She has no plans to go peacefully.
Mathilde pulls on all her power. Everything she has. A century and a half of accumulated magic, blood magic and death magic and the stolen energy of demons she has bound and used and discarded, and she throws it at Erath in a desperate, blazingtorrent, a last stand against the god of death, and she tries. She tries with everything she is.
Malik pulls Newt to him.
He wraps his arms around him and presses Newt's head against his chest and turns his back. Newt's hands fist in his shirt and Newt clings to him and Malik holds him and the room goes very dark and very cold. The green light erupts from the fissure in the floor, and with it come hands. Reaching. Grasping. Grey fingers and grey arms and the sound of voices that have been waiting a very long time, and some of the screaming is Mathilde's, and some of it isn't, and Malik holds Newt tighter and presses his face into the red hair and breathes him in.
He knows what Newt is doing. He can feel it through the bond, the enormous, terrible effort of it, the magic pouring out of Newt in a controlled, deliberate flood, holding the fissure open, keeping the pathway clear, letting Erath do what Erath has come to do. This is the hardest thing Newt has ever done. He is holding the door open between worlds and he is doing it because he has made a choice, and the choice is this: he will not be a pawn any longer. And neither will Malik.
"I love you," Malik whispers into his ear.
The words come out without permission, without authorization, without the careful vetting of years of detachment. They come from the place whereI want youcame from and they are bigger thanI want youand they are truer and they are the thing Malik has been refusing to name since the first time Newt smiled at him from the windowseat.
He says it into Newt's hair and against his ear and into the dark cold room where an old woman is screaming and a god is taking what he's owed, and Newt's hands tighten in his shirt and Newt presses closer and Malik holds him and holds him and holds him.
The fissure closes with a screech.
The screaming stops.
The green light fades. The cold retreats. The room goes still, and dark, and quiet, and Erath and Mathilde are gone.
Malik doesn't let go.
He stands in the ruined study of the Hargrove estate with his arms around the most powerful witch in Haven and his face pressed into the red hair and his heart beating so hard he can feel it in his teeth, and he doesn't let go. The lamps flicker back on. The dust settles. The crack in the floor is still there, a scar in the boards, but the fissure is sealed and the underworld is closed and the room is just a room again.
Newt is trembling.
Not violently. Not the shaking of someone who is falling apart. The trembling of someone who has just done something enormous and is feeling the cost of it, the way muscles tremble after exertion, and Malik can feel it through the bond, the exhaustion rolling through Newt in waves, and underneath the exhaustion something else. Something bright and fierce and alive.
"Newt," Malik says. His voice is hoarse.
Newt pulls back. Just enough to look up at him. His face is pale and his eyes are wet and his lip is still split from yesterday and he looks, in this moment, exactly like what he is: a twenty-year-old boy who just delivered his great-grandmother to the god of death and is not entirely sure how he feels about it.
"You said you love me," Newt says.
"I did."
"Did you mean it?"
Malik looks at him. At the freckles and the red hair and the wet eyes and the split lip and the enormous, reckless, devastating trust on his face.
"I have never meant anything more," Malik says.
Newt's face does the thing it always does. The thing it has never learned not to do, the uncontrollable bloom of everything he's feeling, and what he's feeling right now is so big and so bright that Malik has to look at it, has to let it in, cannot turn away from it the way he has been turning away from it for weeks.
Newt reaches up and takes Malik's face in both hands and pulls him down and kisses him in the middle of Mathilde's ruined study with the dust still settling and the crack in the floor still open and the faint smell of green things and old magic in the air.
Malik kisses him back.
He kisses him back and his arms tighten around Newt's small body and his eyes are purple, they are very purple, and for the first time in eight hundred years Malik is not leaving and is not going to leave and the not-leaving is not terrifying anymore. The not-leaving is the easiest thing he has ever done.
When they pull apart, Newt is smiling. It is not the hesitant smile or the forced smile or the incandescent reflexive smile he wears when Malik walks through a door. It is something new. Something that belongs to this moment and no other. Something that says:we did it. We did it and you're still here and you love me and I love you and the woman who was going to take you from me is gone and I'm holding your face in my hands and I'm not letting go.
"Take me home," Newt says.
Malik takes him home.
Chapter 19
