Chapter 9
Asession goes wrong. Very wrong.
It starts the way most of their sessions start now: Newt standing in the center of the cleared living room floor, shoulders squared with a determination that is almost painful to watch, hair pulled back at the nape of his neck with a leather cord Malik has now twice untied in the privacy of his own imagination.
"A ward," Malik says, circling behind him.
He keeps his voice level. Instructive. The voice of a familiar and nothing more.
"Full perimeter. Every door, every window, the hearth, the threshold.
It's a protective construct—the magic has to know what it's keeping out, and it has to know what it's keeping in. Do you understand?"
"Yes." Newt's voice is more confident than it was two weeks ago.
Malik closes the last of the distance between them.
It is a thing he has been doing slowly, by degrees, over the past several weeks, like a man wading into cold water who has finally decided to commit.
He fits his chest against Newt's back. He slides one arm around Newt's waist, flat-palmed, splayed across his stomach.
The other arm crosses higher, a bar across his collarbones.
He settles his chin against Newt's temple, and Newt's breath catches, audibly, and then releases in a long shaky exhale that Malik feels move through the whole of his body.
"Ready?" Malik asks, low against his ear.
"Mm-hm," Newt manages.
The magic builds slowly at first, the way Malik has taught him.
A thread of it pulling from Newt's center, through his chest, down his arms, pooling in his palms, which he has raised to hover at his sides.
Malik can feel it through the bond—a low warm thrum that climbs in pitch as Newt gathers it.
The ward takes its initial shape: a faint shimmer along the floorboards, tracing the perimeter of the room, finding the weaknesses and sealing them.
"Good," Malik murmurs. "That's good. Keep pulling. It wants more than you're giving it."
Newt inhales. The thrum climbs. The shimmer on the floor brightens, rises, begins to sketch itself up the walls in pale concentric rings.
"More," Malik says.
Newt pulls more.
The ward is beautiful. Malik has seen a great many wards in a great many centuries and this one is pristine.
It's the kind of work a master witch might produce after decades of study, rolling out from Newt's small, tense body in clean waves, finding every angle of the room and claiming it.
The rings reach the ceiling. They close. A dome.
And then they keep building.
Malik feels it through the bond first. A shift, subtle. The thrum becoming a hum becoming a pressure. Newt's magic is not settling into the ward the way it should. It is continuing to rise, pushing past the structure, looking for somewhere else to go.
"Newt," he says. "Ease back. You've got it. Just hold it, don't go further—"
"I can't," Newt gasps. "I can't stop it, it's not—"
The windows rattle.
The floorboards groan—a long deep noise like something settling its weight against the house—and the books on the shelf to Malik's left shudder, and then three of them launch themselves across the room and strike the opposite wall with enough force to leave a dent in the plaster.
A fourth follows. A fifth. Newt flinches and Malik tightens his arms around him.
"Breathe," Malik says. "Newt, breathe—"
"I'm trying, I'm trying, it won't—"
A crack opens in the ceiling. It starts at the light fixture and walks outward, a spidering line of white that Malik tracks with his eyes while his mind tracks the pressure building in Newt's chest beneath his arm.
The bond is taut. It is singing. Newt is rigid against him, shaking, eyes squeezed shut, and Malik can feel the magic building and building and building and the thing he has been avoiding knowing is suddenly, horribly, the only thing he knows.
Oh, he thinks.
He has been circling the knowledge for weeks without letting it land.
The physical contact that stabilizes the surface.
The scent that intensifies when Newt's body responds.
The way every escalation of touch has been met with a corresponding refinement of Newt's control, as though something in him is being unlocked, piece by piece, by the specific language of another body against his own.
Twenty years. Twenty years of power accumulating in a vessel that has never been opened. Never been touched. Sealed tight as a wine bottle, and Malik has been adjusting the label while the pressure climbed.
Contact is not enough. Has never been going to be enough. The physical contact is an analgesic on a wound that requires surgery, and the seal is going to break, and if it breaks on its own it is going to take the house with it and possibly a block in every direction.
