"Lily," she says. "I did not summon you."
Newt doesn't flinch.
Malik watches it happen, watches the name land on Newt's face and watches Newt's face not move, and it is the first time he has ever seen Newt take that hit without flinching. Something in Malik's chest clenches.
"I completed the contract," Newt says. His voice is steady. Clear. It fills the study the way Newt's voice fills every room, but this is different. This is not chatter. This is not the anxious babble of a boy trying to make himself heard. This is a statement, delivered with the calm authority of someone who knows exactly what he's saying and means every word. "I did what you instructed. My magic is stable. The familiar bond is fulfilled."
Mathilde regards him for a long moment. Then her mouth curves, that blade-thin smile.
"That's very good," she says. "You finally did something right."
The words are designed to cut and Malik watches them land and watches Newt not bleed, and the thing in his chest clenches tighter.
"It's just unfortunate," Mathilde continues, folding her hands on her desk, "that your demon didn't cooperate."
The room goes very quiet.
"I'm sorry?" Newt says.
Mathilde's gaze shifts to Malik. It is the look of a woman examining a piece of equipment that has malfunctioned. Clinical. Annoyed. Not angry, because anger implies investment, and Mathilde has never been invested in Malik as anything other than a resource.
"He was supposed to bring you to your full potential," Mathilde says, her eyes still on Malik, "and then consume you as his part of the contract. That was the arrangement. That was what I designed the contract to do. An incubus, bound to a virgin witch of extraordinary power. The feeding would have drained you, slowly, over months, and your power would have transferred to him, and through him, to me." She returns her gaze to Newt. "Instead, he fell in love with you. Which serves no one."
Malik's ears are ringing.
He fell in love with you.
The ringing gets louder. Malik hears the words and cannot unhear them and they sit inside him alongside the ringing, and he thinks about wanting to keep Newt forever, about the feeling in his chest that he said he couldn't name, about the word he kept saying against Newt's mouth without authorization, and he thinks:love.She said love. She used that word. And Malik had not used that word, had danced around it, had called it wanting, had called it caring, had called it the thing he didn't have a name for, but there it is, handed to him by the last person in the world he would want to hear it from, and it is true.
It is true and he has known it was true since the armchair. Since the thistle tea. Since the first time Newt smiled at him from the windowseat and the thing behind his ribs shifted and never shifted back. He has known it and he has refused to say it and Mathilde has said it for him, casually, dismissively, as though Malik's love for Newt is an inconvenience, a malfunction, a variable that disrupted her calculations.
"So," Mathilde says, "I will take him back. His contract with you is fulfilled, as you say. But his contract is not the only one in play. My contract with the incubus predates yours. I will reclaim him, and you will be free to do as you wish. You won't have tobe possessed by Dimitri, since the familiar bond was satisfied. Everyone wins."
Newt is quiet for a long time.
The study is still. The lamps burn low. Mathilde sits behind her desk with her folded hands and her patient eyes and waits, because Mathilde has been waiting for things to go her way for over a century and she is very good at it.
"I have never asked you for anything," Newt says.
His voice has changed. It is not loud. It is not angry. It is something worse than either. It is the voice of someone standing at the edge of a very deep place and looking down and deciding whether to jump.
"Not to call me by my name," Newt says. "Not to train me. Not to love me. I never asked for any of those things because I knew you wouldn't give them and I didn't want to hear you say no."
Mathilde's expression does not change.
"But I am begging you," Newt says, and his voice cracks on the wordbegging, just barely, just a hairline fracture, "not to take him from me."
"It's not personal, Lily. It's practical. I need him more than you do."
"Because he's keeping you immortal."
Mathilde goes still.
Not the controlled stillness of composure. The stillness of something that has been struck. Her hands, folded on her desk, tighten against each other, and her eyes, which have been patient and calculating and cold, go sharp.
"I know about that," Newt says. His voice is quiet and steady and merciless. "I know you've been using a demon as a conduit for immortality. Using his energy to sustain yourself. To stay ageless. Even though you're mortal. Even though you should have been dead decades ago."
"So what?" Mathilde's voice is flat. The first real emotion Malik has heard from her, and it is not fear. It is contempt. "It's no matter of yours."
