by Amy Lane
“A virgin’s tears aren’t likely to be found,” Harry grunted. “That’s true. And neither is a… what is this?”
“A horn of a Pyrenean ibex. Huh—aren’t those—”
“Extinct,” Edward said glumly. “I stole the one I had from a museum.”
“Three strands of hair from an elven king.” Harry looked at Suriel. “Do we know one of those?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Suriel said blandly, and Harry and Edward met eyes. Mullins had told Edward once that Francis was at least a quarter if not a half fey—but that angels didn’t recognize feylings. Edward and Harry had spent some of their formative years gently baiting Suriel to admit what Leonard and Emma guardedly admitted was possible—that the fey existed and were far more common than most people thought. They’d never stopped this game, but watching Suriel draw a complete blank was still mildly entertaining.
“I think you do,” Harry said, grim mouth and dark eyebrows doing a figure eight thing in conjunction. “And someday I’ll get you to admit it.” He turned to Edward, tabling that discussion for the moment. “And you. You’re right—some of this shite you can’t find anywhere—it really is gone. But… but remember, Mullins trained us.”
“He taught us to be precise or we might get ourselves or our subject killed!” Edward protested. “How can I be precise if half this stuff doesn’t exist anymore!”
“Except precision is not necessarily using just the same verb! You remember that? Remember our first munitions spell, Edward? Or did it get shaken out of that egg-shaped head of yours!”
“I remember,” Francis said, smiling wickedly. “We almost blew ourselves up. Beltane, you should have been there. If Leonard hadn’t stopped us, the house would have been in the stratosphere.”
Bel’s hazel eyes grew big and round. “It would have? Who cast that spell? How’d it go so high? Why’d it get out of control? How’d Dad stop it? What did Mum say?”
Edward glared at Harry sourly. “Now look what you’ve done.”
Harry shook his head. “No,” he said, thinking hard. “It’s an important memory. Beltane, you’re sure you’ve never heard this?”
Bel shook his head, masses of yellow hair tumbling over his eyes. “No—I’d have remembered if you all nearly took out my home, wouldn’t I?” He chewed his lip then, an uncharacteristic display of vulnerability in a young man who had been confident and boundless pretty much from birth. “So much you all know that I wasn’t there for.” He smiled uncertainly at Francis, who gazed back with a ton of adoration and not a modicum of self-awareness. “Things you haven’t shared that I can only guess.”
Edward and Harry met stricken eyes then, over their heads. Was it possible? Did Beltane not know about their pasts? That time before Emma, before being magical beings, was both long ago and so immediate, it carried with it the same weight of fear and pain and regret that it had that night they’d accidentally stepped into Emma’s summoning circle.
How was it possible that Bel, the child they’d loved since his birth over twenty years ago, didn’t know who they all had been?
But they had other things to think about—Harry seemed to be making a point.
“So,” Edward said reluctantly, because he was the storyteller of the three of them and always had been, “this goes back to when we started the family business.”
EDWARD REMEMBERED very specifically that, while Suriel had been on board, they’d managed to shock Mullins in the worst way. “You wish to what?”
“We wish to blow up a goddamned brothel,” Harry snapped, glaring at Edward. “Someone here needed to go get his wick wet—”
Edward grimaced. It felt distasteful to talk about things so coarsely—particularly in front of Mullins, who, in spite of the horrors of hell, of which Leonard had let loose only a little, had always presented himself as a gentleman.
Mullins tilted his beastly head. “A girl?” he asked, sounding puzzled.
Edward flushed. During Mullins’s last visit, Harry and Francis had been giving Edward grief about seducing a local shopkeeper’s son. The boy apparently had been horrified by his inclinations, and Emma had ended up magicking him to Paris with a complete knowledge of the language and a job in a shop, just so nobody in their tiny Northern California town north of Mendocino would even know.
Having been raised as a familiar for the past twenty-five years, Edward was beginning to think that actual human beings were terrible, disastrous products of misguided religion and sexual repression who made hells of their own bodies and refused to see the glory they’d been given in the first place.
