Chapter 14
Malik has a problem.
A small, beautiful, red-haired problem that tastes of honey and green things and makes it snow when he comes and whose hand closed around Malik's horn twenty minutes ago and pulled a sound out of him that Malik has not made in longer than some civilizations have existed.
Malik is walking through Haven in the dark with his shirt buttoned wrong and his mouth still tasting of Newt and his eyes, which he can feel are wrong, are gold, are a color they should not be, and he does not know where he is going.
He just knows he can't be in that townhouse.
He can't be in that living room with the snow drifting down and Newt naked on the sofa looking at him with those enormous green eyes and saying did I do something wrong while Malik's entire molecular structure rearranges itself around the fact that his eyes have changed color and he knows what it means.
He'll deal with the eyes. He'll deal with them later. Right now there is a more immediate crisis, which is this:
Malik has taken it upon himself to start feeding from his summoner instead of seeking an outside source, the way he was doing in the beginning, the way he told himself to do in order to keep things simple, and now things are very much not simple.
Things are catastrophically, irrevocably, world-endingly not simple.
Because Newt is a lightning bolt. He is a conduit.
He is a natural disaster wrapped in freckles and a too-large sweater and he has ruined Malik for every other body in the world.
Ruined. Not diminished. Not made them less appealing by comparison.
Ruined, fully and permanently, in the way that a man who has tasted something extraordinary can never again eat something ordinary without knowing the difference.
And Malik hasn't even been inside him yet.
No. Not yet. He's not going down that road.
He's done. He drew a line and the line was I will not fuck him and the line is still there and he's standing on the correct side of it, technically, even if he has now put his mouth on every other part of Newt's body and licked him clean and made him come on his tongue and knelt between his thighs and breathed him in and told him he tasted incredible and called him love, again, the word that keeps falling out of his mouth without authorization, the word that he means, the word that terrifies him.
He's done. The line holds. The line is the only thing holding.
Except how can he not? How can he not cross it?
How can he kneel between Newt's thighs and taste the sweetness of him and feel the way his body opens and listen to the sounds he makes, those wrecked desperate beautiful sounds, and then walk away and pretend there is a universe in which Malik doesn't want to bury himself inside that body and never come out?
He can't come back from this. He can't be with anyone else after having Newt.
The thought of it, the thought of walking into a bar and finding a stranger and putting his hands on a body that isn't Newt's, makes his stomach lurch with a physical revulsion that is entirely new and entirely unwelcome.
Eight hundred years of clean, efficient, transactional feeding and the machinery has simply stopped working.
The gears have seized. The engine has been flooded with something it wasn't designed to process and it will not turn over.
It's not even the magical connection, although that's a big fucking part of it, isn't it?
Newt's power is so overwhelming that his sexual energy has changed Malik's DNA.
Not metaphorically. Literally. Malik can feel it, the restructuring, the rewiring, the fundamental alteration of his physiology that has been happening since the first time Newt came for him against the wall.
He is stronger. He is faster. He is more powerful than he has been in centuries, and the feeding intervals have stretched so far apart that they've become almost irrelevant.
The first time Newt came for him, Malik didn't feel hungry again for a week.
The second time, tonight, with Newt's taste on his tongue and Newt's hand on his horn and Newt's magic pouring through both of them in clean blue fire, Malik suspects he won't need to feed for a month.
Who knows how long this will last? Who knows how far it goes? Who knows what Malik is becoming, what Newt is making him into, what kind of creature emerges from the other side of this transformation?
But it's not about the power.
It's about Newt.
No one, in eight hundred years of exchanges, has ever sat in his lap and kissed him and asked him what he wanted.
Not what Malik could do for them. Not what service he could provide, what pleasure he could perform, what transaction he could execute.
But what did Malik want? What did he desire, for himself, for his own pleasure, as though his pleasure were a thing that mattered?
As though he were a person and not a service?
Newt had looked at him with that flushed, earnest, mortified face and said tell me what you want and anything you want and I want to make it good for you too, and Malik had stared at him and felt something in his chest crack open that had been sealed for eight hundred years.
Because no one asks the incubus what he wants.
No one asks the incubus if he's satisfied.
The incubus is the one who satisfies. The incubus is the tool, the instrument, the means to an end, and the end is always someone else's pleasure, and Malik has never, in all his centuries, been asked to receive.
And oh, Malik had wanted. He'd wanted to take Newt apart.
He'd wanted to taste him since the first time he saw that flush crawl up his throat, since the first time the scent hit him, since the first time Newt's pulse kicked under his thumbs and Malik's vision went soft.
And gods, it had been everything he had wanted and more.
It had been the sweetest thing Malik has ever tasted in eight hundred years of tasting everything the mortal and immortal worlds have to offer, and the sounds Newt had made, the sounds, the wrecked sobbing keening sounds of a body experiencing pleasure for the first time in its life, had burrowed into Malik's brain and taken up permanent residence.
The problem is the eyes.
The problem is the half moon.
Malik goes to Willow's.
He doesn't have a plan. He doesn't have a solution.
He has gold eyes and the taste of Newt on his lips and a deadline that is hurtling toward him, and he goes to Willow's because Willow's is where Dimitri is and Dimitri is the only creature in Haven who might understand what is happening to him, not because Dimitri is sympathetic but because Dimitri is old and angry and honest and Malik needs someone who will not be gentle with him right now.
Dimitri is at the bar. He's drinking something dark and not enjoying it, which is his default state. He turns when Malik sits down beside him, and his expression, which starts at its usual baseline of mild hostility, shifts.
"What's with your eyes?" Dimitri says.
