by Amy Lane
Until now.
“I remember,” Mullins rasped, acutely uncomfortable. His trousers were cut in the style of 150 years prior, and they were too tight for his cock as it swelled against his thigh, and his tail as it twitched in the seat.
“That thing you did for me,” Edward said quietly. “You may tell yourself you were compelled. You may tell your bosses that my brothers laid a spell on you to do the work that they could not. But we all know the truth. You never checked for safeguards that night. You never let a compulsion touch you. You didn’t rend the flesh of any of the people in that room to rescue me from myself. You could have done what Harry and Francis asked and borne me from a charnel house, naked and howling and covered with blood. But you didn’t.”
“No.” Mullins’s heart beat hard in his breast.
“That’s what love is, Mullins. Whether you can say it in your head or not. Whether you can admit it to yourself or not. I think telling you that you have no soul is perhaps the greatest lie ever told in hell. And most of you buy it. Most demons are angry or desperate as humans, and they become angry and desperate as demons, only with magic powers and unlimited physical capabilities. But not you. Not Leonard. Someday you’ll tell me what brought you to hell, but right now, it’s enough that I know your soul has always been your own.”
“This thing you’re saying,” he rasped. “This… this….”
Edward scowled, his forehead growing red. “Get your perspective of the world realigned some other time, Mullins. Right now we’ve got work to do.”
“But don’t you want to hear the reason—” Everybody wanted to hear the reason a demon became a demon. It was often their last and most painful link to the human they had been.
Edward’s eyes, green and clear as glass, bored through Mullins’s façade. In that moment, Mullins could believe Edward Youngblood saw him exactly as he’d been 300 years ago, and loved him for all his tragedy and flaws.
“You’ll tell me in time,” he said. “Right now, my love is plenty. Now here’s the list of ingredients, and here’s the column for possible substitutions. Now see this column here?”
Mullins nodded dumbly.
“This column is the most important. This column here is for what we think the first ingredient does. Do you understand?”
“What do you mean, what it does?”
Edward grinned. “It’s brilliant. Trust me. Harry and Francis—they don’t look like a brain trust, but sometimes they’ll surprise you. Here—this is what we need to do.”
Demon Stew
REMEMBERING THE orgy was a mistake.
Edward firmly believed in consensual sexual experimentation. He saw no morality or immorality attached to a consensual act, and as he figured it, he’d been blessed enough to appreciate all sexes, so he happily took advantage of that attraction.
But that particular moment had been so intense, so sexually charged—his intention had been to forget his grief in its entirety, and he’d almost managed it. He’d orgasmed, the experience so raw he felt like he’d blown his humanity out his cock, leaving his interior clean, antiseptic, unsusceptible to the vulnerabilities of love ever again.
Right up until he’d felt Mullins’s arms around him, heard his voice, low, rough, civilized, in his ears. Mullins might have thought Edward forgot about standing under the spray of the shower wrapped in Mullins’s embrace, but he hadn’t.
Mullins’s upper thighs, groin, torso, and upper arms were all those of a man.
For a few moments, Edward had closed his eyes and pretended he was in the arms of a lover, and when he’d opened them again, he knew that someday it would be true.
After mourning for Dorothy, he stayed celibate for many, many years, and his lovers in the past fifty or so had been mostly casual. Those moments, Mullins holding him, their skin bare, his soul stripped of all pretense, was enough to sustain him.
Someday they would be together.
Edward would not be deterred.
But remembering that moment, their bodies together, made Edward’s body hungry for Mullins in a way Mullins wasn’t ready to be yet.
Edward could see the man—the beast was but a thin overlay, a transparency made to blur his features, but Edward saw him true enough. He knew that if he reached over and put his hand on Mullins’s hoof, they would lace fingers, and the itch to do just that was almost overwhelming.
But he would follow that touch with a cupping of his jaw, and then he’d close his eyes to the blurriness and follow that with a kiss.
Mullins’s body was fully functional.
