Dimitri reaches behind him. His hand finds Newt, who is still right next to Knox, still clutching Knox’s shirt, and closes on the back of the boy’s jacket. He pulls Newt away from Knox and thrusts him forward, planting the stumbling witch directly in front of the silver-haired demon.
“This,” Dimitri says through clenched teeth, “is the one who summoned you.”
The incubus looks thoroughly taken aback. His purple gaze drops to Newt, small and freckled, wearing a secondhand jacket and an expression of paralyzed terror, and then lifts over Newt’s head to Knox. The disappointment on his beautiful face is palpable. His eyes linger on Knox for a long wistful moment, clearly cataloging what he is being asked to give up, but something in the way Dimitri is standing, the darkness bleeding from him, the ancient power pressing against the walls of the room, communicates with perfect clarity that fighting for the alternative is not an option worth pursuing.
The incubus’s gaze turns to Newt.
Newt is staring very fixedly over the demon’s left shoulder. His green eyes are locked on a bookshelf approximately fifteen feet behind the incubus, and his face is the color of a ripe tomato, and he is very obviously, very determinedly not looking at the demon’s muscular chest or the impossible tightness of the leather pants or anything below the demon’s collarbones. His jaw is clenched so hard Knox can see the muscles working.
The incubus studies him for a long silent moment. Then he reaches out.
His hand, long-fingered and elegant and impossibly graceful, catches Newt’s jaw. The touch is light, almost clinical, tilting the boy’s face up, lifting his gaze from the bookshelf to the incubus’s own purple eyes. Newt freezes. His breath stops. His entire body goes rigid, caught in the grip of something beautiful and terrifying.
The incubus holds him there. Those purple eyes search Newt’s face with an intensity that seems to go deeper than the physical, reading something in him, tasting something in the air around him, cataloging whatever information a sex demon gathers through the touch of skin on skin.
He clicks his tongue. A soft, considering sound.
He lets Newt go. Newt sways but doesn’t fall.
The incubus turns to Annabeth. His expression has shifted from seductive to something considerably more complicated, the face of someone who has been presented with a problem they did not anticipate and are not sure how to solve.
“What,” the incubus says, his voice like silk dragged over something sharp, “am I supposed to do with a virgin summoner?”
The library goes very quiet.
Every head in the room turns to Newt. Newt, whose face has transcended red and entered a shade of crimson that Knox did not know human skin could produce. Newt, whose mouth isopening and closing without sound. Newt, who is standing three feet from a half-naked sex demon in leather pants and has just had the most private detail of his life announced to a room full of coven witches.
Annabeth stares. Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
The silence stretches, vast and merciless and absolute, and the incubus stands in the center of it with his silver hair and his purple eyes and his expression of genuine, unprecedented inconvenience, and waits for an answer that nobody in the room seems prepared to give.
Chapter 26
The silence lasts an eternity.
It stretches across the library, filling the space between the shelves and the candles and the mortified witch standing three feet from a half-naked incubus. Nobody speaks. Nobody moves. The coven witches are frozen in various states of shock, and Newt looks as though he is considering whether the floor might be persuaded to open up and swallow him.
Annabeth clears her throat.
“He’s yours to do with as you see fit,” she says. Her voice has regained its clinical edge, though Dimitri can hear the strain underneath. “Newton is indebted to you. The terms are yours to dictate.” She folds her hands in front of her, composure reassembling itself. “And virgins are exceptionally powerful when it comes to sex magic. Their energy is unspent, concentrated. There must be a use for him.”
She says it as though she is discussing inventory. As though Newt is a commodity with an unexpected feature that simply needs to be marketed differently.
Knox’s outrage hits Dimitri through the bond with the force of a fist. White-hot, protective, volcanic. Knox’s hands curl at his sides. His jaw locks. Those green eyes blaze with the particular intensity of a man who has just heard a family member discussed as livestock and is calculating how many people in this room he needs to fight.
Dimitri can see the horror on Newt’s face. The boy is staring at Annabeth with an expression that isn’t surprise. It’s confirmation. The look of someone who always suspected they were expendable and has just received proof.
The incubus regards Annabeth.
The seductive ease is gone. The languid charm, the slow smile, the theatrical sensuality, all of it has been replaced by something cold and sharp and ancient. He looks at Annabeth the way one might look at an insect that has crawled uninvited across one’s floor.
“Is everyone in your coven,” the incubus says softly, “so quick to sacrifice their own?”
Annabeth blanches. A fractional loss of color, a tightening at the corners of her mouth. “Newton chose this fate. He summoned a demon. He made a pact with it. He owes a debt. The consequences—”
“What pact was made?”
The question cuts through Annabeth’s justification. The incubus’s purple eyes are fixed on her, unblinking, and his voice has lost its silk. What is left is something harder. Something that expects answers.
