by Amy Lane
“The one that’s never mentioned.”
“She’s mentioned, just not, you know, where certain people can hear. Anyway, she was… not promiscuous so much as adventuresome. God produced the angels, beings like in power but… but not of this world, you understand? They were of the aether. I would imagine Suriel had to choose a gender before he came down to speak to Emma. Harry is just very lucky that gender was male. Anyway—she and the other were like beings, and the other enjoyed the pleasures of the creatures in the world. They, uh….” A series of vague gestures with hooves that now very clearly were hooves.
“Went clog dancing with mountain goats,” Edward supplied dryly.
Mullins thunked his beastly head on the table. “Fuck off,” he said pitifully, and Edward burst out laughing.
“Gracious, Mullins—that could be the second time I’ve ever heard you swear.”
“Fuck off twice,” he whimpered, and Edward took pity on him, squeezing his shoulder and leaning over to whisper in his ear.
“The words you are looking for is made love, Mullins. Goddess and the other made love.”
Mullins shook his head—and his goatlike ear. “No. They had sex. And enjoyed it. But you see—it… I see humans do this all the time. Their bodies do great things in coitus, and they play with them and go whee! Like a child learning how to do a flip off a diving board into the water. But that’s not what God meant for bodies to do. Sex was his greatest invention—particularly among the sentient. It bonded in body and soul. So Goddess bore a successive brood of children from the other—not as powerful as angels, but beautiful, some of them. Some of them….” He smiled, and even on his beast’s face the look was beautiful. “Some of them were like two-foot-long spiders with six opposable furry arms.”
Edward blinked. “Chaos. Goddess and chaos.”
“Yes.”
“Elves. Fairies. Sprites.”
“Yes.”
“But why is there no… no myth—”
“God did not approve. He… he wanted to be the one for the Goddess, and she had loved him from the first. They were together and they bore a son—”
“I know this story,” Edward said, awe curling in his stomach.
“Yes. And you know the end. When the great quarrel happened. And God turned his back on all his lover’s other children, and she devoted her life to keeping them secret from his followers’ misguided wrath.”
Edward took a big breath and rested his forehead on his fist. “Emma and Leonard come from a whole different mythology,” he said. “Emma created us with elemental forces. We’re not anything like the shapeshifters I’ve heard of.”
“Yes.”
“It makes so much sense. So there are elves!”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. Wait until I tell Harry and Francis. And you really don’t know where they are?”
Mullins grunted. “I… I don’t. And I don’t think anybody in hell does either. They’re not of hell. The elves dislike the ugliness of hell—and I think even the other is repulsed by the chaos. About the only thing I can think of is… maybe creating chaos? Not the terrible kind—no explosions or fires or anything. Like… fields of flowers, I guess.”
“Beautiful chaos,” Edward said brightly.
“Yes. That exactly. If I can cause some beautiful chaos, with a shapeshifting cat by my side….”
“Someone might lead you to elves.”
Mullins nodded. “Indeed.”
“Excellent. So, we can put an M next that one—”
“An M?”
“For mission,” Edward said gravely. “This one is going to take all of us.”
“No it won’t. Just me and you and the chaotic event and some investigation and—”
Edward just waited for him to peter to a halt.
“What?” Mullins asked.
“If we see elves and fairies and Harry, Francis, and Beltane do not, what do you think will happen?”
Mullins grunted. “Chaos.”
“And there will be nothing beautiful about it. So M for mission. Now what’s next on the list?”
A SINGLE red grain of sand on a beach of black.
“Oh, that’s going to be fun,” Mullins muttered.
“It depends on the company,” Edward told him. Then he frowned. “But… but we may be able to make a substitution if we stumble upon one, yes?”
“How?”
“Well….” Edward smiled gently, “I know the why of this one already. It speaks of rarity. You understand? All the demons, screaming in hell, and maybe one in a million of them has the soul of a man who can be raised out of the masses. A single red grain of sand, yes. But also a blue rose on a branch of white ones. Or a multihued butterfly in a swarm of orange. Or a four-leaf clover in a field of thousands. This is the easiest thing on the list.”
“Do you think that should tell you something?” Mullins grumbled.
“You complain a lot. Were you this pessimistic as a human? Because that should be fun for us. I worry and you predict doom.”
Mullins thought about that for a moment. “No,” he said. “I was… I was the one who could always find a way to win.” He smiled faintly, and Edward hung on his every facial twitch. “I… I used to be brave.”
Edward nodded. “You’ve been brave all the time I’ve known you,” he said softly. “You’ve defied hell a hundred times for us. Can you do no less for yourself?”
“I’m here, right?” he said with some irritation. “But we don’t have much more time.”
“Okay—I’ll list the rest and you memorize the list and think about some of the less obvious ones, yes?”
Mullins nodded, looking exhausted. Edward had never been clear on the physics of summoning, but he’d always gathered that a demon’s price for leaving his prison was a great expenditure of energy. Mullins had grown stronger with each passing year in their service. Edward had hopes that he could be strong for them until the end, when he could finally leave hell for good.
“So,” Mullins said heavily, “what’s the rest of the list?”