The kissing would lead to lovemaking, and that would be…
Premature.
Mullins had no hope now. As far as Edward could tell, the man he and his brothers were risking everything for was humoring them.
Edward wanted him to hope. Sex now would be like goodbye.
“So,” Mullins said, breaking into Edward’s contemplation of the summer blue of his human eyes, “what ingredients did the original have?”
Edward grimaced and went back to copying the list onto the legal pad, finishing with a flourish.
“Come see.”
Spell for reversing a demon’s curse—
Magic user makes up his own spell verse
“Ugh,” Mullins muttered. “Poetry—not our best.”
“I’m going to hope they mean blank verse and leave it at that,” Edward agreed. “And I’ll be working on it as we go, so don’t despair. Keep going.”
THE SPIT of the lying tongue, a traitor of the Chameleon people, after he has lied and before the spit has dried.
Edward produced the baby food jar full of Harry’s spit. “I think we can do better than this,” he admitted. “But since Harry lied to me to trap me and force me to accept his help, I’m going to just set this here and stop carrying my brother’s saliva in my backpack.”
TEARS OF one untouched by lust, by the arousal of the flesh, one whose passions stir not with desire but with love.
“A virgin’s tears—” Mullins began, but Edward cut him off.
“Not necessarily. Untouched by lust could mean a lot of things. There’s plenty of people out there whose sexuality doesn’t include sex.”
Mullins blinked at him. “Asexuality has been around for a very long time,” he said, looking embarrassed. “That one should have been easy.”
Edward shrugged. “Everybody makes assumptions—but see? An open mind can’t hurt. And it doesn’t say we have to torture anybody. I mean, I know a couple of people—I could just take them out to a sad movie, buy them popcorn, and have them bottle their tears. This one’s a sinecure.”
THE POINTED horn of the ibex of the Pyrenees.
“Now that one is extinct,” Mullins muttered, glaring at him. “How on earth—”
“Now here’s where we get really tricky,” Edward said. “We can find the horn of some of other ibex, but before we go chopping the horns off the poor creatures, let’s look at why we need them. Demons lie, and their shapes are deliberately changed and distorted—the shapeshifter betrayer’s tongue must be a way to access that, to reach that part of the magic. So as gross as it is, Harry’s spit really might be what we need. The tears of someone untouched by lust—isn’t hell ripe and chock full of lust?”
Mullins looked away, distinctly uncomfortable. “Many demons fornicate regularly, often with the unwilling,” he murmured.
“So what they really needed was an element of purity, of true platonic affection, to cleanse the… the sordidness of the sex from the demon at hand. So our solution would work there too. Now what do you think about the ibex?”
“Well, we all have horns,” Mullins said, his artist’s finger going immediately to the rams’ horns sprouting from behind his ears. “But not all of them are the same.”
“So, a Pyrenees ibex would be a horned animal adept at… what? Jumping a lot? Climbing….” Edward paused, the answer coming to him. “Climbing! So we need a thing that climbs—and sheds its horns. You know, maybe t
he horns that look like yours—”
“Why an animal that climbs?” Mullins asked, seemingly caught up in the mental exercise if not the hope.
“Because you’re climbing out of darkness!” Edward felt the thrill of solving a puzzle rush through his veins, and it did nothing to quiet the underlying thrum of desire that ran there as well.
“Oh!” Mullins grinned at him, caught up in the same rush, apparently. “Good, then. We’ll find an animal that does that—let’s put an R here for research, yes?”
“Excellent. Now, the next thing on the list is going to need you and Suriel to get a grip and spill,” Edward said soberly. “Because we know there must be such a thing because the two of you are so damned cagey about it.”
THREE STRANDS of hair from an elven king.
“Nnnnnnnnnggg….” Mullins’s noise was not promising. “Edward, that one really is—”
“Don’t lie to me, Mullins,” Edward snapped. “Harry, Francis, and I kept brownies in our rooms for ten years after Dorothy died as an experiment of sorts. Harry came up with it to lift my spirits. We left out beer, and it disappeared and our rooms got clean, and we kept giving them beer and crumbs of Emma’s best home-baked bread, and we didn’t have to clean our own toilets or change our own sheets or so much as sweep the corners of the room—ten years!”