The window over the windowseat shatters.
Glass sprays inward. Newt cries out—a small, frustrated, terrified sound—and Malik feels him trying to pull it back, trying to gather the magic and shove it down, and that is worse, that is the worst thing he could possibly do, Malik can feel it in the bond like someone trying to cram a lit match back into the matchbook—
"Newt," Malik says, sharp.
"—I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I can't—"
"Newt."
The ceiling crack widens. A chunk of plaster the size of a fist breaks free and strikes the floorboards three feet from them and bursts into white dust. The ward is still holding—miraculously, the ward is still holding, it is even strengthening, rolling out in wave after wave of pristine protective magic—but the overflow is tearing the house apart around it.
Malik makes a decision.
He turns Newt in his arms.
It is not a graceful movement. Newt is stiff as a board, every muscle locked around the effort of containment, and Malik has to physically pivot him, has to take one hand from his waist and the other from his chest and bring them up instead to cradle his jaw.
Newt's eyes fly open. They are wet. He is trembling.
"Malik—"
"Hold still," Malik says, which is the only way he knows how to say I’m sorry, and then he kisses him.
He has kissed a great many people. He has kissed emperors and handmaidens and creatures who did not have mouths in any conventional sense and he has never, in eight hundred years, kissed anyone the way he kisses Newt now, which is badly.
It is a bad kiss, by Malik's standards. It is too hard and it is off-center and it lands half on Newt's mouth and half on the corner of it, because Newt has gasped at the contact and turned his face, and Malik corrects with his thumb under Newt's jaw and kisses him properly, and Newt makes a sound against his mouth.
A small, broken, astonished sound. A sound like something breaking open that needed to break open for years.
The magic responds.
It responds instantly. The pressure against Malik's chest, the hum in his bones, the terrible building weight of a vessel about to rupture—it doesn't disperse so much as it redirects, pouring itself into the ward, into the bond, into the point of contact between their mouths, and the sound in Malik's head, the sound he did not know he was hearing, cuts out.
The rattle of the windows stops. The groan of the floorboards quiets. The crack in the ceiling stops walking.
Newt is kissing him back.
Clumsily. With his whole body, which is not how one kisses, usually, but is very much how Newt does it.
He has fisted both hands in the front of Malik's shirt and he is pulling, pulling Malik closer, as though there is any space left between them, and his mouth is soft and wet and uncertain and he keeps breaking the kiss to breathe and then surging back into it, and Malik—
Malik is in very serious trouble.
He pulls the tie from Newt's hair. He does it without thinking about it.
The leather cord comes loose in his fingers and he drops it and his hand is in Newt's hair, all of it at once, that heavy red fall of it that he has thought about more than he would ever admit, and it is as soft as he thought it would be, and Newt makes another sound, this one into Malik's mouth, this one breathy and startled and wanting.
The ward surges. Malik feels it close. A snap, a shimmer, and then a settling, the dome of protection humming around the house like a note held on the edge of a bell.
The magic is not done. The magic is nowhere near done.
Malik can feel it in the bond, the leftover pressure, the great store of power that the kiss has opened but not yet spent.
The vessel is cracked but not emptied. And some tactical part of his mind, the part that has survived centuries by reading rooms and reading people and reading appetites, registers this information and understands what it means and accepts it, and the rest of him—
The rest of him walks Newt backward until his shoulders hit the wall.
Newt gasps. His head tips back against the plaster and Malik follows it, mouth on his jaw now, mouth on the soft place beneath his ear, and Newt is shaking but it is a different kind of shaking, it is the shaking of a body that has never been touched like this and cannot decide what to do with itself.
His hands are still fisted in Malik's shirt. He is holding on.
"You can tell me to stop," Malik says into his throat. His voice sounds wrecked to him. "Newt. Tell me to stop and I will."
"No," Newt breathes. "Please, I want—"
Malik slides a thigh between Newt's legs.