by Amy Lane
Edward tried to summon a smile for him, although the knowledge that he’d almost blown up the house would ride him like a near miss for many years. “Of course, Mullins—why would you ask?”
“Because your family is important,” he snapped. “Do you think I just sit on everybody’s floor and talk about normal everyday things? Do you think everybody brings me cushions and asks about my well-being? I live in hell, Edward, and this family gives me just a little bit of earth that I need to not become a sniveling, slavering bestial evil that would devour you, flesh, blood, and soul if you forgot and offered me food.”
Edward stared at him, a shiver running up and down his spine. “You must promise me,” he said seriously. “You must promise all of us that won’t happen.”
Mullins returned his regard, the darkness of his beastly eyes limpid and unfathomable. “I can’t,” he said, voice hard. “Which is why you three boys must take care of this family with all you have. Now they seem to be wrestling the bathtub back into its usual state. Get out your stylus again and write hypothetical or what have you on the top of the spell. Now concentrate on the horse trough in front of your barn, where visitors tie their beasts, and we’ll work on blowing that up.”
Edward grimaced. “That’s really a much better idea,” he said, feeling dense. “It’s a good thing we have you here.”
“I doubt it. Why Suriel couldn’t talk you out of this is beyond me.”
Edward let out a half laugh. “I thought he would,” he admitted. “But Harry had caught hold of the idea by then, and all Suriel could do was stare at Harry with this mooncalf expression like Harry had invented being a hero or something. It was sort of revolting, really.”
Mullins laughed too. “Well, thank hell you’re sensible. You’d never let that sort of emotion”—he spat the word—“get in the way of your reason.”
“No, sir,” Edward reassured him. “Not emotion. Just”—he grimaced—“just my mother’s claw-footed tub.”
BELTANE LISTENED to the story with wide eyes and enchantment. “That’s marvelous,” he breathed when Edward finished.
“All except the part where I mooncalved all over Harry,” Suriel said, pouting. “I was impressed, was all. It was such a noble direction for you three boys to take your powers, and I was the angel bound to service—”
“Don’t apologize,” Harry said, his usually brusque voice something akin to gentle. “That look gave me the courage to go on our first adventure.”
“How did the rescue turn out, anyway?” Beltane asked, as avid as a child.
“It was brilliant,” Francis said, eyes dreamy. “Edward made such a ruckus blowing the horse trough in the air that everybody turned out, and while the whole town was watching the sky to see if it would come back down, we snuck the girls away who wanted to go. We borrowed some horses and they took off, and just when everybody was thinking about going back into their shops and such….” He giggled. “Edward—oh my God, it was amazing! He brought the trough back, spinning like a top and….” He giggled some more. “And….”
“And drove it through the roof of the brothel,” Harry supplied as Francis dissolved into a complete puddle of laughter. “The brothel owners were so busy trying to figure out what had made it do that and what it had destroyed, they didn’t notice the girls were gone until they’d cleared the debris. Nobody even put together our presence in the town and the girls’ disappearance. Overall, one of Edward’s best spells.”
“Thank you,” Edward said humbly, because his brother’s praise was rare and valuable.
Harry turned to Edward with earnestness. “It was our first run. I treasure it. But you see what I’m talking about here, right?”
Edward thought for a moment. “But I almost blew up the house!” he protested.
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t use that idea for something else entirely!” Harry stood and paced at their table. “Don’t you see? You were trying to blow up a horse trough and you chose something with similar weight and mass that served the same purpose.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” Edward said, feeling tearful and out of his depth—again. “Substitute ingredients? But that’s madness—remember what we were taught? Precision—”
“But we were also taught that our will shapes the precision,” Harry supplied in a huff. “Look, Edward, the quest for shit that’s been gone from our world for centuries can resume at any time, but give it some thought, will you? Work with Suriel on it, and Beltane too. Look at the ingredients, and don’t just take them at face value—decide what they’re for. Once you decide what they’re for, you can think of an ingredient that will serve the same purpose.”
