"Does it hurt?" Newt asks.
"No," Malik says, and it's the truth, it doesn't, but it comes out rough and Newt's eyes flicker to his and then away, quickly, and his flush deepens.
They sit like that for a long time. Longer than the compress needs. Longer than the tea needs to cool. Newt holds the cloth against his throat and his fingers are gentle and his breathing is soft and the townhouse is quiet around them, just the two of them in the dark with the single warm lamp from the windowseat casting long shadows across the floor.
Malik thinks about the half-giant. About the vampiress. About the minotaur and the officer and every other body he's pressed himself against in the last two weeks, every exchange, every feeding, every clean and efficient transaction. He thinks about the way he left them. The turned backs. The closed doors. The deliberate, practiced absence of anything beyond the act itself.
He thinks about the fact that not one of them, in all of that, ever pressed a compress against his throat afterward.
Not one of them ever made him tea.
Not one of them ever looked at him the way Newt is looking at him right now, which is with so much worry, so much unearned tenderness, that Malik feels something crack in the wall he's been building between himself and the boy beside him. Just a hairline fracture. Barely visible. But there.
Newt adjusts the compress, his thumb brushing the underside of Malik's jaw, and Malik closes his eyes.
"You don't have to do this," Malik says. The words come out before he's vetted them, which is unlike him, which is a lapse in the control he has maintained for centuries, and he doesn't know what he means by them. Doesn't know if he meansyou don't have to take care of meoryou don't have to be kind to meor something else entirely that he can't bring himself to shape into language.
Newt is quiet for a moment. His thumb stills against Malik's jaw.
"I want to," he says. Simply. Like it's obvious. Like the idea that someone would choose to take care of the demon living in their house is the most natural thing in the world and doesn't require explanation.
Malik opens his eyes and looks at him and Newt is already looking back, and there it is, that thing in his chest, that crack in the wall, and he watches Newt's eyes and thinks:You foolish, reckless, impossibly kind creature. You should not be wasting this on me. I am a thing that takes and leaves and you are offering me something I don't know how to hold and you should stop. You should stop before I let you.
He doesn't say any of that.
He drinks the tea. He lets Newt hold the compress against his throat until the herbs go cold. He sits on the sofa in the quiet dark and lets this boy take care of him, and he doesn't know why.
He doesn't know why, and that is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to him.
Chapter 4
The townhouse is a disaster.
Not the magical kind, for once. Not the kind where spells go sideways and windows shatter and car alarms scream down the block. This is the mundane kind. The kind born of two people living in a one-bedroom space that was barely organized when Newt moved in and has only gotten worse since an incubus started sharing it. There are spellbooks stacked on every horizontal surface, some Newt's and some borrowed from the coven library before anyone thought to cut off his access. There are jars of components on the kitchen counter that have migrated from the shelf Newt designated for them, creeping outward in a slow invasion of dried yarrow and powdered quartz and something in a dark bottle labeled in handwriting that isn't his. There is chalk dust on the hardwood from their sessions. There is a scorch mark on the ceiling from the candle incident. There is a crack in the plaster from the amulet.
Newt is going to clean all of it. By hand.
He starts with the books. He pulls them down from the shelves and the windowseat and the kitchen table and the stackbeside the sofa that has become structurally significant, and he sorts them. Incantation theory in one pile. Transmutation in another. Sigil work, ward construction, herbalism, demonology, the battered copy ofA Practical History of Familiar Bondsthat he's read three times and still doesn't fully understand. He wipes each cover with a damp rag, cleans the dust from the spines, and returns them to the shelves in an order that makes sense to him, which is not alphabetical and not by subject but by frequency of use, the ones he reaches for most at eye level, the ones he references rarely up high, the ones he hasn't opened yet but intends to on the bottom shelf where he can grab them from the floor.
Malik is watching him from the armchair.
He's been there for the better part of an hour, one leg crossed over the other, silver hair draped over one shoulder, a cup of tea balanced on the armrest in a way that should be precarious but isn't because Malik doesn't do precarious. Malik does languid. Malik does effortless. Malik sits in Newt's secondhand armchair and makes it look like a throne and watches Newt crawl around on the floor sorting spellbooks with an expression that hovers somewhere between amusement and bewilderment.
"You know," Malik says, and his voice is that low, unhurried drawl that always sounds like he's got all the time in the world and finds everything in it mildly entertaining, "coven witches don't dust their spellbooks by hand."
Newt blows a strand of hair out of his face and shovesFoundations of Elemental TheorybetweenWard Construction for the Intermediate Practitionerand a water-stained copy of something in a language he can't read. "How do coven witches dust their spellbooks?"
"They don't." Malik lifts his tea to his lips. "They enchant the shelves. Self-cleaning. It takes about four seconds."
"That sounds very efficient and very unhelpful." Newt pushes himself to his feet, knees aching, and grabs the next stack from the windowseat. "If I enchant the shelves, the shelves decide where things go. And then when I need the transmutation index at three in the morning because I can't sleep and I've had an idea, I have to argue with a bookshelf."
"You've had arguments with furniture before?"
"I talk a lot. This should not be news to you."
Malik's lips quirk. One corner. The one that means he thinks something is funny. "I'm learning that."
Newt feels the warmth of that in his chest and ignores it, or tries to, and moves on to the components. The jars are worse than the books because some of them have lost their labels and Newt has to open each one and smell it or, in the case of the ones that shouldn't be smelled, hold them up to the light and squint. Dried yarrow. Powdered quartz. Moonstone dust, which is finer than flour and gets everywhere. Thistle root, which smells sharp and medicinal. Something amber and viscous that he suspects is tree resin but could also be something much worse, so he sets that one aside and makes a mental note to ask Malik later.
