by Amy Lane
The boys all took the hint immediately and turned toward the sand, sifting through it as fast as they could until Beltane shouted “Stop!”
All activity ceased as he scooped up a handful of sand and dusted it, a few grains at a time, from his palm.
“Guys, come here! Come here and look! It’s gorgeous!”
Edward had apparently propped the mirror on a rock so he could see the adventure, and now he picked it up and aimed it toward the few grains of sand left in Bel’s massive palm.
One of them—though seemingly made of the same obsidian—had captured brilliant garnet colors in its depths.
Item #25! Scrawled across the mirror.
Hurray! Tell Suriel he’s brilliant and I see why Harry adores him.
Edward turned the mirror to himself and smiled boldly, and for a moment, Mullins let himself fall into his boy’s eyes.
Clear green, the green of bottle glass or a lake in the summer, the antidote to all of the drab and bitter things in hell.
That had been the night before.
Now, Mullins stood in that miserable line of groveling flunkies and felt that hope again. His breathing calmed down, his heart rate slowed, and he breathed out his anxiety as hope filled him. His boy’s eyes were green, and they could see Clyde, the cottager’s son, brother to Ruthie, Sarah, Mary, and Elizabeth.
The boy who had traded his soul to hell to save his sister’s life.
That boy had been bold once.
That boy hadn’t known vengeance or resignation.
That boy could stand impassively, mind on a faraway beach with sand of obsidian, looking at a miracle through the lighted glow of an angel’s love.
That boy didn’t flinch when Menoch’s lash fell on the demon next to him, who let out a piercing shriek and wet himself. Mullins simply fell out with the other ranks of demons and went back to his cell, where a fragment of mirror sat in his pocket, ready to grow rich with heat, ready to show him wonders once more.
TWO WEEKS after their first triumph with the oystercatcher’s eggshell, Mullins was frowning into the mirror, trying to figure out what in the hell they were doing.
He and Edward had started to experiment—it turned out that if Edward left the mirror open and nearby, it would capture the entire adventure as though from Edward’s point of view. Mullins could watch it at his leisure, like a human might watch his favorite television show—except humans were not often in mortal peril from their favorite TV shows.
This particular show was… confusing.
He studied where they were, what they were doing, hoping for Edward’s usually pithy commentary to scrawl across the mirror to clarify.
The boys were combing through the African underbrush, by a nearly empty watering hole, tracking buzzards the size of small cars.
Harry wasn’t looking well.
It was one of the first things Mullins had noticed in the last few days. He was pale and had lost weight, even in the fortnight since the adventure began. The spell he was using to transport them was very powerful. Mullins knew Emma saved it for big events, and he was wondering if boomeranging a minivan full of wizards wasn’t having a terrible effect on his health.
He kept his back straight, though, and poured himself into every adventure, and here on the savannah he started gesticulating wildly to get everybody’s attention. The lot of them—all dressed in cargo shorts and hiking boots, even Suriel—went running for a corpse that had nearly been picked clean.
A rhinoceros corpse—but judging from the tatters of skin left on it, not an ordinary rhinoceros.
We asked local game wardens if they had any albino rhinos recently dead. We were lucky—we killed six poachers just trying to find it. That horn is big medicine.
Killed?
You killed them? It sounded so cold-blooded from his boys.
Edward’s disgust dripped off every letter of his response. Trust me—just as satisfying as killing human traffickers. No regrets.
Mullins thought about it, about the cold-bloodedness needed to kill a stunning creature of the veldt and hack through its flesh. These were people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill or sell anything—human, animal, anything.
He was pretty sure the paving stones of hell were built on the bones of poachers.
Understood. But I don’t understand—
OMG!
The image jostled, and Mullins found himself watching Edward’s boots kicking backward as Edward took off for his brothers, who were suddenly in the center of some very rough-looking men wielding guns and surrounding the dead rhino’s corpse.
