"You gave him to me to kill me," Newt says. "You designed the contract to drain me. You put an incubus in my house and waited for him to consume me so you could take my power through him. You bred me for this. Six generations, all so you could feed me to a demon and harvest what was left."
"You make it sound so crude."
"It is crude."
"It's survival, child. It's what I have done for a hundred and thirty years, and it is what I will continue to do, and your feelings about your pet demon are not going to change that."
The floor begins to shake.
It starts small. A vibration in the boards, a tremor in the walls, the lamps on Mathilde's desk flickering. Then the tremor deepens. The walls begin to groan. The books on Mathilde's shelves shudder and a crack opens in the plaster above the door, and the door behind them, the one Newt cracked off its hinges, slams shut with a force that makes the frame splinter.
Mathilde throws up her hands.
The spell she casts is old and powerful and it leaves her palms in a wave of compressed force that should have flattened Newt where he stands. Malik starts forward, his body moving before his mind, because Newt is in danger and Malik's body does not care about contractual limitations, his body cares about the boy in front of him, but the spell doesn't hit Newt.
It hits the area around Newt. It strikes the air six inches from his body and dissolves. Not deflects. Not rebounds.Dissolves, as though it has hit a wall it cannot break through, a barrier that is not visible and is not spoken and is simplythere, part of Newt, part of his magic, a protective field that his power has erected without his conscious participation.
Newt doesn't flinch.
The floor begins to crack open.
Mathilde casts again. A different spell, sharper, more targeted, aimed at the space between Newt's eyes. It dissolves before it reaches him. She casts a third time. A fourth. Each one more desperate than the last, each one shattering against the invisible wall of Newt's magic, and Newt is not casting back. Newt is not retaliating. Newt is standing in the middle of Mathilde's study with his hair loose and his hands at his sides and the floor splitting open around him and he is not doing anything except existing, and his existence is enough to turn aside everything the most powerful witch in Haven can throw at him.
The estate is trembling. Malik can feel it in the floor, in the walls, in the ceiling, and he thinks that maybe Newt doesn't mean to bring the whole place down around them. That maybe he's a little upset. That maybe the power pouring out of him is not directed and not controlled and is simply the overflow of a body that has been sealed for twenty years and opened last night and does not know how to contain itself now that the seal is broken.
Malik steps forward and takes Newt's hand.
The walls settle. Instantly. The trembling stops, the groaning stops, the books stop shuddering on their shelves. Malik's touch grounds him the way it always has, the way it has since the amulet, and the chaotic overflow of power narrows and focuses and the floor splits open cleanly.
Not a crack. Not a fissure. A clean, deliberate opening in the floor of Mathilde's study, and from the opening comes a light.
Green. Eerie and deep and wrong, the color of things that grow where no sun reaches, and Malik knows this light. He knows it in his bones. It is the light of the underworld. It is the light that greets him when he is unbound, when there is no contractholding him to the mortal world, and he has walked through it a thousand times and never once been afraid of it.
He is afraid of it now. Not for himself. For Newt.
Because Newt has just summoned the underworld. Newt, who is so young, who was making constellations on a ceiling an hour ago, has opened a door to the realm of the dead in the middle of a study in a coven estate, and Malik has been alive for a long time and he has never, in all that time, seen anyone do this. Not Mathilde. Not any witch, in any coven, in any century. The underworld is not a place you summon. The underworld is a place you go, or a place that takes you, and Newt has reached down and pulled it open the way you open a trapdoor in a floor.
He is shocked. He will process the shock later. Right now, someone is coming through.
Erath rises from the opening.
He looks the same. The Lord of the Underworld does not change. He is tall and dark haired and his usually dark eyes are the green of the light that precedes him and he moves through the opening the way you walk up stairs, each step deliberate, unhurried, as though Newt has constructed a staircase in the earth for him and he is ascending it at his leisure. He stands in the study and the green light pools around his feet and the air goes cold, deeply, fundamentally cold, and he looks around.
He looks first at Newt. For a long time. He looks at the small red-haired figure standing in the middle of the cracked floor with one hand at his side and the other holding an incubus's hand, and something moves in Erath's ancient, unreadable face. Not surprise, which is what Malik expects. It’s recognition. Like he’s seen someone familiar. And isn’t that a strange thought? That Newt might know the god of death and is able to summon him at will. Malik decides to bring it up at a safer, more reasonable time.
Then his gaze rolls over to Mathilde.
Mathilde is standing behind her desk. She is standing the way prey stands when it has been spotted, very still, very straight, as though she is hoping his gaze is based on movement and if she doesn't move he won't see her. The color has drained from her face. All of it. She is white, paper-white, the same white Newt went when Malik's hand found him against the wall, except that Newt's white had been fear of rejection and Mathilde's white is fear of death.
Something flickers in Erath's face.
"Matty," he says, and his voice is different in the land of the living. A little wrong. A little off-key, the way a note sounds when it's played on an instrument that was built for a different octave. "You should know nothing is forever. Everything comes to an end."
"No." Mathilde shakes her head. Her hands are gripping the edge of her desk and her knuckles are white. "No. You can't do this."
She looks to Malik. Her eyes find him, find his hand in Newt's, find his face, and whatever she's looking for there she doesn't find it. Malik looks back at her with eyes that are very, very purple. His contract with Newt is fulfilled. The gold is gone. And the contract Mathilde holds, the original binding, is the thing Erath has come to collect.
Mathilde looks back to Erath. He is waiting. He is patient. He has been patient for over a century, waiting for the mortal woman who stole an incubus's energy to cheat death, and patience is something the Lord of the Underworld has in limitless supply.
