Malik's gaze shifts to Dimitri, who is looking at him with an expression that Malik has never seen on his face before. Not hostility. Not mockery. Something cold and raw and furious, the expression of a creature who is staring down a consequence he thought he'd already prevented.
Malik feels an emotion he doesn't have a name for. He struggles with it. It sits in his chest like something jagged, sharp-edged, lodged between his ribs and trying to tear its way out. It feels like being wrenched in two. It feels like standing in a doorway and watching both rooms collapse.
"Are you listening?" Dimitri snaps.
Malik shakes his head. His vision clears, but the emotion doesn't leave. It settles, heavy, permanent, and he says, flatly, "He'd be yours again."
Dimitri surges forward.
His hands close around Malik's collar before Malik can move, and the bar stool topples and clatters against the floor and they are standing now, nearly the same height, Dimitri's face inches from his, and even with the surge of Newt's power flooding through Malik's veins there's not a lot he can do to stop Dimitri's hands from closing around him. Dimitri is older. Dimitri is a different kind of demon. Dimitri's strength is not the kind that feeds on pleasure. It is the kind that feeds on rage, and right now Dimitri is incandescent with it.
The bar goes quiet. No one approaches them.
"I entrusted him to you," Dimitri says. His voice is low and shaking. "You asshole. I entrusted him to you. Do you know what will happen if he ends up back in my contract?"
Malik knows. He doesn't need Dimitri to say it. He knows what possession means. He knows what it would do to Newt, to be overwritten, to have his consciousness folded beneath Dimitri's, to become a vessel for a demon who never wanted to be inside him in the first place. He knows what it would erase. The brightness. The stubbornness. The earnest, reckless, exhausting sincerity. The way Newt makes breakfast for demons. The way Newt smiles when Malik walks through the door. The way Newt saysanything you wantwith his flushed face and his parted lips and means it, means every word, would give Malik anything, everything, himself.
All of it. Gone.
"Tell me what to fucking do, Dimitri," Malik hisses through his teeth. His hands have come up to grip Dimitri's wrists, not to remove them but to hold on, and his voice is cracking in a way that has never happened. "I can't kill her. You know I can't. She holds the original contract. I can't raise a hand against her. Tell me what to do. I want to save him.Help me."
Dimitri's expression shifts. The fury remains, but something else moves beneath it. A recognition. An understanding of what it sounds like when a creature who has never cared about anything sayshelp meand means it.
Dimitri's grip loosens. Just a fraction.
"Can you complete the contract before she takes you back?" he asks.
"I don't know. We've been... things have been better. His magic is stronger than it's ever been. But the half moon is tomorrow. That's not enough time."
"Then make it enough time." Dimitri releases his collar. Steps back. Rights the fallen bar stool but doesn't sit on it. His eyes are still dark with fury, but the fury has direction now, purpose, and when he looks at Malik there is something in his face that might, under extreme duress, be called respect. "Get your ass home. Stop wasting time here. If there's a chance, take it. Try everything."
Malik stands there for a moment longer. The green drink is untouched on the bar. The taste of Newt is still on his tongue.
He thinks about saying something else. About asking Dimitri to fight the reversion, to resist the possession, to find some way to keep Newt whole if Malik fails. But he doesn't, because he knows Dimitri. He knows what possession means for the possessor as well as the possessed. Dimitri would be trapped inside Newt the way Newt would be trapped inside Dimitri, and neither of them would have a choice. The contract doesn't care about preference. The contract doesn't care about Knox, who would lose his soulbound partner to the body of a twenty-year-old witch, or about Newt, who would lose everything. The contract cares about terms, and the terms are the terms, and there is nothing Dimitri can do about it any more than Malik can.
They look at each other across the bar. Two demons who have never been friends, who have never liked each other, who are standing on opposite sides of a catastrophe that will destroy someone they both, against all expectation, care about.
Dimitri doesn't say anything else. He doesn't need to. The look on his face says it all:fix this.
Malik puts money on the bar and walks out into the night and goes home.
Chapter 15
Newt can do this on his own.
He can. He's sure of it, or at least he's sure enough of it that the alternative, which is giving up entirely, is not something he's willing to consider. They've done enough training. Weeks of it. Weeks of Malik's hands on his shoulders and Malik's body behind him and Malik's voice in his ear, and Newt has learned things. Actual things. Things that work, things that hold, things that the coven never bothered to teach him because the coven never bothered to try. He knows how to channel now. He knows how to direct intent. He knows how to breathe and reach and open instead of grabbing and shoving. He knows these things because Malik taught them to him, and the fact that Malik is going to be taken away tomorrow doesn't mean the knowledge goes with him.
The knowledge stays. Newt keeps that.
He keeps the knowledge. He keeps the spellwork. He keeps the memory of what it felt like to be capable, even if the capability came with conditions attached, even if those conditions were an incubus's hands and an incubus's voice and an incubus'smouth on his throat sayinggood boywhile the ward sealed itself around them.
He keeps those memories too, but he files them somewhere deep and dark where they can't hurt him. Or where they can hurt him less. Or where they can hurt him the same amount but he doesn't have to look at them.
Mathilde is going to take Malik from him. And Malik doesn't even want him regardless. These are the two facts that Newt wakes up with, that he carries downstairs, that he holds in his hands while he makes breakfast for one and doesn't set a cup across the table because Malik isn't here, Malik left last night after... after the couch and the snow and the gold eyes and the leaving, the leaving, always the leaving.
It's in everyone's best interest if Newt just learns to do this himself. If he proves to Mathilde that the contract served its purpose, that he's capable, that the familiar arrangement can be terminated without consequence because Newt doesn't need a familiar anymore. He doesn't need Malik's hands. He doesn't need Malik's touch. He doesn't need Malik.
He's going to prove it.
