by Amy Lane
He sank to a crouch before her. “You make me smile, little one. Please—we don’t know who this red man is. There’s plenty of evil men out there who might fancy a sweet little maid in braids.”
Ruthie nodded soberly, biting her lip. “I’ll ask him to meet you, the next time he comes,” she told him. “That way you don’t have to worry….”
“Mullins!” Renotly’s voice shrilled, breaking into his reverie. “Where have you been?”
“Summoning,” Mullins answered, keeping his voice dead, when the vision of his sister was still very much alive behind his eyes. “Can you not smell the spell?”
It was a taunt. Renotly was magic blind in the worst way. Most summoning spells left a trace in the air that even the most inexperienced demon could detect—but not Edward’s or, in fact, any of the family. But saying the smell of sulfur and meadowsweet and blood lingered in the air when Renotly couldn’t detect it was both cruel and a safety precaution. Renotly wouldn’t admit he couldn’t sense it, and nobody had to know Mullins went mostly willingly when he was supposed to have been compelled.
“Of course,” Renotly said smoothly, customary horrible grimace deepening. “Anybody can smell it. You were just gone a long time.”
“They needed something complex,” Mullins told him. “Unfortunately it was for completely unselfish reasons—not a soul on my roster today.” He barely contained the lilt in his voice celebrating the fact, but Renotly rolled his narrow eyes anyway.
“You haven’t taken one soul,” he sneered. “Not in nearly four hundred years. You’re fooling nobody, you know. You’re soft and weak—not one soul, not one person lured to their doom—you just sit and scribe and scribe. It’s like you’re not even in hell.”
“And yet, here you are. Was there something you needed?”
“Vanth,” Renotly muttered. “Have you seen him? Menoch claimed to smell him around your chamber, but I don’t sense it.” Renotly sniffed wetly. “Although I do smell… wine? Like champagne….” For a moment Renotly flickered, and Mullins got a view of an elegant young man wearing an Art Deco style suit—with a self-inflicted hole in his temple. “Ah, I miss champagne….” Mullins watched sadly as the person Renotly had been before he’d given himself over took a sip of champagne and a shot of opium and embraced his father’s pistol. He’d heard the story of the young wastrel who’d sold his soul to replace his family’s coffers, but seeing it enacted in front of him, as the young man’s sweetheart ran across the room to stop him, was absurdly affecting.
“I’ve never tasted it,” Mullins told him gently. He’d been a demon long before champagne had become a delicacy among the emerging middle class of England. “But I’m glad the smell brings you joy.”
Renotly shook himself, and the vision of him as a human disappeared. “Vanth,” he said, holding on to the mewling tone in his voice with what sounded to be quite an effort. “Champagne,” he whispered, his association so strong Mullins had a moment to wonder what it was he smelled.
“No,” Mullins lied, pulling his attention away. “Haven’t seen the nasty buzzing thing. Where was he last stationed?”
“The Market.” Renotly lowered his head conspiratorially, shaking himself back into the game. “We got a line on your old mentor, my boy. Menoch has the perfect plan to lure him back into hell.”
Mullins raised his bristly eyebrows, keeping his face and body neutral. He couldn’t afford to kill Renotly—the replacement they sent probably would be able to sense some of the things Mullins had been up to. “Unlikely. Leonard had to sacrifice many things in order to escape. Why would he come running back now?”
Renotly’s grotesque features had relaxed somewhat—not the stunning young man, but not the contorted demon. In this moment Mullins could see them both—how ugly the stunning young man became when his only expression for a hundred years was contempt.
“Because that get of his is coming close to mortal peril—that’s what I’ve heard… the whole Market is buzzing about it—searching for illicit things….”
“Everybody searches for illicit things in the Market,” Mullins said, as though bored. “I understand Balaam ejaculates into shot glasses so Ktarkech can sell it for gold.”
Renotly’s eyes widened. “Do people buy it?”
Mullins had many years in which to learn to keep his features schooled and blank. “By the wagonload,” he said.