“I like both,” Edward said with dignity. “It’s not a crime.”
“Sadly not true,” Leonard said, shaking his head. “Sodomy laws are still fairly common, but we understand your point, Edward. Biologically an inclination for both sexes is probably more common than an inclination for just the one, but nobody’s done the research. And we are straying from our topic.”
“Sodomy is way too fun to outlaw,” Edward muttered to Harry, and as Harry looked at him in surprise, he realized that everybody was waiting for him to elaborate on what the topic actually was. “Uh, oh. Anyway, the topic.”
And suddenly he remembered Marilyn, the forward saloon girl in Fort Bragg who had invited him into her bed just two days before.
Edward had been there to doctor a patient—he and Leonard had a reputation as physicians by now, and people had ridden from as far away as Portland for their services. The patient resting comfortably, the danger over, Edward had gone willingly. Unlike Harry, who took sex as seriously as he took everything else, Edward threw himself rather gleefully into any assignation that fortune gifted him with. However, at the end of this one, as the sun rose, Edward recognized bruises all over the young lady’s flank and backside. As he’d run his hands along her mottled skin in horror, she’d gazed at him shyly, biting her lip.
“Don’t you understand?” she asked roughly. “That’s why I wanted you. Because you’d be kind and make it nice. Mistress Cora lets the men do whatever they want to us. I just… I’d give my time for free, just to have it not be awful.”
And for the first time, Edward had drawn the line between the rough-and-tumble saloon in Fort Bragg, where he’d been visiting, and his own terrible childhood in the Golden Child. And indeed, some of the girls were there by choice, and he was all for that.
But some of the girls were not, and Marilyn was one of them.
And he’d been filled with a righteous fury.
He didn’t even remember how he spirited the girl away at that point. He’d brought a horse—he supposed he’d thrown her on it and bundled as many possessions as he could find. He remembered the two-hour ride overland and Marilyn clinging to the saddle pommel, trying not to cry out with pain as Edward recited as many healing spells as he could remember to help her make it to Emma and Leonard’s steadily growing cliff-side home.
As he’d spilled out his story to Emma and Leonard and Harry and Francis, he’d seen the look pass between their parents, that look that said, “We’ll do this, but they have to be sure.”
“Boys,” Emma had said, breaking into Edward’s furious diatribe, “this is important. If we rescue these girls, that might not be the end of it. The ones who still wish to work will need a place of their own. The ones who wish to escape need to be taken to their homes. One of the great paradoxes of a place like this if it’s being run badly is that so many people depend on it, whether it’s evil or not. Are you prepared? Once we help the girls escape and take down the brothel owners, you need to be on board for whatever tasks come after.”
Surprisingly, Francis was the one who spoke. “You rescued us. We can rescue them. We don’t need to make them familiars—just make them free.”
“And give them resources,” Harry said practically. He’d looked at Emma then, a shrewd gleam in his eye that Edward appreciated. Harry was their planner, but he was also their hothead, which made things precarious so
metimes. “You have an idea?”
Emma nodded. “I have… contacts,” she said vaguely, tapping her forefinger to her full lower lip. “Okay. Here’s what we’ll do…. Harry?”
“Yes?”
“You, Edward, Mullins, you formulate a plan that involves….” She grimaced. “Not a lot of carnage.”
“I beg your pardon!” Edward burst out indignantly. “Did you not see her bruises? Did you not treat her bruises?”
“Enough deaths will draw attention, son,” Leonard said, the calm, as ever, in the eye of the storm. “We’re getting rid of the brothel and getting the girls to safety. Mullins and Suriel mete out life and death and justice. We just help the living.”
“Unless they try to unhelp us first,” Harry clarified.
Leonard stared at him levelly, but Harry didn’t back down. “Define that,” Leonard said at last.