“What do you mean, what they’re for?” Francis asked. “And why was I left out of that list of people to help?”
“It’s like the witches in Macbeth,” Beltane said, in an instructing voice Edward and Harry had only heard him use with Francis. “See, everything on the list was something evil, something that spoke of a deliberate choice of someone to be a bad person who did destructive things. It wasn’t the eye of the newt that mattered—it was the stealing the sight from something that needed it. It wasn’t the dog’s tongue that they needed, it was the silence of anything that would warn of the evil to come. So we look at Edward’s list and decide what the ingredients do that will help spring Mullins, and then we decide what we have that will do the same thing.”
Francis wrinkled his nose and batted at it with his palm, fingers curled inward. “But that doesn’t explain why—”
“You think too literally,” Harry said gently. “Your talents would be better used searching for the things we need to—in fact, that’s what most of us are doing. We could use a case too—something that would keep everything separate and in good condition.”
“I’m very good at carpentry,” Francis said, preening.
“I know you are,” Bel told him, so soberly Francis brightened.
Edward and Harry met eyes. Their little brother had developed in so many unexpected ways—but his relationship with Bel was the one most fraught with peril.
“So,” Harry said, offering Edward a hand up from the cushion around the low table. “We’re going back to earth, because I’m betting Emma’s about half out of her mind by now, and then we are going to take that list of yours and do some research for substitutions.”
“And then?” Edward asked.
“We’re going to go find it. The whole shebang. All at once. All together.”
“You?” Edward said, feeling bereft. That list had been his life’s goal for the past year.
“Yes. We.”
“What will I be doing?”
Harry had always claimed to be the plain one of them, but Edward had always thought his eyes—peasant brown—were actually his finest feature. Right now they were bright with intelligence and soft with compassion. “Brother, have you even told him what you’re doing?”
Edward swallowed and looked away. “I… I didn’t want to give him false hope,” he said softly.
“Well we just had a very public conversation in a place where the spies of hell come as cockroaches so they can sample the wine. I suggest you go to the cabin and summon him so you two can have a little conversation, you think?”
“What purpose would that—”
Harry’s fist gathering his shirtfront was not really a surprise. “Because this is a bloody dangerous thing we’re all doing here, and none of us regret a second of it, but if you blow yourself up trying to pull him out of hell, then he damned sure has the right to know why.”
Edward met Harry’s eyes then, his heart so sore he could barely breathe. “What if he tells me not to?” he whispered.
Harry snorted and let go of him so abruptly he stumbled back. “Leonard told Emma to do the same damned thing, did you know that?”
Edward stared at him. How had he not known this? “No.”
“You know what she did?”
Edward’s mouth twisted, and for the first time in
two long years, he felt hope. “Ignored him.”
“Damned straight.” He grinned fiercely, their most bloodthirsty warrior, always, before looking behind him. “We ready, everybody? I’ve got the spell fixed in my head. Edward, you got your own?”
Edward nodded. “Yes.” Harry could boomerang them all out—it was a simple teleportation spell, although it required a whopping burst of power. Edward wasn’t good at it yet. He needed to have something more involved at the ready, and he’d come prepared.
“I suggest you summon him immediately, Edward. You don’t want to know what he’ll be like if he hears it from that sniveling little fly gut demon that just flew out of here!”
“Harry—”
“C’mon, boys, let’s track that fucker down!” Harry paused just long enough to shout, “Edward, not you!” before all of Edward’s brothers disappeared out the flap of the tent, searching for a demon who hadn’t shown more than a twitchy exoskeleton before Harry had spotted him.
Gah! Apparently, Harry was right. Edward needed to call Mullins and they needed to coordinate a plan.
Step from Sorrow to Sorrow
VANTH WAS a weaselly little thing for a fly, and as he danced around Mullins’s head in delight, Mullins was forced to wonder if, should he lose his temper and squash the little troublemaker against the jagged walls of his cell, anybody would wonder what happened to him.
