No way out with Naoki and Newt
His fingernails were bloodied from trying to scratch a hole in the wall. Were the situation different, Newt could’ve easily fled via fire and brimstone, but the situation wasn’t different. It was what it was. Chicago’s bitter Winters had stunted his flame, and the power Naoki had over him had done much the same.
Naoki, of course, hadn’t been what he went by back then. It had been something much easier to fly under the radar. The 1920’s weren’t exactly a forgiving time for anyone who picked a name outside of Johnny or Sue. Newt himself went by Albert; Albert Pennyworth, for better or for worse, and Naoki—Newt didn’t even want to think about him, much less his name.
Plastering himself to the wall, Newt turned to stare his employer in the face—or what was left of it. Naoki’s vessel was wearing thin, his lips creased in an unforgiving and downright ugly little snarl—the mask was slipping. There was a monster underneath the rubbery remains of a once-proud gangster. Newt felt bile bubble up the back of his throat and had to force it down, his legs shaking.
"You’re impudent," Naoki remarked airily, as if commenting on the color of Newt’s hair or the manner in which he dressed. "You’re boring, you’re defiant, and you need to be taught a lesson. So I’m going to leave you down here," Naoki said, looking around the dingy, dimly-lit ice box of a warehouse basement’s storage containment, adjusting a sleeve cuff. "You haven’t done as I asked, and you deserve to be taught a lesson."
Newt’s bloodied fingers dripped crimson onto the dirt-packed floor. Naoki’s lip curled back a little more, revealing teeth that threatened to expose themselves as something other than human. Newt closed his eyes and thumped his head back slightly against the wall, wishing he was anywhere but here. He had so little energy left—Naoki had devoured it all.
Or almost all, as Fates would have it.
"When I say ‘kill’, you say, ‘how brutally’?" Naoki stepped forward and Newt braced himself, feeling fingers dig into his chin to jerk him around. Brown eyes remained tightly-cinched, the salamander refusing to look at his master. "And when I want something done, you do it quickly. You don’t dally around just because you happen to take a fancy to one of these…brainless, pathetic, spineless humans—!” His grip tightened on Newt’s face and Newt whimpered. “Look at me.”
It was the signal Newt had been waiting for, honestly.
His eyes flashed open; red with fire, and his bleeding hand slapped a symbol behind his back he’d etched on the wall and hidden with his body. The surprise on Naoki’s face as he was ripped from the fabric of time and space in the warehouse to somewhere else entirely—the harbor, if Newt was lucky—was delicious. Downright sinful.
Newt threw up on the warehouse floor and buckled to the ground.
His energy spent, he in turn spent the majority of the next hour crawling out of the storage area and up the steps to freedom.
It was only the warmth of a brothel light glowing this late at night that kept Penderghast alive.
He slipped toward it like a moth down a drainpipe, and threw himself on the mercy of its flames.
They were more accepting than the fires of hell, at any rate.