He couldn’t hear anything—he couldn’t hear anything! It was terrifying, watching the boys in the center, hands out, while Edward—always the best at languages—tried to negotiate with men who very much wanted what the boys had.
Then Harry cast a spell.
It must have been him—the mirror threw a sort of glow around anyone who used magic as it was. Bel’s was gold, Francis silver, Edward green, and Harry’s was amber. Now it grew strong and stronger, while around them—
Mullins squinted at the mirror, and then squinted again, and then had to clap a hoof across his mouth to keep silent.
About 200 snakes were undulating through the air, all of them coming from different directions, in different postures, as though Harry had simply cast a spell calling all snakes and then making them fly.
Beltane literally grabbed Francis around the middle as he leaped into the air to do battle with them, and Edward looked decidedly uncomfortable as the creatures passed overhead. Cobras, anacondas—poisonous and non—the snakes continued their way suspended in the air as they might have through the tall grasses or in their underground abodes.
And then abruptly dropped on the poachers’ heads.
Mullins would forever be grateful he couldn’t hear their screams, because few things in hell rivaled the mayhem that followed. Each man got more than a man’s share of deadly venom from multiple sources, and the snakes themselves were not happy with each other as they landed. Edward’s solid blue shield appeared around the boys as Mother Nature and some of her most toxic creatures struggled to balance the scales.
It felt like it took them an absurdly long time to die, thrashing, extremities blackened with toxin, tongues protruding, eyes leaking blood. Edward spoke sharply to Harry, and the snakes suddenly rose again to be catapulted a good mile away—some place where they could hash out their differences away from human or animal eyes.
Only one remained—a giant white anaconda, perhaps twenty feet across and a foot around.
He was shedding his skin as they watched.
Edward dropped the shield, and the boys looked at each other and then at the snake, and Edward pulled out the much-weathered list of things on the long-ago-written sheet of yellow legal paper and consulted. His face wore a look of intense disbelief.
Well, it should have. That snake was at least a hundred miles from its rightful home in the jungle—and Mullins was pretty sure it only shed during the rains.
Not only that but, according to the list in front of them, they needed it?
No.
No no no no no—
Impossible.
Mullins had been over that list with a fine-toothed comb. He’d helped Emma assemble the ingredients the first time around with Leonard, and he’d known it. This time, his job had been to determine which things on the list could be substituted by things with similar magical and metaphorical properties—he knew that list in his sleep.
There was no call for anaconda’s skin or rhinoceros’s horn—there just wasn’t!
There was no reason on earth—literally on earth—for the lot of them to be there, watching an impossible creature shed its skin.
Eventually the snake was done, and Francis and Bel were given the job of rolling the skin up carefully while Harry and Suriel very gently disengaged the dead rhino’s horn from its skull. Edward strode forward to retrieve the mirror, and he visibly flinched from Mullins’s message.
<
br /> What in the bloody hell are you doing?
They’re on the list! Edward added a wild gesticulation to the thought, and in other circumstances Mullins might have been amused.
No they’re not! They weren’t on it for Leonard and Emma, and they shouldn’t be on it for me!
Edward held his list up to the mirror, and Mullins squinted. It looked like Edward’s handwriting, and it was definitely in the right place in the poem.
Albino skin of one that slithers, horn of one that thunders the earth, fit together, sword and sheath, use the wand to find your ease.
BUT MULLINS knew he hadn’t written it.
That is not an ingredient I know!
Edward huffed with exasperation.
I don’t know what to do about that!
What does it mean, wand?
I have no—
All of the Youngbloods ducked, and Mullins suppressed a groan. More bullets! Damn this family, why were there always more bullets?
Later! Edward finished, and the mirror went black.
Blue Earth, Red Sky
HARRY BARELY boomeranged them in time.
The original group of poachers—the ones rotting from snakebite on the savannah—were apparently an advance guard. The Youngbloods had stalked the watering hole for two days, trying to make sure the gamesmen who’d been watching the rhino be reclaimed by the wild weren’t going to jump out and get them.
