Chapter 15 #2
"Just a hedge witch." The first one looks at the chalk circle. At the candles. At the shimmering, unstable portal behind Newt. "Out here by herself. In an abandoned building. Drawing circles. Opening portals. Sure looks like necromancy to me."
"It's a spatial working," Newt says, faster now, the words tripping over each other. "It's not even close to necromancy, they're completely different disciplines, spatial manipulation is just relocating through existing planes, it has nothing to do with the dead, I would never..."
"You know what I think?" The first one steps forward.
The amusement is gone from his face. What's left is something flat and decided.
"I think you're out here because you can't do this shit in front of anyone.
I think you're hiding because you know what you're doing is wrong.
And I think the demon in your house isn't a familiar at all.
I think you're a necromancer and a liar and I think someone should have dealt with you a long time ago. "
The punch lands on the right side of Newt's face.
It is so fast and so expected, in a way that is its own kind of devastating, that Newt doesn't flinch.
He sees it coming. He watches the fist arc toward him and he doesn't move because some part of him, the trained part, the conditioned part, the part that has been absorbing blows from people who are bigger and meaner and more certain of themselves for twenty years, knows that flinching makes it worse.
You take it. You go down. You cover your face. You wait for it to be over.
His cheekbone detonates. His vision whites out.
He hits the warped gymnasium boards shoulder-first and his head bounces off the wood and for a disorienting, airless moment he is everywhere and nowhere.
He is here on this floor and he is on every other floor, every other hallway, every other corner where someone decided that Newt was the wrong shape, the wrong name, the wrong kind of thing, and the right response was to hit him until he was quieter.
His lip is split. He can taste blood, copper-bright and warm.
Hands grab his cloak and haul him up. He's on his feet, barely, and one of them is asking him something about skeletons and Newt is saying he doesn't know, he's never summoned anything dead, he's just a hedge witch, and the second hit comes from the side and catches him in the ribs and he doubles over and the third one shoves him and he stumbles and the hits keep coming.
He covers his face. He curls in on himself, elbows up, chin down, the posture of someone who has been hit enough times to know where to protect and not enough times to know how to stop it.
A boot catches his side. A fist glances off his forearm.
Someone grabs his hair and yanks and the leather tie snaps and his hair comes loose and falls around his face.
"Fucking freak," someone says, from above. "Summoning demons and opening rifts and can't even throw a punch."
"She can't do anything right," another one says, and the laughter is back, and the laughter is the worst part, worse than the fist, worse than the boot, because the fist and the boot are honest and the laughter is not. The laughter says you're not even worth taking seriously enough to hate.
Newt is on the floor of an abandoned gymnasium with blood on his lip and his ribs screaming and three men standing over him and they are laughing, and the sound of it is so familiar, so old, so deeply embedded in the architecture of his life that it barely registers as cruelty anymore.
It's just noise. It's just the sound the world makes when it's reminding Newt of his place in it.
You literally had to summon someone to fuck you.
The words echo. They sit inside him alongside the boot in his ribs and the blood on his lip and the laughter and all of it, all of it, is just more evidence for the same conclusion he's already reached.
He's not enough. He's never been enough.
He's not enough for the coven, not enough for Mathilde, not enough for Malik, not enough for anyone, and the only thing he's ever been good at is taking up space that other people would prefer to be empty.
The portal.
The thought arrives through the pain, sharp and clear.
The portal. It's still there, somewhere behind him, half-open, guttering, barely holding.
He'd been forming it when they came in. He'd been reaching across the district toward his townhouse.
It's unstable and it's weak and it might collapse the moment he pushes, but it's there.
He wonders if he's good enough.
He wonders if he can open it without the chalk circle, which he's been kicked out of.
Without the candles, which have been knocked over.
Without the incantation, which he hasn't finished.
He wonders if the weeks of training were enough, if the things Malik taught him, the breathing and the reaching and the opening, can carry him through this without hands on his shoulders and a voice in his ear.
He closes his eyes.
A boot hits his thigh and he gasps but he keeps his eyes closed.
He stops reaching for the portal. He stops reaching for the townhouse.
He reaches, instead, for something else.
For the bond. For the thin contractual tether that connects him to Malik, that thread of magic that he can feel even now, even through the pain and the fear, humming in his chest.
He thinks of Malik's hands in his.
He reaches out.
The portal doesn't open across the room where the chalk circle is.