“If you see Menoch, tell him I’m looking for Vanth in the Market,” Renotly hissed, disappearing in short order.
Mullins waited an entire minute, sitting primly on his bed, eyes staring blankly ahead, before he allowed himself to breathe.
In his head, he summoned his stylus, but instead of writing on the earth, he envisioned the rearview mirror in the old truck the family used on their property. In his head he wrote The market is compromised on the mirror, and got a good look at Edward’s eyes growing large as he saw the writing.
Another breath, the stylus disappeared, and Mullins was back in his chamber, summoning an old-fashioned fountain pen and white paper with which to write.
By the time Menoch found him, he was immersed wholly in his work of transcription, and the smell of spellwork had disappeared.
“Vanth….” Menoch mumbled. “I smell… wine?”
“I smell neither,” Mullins lied. He’d thoroughly disinfected the area of Vanth—that at least he didn’t have to worry about. But the wine—again? That was… troubling.
“I don’t smell Vanth.” Menoch crossed his stubby arms. “What are you doing here in the dark?”
“My job,” Mullins told him shortly. “I’ve always worked in my cell.” This was truth—he’d started when Leonard told him there were no rules against it. For some reason, Menoch would rather bitch about the lack of rules than go to his superior to figure out how to make one.
“Why?” Menoch did that thing where he made his snout touch his upper lip. It was repulsive.
“Why what?”
“Why do you smell like wine and why do you work in your cell?”
“I don’t smell like wine, and I work in my cell because, if I can escape the usual round of fornications and murders on the scribe floor, I alone can finish all the work you need done that allows that to happen.” This was only partially true. Mullins and Leonard combined used to be able to knock out the “work” the scribes were supposed to do. Mullins alone managed about half of it—but one demon doing the work of 333 wasn’t bad.
Menoch’s snout and upper lip maintained contact. “It still doesn’t excuse the wine.”
Mullins stood, still bored, and began to strip out of his clothes.
“What are you doing?” Menoch demanded, aghast.
“Were you going to scourge me for smelling like wine? Because if so we need to do it now before you get behind.”
“No! Hells no!” Menoch turned and stalked toward the entrance in a fit of disgust. “No! Just do your fucking job!” he snarled, and Mullins waited until the stench of rotting flesh receded before he flopped back onto his cot.
Hells.
He tried to be horrified—he really did. He smelled like wine, and apparently every demon in hell could tell something was amok.
But he couldn’t be horrified. Edward’s kiss had not stopped buzzing under his skin, had not stopped bubbling, like carbonation, in his veins. Ah, gods—so sweet. Edward looked like a young man, but he kissed like a master, and in spite of that, some innocence and a whole lot of hope permeated his every touch.
Mullins could taste the boy he’d seen on Leonard’s hearth that first night, could taste the man that both loss and triumph had shaped, and the results on his tongue, in his human mouth, were glorious.
Mullins had not felt like this since… since….
Oh hells… must he remember?
“You need to go!” Clyde whispered. “It’s not fitting a grown man should visit the window of a child.”
“But she’s lovely!” the man at the window said, laughing. “Who would harm such a
charming little girl?”
He wasn’t red tonight, he was blue, as though a perfectly ordinary—if extraordinarily beautiful—man had been suffused with indigo.
“Anyone who thought she was trafficking with spirits!” Clyde told him indignantly. “You’re blue!”
The “red” man flashed a white smile. And his color—barely distinguishable in the midsummer sunset—changed to a rich orange-gold. “And now I’m not.” He blinked, his almond-shaped eyes growing sleepy. “And you too are a charming child—but a fully grown one.” He extended a finger through the opened window and tilted Clyde’s chin up. “And you like my form?” He smiled prettily, his lush mouth tilting at the corners. “Mm… not this one?”
In a breath he was female, with a softer jaw and more delicate chin, face a perfect oval. Lush yellow hair spilled over bare shoulders, and Clyde felt the spell woven by the man fade.
“No,” Clyde said, leaning back from the soft fingertip at his chin. He’d had to walk over his sisters in their beds when Ruthie had hissed at him. “I’m sorry. My sister is innocent, and you are… fey?”