“You have no proof of—” Mullins began primly, but Edward cut him off.
“We saw them. Harry brought them pie once, fresh blackberry pie, and they got drunk off it. One minute we were watching the thing just disappear, tiny bite by tiny bite, and the next there were all these brown-pelted spider-shaped creatures, about two feet tall, lounging about our room in a stupor. Harry and I had to tackle Francis so he didn’t turn into a cat and chase them, and we realized that now that we knew what they looked like, it would really be best for us if we did our own chores.”
Mullins laughed delightedly, the sound curling low and hot in Edward’s stomach. “You three never told us that!”
“We never told Suriel, either,” Edward said, brows knit. “Or Emma and Leonard. Because every time we tried to mention the fey to you, it was all, ‘Uhm, you know….’ Same with the vampires and shapeshifters—yes, we know about the vampires. That shit that went down in Redding two years ago—the club leveled to the ground, the blood everywhere but no bodies? Everybody in Emma’s witch’s circle knew something huge had gone down, but nobody knew what it was. I’m telling you, Mullins, it’s starting to hurt our goddamned feelings is what it’s doing.”
Mullins inhaled harshly. “It’s… well, it’s not your fault,” he murmured. “But…. See, there was a terrible quarrel between God and Goddess about two millennia ago—”
“Convenient timing,” Edward said dryly.
“We’re not going there,” Mullins returned, voice no bullshit. “Anyway, afterwards, all of God’s creatures were supposed to ignore the fact that Goddess and her get existed, and that included God’s supernatural creatures too. But… but there’s something weird going on down south—that’s all I can tell you. The last five or so years have just been… odd. Like Goddess has a champion and her brood are all joining under one umbrella, which is ridiculous, of course, but—”
“Why ridiculous?” Edward was fascinated. They’d studied for 140 years, but this was a whole new world.
“Because vampires and werewolves, yes—they have a symbiotic relationship. Vampires drink their blood and werewolves protect them when they’re dead to the world. But elves and vampires? Who’s ever heard of such a thing?”
Edward rolled his eyes. “Witches and ex-demons? Familiars and angels? Familiars and demons? Come on, Mullins—I know you’ve been operating from a base of fear for the past few hundred years, but use your imagination!”
Mullins sighed. “Okay. Yes. Fine. I’ll put some feelers out. But you boys are going to have to do the final contact. I have no idea what would happen if God magic and Goddess magic collided to that extent.”
“What kind of magic are familiars?” Edward asked curiously.
Mullins shifted a little on his buttcheeks, which Edward found unbearably cute. “You are not, strictly speaking, supposed to know this, but when Emma calls on Hecate and Juno and Venus and Artemis and Brigit—”
“They all relate to Goddess,” Edward figured dryly. “Damn, Mullins—does Emma know this?”
Mullins grimaced. “She figured it out long before she fell in love with Leonard. Frankly, I think it’s why she was bold enough to summon angels and demons. She had a feeling she had a more direct connection to a higher power.”
Edward chuckled, impressed. “Emma is nobody to mess with or deceive,” he said with some satisfaction. “I’m surprised she didn’t rip yours and Suriel’s ears off for the deception.”
“It’s not necessarily deception from Suriel,” Mullins admitted. “It’s more… what’s that sci-fi term? Doublethink. Where on the one hand he knows, but he’s not supposed to know and it’s not supposed to exist, so on the other hand he knows nothing.”
“Oh my God,” Edward muttered. “Enough. You two will need to talk and give us some places to ask so we can go make a very odd request of a complete stranger, no matter how powerful they might be. And, for the record, unbelievable. Just… unbelievable. Okay, moving on to the next ingredients on the list—what?”