Malik orders a drink. Something effervescent and green, because he needs something in his hands and he's not going to drink it anyway, not with the taste of Newt still coating his tongue, and he sets the glass on the bar and looks at it and doesn't see it.
"She's trying to take me from him," he says.
Dimitri's brow furrows. "Who?"
"The elder witch who owns my original contract. The one who transferred it."
"Mathilde."
"Yes."
Dimitri is quiet for a long minute. Malik can feel him thinking, can feel the gears turning behind those dark, ancient eyes, and then Dimitri says, slowly, with the precision of someone who has just realized something terrible:
"Wait a minute. If she takes you back, what does that mean for the original contract I had with Newt? It got transferred to you."
Malik stares at his drink without seeing it.
The question lands and he knows the answer already, has known it since Mathilde said we will void the contract in her study with her calculating eyes and her patient, cruel mouth.
He thinks of that moment in the library when the coven summoned him.
The circle of Hargrove witches, smug and arranged.
Newt, half-hidden behind Knox's shoulder.
And the contract, the one that had existed before Malik, the one between Dimitri and Newt, the one with no set terms, the one that, without Malik's intervention, would have ended with Dimitri possessing Newt.
Body and mind and magic, subsumed, overwritten, erased.
Malik's contract was meant to replace Dimitri's. It was meant to satisfy Dimitri's summoning while transferring Newt's debt from one demon to another. A lateral move. A substitution. Malik in place of Dimitri, familiar in place of possessor.
And if Malik's contract is nullified. If the terms are voided. If the substitution is reversed.
The debt goes back to Dimitri.
Malik's gaze shifts to Dimitri, who is looking at him with an expression that Malik has never seen on his face before. Not hostility. Not mockery. Something cold and raw and furious, the expression of a creature who is staring down a consequence he thought he'd already prevented.
Malik feels an emotion he doesn't have a name for. He struggles with it. It sits in his chest like something jagged, sharp-edged, lodged between his ribs and trying to tear its way out. It feels like being wrenched in two. It feels like standing in a doorway and watching both rooms collapse.
"Are you listening?" Dimitri snaps.
Malik shakes his head. His vision clears, but the emotion doesn't leave. It settles, heavy, permanent, and he says, flatly, "He'd be yours again."
Dimitri surges forward.
His hands close around Malik's collar before Malik can move, and the bar stool topples and clatters against the floor and they are standing now, nearly the same height, Dimitri's face inches from his, and even with the surge of Newt's power flooding through Malik's veins there's not a lot he can do to stop Dimitri's hands from closing around him.
Dimitri is older. Dimitri is a different kind of demon.
Dimitri's strength is not the kind that feeds on pleasure.
It is the kind that feeds on rage, and right now Dimitri is incandescent with it.
The bar goes quiet. No one approaches them.
"I entrusted him to you," Dimitri says. His voice is low and shaking. "You asshole. I entrusted him to you. Do you know what will happen if he ends up back in my contract?"
Malik knows. He doesn't need Dimitri to say it.
He knows what possession means. He knows what it would do to Newt, to be overwritten, to have his consciousness folded beneath Dimitri's, to become a vessel for a demon who never wanted to be inside him in the first place.
He knows what it would erase. The brightness.
The stubbornness. The earnest, reckless, exhausting sincerity.
The way Newt makes breakfast for demons.
The way Newt smiles when Malik walks through the door.
The way Newt says anything you want with his flushed face and his parted lips and means it, means every word, would give Malik anything, everything, himself.
All of it. Gone.
"Tell me what to fucking do, Dimitri," Malik hisses through his teeth.
His hands have come up to grip Dimitri's wrists, not to remove them but to hold on, and his voice is cracking in a way that has never happened.
"I can't kill her. You know I can't. She holds the original contract.
I can't raise a hand against her. Tell me what to do. I want to save him. Help me."
Dimitri's expression shifts. The fury remains, but something else moves beneath it. A recognition. An understanding of what it sounds like when a creature who has never cared about anything says help me and means it.
Dimitri's grip loosens. Just a fraction.
"Can you complete the contract before she takes you back?" he asks.
"I don't know. We've been... things have been better. His magic is stronger than it's ever been. But the half moon is tomorrow. That's not enough time."
"Then make it enough time." Dimitri releases his collar.
Steps back. Rights the fallen bar stool but doesn't sit on it.
His eyes are still dark with fury, but the fury has direction now, purpose, and when he looks at Malik there is something in his face that might, under extreme duress, be called respect.
"Get your ass home. Stop wasting time here.
If there's a chance, take it. Try everything. "
Malik stands there for a moment longer. The green drink is untouched on the bar. The taste of Newt is still on his tongue.
He thinks about saying something else. About asking Dimitri to fight the reversion, to resist the possession, to find some way to keep Newt whole if Malik fails.
But he doesn't, because he knows Dimitri.
He knows what possession means for the possessor as well as the possessed.
Dimitri would be trapped inside Newt the way Newt would be trapped inside Dimitri, and neither of them would have a choice.
The contract doesn't care about preference.
The contract doesn't care about Knox, who would lose his soulbound partner to the body of a twenty-year-old witch, or about Newt, who would lose everything.
The contract cares about terms, and the terms are the terms, and there is nothing Dimitri can do about it any more than Malik can.
They look at each other across the bar. Two demons who have never been friends, who have never liked each other, who are standing on opposite sides of a catastrophe that will destroy someone they both, against all expectation, care about.
Dimitri doesn't say anything else. He doesn't need to. The look on his face says it all: fix this.
Malik puts money on the bar and walks out into the night and goes home.