If the Youngbloods hadn’t been hunting poachers to help the gamesmen, they would have.
So having a group of freaked-out poachers, replete with automatic weapons, jump out of nowhere to take off their heads was a bit of a shock. Harry’s mastery of the teleportation spell was commendable. Not even Emma could have gotten them out of danger faster.
The only problem was—
“Where in the hell are we?” Edward asked, looking around him in confusion.
“A cornfield in Kansas?” Francis hazarded. “Where the corn is the size of a small child. And blue.”
“An MC Escher painting?” Bel was poking one of the stalks of—grain?—tentatively, and they were all relieved when it didn’t wiggle like an alien embryo pod.
“An alternative plane of existence with oxygen and water,” Harry muttered weakly. They all turned to him in time to watch him topple over, a red stain spreading on his shoulder.
“Seriously?” Edward muttered, as Suriel caught Harry before he hit the ground.
“It’s not bad,” Harry assured them—and given the number of times he’d been injured, he should know. “Blood loss. Edward, you can doctor it. Beloved, any healing would help, but don’t feel obligated—”
“Harry, for fuck’s sake, shut up,” Francis snapped. He fell to his knees by his brother’s side, put his hand on Harry’s shoulder, and muttered a few words.
The area around Harry’s shoulder glowed brightly, and Harry gave a yelp of pain. “Jesus, Francis—” He hissed then, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he passed out.
“Francis?” Beltane asked, concerned. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“No.” Francis scowled at everybody. “My power’s different. ’S weird. But the wound’s closed. Bullet’s out. Let him sleep.”
And then he turned into a cat, leaving the three conscious adults to stare at each other. But the mystery of Francis was no clearer now than it ever had been, and they had other things to do.
“How is he?” Edward asked Suriel.
“Like Francis said,” Suriel murmured, looking thoughtfully at Francis as he insouciantly licked his paw. “The bullet was pushed out.” With one hand, Suriel scrabbled in the earth—the blue-colored earth—beneath Harry’s shoulder and came back with the small bit of lead, still steeped in blood. “The bleeding is stopped. He’s just….” Suriel tilted his head and listened for his breath. “Just sleeping to heal.”
Edward and Beltane exchanged glances. “Uh,” Edward began.
“You think…?” Beltane tried, and Suriel rolled his eyes.
“No, we’re not going to wake him early. We have granola bars and water,” he said sharply. “We can wait two or three hours, right here, while he sleeps off whatever healing Francis gave him. He’s exhausted as it is from using the boomerang nonstop in the past two weeks. Imagine what would happen if he tried to pull us back to earth, weak as he is? That thing in your pocket might pull us halfway to hell, Edward, and your yearning for Mullins might take us the rest of the way.”
Edward and Beltane looked at each other shamefaced, and Edward let out a sigh.
“The sky is creeping me out,” he confessed. Bloodred, with a moon of glowing black.
“The earth is creeping me out,” Beltane admitted. “And I keep expecting those ears of whatthehellever to open up and eat us.”
Edward held his finger to his lips. “Sh! They might hear!”
Beltane nodded and held his hands out in a shrug. Francis jumped right into his arms and started licking his blond-stubbled chin.
“Thanks, Francis.”
Francis rubbed whiskers against Bel’s cheeks, and Bel sat back on the weird blue dirt and made out with his boy in cat form, leaving Suriel and Edward alone, as it were, with an unconscious Harry.
“What were you arguing with Mullins about?” Suriel asked quietly, holding Harry’s head in his lap and brushing his hair back from his brow. He looked awful, almost gray, and gaunt, and Edward’s heart pinged. He’d been driving himself damned hard.
Edward frowned. “It was weird. Suriel, he said that the things we were looking for—the horn, the snakeskin—they weren’t on our list.”
Suriel’s eyes opened wide, and he frowned and then did that searching thing with his eyes in his head that people did when they lost their glasses.
“Is he sure?”