It opens in front of him, inches from his curled body, and it is not half-formed, not guttering, not weak.
It is vivid. Purple and blazing, a tear in the air that crackles with energy, and the men around him scramble backward because a portal has just ripped open in the middle of a gymnasium floor and something is coming through.
Malik falls out of it.
Not gracefully. Not the way demons are supposed to arrive, all smoke and presence and calculated menace.
He staggers, catching himself on one knee, as though the portal opened up beneath his feet without warning and dropped him through, and for a half-second he is disoriented, one hand braced on the warped gymnasium floor, silver hair swinging forward over his face.
Then he looks up.
Then he sees Newt.
Then he sees the blood on Newt's lip and the way Newt is curled on the floor and the men standing over him and the expression that crosses Malik's face is not the careful neutrality that Newt has learned to read.
It is not the raised eyebrow or the quirked lip or any of the controlled tells that Malik wears when he's managing his reactions.
It is rage. Pure, uncomplicated, incandescent rage, and it transforms his face entirely, strips away centuries of composure in the space of a heartbeat, and the men who were laughing a moment ago are not laughing now.
They're backing up. They're running. They scatter toward the gymnasium door, boots scuffing on the warped floor, and they're gone, and Malik is on his feet and his body is angled toward the door and Newt can see it in every line of him, the coiled intent, the predatory calculation, the demon deciding how many pieces to leave them in.
Newt grabs his wrist.
His fingers close around Malik's wrist and hold on and Malik doesn't stop. He takes another step toward the door, dragging Newt's arm with him, and Newt's grip tightens and the pain in his ribs flares white and he gasps.
"Malik, wait!"
"Let go." Malik's voice is not his voice. It is something stripped and raw, something that has had years of composure peeled off it, and he is not looking at Newt. He is looking at the gymnasium door where the men disappeared and every line of his body is pointed toward it. "Let go of me, Newt."
"No."
"I'm going to find them."
"Malik, please." Newt's fingers tighten on his wrist. He can feel Malik's pulse under his fingertips, hammering, faster than he's ever felt it, and the bond between them is flooding with something so hot and so violent that Newt can taste metal in the back of his throat. "Please just take me home."
Malik turns his head. He looks down at Newt on the floor, at the blood on his lip and the hair in his face and the hand wrapped around his wrist, and his expression is terrible.
It is fury and something underneath the fury that Newt cannot name, something that looks like it is costing Malik a great deal to hold inside his body.
"They hurt you," Malik says, and the words come out like they've been bitten off, ragged at the edges.
"I know."
"I'm going to—"
"They're not worth it." Newt's voice is steady. He doesn't know where the steadiness is coming from, because everything inside him is shaking, but the words come out even and clear. "They've never been worth it. Please. Malik. Take me home."
Malik stares at him. The fury is still there, still burning, and Newt can feel through the bond how much he wants to go after them.
How much he wants to take them apart. How much the wanting is costing him to resist. It is vivid, incandescent, a heat that pulses through the tether between them with every heartbeat, and Newt holds his wrist and doesn't let go and waits.
The moment stretches. Malik's jaw works.
His free hand is a fist at his side, the knuckles white, and Newt can see the decision being made behind his eyes, can see the war between the part of him that wants blood and the part of him that is looking at the small hand on his wrist and choosing to listen to it.
Malik leans down.
He slides one arm under Newt's knees and the other behind his back and lifts him off the gymnasium floor as though he weighs nothing.
As though Newt is a thing made of paper and air, not a person with bones and bruises and a split lip that's dripping blood onto Malik's shirt.
Newt is scooped up and held against Malik's chest and his face goes scarlet, even through the pain, even through the throbbing in his ribs and the ache in his cheekbone, because he is being carried by an incubus in an abandoned elementary school and the indignity of this is somehow worse than the beating.
He stares at Malik's shoulder. He cannot look at his face.
If he looks at Malik's face right now he is going to see something there that he is not equipped to process, so he stares at the fabric of Malik's shirt and the silver hair falling over it and presses his forehead against the curve of Malik's neck and breathes.
Malik's arms tighten around him. Just a fraction. Just enough.
He turns, and carries him through the portal that Newt made, the portal that Newt summoned without chalk or candles or incantation, the portal that Newt opened by reaching through the bond and pulling Malik to him with nothing but his magic and the thought of Malik's hands.
The portal closes behind them with a soft, clean snap.