DEMON BLOOD, shed in a righteous cause.
“At least it doesn’t say last mortal drop,” Edward muttered.
“It’s implied,” Mullins said darkly.
A CROSS that won’t burn the flesh of a demon.
“There’s a fun experiment!” Mullins rolled his eyes.
“We’ll line them up,” Edward told him. “You can run across them like a firewalker—we’ll cheer you on.”
“Your tongue—”
“Is going to lick all over your body someday, so be nice.”
“Nungh.”
A MIRROR so pure a vampire may see his soul.
“I actually had one of those,” Edward said, shaking his head in disgust.
“But you just asked me about vampires!”
“Well I didn’t see any vampires! But I bought it from a very reputable vendor on the desert plain.”
“If you want me dead, Edward, just say so. There’s no reason to risk my life by using Ktarkech’s cut-rate supplies.”
“Just think about why we need it, dammit!” But Edward knew the answer to this one. If a vampire could see his soul, then a demon could surely see his worth. Mullins didn’t need Ktarkech’s cut-rate supplies, really. He needed a way he could see that he still had a soul.
LIQUOR SO pure it burns to the heart.
“Please tell me you’re not going to get me drunk,” Mullins muttered.
“I don’t know, after this list of items, I think you could use a drink.”
And so on. In the end, there were over forty items on the list of the spell for demon redemption and recovery—but it was the last one that made them both pause.
Mullins grimaced. “This one….”
Edward nodded.
ESSENCE OF one passed down the line of what was once the demon’s kind.
“Nice,” Edward said with a sigh. “This was one of few items I didn’t have in the minivan when it blew up.”
&nbs
p; “Wait a moment!” Mullins protested. “You… you had most of the ingredients in the minivan before it blew up?”
“Yes. Yes, I did. And then we all went on a mission without Harry and they spotted us and were completely on our tail with guns and Emma pulled us out of the minivan with that boomerang thing she does in her sleep, and the minivan was sailing through the air like an unmanned cruise missile. Are you happy?”
“But… but you were doing this before? Without my knowledge? Edward—why?”
“Because I wanted it all done before we told you!” Edward exclaimed. “I wanted to offer it—and I know it’s silly and simplistic and sad—but I wanted to offer it, like a courting gift, and say, ‘Mullins, I’ve loved you forever. Will you leave hell for me?’ And then everything I’d collected went kaboom and….” Edward’s shoulders slumped. “Harry and Suriel were separated. And I know we told you about it afterward, but… but I thought I was going to lose my brother, Mullins. And I was terrified. So I gave up the search until Suriel was released from heaven, and now—”
“Now you’re ready to search again.” Mullins bowed his head. “Edward, you have nothing to be ashamed about. You should have asked me first—”
“So you could say no?” Edward demanded.
Mullins shook his head, eyes focused on Edward’s loopy scrawl. “I wouldn’t have said no,” he whispered. “Not to you.”
And Edward had to grin, his heart warming in his chest. “And that is the best thing I’ve heard all day. But about that last thing—”
“I’ll search for it,” Mullins told him soberly. “But sometime—not now—I think I’m going to have to tell you the story about how one young cotsman became a demon.”
“I’m waiting to hear it,” Edward whispered. “Mullins, you’re growing thin. Let me kiss you, and you can wear my love under your skin, to protect you until it’s time again.”
Growing thin was the expression Francis had coined for the transparency Mullins formed around the edges before Mullins asked for the words that would banish him back to hell.
“Kiss—”
Edward ignored him, turned his head, and cupped his jaw. His fingers slid through the façade of the beast like a photo projection on the wall, and he could feel the faint bristle of day-old beard abrade his palm. “I can see you, this close, Mullins. I know who I’m kissing. You are a very beautiful man.”
He found Mullins’s mouth unerringly, and Mullins’s gasp of surprise told Edward the touch was alien, and not unpleasant.
Edward breathed softly and found the seam of Mullins’s lips with the tip of his tongue, and Mullins’s breathy little moan sent wildfire ripping through Edward’s blood.
He slid his fingers along the back of Mullins’s round, human skull and plundered.
So many years of depending on this steady, practical demon. So many years wanting to escape the strictures of courtesy and magic that bound them.
And now Edward was tasting him, and he tasted rich, sweet, exotic—Turkish coffee and cinnamon.
Mullins groaned and lifted his hand to Edward’s temple—
And sliced his skin with the sharp edge of his hoof.
Edward gasped and Mullins jerked back, turning away and shrinking inward.
“Let me go,” he murmured, like the last hour of them working together, partnering as though they had a future, had never happened.
“Never.”
Edward reached for his chin and found it—still human under his fingers. He gave a little pull and Mullins reluctantly turned toward him. Edward couldn’t see him anymore, but he could feel him under his fingers. “That kiss is my vow to you, Mullins. I fell in love bit by bit, you understand? For the last fifty years, it’s been you, just you, in my heart, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t been there from the very first. You and me, we have things to do together. This isn’t the end. I may let you return to your cell, to gain strength, to think about the challenges we have together, but trust me, I’ll be summoning you again. And if you don’t come, I’ll know you’ve been taken, and thanks to you, I’ve got a plan—”
“What’s the—”
“Enough. Enough of the plan.” Edward smiled and tapped his forehead, calling up his brother’s mantra when things got really hairy. “It’s all up here,” he said.