The other changed forms again, to a man this time—naturally colored. Skin a medium clay color, not cochineal red, hair a lush straight spill of black past his shoulders, chest a smooth expanse of touchable muscle.
He was wearing a loincloth and nothing else.
“Not fey,” the man purred. “Father of fey.” His hooded gaze raked Clyde up and down. “Perhaps you are one of my many times removed great-grandchildren. I don’t smell fey on you or your sister, but….” He closed his eyes and inhaled sensually. “Still delicious.”
Clyde swallowed. “You need to go away and not eat us,” he said seriously. Behind him, Ruthie giggled.
“Like porridge?”
“No, little one. That’s not how he meant.” The man pinned Clyde with a rather stern expression. “Your sister is too young. She does not need to be here for this.”
Clyde gasped, turning toward Ruthie, suddenly afraid. She yawned, looking confused, and fell backward onto her thin pillow, snoring softly.
“What did you—”
“Just put her to sleep. She will wake in the morning, thinking this is a dream.”
“She thinks you’re her friend!” Clyde couldn’t contain his outrage.
“I am!” A white smile flashed, and Clyde’s stomach quivered. His groin tingled as though it had been touched. “Some days, I play with the friends who like sweets and poppets and daisy chains.” That finger moved to Clyde’s lower lip. “Some days, I play with the friends who have delicious pricks and juicy holes.”
Clyde swallowed, the crudity not repelling him at the least. “My parents are asleep in the next room,” he said, his throat dry. The practical thought helped ground him. “And I… I frolic with another—”
“The smithy’s boy? Mm… whom do you think taught him about goose grease, young cotter’s son? Imagine the things I might teach you.”
Clyde shuddered sensually, but he knew his duty. “You put my family in danger every moment you stay,” he said softly. “You should leave us to our ordinary lives.”
“Then we shall go somewhere else,” the man said easily. “And you will be back in your bed by morning, with a story to tell the smithy’s lad and a body that’s been well used.”
Mullins swallowed hard on his little cot in hell, his face working painfully as he fought tears. Oh, they said the road to hell was paved with good intentions, but his had been paved with the worst. He didn’t remember much of his time with the other, but he certainly remembered the aftermath. Jonathan, the boy he’d loved—yes, he could say that now, he’d once loved—had not been entertained by his story in the morning. In fact he’d been so damned hurt, he’d told the entire village of the terrible creature who snuck into young people’s beds and seduced them in a field of flowers, no single bloom the same.
“Clyde!” Ruthie screamed, tripping on a rut in the road. “Clyde! Where are we going!”
“To hide!” he said, scrambling around brush. Oh God. Oh God—they’d set their house on fire. His mother and father and sisters had been held back, shouting their names as the villagers had chased after them in the night. He still remembered the shocked hurt on Jonathan’s face as his confrontation in front of the town square grew wildly out of hand.
He’d cried, “Clyde, I’m sorry!” as the house had gone up, but Clyde and Ruthie had been on the run, so Clyde hadn’t been able to reply.
They were going to catch Ruthie. Jonathan had been yelling at Clyde about sporting with demons when Ruthie had cried out, “But he’s not a demon! He’s my friend!”
And that had been it. The end. Their fates sealed. If their own village didn’t kill them, they’d die of starvation, exiled from all the villages for miles around. But Clyde couldn’t think that way, couldn’t think of abandoning his sister—he just had to get them past—
“Clyde—they’re behind us,” Ruthie wailed, and Clyde had had enough.
He dragged Ruthie into the underbrush by the river and cautioned her to lay low. “If they catch me I’ll say I drowned you,” he whispered. “But hide. Don’t let them see you!”
“But Clyde!”
“Love you, little sister.”
And then he’d started to wade into the river, calling at the top of his lungs.
“Demons and devils, whoever seduced me, come out! Come out! I have a bargain to make, damn you all! Come out!”
A hideous creature appeared then, with bulging skin and sparse green hair and the stench of a thousand tortures, and for a moment, Clyde recoiled.
