nowhere else to be and finds the whole thing quietly delightful.
"You're stalling," Newt says.
"I'm preparing."
"You're tucking your hair for the third time."
"My hair requires attention."
"Your hair is perfect and you know it and we're leaving."
Malik's mouth twitches. Just barely. The ghost of something that isn't quite a smile but lives in the same neighborhood, and he follows Newt out the door, and sunlight hits him, and he does not burst into flames.
"Wow," Newt says. "Not allergic."
"The morning is young."
They walk.
Haven in daylight is a different city than Haven at night, and Newt suspects Malik has only ever seen the night version.
The morning version is cobblestones and market stalls and the smell of bread from the bakery on the corner and sunlight catching on the canal water in bright flashes.
It's busy. People move through the streets with the purposeful energy of a city waking up, and Newt navigates through them easily because Newt is small and knows how to slip through gaps, and Malik navigates through them easily because Malik is enormous and people simply get out of his way.
The horns help.
Newt glances up at him as they walk. Malik in daylight is a different creature than Malik in lamplight.
The silver of his hair catches the sun and turns white-bright, almost blinding, and his skin has a warmth to it that the low light of the townhouse never reveals, and his horns cast short curved shadows across his temples.
People are looking at him. Of course they're looking at him, because Malik is impossible not to look at, and Newt watches a woman walking a small dog nearly trip over her own feet when Malik passes and feels a complicated mixture of secondhand embarrassment and something that might, under laboratory conditions, be classified as pride.
Not pride. Not that. He has no claim on Malik. He has no reason to feel proud that other people find his familiar attractive, because his familiar is not his, and the word his doesn't apply here, and Newt needs to stop thinking about it.
"Do you always cause traffic incidents," Newt says, "or is that a daylight-specific phenomenon?"
Malik glances down at him. "What?"
"The woman with the dog. She nearly broke her ankle."
"I didn't notice."
"How did you not notice?"
"I notice very little about the general public, Newt. They're ambient."
Newt laughs. He can't help it. The word ambient applied to human beings is so perfectly, absurdly Malik that it catches him off guard, and the laugh comes out bright and surprised and louder than he intended, and a man carrying a crate of vegetables gives him a look.
The apothecary is on Threadneedle Street, tucked between a candlemaker and a shop that sells enchanted stationery.
It's small and dim and smells of dried herbs and old wood and the particular dusty sweetness of components that have been sitting in jars for a long time.
The bell above the door chimes when they enter and the sound of it is thin and bright in the close air.
Newt loves this place. He has been coming here since he was sixteen, since before the coven cut off most of his library access, since before his magic became something people were afraid of.
The shelves are crammed with jars and bottles and pouches and bundles, organized in a system that makes sense only to the woman who runs it, and Newt knows where everything is because he has memorized the chaos.
The shopkeeper is behind the counter. Her name is Edda and she is approximately four hundred years old and she is a gnome and she comes up to Newt's waist, which means she comes up to approximately Malik's knee.
She has spectacles perched on a nose that is mostly cartilage and an expression of permanent, low-grade suspicion directed at the world in general.
"Newt," she says, without looking up from the ledger she's writing in. "You owe me for the last batch of thistle root."
"I know, I'm sorry, I brought coins this time, I promise." Newt sets his bag on the counter and starts pulling out his list. "I need moonstone dust, dried yarrow, powdered quartz, chalk, and more thistle root. A lot more thistle root."
"Hmm." Edda writes something in her ledger. Then she looks up, and her gaze travels past Newt's shoulder, and her spectacles slide down her nose.
Malik is standing behind Newt. He is standing very close behind Newt, because the shop is narrow and Malik is large and there is nowhere else for him to stand, and the closeness means that Newt can feel the warmth of him through his cloak and this is fine.
This is completely fine. Newt's ears are not burning.
His face is not hot. He is a functioning adult who can stand near another person in a shop without having a crisis.
Edda looks at Malik. She looks at Newt. Her mouth purses. Her spectacles slide further down her nose. And she makes a sound, a small, knowing, hmm, that contains within it an entire encyclopedia of implication.
“You finally get a boyfriend?" Edda asks.
"Familiar," Newt says, quickly. "He's my familiar."
"Mm-hmm."
Edda peers over her spectacles at Malik, who is looking down at her with an expression of mild, regal interest. Then she peers back at Newt, whose face is now the approximate color of his hair.
Then she makes the hmm sound a third time, this one the most devastating of the three, and returns to her ledger.
"Moonstone dust is on the third shelf," she says. "Don't knock anything over. And tell your familiar to mind the chandelier."
She says the word familiar the way someone says sure, honey, and Newt's face goes from red to crimson and he turns and walks very quickly toward the third shelf and does not look at Malik.