It's enticing. It's so very, very enticing. And Malik is an incubus, and enticing is what he feeds on, and every instinct he has is telling him that what's in front of him is not just food but a feast, and the feast is being offered freely by someone who does not understand what it would cost.
He pulls his hands away. He steps back. He puts distance between them and watches the disappointment land on Newt's face, open and unhidden and devastating in its sincerity, and tells himself this is the right thing to do.
He's been telling himself that a lot lately. The repetition is not as reassuring as it used to be.
Meanwhile, there is the matter of the Hargrove Coven, and that is something Malik can think about without his hands shaking.
He's been around long enough to recognize cultivation when he sees it. The careful, patient architecture of a bloodline bred for power over generations, each pairing selected, each child assessed, each generation a step closer to the goal. Six generations of Hargrove witches, each one stronger than the last, and Newt at the end of that chain, the culmination, the product of over a century of calculated breeding.
Newt's power isn't accidental. Someone designed it. Someone cultivated it. And someone kept it untrained on purpose.
Malik turns this over during the hours when Newt is asleep and the townhouse is quiet and he's sitting in the armchair that smells of Newt and trying not to think about that. The coven has had twenty years to train this boy. Twenty years during which Newt's magic has been building, accumulating, a pressure vessel with no release valve, and they've done nothing. No instruction. No guidance. No attempt to help him control the power that is tearing him apart from the inside out.
They want him volatile. They want him desperate. They want him so overwhelmed by his own abilities that when they finally step in, he'll be grateful for whatever control they offer, whatever leash they extend, whatever cage they build for him.
Malik is the variable they didn't account for.
The contract had been Mathilde's play. Transferring Malik from herself to Newt, assigning him as a familiar, had been her move. Malik suspects she'd expected one of two outcomes: either Malik would consume Newt, feeding on his enormous reserves until there was nothing left, or Malik would fail to help him and the failure would prove that Newt was beyond saving and the coven could proceed with their contingency.
Neither outcome has materialized. Instead, Malik is teaching him. Instead, Newt is getting better. Instead, spells are completing and wards are forming and a boy who couldn't light a candle three weeks ago is transmuting snakes on his living room floor and the coven is watching and Malik can feel their attention shifting, recalibrating, adjusting.
A witch from the coven stopped by the townhouse last week. Routine, she'd said. A progress report. She'd been polite. She'd been pleasant. She'd looked at Newt the way a farmer looks at livestock and Malik had wanted to close the door on her hand.
He thinks about Newt's face when the witch left. The way he'd gone quiet, the way the brightness had drained from his expression and been replaced by something careful and guardedand old, too old for twenty, too practiced. The way he'd sat on the windowseat and pulled his knees to his chest and stared out the window and hadn't talked for nearly an hour, which for Newt is an eternity, which for Newt is a silence so loud it filled the entire townhouse.
Malik had sat in the armchair and watched him and said nothing. He'd wanted to say something. He'd wanted to say a lot of things, most of them violent, most of them promises he wasn't certain he could keep, most of them directed at the old woman in the estate who has spent years breaking this boy down to make him easier to use.
Malik sits in the armchair now, in the dark, and the townhouse is quiet, and Newt is asleep behind a closed door upstairs. He thinks about the coven and the contract and the old witch's calculating eyes. He thinks about the progress report and what it really means. He thinks about contingencies and possession and the careful, patient machinery of people who view a human being as a resource to be harvested.
He thinks about Newt making him breakfast.
He thinks about Newt smiling at him from the windowseat.
He thinks about the scent that fills his head every time they touch, sweet and warm and devastating, and the way his instincts screamthis one, this one, this one.
Malik leans his head back against the armchair and closes his eyes and breathes in the faint, lingering traces of Newt that cling to the fabric and doesn't think about how much of a problem this is.
He already knows.
Chapter 6
Their sessions are escalating and Newt is losing his mind.
Not in the magical sense, although there's an argument to be made there too. In the other sense. In the sense that Malik's hands have migrated from Newt's shoulders to his arms to his waist over the past week and every escalation in contact produces an escalation in Newt's inability to think in coherent sentences, and he's starting to wonder if there's a mathematical formula for this. If someone could graph the inverse relationship between Malik's proximity and Newt's cognitive function. If there's a point on that graph where the line crosses zero and Newt's brain simply ceases to operate altogether.
He suspects they're approaching that point rapidly.
The exercises are getting harder. More complex. The transmutations require sustained concentration over longer periods, the wards demand layered intent, the conjurations pull from deeper wells of power that Newt didn't know he had. Malik is pushing him, deliberately, methodically, with the patient precision of someone who has been teaching for centuries and knows exactly how far to extend the leash before his studentstumbles. And Newt is keeping up. Barely, messily, with the magical equivalent of running full speed while tripping over his own feet, but he's keeping up, and every completed exercise is a small, private miracle that he holds close to his chest and guards.
The problem is that keeping up requires contact. More of it. Always more.
Today's transmutation is a sustained working. A length of copper wire that Newt needs to transmute into a silver chain, link by link, without breaking the spell between links. It's a precision exercise, Malik told him this morning over toast. It requires focus, patience, and the ability to hold a single thread of intent steady for an extended period of time. Newt had nodded and chewed his toast and tried not to think about the fact that an extended period of time means an extended period of Malik's hands on him and what that's going to do to his already tenuous grip on composure.
They start with Malik's hands on his shoulders. Standard position. Familiar. Newt can handle this. He's been handling this for days, he's practically an expert at being touched on the shoulders by an incubus while pretending his entire nervous system isn't lit up. He takes the copper wire in both hands, closes his eyes, and begins.
The first three links go well. Copper to silver, smooth, precise, each one clicking into place against the last. Malik's thumbs press into the ridge of his spine and the magic flows and the wire transforms and Newt thinks,I can do this. This is fine. Everything is fine.
The fourth link wobbles. The silver wavers, flickering between silver and copper, and Newt's concentration hiccups and the wire goes hot in his hands. He hisses and grips harder and tries to force the transmutation through and it's not working, the thread of intent is fraying, he's losing it, and the wire is startingto glow and if he doesn't stabilize this in the next few seconds he's going to turn a copper wire into a molten projectile.