“I’m not letting another fuckin’ prick use me—”
Leonard recoiled. “Never,” he said fiercely. “Self-defense, yes. Nobody hurts my boys. But no offense. No cold-blooded murder. No piles of bodies. Keep yourselves safe and minimize the number of deaths. Glory hallelujah, boys—have we not tried to teach you moderation?”
“I’ll moderate him!” Edward and Harry said in tandem, glaring at each other.
Harry had stared him down then, and Edward had broken, as always. Eventually Edward would learn to love being Harry’s second, but in the beginning he had felt…
Failed. Like he’d been given this second chance with Leonard and Emma and wasn’t adequate to the task.
It was a feeling he’d never been able to shake.
But they’d been too busy then for him to even give the feeling voice.
“I’ve got an idea,” Harry said then, because no surprise there. “But we’ll need Mullins to teach Edward a spell.”
“Not you?” Edward asked, miffed.
“I’m not as good with them on the fly. You’re better with magic and always have been,” Harry said without quailing from the knowledge at all.
It was the truth, but Edward had learned then what made his brother the leader as much as he wished he was up for the task. As it was, he and Harry drew up the summoning circle and Edward said the words.
As Harry said, he was the most adept at magic, but there was more to it than that.
Edward just liked Mullins; that was all.
“What kind of spell?” Mullins asked after they’d explained it to him, and Edward took a moment to breathe and appreciate Mullins’s presence. Like Leonard, Mullins had a calmness to him that soothed all the boys. Unlike Leonard, Mullins also held a sort of attraction for Edward that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Underneath the formal coattails he always wore, Edward suspected his human body was quite fit—but it wasn’t that, or not entirely.
It was that his beast’s face, which should have been terrifying on the human shoulders, seemed more even, more handsome and noble every time Edward saw him. There was a balance inside Mullins that seemed to indicate both great stillness and great power all at the same time.
Either way, he wasn’t sorry to be working in harmony with Mullins.
“We need an explosive spell,” Harry said decisively. “We need something that will send, say, a horse trough or a hitching post into the stratosphere. We’re looking for a distraction here, not complete destruction. And it needs to happen during the day, when there’s fewer customers, because them’s our enforcers, you think?”
Leonard nodded. “I agree. So you’re thinking a diversion. Edward blows something up, and the customers and girls will run outside to see and—”
“We’ll need to prep the girls first,” Harry said decisively. “Edward, can you get Marilyn to give you a list of names of the girls who will definitely want to run?”
Edward nodded, but not decisively. “She’s not entirely sure,” he admitted. “She says some of the girls are scared enough to turn on rescuers.”
Harry grunted. “Perhaps….” He brightened. “Suriel—I could ask him for a spell of my own. A truth spell, a veracity spell—something that will let me know which ones are with us and which against—”
“I can scry for that,” Emma said casually, and Harry’s face fell.
“Excellent,” Harry said, masking his disappointment well for a boy who’d always worn his emotions in full view. Edward would learn to hate that stoic mask in the years to come, but he did appreciate how it let Harry think. “We’ll get word to those girls, and the thing will go kaboom, and we can hurry the willing away from the brothel down the alleyway. If we have horses waiting, we can have them ride cross country—nobody will spot them if we’re not on the road.”
Emma and Leonard both pondered the plan, making suggestions here and there that even Edward had to admit he hadn’t thought of. Mullins tilted his head, and Edward came to the edge of his summoning circle, grabbed his tablet, and sat down.
“You are certain you want to do this?” Mullins asked immediately.
“Well, yes.” Edward took a breath, because Mullins looked so concerned, and given the way even Francis was throwing himself into a plan that already involved stuff getting blown up and horses they didn’t have, it was probably a good thing that one of them was showing some restraint. “She was beaten, Mullins. We got her away to a job as a cleaning girl with one of Emma’s friends. Maybe she’ll meet a husband there, and maybe not—but even if she doesn’t, she’s in a place where her free will counts, you understand?”