Mullins didn’t smile back. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “I do have a soul. But if you get hurt before we can make this come true, you’ll break my heart.”
Edward nodded, suddenly sober. “Understood. I’ll say the words to let you go, and I swear I’ll call you back again.” A drop of blood dripped over Edward’s forehead from the cut Mullins had left, and before Edward knew how to react Mullins leaned forward and lapped.
The buzz of magic that passed through the room left them both breathless.
“What the—”
“I’m sorry!” Mullins muttered. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that—”
Edward’s cockiest grin took him by surprise. “I do. You locked that promise in blood, you clever boy. I’m sworn to it for real now—written right in the annals of hell, isn’t that how the blood oath goes?”
Mullins shut his eyes. “It was unconscionable—”
“It was heroic!” Edward crowed. “And I owe you the same sort of heart. I’ll get you out of there, beloved. Just hang on, understand?”
To his relief Mullins nodded, and Edward reached out and touched his face tenderly. “Get thee gone, demon,” he said, voice choking on the old words. “Return only when summoned, harm none in this house, harm none at my hearth. Get thee gone.”
And Mullins disappeared, fading into the air, leaving only the heat of his body and his hope behind.
At that moment, Edward felt a telepathic tap on his shoulder from Harry.
What?
Did you make any headway?
We only talked about half the list, but yes.
Fair enough. Get your ass to Mom’s house—we’ve got a rescue to make. We can hash out the rest of the list while I drive.
Edward half laughed. On it. Taking the truck. As he tucked his legal pad and his sulfur and his chalk and thyme into his backpack, he recognized the ache in his heart and knew nothing could make up for watching Mullins fade from his home, from his life, one more time.
But going out to kick a little ass with his brothers helped.
Under a Rock
OVER THE years, Mullins’s cell had come to offer a certain comfort. It was a stretch of cot—Emma had given him bedding for it—simple, human, and permeable through the dimensional wall that separated hell from the surface of earth—and somehow it had escaped notice or censure of the other demons. The surrounding walls had not worn one molecule more comfortable or smooth in the hundreds of years since his incarceration, but every bit of flesh or drop of blood seemed to have rendered the cell into something Mullins had never known before his time in hell:
A thing uniquely his.
Disconsolately, he sat down, patting the plain cotton bedding.
Edward’s kiss buzzed like wine beneath his skin.
Freedom.
Edward promised him freedom.
Typically, he had not asked Mullins if he wanted such a thing—he had simply assumed it would be reasonable that Mullins would not want to linger in hell.
Did Mullins want to linger in hell?
Alone, without Edward there to disappoint, to hurt, Mullins thought carefully about why he’d ended up there in the first place.
“Clyde! Clyde! Come look!”
“Ruth—wait!”
Clyde’s little sister was always so fast! He ran, tired—he’d snuck out the night before, because the smithy’s boy had beckoned, with wicked eyes and forward hands. Rutting with women had never appealed to Clyde, but the things Clyde and James did when no eyes pried were magical.
“But can you see him? It’s the man! The red man!”
A shiver raced up Clyde’s spine. “No red men, Ruthie—do you not learn your scripture?”<
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“But he’s not evil—he’s kind! See?”
She crouched at the split base of an old oak tree that had once been riven by lightning, poking at the offerings.
An odd sort of flower, with stiff white petals and a cluster in the center the color of blood, sat in the crevice, along with a tiny sweet, wrapped in parchment.
Clyde stared at the offerings for a moment, undecided.
“The sweet may not be—”
But Ruthie had already popped it in her mouth, and she sucked on it with a look of bliss. “See, Clyde? He’s not evil. He’s my friend.”
Clyde shuddered. Nobody in the family had seen this “red man.” When asked to elaborate on “red,” she’d pointed to their mother’s faded washday skirt. “That red—but brighter.”
Not a human red.
Clyde had kept the conversations to himself—there had been a witch burning not five leagues from their village the year before. His little sister was kind to feral cats, sang to the chickens as she fed them, mourned the slaughter of every pig for the winter. Clyde didn’t see how his sister, little more than an infant, really, could be under the sway of devils, real or imaginary.
He wouldn’t turn their village on her for all the gold in England.
“Ruthie,” he said hesitantly. “Ruthie, your friend may be made of nothing more evil than dead leaves and wind, but when the wind stirs up dead leaves, people often cry ghost. Please, little one, for me, don’t call attention to this red man.”
“Fine,” Ruthie huffed. “I’ll be quiet. But he comes to my window at night—how do the others not see him?”
Clyde shuddered. Their cottage had two rooms for sleeping—and four daughters and one son. Clyde spent his nights in the front room, on a pallet by the fire. If the red man was coming to her window, Ruthie had to walk over a lot of bodies to talk to him there.
“Ruthie—be careful! You shouldn’t ought to—”
“I’m being careful,” she assured him, so winsome and so prim at the same time, Clyde didn’t have the heart to reprimand her.