Chapter 18
Malik has lived a long time and he has fulfilled a thousand contracts and he has never wanted anything as much as he wants Newt Hargrove.
This is the thought he carries through the door, down the stairs, out into the grey morning, two steps behind a witch who just conjured clothes from nothing and walked out of the bedroom with the quiet, terrifying certainty of someone who has stopped asking permission.
Newt's hand is in his. Newt's grip is tight.
Newt is walking fast, his newly conjured boots hitting the cobblestones with a rhythm that is all purpose and no hesitation, and his red hair is loose around his shoulders because Malik has his leather tie and Malik is not giving it back.
Malik knows where they're going. He doesn't ask. He doesn't need to.
Part of him, the part that has survived centuries by calculating odds and managing risk, knows he should say something.
Should tell Newt that this is a bad idea.
Should explain that Malik cannot go against Mathilde directly, that the original contract binds him, that he is physically, magically, contractually incapable of raising a hand against the woman who holds his binding.
Should tell him that storming the Hargrove estate with a half-dressed incubus and a bellyful of rage is not a strategy, it's a tantrum, and tantrums do not historically end well for the people throwing them.
He doesn't say any of it.
Because the other part of him, the part that is newer and rawer and doesn't know its own name yet, wants Newt to fight for this.
Wants to fight for this. Doesn't want to give up until the chains are back around his wrists and he's back inside the portal and there is nothing left to do but go.
He said I want you ten minutes ago and the words are still reverberating in his chest, still ringing through the bond between them, and he is not going to take them back.
He is not going to unsay the truest thing he's ever said just because the world has decided it doesn't matter.
They walk through Haven in the early morning.
The streets are quiet. Shopkeepers are opening doors.
A woman walking a dog gives them a wide berth, and Malik doesn't know if that's because of the horns or the expression on Newt's face or the fact that the air around them is crackling with something that makes the streetlamps flicker as they pass.
The Hargrove estate rises at the end of the lane, old stone and dark windows, and Newt does not slow down. He walks straight up to the front door and the door does not open for him because the door is locked and warded and reinforced with a century of protective magic.
Newt doesn't touch it. He doesn't raise a hand. He doesn't speak an incantation. The door cracks off its hinges and swings inward with a sound like breaking teeth, and the ward that was protecting it dissolves like smoke in a wind, and Newt walks through the opening without breaking stride.
Malik follows.
The corridors of the Hargrove estate are full of people who suddenly find other places to be.
Coven members pressing themselves against walls, ducking into rooms, averting their eyes.
Malik recognizes some of them. The witch who delivered the summons.
A young conjurer who once sneered at Newt across a hallway.
They are not sneering now. They are watching the small red-haired figure striding through their halls with something that is not quite fear and not quite awe and is somewhere very uncomfortable between the two.
Annabeth is in the corridor outside Mathilde's study. She sees them coming. She looks at Newt, at the set of his jaw and the loose hair and the magic crackling around him in visible arcs, and she looks at Malik behind him, and her sharp features do something complicated.
She steps aside.
She doesn't try to stop them. She doesn't raise a hand or speak a word of warning.
She simply moves out of the way, pressing her back against the wall, and watches them pass with an expression that Malik files away for later examination.
It is not betrayal of Mathilde, and it's not necessarily loyalty to Newt, but it's not not either of those things either.
Malik recognizes ambition when he sees it and Annabeth, who has done her mother's bidding her entire life with probably little gratitude, is brimming with it.
Newt finds Mathilde's study. He does not knock. He does not pause. The door opens the way the front door opened, cracking at the frame, swinging inward, and Newt walks through and Malik follows and the door slams shut behind them without anyone touching it.
Mathilde is at her desk.
She looks the same. She always looks the same.
Ancient and sharp and sustained by magic that should not be sustaining her, and she looks up from her papers as they enter with an expression of such controlled displeasure that it barely registers as a reaction at all.
She is not surprised. She is not frightened.
