The horns help.
Newt glances up at him as they walk. Malik in daylight is a different creature than Malik in lamplight. The silver of his hair catches the sun and turns white-bright, almost blinding, and his skin has a warmth to it that the low light of the townhouse never reveals, and his horns cast short curved shadows across his temples. People are looking at him. Of course they're looking at him, because Malik is impossible not to look at, and Newt watches a woman walking a small dog nearly trip over her own feet when Malik passes and feels a complicated mixture of secondhand embarrassment and something that might, under laboratory conditions, be classified as pride.
Not pride. Not that. He has no claim on Malik. He has no reason to feel proud that other people find his familiar attractive, because his familiar is not his, and the wordhisdoesn't apply here, and Newt needs to stop thinking about it.
"Do you always cause traffic incidents," Newt says, "or is that a daylight-specific phenomenon?"
Malik glances down at him. "What?"
"The woman with the dog. She nearly broke her ankle."
"I didn't notice."
"How did you not notice?"
"I notice very little about the general public, Newt. They're ambient."
Newt laughs. He can't help it. The wordambientapplied to human beings is so perfectly, absurdly Malik that it catches him off guard, and the laugh comes out bright and surprised and louder than he intended, and a man carrying a crate of vegetables gives him a look.
The apothecary is on Threadneedle Street, tucked between a candlemaker and a shop that sells enchanted stationery. It's small and dim and smells of dried herbs and old wood and the particular dusty sweetness of components that have been sitting in jars for a long time. The bell above the door chimes when they enter and the sound of it is thin and bright in the close air.
Newt loves this place. He has been coming here since he was sixteen, since before the coven cut off most of his library access, since before his magic became something people were afraid of. The shelves are crammed with jars and bottles and pouches and bundles, organized in a system that makes sense only to the woman who runs it, and Newt knows where everything is because he has memorized the chaos.
The shopkeeper is behind the counter. Her name is Edda and she is approximately four hundred years old and she is a gnome and she comes up to Newt's waist, which means she comes up to approximately Malik's knee. She has spectacles perched on a nose that is mostly cartilage and an expression of permanent, low-grade suspicion directed at the world in general.
"Newt," she says, without looking up from the ledger she's writing in. "You owe me for the last batch of thistle root."
"I know, I'm sorry, I brought coins this time, I promise." Newt sets his bag on the counter and starts pulling out his list. "I need moonstone dust, dried yarrow, powdered quartz, chalk, and more thistle root. A lot more thistle root."
"Hmm." Edda writes something in her ledger. Then she looks up, and her gaze travels past Newt's shoulder, and her spectacles slide down her nose.
Malik is standing behind Newt. He is standing very close behind Newt, because the shop is narrow and Malik is large and there is nowhere else for him to stand, and the closeness means that Newt can feel the warmth of him through his cloak and this is fine. This is completely fine. Newt's ears are not burning. His face is not hot. He is a functioning adult who can stand near another person in a shop without having a crisis.
Edda looks at Malik. She looks at Newt. Her mouth purses. Her spectacles slide further down her nose. And she makes a sound, a small, knowing,hmm, that contains within it an entire encyclopedia of implication.
“You finally get a boyfriend?" Edda asks.
"Familiar," Newt says, quickly. "He's my familiar."
"Mm-hmm."
Edda peers over her spectacles at Malik, who is looking down at her with an expression of mild, regal interest. Then she peers back at Newt, whose face is now the approximate color of his hair. Then she makes thehmmsound a third time, this one the most devastating of the three, and returns to her ledger.
"Moonstone dust is on the third shelf," she says. "Don't knock anything over. And tell yourfamiliarto mind the chandelier."
She says the wordfamiliarthe way someone sayssure, honey, and Newt's face goes from red to crimson and he turns and walks very quickly toward the third shelf and does not look at Malik.
Malik follows him. Of course Malik follows him, because the shop is narrow and the aisles are narrower and Malik has to turnsideways to fit between the shelves, and his horns nearly clip a hanging bundle of dried rosemary as he goes. Newt reaches the moonstone dust and pulls a jar from the shelf and holds it up to the light to check the quality, and Malik leans down, close enough that his mouth is near Newt's ear, and says, very quietly:
"She'd be more intimidating if I didn't think a wayward guinea pig might bowl her over."
Newt snorts. The laugh comes out through his nose, sharp and undignified, and he claps a hand over his mouth and nearly drops the jar.
"Stop," Newt manages, through his fingers. "Stop, she'll hear you."
"She's four hundred years old. Her hearing can't be that good."
"She's agnome, Malik, their hearing is better than ours, she can absolutely..."
