Dimitri grabs the kid by the collar before Knox’s hands have even left his shoulders.
He hauls Newt upright, really upright, feet barely touching the cobblestones, collar twisted in Dimitri’s fist, and the boy weighs about as much as a wet newspaper. He dangles there, freckled face white, eyes the size of dinner plates, and Dimitri stares into them with years of accumulated fury and thinks about how satisfying it would be to shake him until his teeth rattle.
This is the witch who dragged him across dimensions. This is the freckled catastrophe who botched a summoning so thoroughly that it ripped a hole in reality and loosed acid-dripping monsters on a city and bound Dimitri’s soul to a nephilim Templar who makes him feel things he has spent a millennium successfully avoiding. This twenty-year-old boy with his shaking hands and his stolen spellbook is responsible for the worst and best thing that has ever happened to Dimitri, andDimitri is going to kill him, or thank him, and he hasn’t decided which.
“Dimitri,” Knox says sharply.
Dimitri ignores him.
“Do we look familiar?” he asks.
Newt’s mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. His gaze darts between Dimitri and Knox with the frantic, cornered-animal energy of someone whose worst nightmare has just materialized on a public street and grabbed him by the throat.
“I—I’m sorry—I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—I thought I was summoning a familiar, not a—I didn’t know the spell would—” The words tumble out in a breathless stammering rush, tripping over each other. “The book said it was a conjuration for a bonded companion, I didn’t know it was a summoning circle for a demon, I swear I didn’t—”
“Did you mean,” Dimitri interrupts, his voice low and precise, “to use blood magic to bind me to a Templar?”
Newt goes a shade of white that Knox probably has a medical term for. The horror on his face is total, not the performative horror of someone caught in a lie, but the genuine gut-deep horror of someone who is only now understanding the full scope of what they’ve done.
“I—bound—” Newt’s voice cracks. “I bound you? To each other? I thought—the spell said it would close the rift and send you back, I didn’t—oh God, I can barely read Old Tongue, I thought the runes meant—”
Knox’s hand closes on Dimitri’s wrist. Firm. Insistent.
“Let him go,” Knox says.
Dimitri’s jaw tightens. Through the bond, he can feel Knox’s calm pressing against his fury, steady and immovable and patient. Knox doesn’t demand. He doesn’t pull. He just holds Dimitri’s wrist and waits, and the quiet certainty of the touchsaysI know you’re going to put him downwith a confidence that Dimitri finds both insulting and accurate.
He releases Newt.
The kid stumbles backward, nearly falls, catches himself against the bookstore’s brick facade. His hands are shaking. His eyes are wet. He looks exactly like what he is, a twenty-year-old in over his head who broke something he doesn’t know how to fix.
Knox steps forward. He positions himself between Dimitri and Newt, not aggressively, not protectively, justthere,and his voice when he speaks is patient but firm, the voice of a man who has spent a long time talking to people who are scared and in trouble and who has learned that steadiness carries further than urgency.
“Newt,” Knox says. “The binding you cast didn’t undo the debt you owe to Dimitri. When you summoned him, you opened a contract. The binding redirected it, but it didn’t cancel it. That debt is still open.”
Newt swallows. His freckles stand out against his ashen skin. “I—okay. Okay. I understand.”
“There’s something else.” Knox pauses. His voice stays steady, but Dimitri can feel the cost of the steadiness through the bond, the effort it takes to discuss this calmly, as though it’s someone else’s problem. “Because of my heritage, the binding is incompatible with my blood. It’s causing damage. The longer the bond remains, the worse it gets.”
Newt’s eyes widen. “It’s hurting you?”
“It’s killing me,” Knox says. Simply. Without drama.
The words land in Dimitri’s chest with a weight they shouldn’t have, because he already knows this, has known it since the first night when Knox lay in bed and the angelic rejection ground through his blood. But hearing Knox say it out loud, flat and factual, to a stranger on a street, makes it real in a way Dimitri’sprivate awareness of it never quite achieved.It’s killing me.Three words. Knox says them the way he’d say the weather is cold. Dimitri’s hands curl into fists at his sides.
Newt looks as though he’s going to be sick. His gaze drops to the ground, then comes back up, and his jaw sets with the same stubborn determination Dimitri remembers from the warehouse, the chin coming up, the refusal to buckle.
“I’ll fix it,” Newt says. “I’ll undo it. I swear. Whatever I have to do.”
“You’ll also need to come to terms with Dimitri about what you owe him.” Knox glances over his shoulder and gives Dimitri a pointed look, the kind that saysreasonable termsandwe’ve discussed thisandI will make your life very difficult if you don’t behave.“Reasonable terms.”
Dimitri smiles. It is not a reassuring smile. Knox’s look sharpens.
Newt glances between them. “We should—can we get off the street? Please? We’re right outside my great-grandmother’s shop and if anyone from the coven sees me talking to a—” His gaze flicks to Dimitri and he doesn’t finish the sentence. “My casting supplies are at my house. It’s not far.”
He leads them. He keeps his distance from Dimitri, a wide deliberate berth that he maintains with the careful attention of someone navigating around an off-leash predator, and drifts instead toward Knox’s side, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushes the Templar’s arm.
Dimitri watches the kid walk.
