Chapter 10
Malik is in crisis.
He is standing in the living room of the townhouse with his shirt untucked and Newt's slick drying on his fingers and the ward humming around them in a perfect, unbroken dome, and he is in crisis.
Not the kind of crisis he is accustomed to, the kind that involves combat or contractual disputes or the occasional attempt on his life by a summoner who decided they wanted their soul back.
Those crises have protocols. Those crises have solutions.
Those crises do not involve standing in the middle of a demolished living room at nine o'clock at night with an erection he refuses to acknowledge and the taste of a twenty-year-old witch still on his lips.
The discovery during sex is not the crisis.
He needs to be clear about this, if only to himself, if only in the privacy of his own rapidly deteriorating composure.
What he found when his hand slid past Newt's waistband is not a crisis.
It is not a surprise, exactly, because Malik has been detecting that scent for weeks and some part of him, the analytical part that runs beneath the surface of every interaction, had already been assembling the data points into a picture he hadn't let himself look at directly.
The scent. The intensity of it. The specific, vivid, unmistakable pull of it. He'd known. On some level, he'd known.
And it doesn't matter. It is a puzzle piece clicking into place, the scent explained, filed and understood in the space of a heartbeat.
Malik is eight hundred years old. He has been with every configuration of body the mortal and immortal worlds have to offer.
He has been with bodies that shifted mid-act and bodies that defied categorization entirely and bodies that existed in states the mortal vocabulary hasn't invented words for.
What's between Newt's legs is of academic interest at best.
What matters is the moment after Malik made his discovery.
The moment when Newt went white and rigid and started to pull away, started to stammer an apology or an explanation, and the terror on his face had been so absolute.
The terror wasn't about Malik rejecting him.
The terror was older than that. Deeper. The terror was about being seen and found wrong, and it had been carved into Newt by people who should have protected him, and Malik had bitten his jaw and asked if he wanted to stop and the desperation in Newt's voice when he said no had cracked something in Malik's chest that he does not think is going to heal.
That is not the crisis either, although it is adjacent to it.
The crisis is everything else.
Malik is buzzing.
Not metaphorically. Not in the poetic, figurative sense of heightened awareness or emotional agitation.
He is physically, literally buzzing. His skin hums with energy.
He can feel it under his surface, a low vibration that runs from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, and his vision is sharper.
Colors are more vivid. The cracks in the ceiling plaster, the ones the ward knitted closed, stand out in high relief, every shadow and texture amplified.
His reflexes are faster. He tested this by catching a book that slid from the shelf a moment ago, and his hand was around it before his brain registered the movement, which is not normal, which is not how his body has operated in centuries.
He feels like he drank lightning.
He gave Newt Hargrove a handjob against a wall and it has given him more energy than a week of feeding from anyone else.
A week. Seven nights of every other body he has pressed himself against in Haven, and the cumulative energy of all of them combined does not approach what he absorbed from Newt in the space of ten minutes.
And he didn't even get off.
Malik sits down on the sofa. Stands up. Sits down again.
Stands up again. He doesn't know what to do with his hands.
He doesn't know what to do with any part of himself.
His hands were inside Newt ten minutes ago and now they're hanging at his sides and they are vibrating with energy and he wants to put them back and that thought sends a spike of something through him that he does not have a name for.
The implications are staggering.
Newt is exactly what an incubus is designed to feed on.
Not just compatible. Optimal. The raw magical potential, years of accumulated power sealed inside a body that has never been opened.
The emotional intensity, that incandescent sincerity, that staggering, reckless, devastating trust. The arousal, the scent of it, the wetness of it, the way Newt's body had responded to his touch with a frankness and a generosity that Malik has never encountered in centuries of taking and leaving.
All of it. Every component perfectly calibrated to produce the maximum possible energy exchange, and Malik had barely scratched the surface.
He has stumbled onto the incubus equivalent of a five-course meal in a world of gas station sandwiches.
Malik does not know how to do this.
He paces the living room. Four steps to the wall.
Turn. Four steps to the other wall. Turn.
His body doesn't want to be still. The energy is too much.
He feels like a battery that's been overcharged, like something in him is humming at a frequency just beyond the range of hearing, and the vibration is making it impossible to think clearly.
He needs to think clearly. He needs to think about what just happened and what it means and what happens next and he cannot think about any of it because every time he tries, his mind goes back to the sounds.
The sounds Newt made.
The small, broken, astonished sound when Malik kissed him.
The gasp when Malik's thigh pressed between his legs.
The high, thin whimper when Newt's hips rocked forward.
The sob, the actual sob, when Malik's fingers found him.
