No. Not yet. He's not going down that road. He's done. He drew a line and the line wasI will not fuck himand the line is still there and he's standing on the correct side of it, technically, even if he has now put his mouth on every other part of Newt's body and licked him clean and made him come on his tongue and knelt between his thighs and breathed him in and told him he tasted incredible and called himlove, again, the word that keeps falling out of his mouth without authorization, the word that he means, the word that terrifies him.
He's done. The line holds. The line is the only thing holding.
Except how can he not? How can he not cross it? How can he kneel between Newt's thighs and taste the sweetness of him and feel the way his body opens and listen to the sounds he makes, those wrecked desperate beautiful sounds, and then walk away and pretend there is a universe in which Malik doesn't want to bury himself inside that body and never come out?
He can't come back from this. He can't be with anyone else after having Newt. The thought of it, the thought of walking into a bar and finding a stranger and putting his hands on a body thatisn't Newt's, makes his stomach lurch with a physical revulsion that is entirely new and entirely unwelcome. Eight hundred years of clean, efficient, transactional feeding and the machinery has simply stopped working. The gears have seized. The engine has been flooded with something it wasn't designed to process and it will not turn over.
It's not even the magical connection, although that's a big fucking part of it, isn't it? Newt's power is so overwhelming that his sexual energy has changed Malik's DNA. Not metaphorically. Literally. Malik can feel it, the restructuring, the rewiring, the fundamental alteration of his physiology that has been happening since the first time Newt came for him against the wall. He is stronger. He is faster. He is more powerful than he has been in centuries, and the feeding intervals have stretched so far apart that they've become almost irrelevant. The first time Newt came for him, Malik didn't feel hungry again for a week. The second time, tonight, with Newt's taste on his tongue and Newt's hand on his horn and Newt's magic pouring through both of them in clean blue fire, Malik suspects he won't need to feed for a month.
Who knows how long this will last? Who knows how far it goes? Who knows what Malik is becoming, what Newt is making him into, what kind of creature emerges from the other side of this transformation?
But it's not about the power.
It's about Newt.
No one, in eight hundred years of exchanges, has ever sat in his lap and kissed him and asked him what he wanted. Not what Malik could do for them. Not what service he could provide, what pleasure he could perform, what transaction he could execute. But what did Malik want? What did he desire, for himself, for his own pleasure, as though his pleasure werea thing that mattered? As though he were a person and not a service?
Newt had looked at him with that flushed, earnest, mortified face and saidtell me what you wantandanything you wantandI want to make it good for you too,and Malik had stared at him and felt something in his chest crack open that had been sealed for eight hundred years. Because no one asks the incubus what he wants. No one asks the incubus if he's satisfied. The incubus is the one who satisfies. The incubus is the tool, the instrument, the means to an end, and the end is always someone else's pleasure, and Malik has never, in all his centuries, been asked to receive.
And oh, Malik had wanted. He'd wanted to take Newt apart. He'd wanted to taste him since the first time he saw that flush crawl up his throat, since the first time the scent hit him, since the first time Newt's pulse kicked under his thumbs and Malik's vision went soft. And gods, it had been everything he had wanted and more. It had been the sweetest thing Malik has ever tasted in eight hundred years of tasting everything the mortal and immortal worlds have to offer, and the sounds Newt had made, thesounds, the wrecked sobbing keening sounds of a body experiencing pleasure for the first time in its life, had burrowed into Malik's brain and taken up permanent residence.
The problem is the eyes.
The problem is the half moon.
Malik goes to Willow's.
He doesn't have a plan. He doesn't have a solution. He has gold eyes and the taste of Newt on his lips and a deadline that is hurtling toward him, and he goes to Willow's because Willow's is where Dimitri is and Dimitri is the only creature in Haven who might understand what is happening to him, not because Dimitri is sympathetic but because Dimitri is old and angry andhonest and Malik needs someone who will not be gentle with him right now.
Dimitri is at the bar. He's drinking something dark and not enjoying it, which is his default state. He turns when Malik sits down beside him, and his expression, which starts at its usual baseline of mild hostility, shifts.
"What's with your eyes?" Dimitri says.
Malik orders a drink. Something effervescent and green, because he needs something in his hands and he's not going to drink it anyway, not with the taste of Newt still coating his tongue, and he sets the glass on the bar and looks at it and doesn't see it.
"She's trying to take me from him," he says.
Dimitri's brow furrows. "Who?"
"The elder witch who owns my original contract. The one who transferred it."
"Mathilde."
"Yes."
Dimitri is quiet for a long minute. Malik can feel him thinking, can feel the gears turning behind those dark, ancient eyes, and then Dimitri says, slowly, with the precision of someone who has just realized something terrible:
"Wait a minute. If she takes you back, what does that mean for the original contract I had with Newt? It got transferred to you."
Malik stares at his drink without seeing it.
The question lands and he knows the answer already, has known it since Mathilde saidwe will void the contractin her study with her calculating eyes and her patient, cruel mouth. He thinks of that moment in the library when the coven summoned him. The circle of Hargrove witches, smug and arranged. Newt, half-hidden behind Knox's shoulder. And the contract, the one that had existed before Malik, the one between Dimitri and Newt, the one with no set terms, the one that, without Malik'sintervention, would have ended with Dimitri possessing Newt. Body and mind and magic, subsumed, overwritten, erased.
Malik's contract was meant to replace Dimitri's. It was meant to satisfy Dimitri's summoning while transferring Newt's debt from one demon to another. A lateral move. A substitution. Malik in place of Dimitri, familiar in place of possessor.
And if Malik's contract is nullified. If the terms are voided. If the substitution is reversed.
The debt goes back to Dimitri.