“No!” he cried to the creature hovering over the water that he stood waist-deep in. “I don’t want you!”
“What you want is immaterial,” the creature hissed. “You called on demons and I’m a demon—now tell me your bargain!”
“My sister!” Clyde’s voice trembled and his eyes burned. “Save her—” And oh, he knew the stories of the crossroads demons! “Save her, let her live a long, happy life, with children who live long, happy lives and so on for as many generations as there are down the road. Save her and….”
“I know the rest,” the creature purred, holding up a gleaming golden parchment and a sharpened quill, rusty and black at the end.
Clyde quailed at the sight of that quill, closing his eyes and saying a brief prayer. Oh, whoever that man had been, the one at his window, who had seduced him in a bed of flowers, no two the same—why couldn’t he come to offer Clyde a millennia of servitude?
“They’re coming,” the creature wheedled. “Sign for Menoch, yes? I won’t hurt you… that badly.”
Clyde looked away, and then, involuntarily, he looked to Ruthie, crouched in the underbrush, terrified. She didn’t deserve this. Oh God—she didn’t.
He seized the quill from Menoch’s pudgy hand and plunged it into the vein in his wrist, then signed his name on the line the way he’d learned at his father’s knee.
Menoch gave a howl of laughter—and in that moment, the other man appeared.
He took in the scene—Clyde, Ruthie, Menoch, the signed contract—and then, over Clyde’s shoulder, he saw the villagers.
To Clyde’s surprise, his face filled with sorrow.
“You couldn’t have wait—”
“There he is!” someone cried from the distance.
“No, I suppose not,” the man sighed. “I’m so sorry, my boy. This is not the kind of chaos I’d envisioned the two of us wreaking.”
“Help me!” Clyde wailed as Menoch seized his hand. “Oh please—make sure they don’t hurt Ruthie—”
“Your sister, I can help,” he said, pausing to, of all things, rub his thumb along Clyde’s lower lip. “But you, boy—I’m sorry. All things considered, I really don’t care for demons.”
At that moment the villagers crested the levee leading down to the river, screaming with rage as they caught sight of Clyde.
“I’ll save her, boy.”
And Menoch gave hi
s arm a hideous wrench, parting his shoulder from its socket, and blackness washed over his vision.
When he awoke, he was in hell, and Leonard was setting his shoulder, telling him how to keep hold of his sanity.
Mullins had nearly 400 years to keep his emotions in check, to hide his grief, to hide his fear, to hide, even, his humanity, which he was painfully aware had never deserted him as it seemed to have left his peers.
But as the memories rolled over him, he could smell the sweet liquor of Edward’s love buzzing just under his skin, and thought of the moment he’d have to tell Edward that his crime had been being a faithless lover, an easy target for the other, a willing participant in a careless seduction.
He’d put his entire family in jeopardy to have sex in a field of wildflowers, no two blooms alike.
Objectively he knew his crime was minor—he’d seen murderers in these jagged stone caves, rapists, narcissists who toyed with the emotions of the people they claimed to love until that person committed suicide out of desperation.
But hell was not built with bricks of objectivity. It was thrown together haphazardly with the bitter, razor sharp stones of self-blame.
Not even Menoch could stop his beast’s face from contorting as he shed bitter tears.
The Youngbloods Go on Quest
“SO THE message just appeared?” Harry asked, jouncing down the driveway in the family minivan.
“In the rearview mirror of the truck last night,” Edward confirmed. “And I could….” Ugh. This sounded so personal. “I could smell him—Mullins, I mean. It was from him.”
“I don’t doubt you,” Harry said mildly, swerving to avoid a pothole. Leonard had been promising to re-gravel the driveway for months. “I’m just saying, that’s a fun spell. Since we can’t use telepathy when he’s in hell and all.”
Mullins had very carefully explained to them that just as a summoning could be detected by the denizens of hell, so too could any connective magic. It was why they were so careful about calling him, even when things got crazy. It was why Edward had been so surprised to see him in that hotel room in Vegas, when he and Francis had been losing their minds.