The way he'd said Malik's name, desperate and wrecked and wanting, and the way he'd come apart with a cry that had felt, through the bond, like something shattering and reassembling in a new configuration.
Malik sits down on the sofa and puts his head in his hands.
He has never stayed after.
This is the fact that sits at the center of the crisis, the load-bearing wall of the entire collapsing structure.
Malik has never woken up next to the same person he went to bed with.
Not once. Not with anyone. The entire foundation of his existence is built on the principle that intimacy is a transaction, that the taking and the leaving are inseparable, that the door closes behind you and you don't look back.
He has refined this principle over centuries.
He has elevated it to an art form. He has made it the cornerstone of his identity, the thing that separates him from the messy, entangled, vulnerable existence of creatures who stay.
And now he is contractually obligated to remain in this townhouse with a freckled witch who he just got off against a wall, who is currently upstairs in the shower probably having a complete emotional breakdown, who is going to come downstairs tomorrow morning and make him breakfast because that is what Newt does.
Newt makes breakfast for demons, Newt takes care of things that haven't asked to be taken care of, and Malik is going to have to sit across from him and eat toast and jam and drink tea that Newt brewed for him and look at Newt's face and see whatever is there, whatever the aftermath looks like on someone who has never been touched before, and he has no idea.
He has no protocol for this. No script. No playbook for what to do when you've cracked open the most powerful witch in Haven against a wall and he is the most important thing you've ever touched and you can still feel him on your fingers.
He does not go out that night.
For the first time since arriving in Haven, he does not feed elsewhere.
He does not go to a bar. He does not find a stranger.
He does not perform the clean, efficient transaction that has sustained him for centuries.
The impulse isn't there. The hunger isn't there.
He is full. He is so full it aches, a warm pressure behind his ribs that is not unpleasant but is unfamiliar, like a muscle stretched past its usual range.
He tells himself it's because he doesn't need to. He's never been this full. The energy Newt gave him is enough to sustain him for a week. Possibly longer. He does not need to feed from anyone else.
He tells himself this.
The shower is running upstairs. He can hear the water through the ceiling, a steady hiss and patter that fills the quiet of the townhouse.
Newt has been in there for a long time. A very long time.
Long enough that Malik has thought about going up and knocking on the door, and has not done so, because what would he say?
What possible words exist for this? Are you alright is inadequate.
I'm sorry is impossible. I called you love and I didn't mean to and I can't stop thinking about the way you sounded when you came is not a sentence that leads anywhere productive.
Malik sits on the sofa and listens to the shower run.
He tries not to think about the sounds Newt made. He fails.
He tries not to think about the feeling of Newt slick around his fingers, the tight hot clench of him, the way Newt's body had opened for him with a trust that was almost unbearable. He fails.
He tries not to think about the word that had fallen out of his mouth, unvetted, unauthorized.
Love. He had said love. He had called Newt love in the middle of getting him off against a wall, and the word had come from somewhere so deep inside him that he hadn't felt it rise, hadn't felt it form, had only heard it in the air between them and known, with the bone-deep certainty of a creature who has been lying to himself for weeks, that it had not been an accident.
He fails at not thinking about this too.
The shower turns off.
Malik holds very still. He listens to the quiet sounds of Newt moving upstairs, the pad of bare feet on the floorboards, the soft click of the bedroom door closing. The creak of the bed as Newt lies down. And then silence.
Malik sits on the sofa in the dark and the ward hums around them, perfect and unbroken, the most powerful protective spell Newt has ever cast, sealed with an orgasm and a sob and Malik's hand between his legs.
He sits in the dark and the energy buzzes under his skin and the townhouse smells of crushed herbs and honey and spent magic and he does not move.
He does not go upstairs.
He does not open Newt's door.
He does not climb into the narrow bed and pull the small, trembling, red-haired body against his chest and press his face into the back of Newt's neck and breathe him in and say the word again, the one that fell out of him, the one he meant.
He doesn't do any of this.
But he doesn't leave, either.
For the first time in eight hundred years, Malik stays. He stays on the sofa in the dark and he listens to the silence upstairs and he does not sleep and he does not go, and the not-going is the most terrifying thing he has ever done.
In the morning, Newt will make him breakfast.
In the morning, Malik will have to look at him across the table and decide what kind of creature he is. The kind that takes and leaves, or the kind that stays.
He already knows the answer. He's known it since the armchair. Since the thistle tea. Since the first time Newt smiled at him from the windowseat and something behind his ribs shifted and never shifted back.
He stays on the sofa. He closes his eyes. He does not sleep.
He doesn't need to. He's never been this full.