“Youuuuuu shoulllddd have seeeeeeeeen thheemmmmm…,” Vanth buzzed. After a while, Mullins learned to let his mind wander during words or he would have lost his sanity. “All gatherrrrred togetherrrrr… plotting to saaaaaaave youuuuu….”
Mullins froze. “Nobody saves demons,” he said, keeping his voice cultured. Inside his head, his own stylus—an elm switch scratching designs in rich brown earth—began to work subtle magic. Hopefully so subtle that Vanth—who was infamous for being brain deaf to magic—wouldn’t sense what he was up to.
Because if his intel was right, and the Youngbloods were doing something as bloody stupid as forming a rescue team, Vanth spreading his information to anybody else in hell could spell out a death sentence.
“Why would they save me?” he asked, disbelief clear in his voice. “What purpose would that serve?”
In his head the spell—shaped like a giant flyswatter, extending from his hoof—continued in its solid way.
Vanth laughed unpleasantly. “Twoooooooo luuuuuuvvvvv—augh!”
Wielding his magic and swinging like an all-pro tennis champion, Mullins did exactly what he’d written and splatted Vanth against the wall of his cell, where the bug-demon’s insides spread across the jagged stone in a white smear.
Mullins knew a cleanup spell by rote, and he’d just waved his hand to peel the whole mess from the wall and send it into a toxic waste dump in the human world when he felt the call.
“Really, Edward?” he snarled, the murder of Vanth working him up into a right frothy head of steam before he even disappeared from hell. “Really? You think—”
He appeared then, not in the Youngblood living room, a place he knew well in spite of the many changes and modernizations made over the past 140 years, but in their cabin.
A place that held its own intimacies.
“—summoning me right now is a good idea? Great hell’s fiery breath, Edward Youngblood, who are you trying to kill here, me or you?”
He looked around the cozy space, scowling. Edward. Edward alone had summoned him, which didn’t bode well—had never boded well, not even the first time he’d done it.
The bulk of the cabin was a kitchen and a living room, all in one space, with a bed in the corner of the living room and a door opening into a rather luxurious bathroom.
He’d been in this space unencumbered by the summoning circle. He’d been free here, to sit at the table with Edward like a human being and to imagine being with Edward, both domestically and carnally, in ways he didn’t want to think about now.
“I’m not trying to kill either one of us,” Edward said shortly. “I’m trying to find a way for us to be together. You knew this. I told you about my plan.”
Mullins closed his eyes and wished for actual human hands so he could drag them through what used to be thick, curly brown hair. “You told me about your dream,” he said desperately. “I told you not to do it, because it was too dangerous.”
Edward was standing, arms crossed, facing away from Mullins but regarding him from a skeptical profile.
“You do know what me and the others spend our time doing, right? Did I not spend enough time begging you to stop Harry from being a suicidal fucking maniac?”
Mullins sighed and shifted from hoof to hoof. Those had been dark times for all the brothers. Suriel’s suffering to come back down to earth had been no small thing, but Mullins had to give it to the angel for surviving that test with his skin—if not his wings—intact.
“I’m here to help you survive that,” he said gruffly. “Not to make things worse.”
Edward kept his face averted, but Mullins recognized the unsteady indrawn breath. It was the sound he made when there wasn’t reason enough in the world to shore up his broken heart.
Mullins was reluctantly taken back to the first time Edward had summoned him, and him alone, to this sweet little cabin where lovers whispered promises they never wanted to break.
“EDWARD?”
Edward sat, cross-legged, head bowed, his still-young face etched in grief.
“Oh. He’s passed. I’m so sorry.”
Unlike Harry, who after nearly sixty years on earth seemed determined to have only the briefest of moments with the mortals he shared the planet with, or Francis, who wandered the world as a wraith, as innocent of sex and love as a child, Edward had thrown himself into a relationship.