She looks at Newt the way she has always looked at Newt, with the patient, assessing gaze of a woman examining a tool that has not performed as expected.
"Lily," she says. "I did not summon you."
Newt doesn't flinch.
Malik watches it happen, watches the name land on Newt's face and watches Newt's face not move, and it is the first time he has ever seen Newt take that hit without flinching. Something in Malik's chest clenches.
"I completed the contract," Newt says. His voice is steady.
Clear. It fills the study the way Newt's voice fills every room, but this is different.
This is not chatter. This is not the anxious babble of a boy trying to make himself heard.
This is a statement, delivered with the calm authority of someone who knows exactly what he's saying and means every word.
"I did what you instructed. My magic is stable. The familiar bond is fulfilled."
Mathilde regards him for a long moment. Then her mouth curves, that blade-thin smile.
"That's very good," she says. "You finally did something right."
The words are designed to cut and Malik watches them land and watches Newt not bleed, and the thing in his chest clenches tighter.
"It's just unfortunate," Mathilde continues, folding her hands on her desk, "that your demon didn't cooperate."
The room goes very quiet.
"I'm sorry?" Newt says.
Mathilde's gaze shifts to Malik. It is the look of a woman examining a piece of equipment that has malfunctioned. Clinical. Annoyed. Not angry, because anger implies investment, and Mathilde has never been invested in Malik as anything other than a resource.
"He was supposed to bring you to your full potential," Mathilde says, her eyes still on Malik, "and then consume you as his part of the contract.
That was the arrangement. That was what I designed the contract to do.
An incubus, bound to a virgin witch of extraordinary power.
The feeding would have drained you, slowly, over months, and your power would have transferred to him, and through him, to me.
" She returns her gaze to Newt. "Instead, he fell in love with you. Which serves no one."
Malik's ears are ringing.
He fell in love with you.
The ringing gets louder. Malik hears the words and cannot unhear them and they sit inside him alongside the ringing, and he thinks about wanting to keep Newt forever, about the feeling in his chest that he said he couldn't name, about the word he kept saying against Newt's mouth without authorization, and he thinks: love.
She said love. She used that word. And Malik had not used that word, had danced around it, had called it wanting, had called it caring, had called it the thing he didn't have a name for, but there it is, handed to him by the last person in the world he would want to hear it from, and it is true.
It is true and he has known it was true since the armchair.
Since the thistle tea. Since the first time Newt smiled at him from the windowseat and the thing behind his ribs shifted and never shifted back.
He has known it and he has refused to say it and Mathilde has said it for him, casually, dismissively, as though Malik's love for Newt is an inconvenience, a malfunction, a variable that disrupted her calculations.
"So," Mathilde says, "I will take him back.
His contract with you is fulfilled, as you say.
But his contract is not the only one in play.
My contract with the incubus predates yours.
I will reclaim him, and you will be free to do as you wish.
You won't have to be possessed by Dimitri, since the familiar bond was satisfied. Everyone wins."
Newt is quiet for a long time.
The study is still. The lamps burn low. Mathilde sits behind her desk with her folded hands and her patient eyes and waits, because Mathilde has been waiting for things to go her way for over a century and she is very good at it.
"I have never asked you for anything," Newt says.
His voice has changed. It is not loud. It is not angry. It is something worse than either. It is the voice of someone standing at the edge of a very deep place and looking down and deciding whether to jump.
"Not to call me by my name," Newt says. "Not to train me. Not to love me. I never asked for any of those things because I knew you wouldn't give them and I didn't want to hear you say no."
Mathilde's expression does not change.
"But I am begging you," Newt says, and his voice cracks on the word begging, just barely, just a hairline fracture, "not to take him from me."
"It's not personal, Lily. It's practical. I need him more than you do."
"Because he's keeping you immortal."
Mathilde goes still.
Not the controlled stillness of composure. The stillness of something that has been struck. Her hands, folded on her desk, tighten against each other, and her eyes, which have been patient and calculating and cold, go sharp.