It is not a slow stilling. It is instant. Every line of his body locks, and the heat and the languor of the last several minutes evaporates, and Newt feels the cold rush in to replace it.
"What?" Malik says.
"They're gold. They're—they were purple, and now they're—"
Malik sits back on his heels.
He wipes his mouth, once, with the back of his wrist, and the gesture is so clinical, so efficient, that Newt's chest cracks open. He reaches for Malik. Hand outstretched. Half sitting up.
"Malik—"
Malik stands.
He pulls his shirt back onto his shoulders. Begins, with quick practiced fingers, to button it. He does not look at Newt. He does not look at the snow still drifting around them. He does not look at anything. He fastens one button, and then the next, and Newt's voice, when it comes, is very small.
"Did I—did I do something wrong?"
Malik's hands stop. For just a moment. Then they resume.
"No," he says. Quiet. Very quiet. "No, Newt. You didn't."
"Then—"
"I have to—" Malik clears his throat. "I have to go."
Malik crosses the room. He does not look back. He opens the door and closes it behind him with a care that is almost tender, and Newt is alone on the couch, naked, sticky, shaking, with snow drifting down around him in soft silent flakes.
He pulls his knees up to his chest. Wraps his arms around them. Makes himself very small.
He sits there for a long time.
Eventually—he does not know how long—he exhales a slow careful breath and waves one hand, and the snow lifts from the floor, the couch, the shelves. It rises up in a slow spiral and gathers itself into a single small cloud near the ceiling and then, with a soft sigh, simply vanishes.
The living room is quiet.
The torches are out. The coffee table is dry. There is no trace of any of it, nothing to prove it happened, and Newt sits naked on his couch with his arms around his knees and feels, returning, that familiar ache in his chest—the one that has lived there his whole life, the one he had, stupidly, for a moment, allowed himself to believe was gone—and he presses his face into his knees and he does not cry.
He is done crying.
He tells himself this, over and over, in the cold silent living room, until he almost believes it.
Chapter 14
Malik has a problem.
A small, beautiful, red-haired problem that tastes of honey and green things and makes it snow when he comes and whose hand closed around Malik's horn twenty minutes ago and pulled a sound out of him that Malik has not made in longer than some civilizations have existed.
Malik is walking through Haven in the dark with his shirt buttoned wrong and his mouth still tasting of Newt and his eyes, which he can feel are wrong, are gold, are a color they should not be, and he does not know where he is going. He just knows he can't be in that townhouse. He can't be in that living room with the snow drifting down and Newt naked on the sofa looking at him with those enormous green eyes and sayingdid I do something wrongwhile Malik's entire molecular structure rearranges itself around the fact that his eyes have changed color and he knows what it means.
He'll deal with the eyes. He'll deal with them later. Right now there is a more immediate crisis, which is this:
Malik has taken it upon himself to start feeding from his summoner instead of seeking an outside source, the way he was doing in the beginning, the way he told himself to do in order to keep things simple, and now things are very much not simple.
Things are catastrophically, irrevocably, world-endingly not simple.
Because Newt is a lightning bolt. He is a conduit. He is a natural disaster wrapped in freckles and a too-large sweater and he has ruined Malik for every other body in the world. Ruined. Not diminished. Not made them less appealing by comparison. Ruined, fully and permanently, in the way that a man who has tasted something extraordinary can never again eat something ordinary without knowing the difference.
And Malik hasn't even been inside him yet.