Mullins snorted. “I have to follow the orders of anybody who summons me, Edward. And when I’m not here or being summoned, I’m at the beck and call of a repugnant moron. Of course I understand. What I’m saying is that you put your family at risk here—”
Edward looked up and saw Harry drawing on the tablet and Francis—still in human form, which was a surprise because he rarely stayed so long—all talking purposefully and had his own revelation.
“We need to do this,” he said quietly. “Can’t you see? We were Marilyn. We were beaten and forced to do things we’d rather not. That Emma found us? Gave us this freedom, these powers, these gifts? What’s the likelihood that would happen? We owe the world, don’t you see? This is a gift we can give for all that we’ve gotten. My brothers think so too.”
“But those people are dead now!” Mullins let out a sound like a growl that made Edward jerk back.
“How do you know?” Edward shrugged. “It’s not been that long, for certain. Twenty years? Twenty-five? And even if all those people are dead, these people are still forcing girls to do what they’d rather not. It needs to be stopped. We’re… well, gifted. We’re gifted in ways that will make it stop. It’s important we do what we can.”
Mullins just shook his head. “Fine,” he grumbled. “Do you have your stylus fixed in your head?”
Edward’s stylus was an actual feather quill, scratching black oak-gall ink onto a ready piece of parchment. Harry’s was—in his own words—a brand of fire, etching fiery words on a black wall, and Francis’s was a stick in the sand, but instead of the water washing away the words, it revealed them written in obsidian.
But Edward’s was simple and old-fashioned, and he closed his eyes and envisioned his stylus and medium, and allowed Mullins’s instruction to wash over him.
“Do you know what you’re going to detonate?” Mullins asked. “Approximate weight, size, density?”
“Horse trough along the street,” Edward told him, eyes still closed. “I figure if it catches fire, the water’ll put it out.” In his head he didn’t see the horse trough, though, but the claw-footed bathtub that Emma had Leonard install in their first years in the house. It still stood, cast-iron and adamant—with whimsical butterflies painted on the side.
“Very wise.” Mullins’s voice was low, kind—almost a handsome voice. “I want you to think about our mathematical studies. What kind of force would it take to propel an object that size into the air? How high do you wish it to go? Make those calculations wi
th your stylus, thinking purely in terms of force and velocity.”
Edward’s stylus moved slowly, because he was thinking about the difference between cast iron and wood—which was the only thing that saved their house and the tub, which Emma adored.
“Edward!” Leonard snapped, and Edward shook his head, eyes open but out of focus, the concentration broken.
“What?” Dammit—all his calculations, lost in his head—
“Stop trying to blow up the bathtub! It’s shaking in its fixtures! Mullins—did you tell him to think hypothetically before he started calculating the damned spell?”
“Fuck.” The succinct oath popped Edward’s vision into complete focus. Mullins never swore.
“Mullins?” he said uncertainly. “Did I… did I do anything wrong?”
“No, young Master Edward,” Mullins muttered. “I was remiss. I was worried about you, about the boys—”
“I’m not that young, you know,” Edward said, which of all things at this moment, when he could hear his brothers in the washroom yelling as they manually tightened the fixtures that would keep the water from pouring in. He should go and help them—he should—but he’d apparently been dumping power into the aborted spell and could barely stand.
“You’re—”
“I’ve lived thirty-five years on the planet,” he said with dignity, although he knew he still looked to be a boy in his teens.
“And I’ve lived nearly three hundred,” Mullins said shortly. “I know how to practice a spell, and I was so worried getting you to calculate mass and velocity I forgot… for something like this, write a practice word—hypothetical, or tomorrow and tomorrow, or something that will make the spell not an immediate happening but a thought exercise. Usually it’s not necessary—usually your mind knows the difference—but a spell using munitions is so specific, you’re occupied with higher math, and doing things like estimating the bulk of an object takes your thoughts from the hypothetical to the real. It’s my fault, Edward. I knew this, and I forgot to tell you and….” He sighed. “You boys will be careful, won’t you?”