He grabs his bag. His spellbook, the one that's too simple for him, the one he could have written himself. His chalk. His cloak. He doesn't leave a note because there's no one to leave a note for, and he heads out into the grey morning.
The abandoned elementary school is on the far side of the district, past the canal and the old warehouses, in a neighborhood that was mostly mundane before the supernatural population expanded and the mundanes moved out. The building is squat and brick and the windows are boarded and the door hangs on one hinge and it smells of damp concrete and old paint and absolutely nothing magical, which is the point. If something goes wrong here, the blast radius is emptyclassrooms and crumbling plaster, not Newt's townhouse and Newt's bookshelves and the armchair that smells of amber.
He sets up in what was probably the gymnasium. The floor is scuffed wood, warped at the edges. He draws a chalk circle, careful, precise, the way Malik taught him. He sets candles at the cardinal points. He opens his spellbook and flips through it, through the pages he's dog-eared and annotated, through the spells Malik has taught him to read with more critical eyes, and he finds an incantation for creating a portal from one location to another.
Simple enough. Create a portal from here to his townhouse. Step through. Close it behind him. A clean, self-contained exercise that demonstrates spatial manipulation, sustained concentration, and the ability to anchor a working across distance. If he can do this alone, without Malik's hands, without Malik's body, without Malik, he can do anything.
He closes his eyes. He breathes. He reaches for his magic.
It comes. Sluggish at first, reluctant, and there's a wobble in it that wasn't there when Malik was behind him, a looseness in the thread of intent that makes Newt's jaw tighten. But it comes. He pulls it up from his center, gathers it, shapes it. The chalk circle glows faintly. The candles flicker. The air in the gymnasium thickens, and Newt can feel the portal forming, a thin seam in the space in front of him, shimmering, half-open, reaching toward the townhouse across the district.
He's doing it. It's working. It's messy and it's slow and the portal is flickering at the edges in a way that suggests it might collapse at any moment, but it's forming, and Newt is forming it, alone, without anyone's hands on him, and the pride that blooms in his chest is small and fierce and his.
Then he hears footsteps behind him.
Multiple footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate. The creak of the gymnasium door swinging wider, the scuff of boots on warpedwood, and Newt's concentration fractures for just a moment before he catches it, holds the portal at half-open, and turns his head.
Three men. Conjurers, from the look of them, coven-adjacent, the kind of witches who operate in Mathilde's orbit without being formally bound. They're older than Newt. Bigger. They fan out as they enter, the casual spread of people who are used to taking up space and don't expect resistance.
The one in front looks at Newt, at the chalk circle and the candles and the shimmering half-portal, and his lip curls.
"Hey, Lily," he says.
The name hits Newt in the chest. It always hits him in the chest, no matter how many times he hears it, no matter how many years it's been since he stopped answering to it. It's a fist that lands in the same bruise, over and over, and the bruise never heals because people keep hitting it.
"That's not my name," Newt says. His voice is steady.
"Isn't it?" The man tilts his head. He's enjoying this. Newt can see the enjoyment in the angle of his mouth, the casual lean of his posture, the way he's looking at Newt the way you look at something that's already decided to be beneath you. "That's what Mathilde calls you. You telling me the matriarch's got your name wrong?"
"I go by Newt."
"Yougo byNewt." He repeats it slowly, tasting the words. The other two laugh. "Right. Sure. Whatever you say, sweetheart."
The second one circles wider, moving around the chalk circle, looking at the candles and the spellbook with an expression of theatrical curiosity. "So what's the story with the demon, Lily? Heard you've got yourself a familiar now. That right?"
Newt's jaw tightens. He doesn't answer. His eyes flicker to the portal behind him, still guttering, still half-formed, and he calculates the distance and the time and knows he can't make it.
"Heard it's an incubus," the second one continues, and the grin on his face widens. He turns to the other two. "Did you hear that? She's got anincubus."
They laugh. All three of them. The sound bounces off the gymnasium walls and the high dusty ceiling and it is the particular kind of laughter that exists to make someone feel small, targeted and precise and designed to land exactly where it hurts.
"An incubus," the third one repeats, the largest of them, and he's shaking his head like this is the funniest thing he's heard all week. "A sex demon. As afamiliar.What the fuck did Mathilde think was going to happen?"
"Well," the first one says, looking at Newt with a slow, appraising drag of his eyes that makes Newt's skin crawl, "maybe that was the point. Maybe the old woman figured if Lily can't get anyone to fuck her the normal way, she'd summon someone contractually obligated to do it."
More laughter. Louder.
Newt's face is burning. His hands are fists at his sides and his nails are cutting into his palms and the portal is guttering behind him and he cannot look at any of them.
"Is that what happened?" the second one asks, and he's stepped closer now, close enough that Newt can smell the stale magic on him, earth and iron. "You literally had tosummonsomeone to fuck you?"
"That's not what happened," Newt says. His voice has gone thin. He hates the sound of it. He hates how small it is, how tight, how obviously affected. "That's not... he's my familiar. It's a standard contract. It's not..."
"It's not what?" The first one is close now too. "It's not sad? Because it sounds pretty sad to me. Twenty years old and the only way you can get someone to touch you is to bind them with a contract."
"Must be awkward," the third one adds, arms crossed, head tilted. "Having a demon in your house who's literally built to want everyone and he's stuck withyou."
The words land where they're aimed. Every single one of them finds the bruise that Newt has been carrying since the night Malik went out to find a better meal. The bruise that sayseven an incubus doesn't want you.The bruise that saysyou had to summon someone to touch you and even then it wasn't enough.
