Newt looks at them with an expression that is equal parts sympathy and fear.
Chapter 24
The Hargrove Coven’s mansion looks as though something crawled out of the eighteenth century and refused to leave.
It sits at the end of Thornfield Row, three stories of dark stone and wrought iron, its windows tall and narrow, its facade choked with ivy so old it has become structural. The iron gate opens before Newt touches it. A young woman in black meets them at the door. She is tall and sharp-featured, with her dark hair pulled back so severely it looks painful, and she looks at Newt the way one might look at a stain on an expensive carpet. She doesn’t speak. She leads them through a foyer of dark wood and polished stone, past portraits that Dimitri suspects are watching them, and into a parlor with high ceilings and heavy furniture and the oppressive airless feeling of a room where bad news is traditionally delivered.
A woman is waiting for them.
She stands by the fireplace. Mid-forties, maybe, though with witches it’s hard to tell. Auburn hair twisted into a complicatedknot. Sharp cheekbones. A mouth designed for disapproval. She wears charcoal gray, simple and expensive, and her posture has the rigid controlled quality of someone who considers relaxation a character flaw.
“Annabeth,” Newt says. His voice has gone small again. Everything Knox’s patience rebuilt on the walk over has evaporated in the doorway of this room, replaced by the hunched apologetic smallness of someone who knows he’s about to be kicked.
Dimitri can feel Knox’s concern flare through the bond. Hot and immediate. Protective.
“Newton.” Annabeth’s gaze moves over him with clinical efficiency, cataloging and dismissing in the same sweep. Then it lands on Dimitri. Then on Knox. Her eyebrows draw together by a fraction of a millimeter, which Dimitri suspects is the Annabeth equivalent of dropping her jaw in shock. “What have you done?”
Newt tells her. Haltingly, miserably, with the particular brand of shame that comes from confessing a catastrophic failure to someone who expected you to fail. The summoning. The rift. The blood magic. The binding. The sex magic complication. He tells it all, standing very straight and very small in the middle of the parlor, and his voice only cracks twice.
Annabeth listens. Her expression transitions from annoyed to more annoyed to the kind of cold settled fury that doesn’t need to raise its voice.
“Mathilde will not be pleased,” she says when Newt finishes. The words land and Newt contracts further. His shoulders curl. His chin drops. Through the bond, Knox’s concern curdles into something sharper, and Dimitri has to actively resist the urge to do something violent to the auburn-haired woman by the fireplace who is looking at Newt as though he’s a problem to be managed rather than a person to be helped.
He doesn’t care about Newt’s family dynamics. He doesn’t. Knox is a bad influence.
Annabeth turns to them. Her sharp eyes read the bond between them, and her mouth thins.
“Sex magic,” she says. “Consummated.”
“Yes,” Knox says without flinching.
“Under normal circumstances, a consummated soulbind would seal into a lover’s promise. Permanent, but stable. The bond would become part of your shared magical architecture, self-sustaining, self-regulating. It would stop fighting your blood.” Her gaze lingers on Knox with clinical interest. “But Newton’s debt to the demon has created a rift in the connection. The bond is trying to seal, but the open contract is preventing it. It’s trying to close a door with a chain still threaded through it.”
“So what do we do?” Knox asks.
Annabeth folds her hands in front of her. “There are two options. Newton fulfills his debt to the demon directly. He gives what was promised when he cast the summoning, and the contract closes, and the bond between you and the demon shatters.”
“Shatters,” Knox repeats.
“Completely. Violently. And the demon will possess Newton as payment.” Annabeth says this the way she might describe a change in the weather. “That’s the nature of an unfulfilled summoning contract forcibly closed. The summoner becomes the vessel.”
Newt doesn’t move. He has gone very pale, the kind of pale that suggests the blood has left his face entirely and taken up residence somewhere around his knees. But he stands firm. His jaw is set. His trembling hands are stuffed in his pockets. He is willing to accept it. Dimitri can see it on his face, the terrible resigned acceptance of a boy who has spent his whole life beingtold he’s a problem and has finally decided to stop being one in the most permanent way possible.
Knox is white. Not flushed, not pale. White. Through the bond, Dimitri can feel the Templar’s composure cracking, hairline fractures spreading through the steady calm, panic seeping through.
“And the second option?” Knox’s voice is thin.
“Transfer the debt,” Annabeth says. “The contract Newton opened doesn’t have to be fulfilled by this demon specifically. It can be transferred to another. The new demon assumes the debt, the contract closes with Newton and the original demon simultaneously, and the soulbind is free to seal properly.”
“Because the bond was consummated through sex magic,” Annabeth continues, her tone clinical, “the transfer would need to go to a demon of compatible affinity. A sex demon, specifically. An incubus. I know of one who owes a debt to Mathilde. The transfer would be clean.”
Knox’s eyes widen. Dimitri can feel the cascade of thoughts behind them, the rapid-fire calculation of a man who has fought demons for forty years and knows exactly what most of them are capable of. Demons worse than Dimitri. Demons who wouldn’t sit in a kitchen and share a coffee mug. Demons who wouldn’t carry an unconscious Templar home and take his boots off and stay awake all night watching him breathe.
“Absolutely not.”
Knox steps forward. He is still white. His hands are at his sides and his green eyes are bright with something that Dimitri recognizes with a surge of dread, because he has seen it before, on the warehouse floor, in the apothecary, every time Knox has decided to be noble about something that is going to get him killed.
“That’s completely unacceptable,” Knox says. His voice is steady. His voice is always steady when he’s about todo something catastrophically self-destructive. “I won’t trade Newt’s life for my own freedom. I'm not going to let Dimitri possess him and I'm definitely not going to hand him over to an incubus. If there's no way to break the bond cleanly then I’ll endure it until my body gives out.”
