The snake is still waiting. Newt waves a hand and it dissolves, the magic unraveling cleanly, the scales and coils and bladed tongue dispersing into the air, and three ordinary table forks clatter to the hardwood floor.
Newt looks at them. Looks at the sofa, which is three feet to the left of where it started. Looks at the armchair, which is facing the wrong direction. Looks at the bookshelf, which is intact but slightly crooked. Looks at the three forks on the floor, unremarkable, dull, already cooling.
He is so happy he could burst.
He doesn't say that to Malik. He bends down and picks up the forks and takes them to the kitchen and puts them in the drawer, and his hands are shaking and his face is flushed and there is a smile on his face that he can't get rid of and doesn't want to, andwhen he turns around Malik is leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen, arms crossed, watching him with that unreadable expression that isn't in Newt's dictionary yet.
"Two snakes tomorrow?" Newt asks, and his voice comes out breathless and bright and he's aware of how eager he sounds and he doesn't care.
Malik's lips quirk.
"Sure," he says, and pushes off the doorframe, and goes upstairs, and Newt stands in the kitchen with three forks in a drawer and a heart that won't slow down.
Chapter 5
If he thinks about it long enough, the physical contact makes sense.
He's a sex demon. Touch is the medium through which he operates, the currency of his existence, the tool he has been wielding since before most of the civilizations in this realm had names. Of course physical contact from an incubus would enhance magical ability through a familiar bond. Of course his hands on Newt's shoulders would stabilize what Newt's mind cannot. The bond between them is built on a foundation of connection and intent, and touch is the purest expression of both. It's not mysterious. It's not complicated. It's just the mechanics of what they are to each other, familiar and summoner, and Malik can rationalize it in the time it takes to finish his morning tea.
The question is how far this goes. How much closer he's going to have to be before the magic decides to cooperate permanently. How much of his body pressed against Newt's before the contact stops being a technique and starts being something else entirely.
He doesn't know, and the not-knowing is becoming an issue.
The larger issue, however, is the scent.
Malik is an incubus. Incubi detect arousal the way sharks detect blood. It's not a gift, not a talent, not something he cultivated over centuries of practice. It's biological. Hardwired. The scent of someone who wants him registers in the back of his throat and the base of his skull simultaneously, a warm chemical bloom that tells him everything he needs to know about the body in front of him. How far gone they are. How close to the edge. Whether the desire is real or performed, because there's a difference, and Malik has always been able to tell.
The scent is tied to wetness, to the body's physical response to arousal, that warm, involuntary preparation that saysyesbefore the mouth has formed the word. Malik catches it most strongly from female partners, always has, because female bodies produce it in abundance and the chemistry aligns neatly with what incubi are built to detect. Males produce less. The signal is fainter, quieter, easier to miss beneath the louder notes of sweat and heat and adrenaline. Malik has slept with hundreds of men across eight centuries and the scent has always been there, technically, if he bothered to look for it. He usually doesn't. There's no need. He can read a body's desire in a dozen other ways and the faint whisper of male arousal beneath everything else has never been worth isolating.
Until Newt.
Because nothing about Newt Hargrove has ever been faint.
The first time Malik catches it, they're mid-session. Newt is standing in front of him with Malik's hands on his shoulders, attempting a transmutation that's going well, for once, and his body is relaxed and his breathing is even and the spell is behaving and then Malik says something without thinking. Delivered low and close because that's how he talks during their sessions, his mouth near Newt's ear, his voice a murmur that carries through the bond between them. He says "Good boy,Newt," and Newt's pulse kicks under his thumbs and the flush crawls up his throat and the scent hits Malik in a wave.
Sweet. Warm. Botanical. Crushed herbs in sunlight, green and golden. And beneath it, rich and dark and unmistakable, the honeyed smell of slick, of wetness, of Newt's body responding to him with a frankness that his face is already broadcasting but that his scent confirms.
It's not faint. It's not a whisper. It's not buried beneath sweat and adrenaline and the ambient noise of a body in motion. It is vivid and potent and saturating and it fills Malik's head so completely that for a disorienting moment he forgets what they're doing. He forgets the spell. He forgets the transmutation. He forgets that he is standing in a townhouse living room with his hands on a novice witch's shoulders and that there are contractual reasons for this contact and that those are the only reasons.
It's not unexpected. He reminds himself of this. It should not be surprising that Newt, who cannot hide a single thing he's feeling, whose face broadcasts every thought and every want and every flicker of emotion with the subtlety of a bonfire, is aroused by the touch of an incubus. That's what incubi do. That's what they are built for, and it would be strange, genuinely strange, unusual, if Malik's hands on his shoulders and Malik's body behind him and Malik's voice in his ear did not produce exactly this response. The arousal is normal. The arousal is expected. The arousal is a predictable biological reaction to the presence of a creature designed to elicit it and Malik should not be thinking about it.
He should not be thinking about howgoodNewt smells.
He should not be thinking about the fact that the scent is stronger than anything he's detected from a male partner in eight hundred years, and that has everything to do with the sheer, staggering intensity of his response. Newt is notproducing a faint signal beneath louder noise. Newt is producing a signal so potent it drowns out everything else in the room. He is so aroused, so viscerally, physically turned on by Malik's touch, that his scent is a wall, a presence, a thing that takes up space and fills corners and lingers in the air after Newt has left the room.
It's not unexpected, he tells himself again. It's not mysterious. It's just biology. Newt is a virgin with enormous magical reserves and a body that has never been touched and an incubus living in his house. The combination of those factors means that Newt is, to put it clinically, in a near-constant state of low-grade arousal that spikes dramatically whenever Malik is within arm's reach.
That's all this is.
Except that's not all this is, and Malik knows it, and the knowing is what keeps him up at night.
Because the scent doesn't just register. It resonates. It hooks into something deep in the machinery of Malik's instincts, something primal, something that predates his consciousness and his discipline and his centuries of careful, practiced detachment, and it pulls. It saysthis one.Notthis one is aroused,which is information, useful, forgettable. Butthis one.As though Malik's body has identified Newt as something specific. Something rare. Something that his predatory architecture has been calibrated to respond to and has never before encountered in sufficient concentration.
He's not going to think about this.
Their sessions continue. The contact escalates. Hands on shoulders become arms around waists, and Newt gets better, and Malik gets closer, and the scent is always there, warm and sweet and devastating, and Malik does not follow it.
Except sometimes, when Newt leans back into him and the scent blooms open, Malik thinks about it. Thinks about the fact that Newt is positively leaking for him. That this small, freckled,earnest witch who makes him breakfast and brews him tea and cannot look him in the eye without blushing is so aroused by Malik's proximity that his body is slicking itself, readying itself for something that is not going to happen because Malik will not let it happen. And the thought of that, the mental image of Newt's body responding to him with that level of involuntary, visceral want, is so enticing that Malik's vision goes hazy and his jaw aches and his hands tighten on Newt's shoulders and he has to remind himself to breathe.