Mullins was tapping his lower lip with his forefinger—which looked much better with a forefinger than it had when all Edward could see were his hooves.
“We should probably figure out why we need that,” he said, thinking. “I mean… we can get it, but I think you’re right. Figuring out the significance to the spell is going to be important. It may even help us build the wording—in rhyme or not.”
“Well, what does an elven king represent to you?” Edward asked, curious. “You barely admit there was one.”
Mullins blew out a breath. “Well… who do you think my boss is?”
Edward raised his eyebrows. “Uh, the… you know… uh… de… vil?” It sounded superstitious to even say it, and the skeptical rise to Mullins’s eyebrow indicated this wasn’t the right answer by a long shot.
“Simply? No. My boss in hell is other demons—demons who’ve traded their soul to the other for… well, for an immortal life, or power, or some sort of ‘get out of jail free’ card, yes?”
Edward nodded. “So we’ve always assumed.”
“Edward—there are no human souls down there.”
Edward’s eyebrows went straight up. “I’m sorry?”
“Everybody in hell is a demon, and all the demons are tasked with torturing other demons. Hell is peopled with either the monstrously evil—people who have already traded themselves and just don’t care—or the monstrously desperate and afraid. The man who ruined his life by shooting a clerk in a 7-Eleven isn’t there. He’s in the other place, learning the full extent of the damage he’s done and grieving for every soul he’s hurt. That’s his hell right there—and I wouldn’t want it for all the years of torture I’ve lived. My boss isn’t a mythical devil—it’s the terrible things people make of themselves when they’re truly evil, or truly desperate and unable to cope with the natural laws of God and man.”
“But… but who takes your soul?” Edward asked, appalled.
“It’s supposed to be the other—but that’s not really how it happens.”
“Who?”
“Well….” Mullins sighed. “This is the thing nobody learns,” he said quietly. “This is the lore nobody believes. But… I think it explains why you need to go introduce yourself to a strange elf and steal his hair.”
Edward braced himself. “Shoot.”
“Fine.” Moodily, Mullins laced his fingers and rested his chin on them. “The legend is, there were three. The God, the Goddess, and the other. We don’t capitalize his name—he doesn’t really have a… codex or anything. He’s just… you know. The other one. Anyway, God created the world—and it was very orderly. And Goddess wanted to create too, and togethe
r they came up with the perfect harmony of the cosmos. The way plants give us oxygen and then food, the perfect symmetry of science, you understand?”
Edward nodded. “Yes. It’s a lovely story.”
“Well, according to the story, at first, the other wasn’t… wasn’t characterized as evil. He was just… you know. Asymmetry. Leaps in evolution. The way gasses and magnetic fields create the aurora borealis. The scattering of stars as they appear in the sky. Chaos.”
Edward thought about that. “Fields of flowers, schools of fish, kittens in a clowder—also lovely.”
Mullins sat up straighter and nodded. “Agreed. But then… well, God’s creatures procreated. And the Goddess got in there and realized procreation could be fun—not just a drive to copulate, you understand, but….”
Under the ever-thinning mask, Edward saw a dark crescent of heat stain Mullins’s cheeks. “Pleasurable,” he supplied, a wave of want washing his own body. His neck prickled with heat.
“Yes.” Absently, Mullins chewed on a cuticle. “And she played with the creatures, taking their shapes and then giving birth—”
“Shapeshifters?” Edward gasped.
“You’re very quick,” Mullins said, smiling that proud paternal smile he often used when the boys were in lessons.
“But they’re supposed to be a myth—”
“There is no bible with this story, Edward,” Mullins said primly.
“But… but that explains it! And the vampires—”
Mullins’s expression closed down so fast it was like a wall. Even his mask dropped in place. “Don’t make me tell the story of the vampires,” he begged softly. “It… it ravages the heart.”
“Sure, beloved—”
Mullins pulled in a breath. “That’s their word too.”
Oh, this was a surprise. “Beloved?”
“Yes. See, the Goddess—”