For the past thirty years, he and a once-young doctor had lived a few miles from Emma’s and Leonard’s home, lovers, spouses—true partners. Mullins had met Paul on more than one occasion and had liked the man. Steady, without temper, and pleasantly bemused by the immortals he was surrounded by, he would walk the cliffs and the seaside and the forests of Mendocino with three cats at his ankles or Edward by his side.
Or at least that’s what Emma had told Mullins thirty years prior, when Edward had decided to let Paul into their circle, to love him the length of his mortal lifetime, and then to let him go.
Mullins could not have imagined doing that with a whole heart—but then, he hadn’t become a demon because he was brave.
“This morning,” Edward rasped. “He… his heart gave out. We weren’t expecting it. I mean, I’d heard murmurs, but nothing like this and….” He swallowed hard and met Mullins’s sympathetic gaze. “It hurts,” he said plaintively, surprised as a child. “God… I won’t see him again until… until many mortal lifetimes. And… and right now there’s just this hole. And all I could think about was you. You’d know how to fill this hole in my chest. And I don’t know why—Harry would turn to Suriel, and all I can think about is you.”
Mullins let out a harsh breath. “My boy—”
“I’m seventy-five,” Edward snapped. “I know I look… hell, twenty or whatever. But I’m seventy-five. I’ve… I’ve lived a whole life. I should know this feeling but I don’t… I don’t understand….”
“Harry would turn to Suriel because Harry’s in love with Suriel!” Mullins burst out, unable to confront Edward’s terrible vulnerability. He’d long ago taught the boys how to guard themselves against a demon, even if they broke the rules of hospitality or the summoning circle, but he didn’t feel any of those safeguards in place. Edward had summoned him here, alone, because he sought solace from a friend, and he was either hoping Mullins would kill him and put him out of his misery, or he’d genuinely forgotten that Mullins had orders from a lower power.
Mullins was in a ferocious mood to disappoint both Edward and his bosses, because he wasn’t going to kill anybody today.
Edward glared up at him from a face rumpled and blotched with tears. “You lie!” he s
narled indignantly. “That would be madness—”
“Like bringing me here without safeguards?” Oh, suicide by demon had never infuriated Mullins more.
And then he felt the faint buzz of Edward hastily erecting the shields Mullins had taken such pains to teach him.
“I’m sorry,” Edward whispered. “I… I didn’t do that intentionally.” He swallowed loudly. “That would be a terrible thing to force a friend to do, Mullins. I’d never treat you like that.”
Mullins’s eyes burned with tears a beast could never shed. “Thank you.” He wiped his face on his shoulder, because he couldn’t help the very human feeling that his eyes were leaking and his face was wet.
“What do you mean, Harry’s in love with Suriel?”
Mullins sighed and sat down across from Edward, crossing his legs the same way. The summoning circle was unnecessary at this point, and this gave them some intimacy, some gentleness, that the moment seemed to badly need.
“You can’t see it?” he asked. “The way Harry seems to light up inside whenever you speak of him? The way he seems to mourn if you go too far between summoning?”
“He always argues against calling him,” Edward mumbled, looking at his hands. They were wide-palmed and long-fingered—strong, capable, and surprisingly agile. Between Mullins’s and Leonard’s tutelage, and lots of practice in this out of the way area, Edward had the hands of a first-rate surgeon.
Mullins let out a snort. “Do you think this thing you do, where you and your brothers displace heaven and hell on your whim—do you think that doesn’t come without a price from those of us yanked out of our element?”
Edward glanced up at him hurriedly. “This hurts you?” he asked anxiously. “How does it—”
Mullins shook his head. “Harry knows Suriel’s price,” he said through a scratchy throat, knowing this because he’d seen Harry’s face when Suriel was discussed. “And he refuses to call him. I won’t tell you my price, Edward Youngblood, because I don’t ever want you not to call me.”