Newt doesn't say anything. He can't. His throat is closed and his eyes are burning and if he opens his mouth right now what's going to come out is not words.
"I heard something else too," the second one says, and his tone shifts. Darkens. The amusement is still there but there's an edge under it now, something harder, and he glances at the chalk circle and the half-open portal with narrower eyes. "Heard she's been playing with portals. Heard she had something to do with those necromancer rifts opening up in the city."
The temperature in the room changes. The other two stop laughing.
"I didn't," Newt says, and he can hear the desperation in his own voice, the way it pitches upward. "I opened one portal and it was immediately closed. I'm not a necromancer. That's not what I do. I'm just a hedge witch."
"Just a hedge witch." The first one looks at the chalk circle. At the candles. At the shimmering, unstable portal behind Newt. "Out here by herself. In an abandoned building. Drawing circles. Opening portals. Sure looks like necromancy to me."
"It's a spatial working," Newt says, faster now, the words tripping over each other. "It's not even close to necromancy, they're completely different disciplines, spatial manipulation is just relocating through existing planes, it has nothing to do with the dead, I would never..."
"You know what I think?" The first one steps forward. The amusement is gone from his face. What's left is something flat and decided. "I think you're out here because you can't do this shit in front of anyone. I think you're hiding because you know what you're doing is wrong. And I think the demon in your house isn't a familiar at all. I think you're a necromancer and a liar and I think someone should have dealt with you a long time ago."
The punch lands on the right side of Newt's face.
It is so fast and so expected, in a way that is its own kind of devastating, that Newt doesn't flinch. He sees it coming. He watches the fist arc toward him and he doesn't move because some part of him, the trained part, the conditioned part, the part that has been absorbing blows from people who are bigger and meaner and more certain of themselves for twenty years, knows that flinching makes it worse. You take it. You go down. You cover your face. You wait for it to be over.
His cheekbone detonates. His vision whites out. He hits the warped gymnasium boards shoulder-first and his head bounces off the wood and for a disorienting, airless moment he is everywhere and nowhere. He is here on this floor and he is on every other floor, every other hallway, every other corner where someone decided that Newt was the wrong shape, the wrong name, the wrong kind of thing, and the right response was to hit him until he was quieter.
His lip is split. He can taste blood, copper-bright and warm.
Hands grab his cloak and haul him up. He's on his feet, barely, and one of them is asking him something about skeletons and Newt is saying he doesn't know, he's never summoned anything dead, he's just a hedge witch, and the second hit comes from the side and catches him in the ribs and he doubles over and the third one shoves him and he stumbles and the hits keep coming.
He covers his face. He curls in on himself, elbows up, chin down, the posture of someone who has been hit enough timesto know where to protect and not enough times to know how to stop it. A boot catches his side. A fist glances off his forearm. Someone grabs his hair and yanks and the leather tie snaps and his hair comes loose and falls around his face.
"Fucking freak," someone says, from above. "Summoning demons and opening rifts and can't even throw a punch."
"She can't do anything right," another one says, and the laughter is back, and the laughter is the worst part, worse than the fist, worse than the boot, because the fist and the boot are honest and the laughter is not. The laughter saysyou're not even worth taking seriously enough to hate.
Newt is on the floor of an abandoned gymnasium with blood on his lip and his ribs screaming and three men standing over him and they are laughing, and the sound of it is so familiar, so old, so deeply embedded in the architecture of his life that it barely registers as cruelty anymore. It's just noise. It's just the sound the world makes when it's reminding Newt of his place in it.
You literally had to summon someone to fuck you.
The words echo. They sit inside him alongside the boot in his ribs and the blood on his lip and the laughter and all of it, all of it, is just more evidence for the same conclusion he's already reached. He's not enough. He's never been enough. He's not enough for the coven, not enough for Mathilde, not enough for Malik, not enough for anyone, and the only thing he's ever been good at is taking up space that other people would prefer to be empty.
The portal.
The thought arrives through the pain, sharp and clear. The portal. It's still there, somewhere behind him, half-open, guttering, barely holding. He'd been forming it when they came in. He'd been reaching across the district toward his townhouse.It's unstable and it's weak and it might collapse the moment he pushes, but it's there.
He wonders if he's good enough.
He wonders if he can open it without the chalk circle, which he's been kicked out of. Without the candles, which have been knocked over. Without the incantation, which he hasn't finished. He wonders if the weeks of training were enough, if the things Malik taught him, the breathing and the reaching and the opening, can carry him through this without hands on his shoulders and a voice in his ear.
He closes his eyes.
A boot hits his thigh and he gasps but he keeps his eyes closed. He stops reaching for the portal. He stops reaching for the townhouse. He reaches, instead, for something else. For the bond. For the thin contractual tether that connects him to Malik, that thread of magic that he can feel even now, even through the pain and the fear, humming in his chest.
He thinks of Malik's hands in his.
He reaches out.
The portal doesn't open across the room where the chalk circle is. It opens in front of him, inches from his curled body, and it is not half-formed, not guttering, not weak. It is vivid. Purple and blazing, a tear in the air that crackles with energy, and the men around him scramble backward because a portal has just ripped open in the middle of a gymnasium floor and something is coming through.
Malik falls out of it.
Not gracefully. Not the way demons are supposed to arrive, all smoke and presence and calculated menace. He staggers, catching himself on one knee, as though the portal opened up beneath his feet without warning and dropped him through, and for a half-second he is disoriented, one hand braced on thewarped gymnasium floor, silver hair swinging forward over his face.
Then he looks up.