Edward had to laugh.
“Little bit, yeah. He’s sure. I mean, he helped Leonard and Emma, right?”
Suriel sat up a little straighter, careful not to disturb Harry as he did so. “So did I,” he said softly. “Edward, let me see your list.”
Edward handed it to him, three pages of dirty, rumpled legal paper, painstakingly graphed and copied into Edward’s phone as well.
“These things I remember,” he said, tracing an elegant finger down each page. “I remember the ones we altered for Leonard—”
“You altered the spell for Leonard? Why didn’t you tell—”
Suriel shrugged. “You didn’t ask. Also, Emma didn’t sit around and have a discussion circle.” His full angel’s mouth twisted up. “She gave a lot of orders in those days—particularly after Leonard got captured and tortured in Mullins’s stead. I think it took Emma about three hundred years of knocking about the world on her own to understand how much she hungered for company, Edward. You three learned it in about twenty years. Not bad for a learning curve.”
Edward rolled his eyes, frustrated. This alternative plane of existence smelled like barbecued potato chips, spoiled salsa, and dead lilies. He really wanted to go home.
“I still can’t do a boomerang spell,” he muttered.
“Well, she didn’t get really good at it until you four started getting into danger,” Suriel reminded him. Then he frowned again. “Mullins is right. These items—they’re not… they’re… fuzzy.”
Edward looked over Suriel’s shoulder. “They’re clear to me,” he said. “I mean, Jesus, Suriel—I wouldn’t have just sent us all into that sort of danger for kicks, would I?”
Suriel shook his head and stroked Harry’s brow again. “Of course not. If nothing else, none of us is thrilled to see this happen again.”
“We were lucky it wasn’t us,” Edward admitted, squeezing Harry’s uninjured shoulder.
“It’s like he’s a magnet,” Suriel muttered. “I’m… there is something so odd about this writing here. I can see the bit of verse you copied, and then the notes about what you think it means, but… but it’s giving me a headache. I don’t think you wrote those words at all.”
Edw
ard shivered. “But who would alter the spell?” he asked, feeling a hint of desperation. “Seriously, Suriel—what purpose would it serve to change the damned thing? This only has consequences for Mullins and me—”
“And those of us who love you both,” Suriel interjected. “You should already know it’s no easy thing to see a brother suffer.”
“Understood.” It was a brief word—a brief way—to underscore Edward’s appreciation and love, but they needed to think about other things now! “But we don’t know if the purpose there is friendly or not friendly or even where it came from!”
“Well,” Suriel said, tapping his lip with a finger. “I think there’s one way to find out. Beltane, do you have the—”
“No,” Edward said, feeling panic settle in his bones.
“No what?”
“No, whatever you’re going to do here that you seem to think is so logical. Suriel, I don’t even know when we are. I mean, I want to get Mullins out as quickly as possible too, but we’re not going to get back any quicker if we try some sort of fucked-up spell here where the barbecued corn chip lilies bloom!”
Suriel inhaled deeply and grimaced. “Ugh. Yes. I understand. If nothing else, the snakeskin and rhinoceros are both dead things. I can’t imagine it, but the spell could even get worse.”
Edward smiled slightly and squeezed Harry’s shoulder again. “A few hours?” he said, to make sure.
“I promise. Whatever magic Francis used, it was good stuff. He’ll be hungry and thirsty when he wakes up, so leave him some provisions!” That last was aimed at Beltane, who looked up from the granola bar he was shoving in his mouth and pointed to the satchel at his hip, indicating more. “And then he should be able to get us back home.”
Edward nodded and yawned, and Suriel pointed to his shoulder. “You used to fall asleep when you were doing lessons too.”
“Not Harry?”
“No.” Suriel leaned forward and kissed his beloved’s brow. “Harry was like a torch, the entire time. Never wanted to waste a second.”
Edward swallowed. He wanted to see Mullins again, for real, where he could touch, and maybe lace fingers, and feel his body’s heat.