by Amy Lane
“Always.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You’re leaving soon,” Harry said baldly. Edward hadn’t called that night, hadn’t answered his phone call. He was worried on more than one front. “You’re leaving, and I’ve got one thing to do—and I might not be able to do it.”
Suriel’s eyes snapped open. “What’s your one thing? Why can’t you do it?”
“Stay alive,” Harry said. “And life’s uncertain—I can only try.”
Suriel nodded gravely. “Try hard,” he whispered. “Try with all your heart.”
Harry nodded back. “You too.”
They kissed then, and Harry thought they would make love, but Suriel pulled him hard into his embrace, and instead they fell asleep, limbs tangled, as much bare skin touching as possible.
At dawn, Harry felt the pull in his stomach that meant magic was coming.
“Suriel!” he called out, opening his eyes in time to hear Suriel scream. Even as Suriel disappeared, Harry saw the scores of the whip opening the flesh of his arms, his face, his shoulders.
Right before Harry’s ears popped brutally, Suriel’s body faded into mist.
WHEN HARRY opened his eyes, he was standing naked behind a group of men holding semiautomatic weapons.
In front of them, staring down the barrels of the guns, stood Harry’s family. Emma and Leonard clutched hands, Leonard’s mouth moving in a sotto voce spell Harry could only imagine. Edward crouched, impressive shoulders flexed, with a blood-dripping machete in either hand, and Francis growled through his human throat, his face battered and angry, his eyes wide and fully blue with the slitted black pupils of a cat.
Emma’s lovely face relaxed into a smile as she saw Harry. “We waited as long as we could,” she said apologetically.
Slowly, seven sets of eyes turned to see who she was talking to, and seven men threatening deadly force to the people Harry loved most turned bruised, sliced, scratched, and bewildered faces to see what fresh hell had just erupted out of thin air.
“Hello, boys,” Harry growled, fury and fear and anguish making him mean. “I see you saved the best for last, didn’t you?”
Behind them, Leonard raised his voice in the finale of the spell, and the guns tore themselves out of the men’s hands, rocketing through the air in a giant arc, melting and twisting into uselessness as they flew.
Harry laughed, a brutal, angry sound he remembered Big Cass making right before Cass went on a beating spree that left the brothel bruised and bleeding.
With a howl of rage, he jumped into the fray.
Crossroads
“STOP!” EDWARD yelled, hauling at Harry’s arm. “Stop, Harry—they’re down! They’re down! If you keep this up, they’ll be dead!”
Harry’s vision still bled—but then, so did the men at his feet. He raised a bare foot to kick the nearest one in the nose when Edward slapped his face, hard.
“Harry! What will Suriel say?”
Harry froze, brain processing, body still set on “kill.” “Suriel’s gone,” he said numbly. “He got called back when I did….” Harry closed his eyes and saw two Suriels—one the haunting, gentle lover he’d gazed upon that night, and the other the frightened, tortured celestial being who had vanished before his eyes. “He’s being tortured as we speak.”
Edward’s hands on his shoulders became an all-encompassing embrace. “Oh, Harry—I’m so sorry. But we need you. All of you. Your mind too. They have Bel, Harry. Big Cass has Bel.”
Harry went limp in Edward’s arms. “Bel? Oh my God. Bel?” He looked up, a sleepwalker waking from a dream, and glanced around at his surroundings. Dry air sapped the moisture from his skin, the breath from his lungs; and the sun coming up over hills at the far end of the long horizon burned hot and so damned bright. They were at a storage unit warren off the freeway, Harry assumed, but he had no idea which one.
“Where are we?” he asked, squinting. “And how in the hell did Big Cass get Bel?”
Francis appeared at Harry’s elbow, whimpering disconsolately, and Harry pulled back enough to draw his brother to his chest and accept Edward’s hug too. He recalled Suriel’s words about Francis and Bel and the change in their relationship over the last year.
“We’ll get him back,” Harry whispered, nuzzling the pale blond hair at Francis’s temple. “Don’t worry, Francis. I’ve lost my lover. We won’t let you lose yours.”
Francis moaned softly and broke into tears, and Harry came fully human to himself and comforted his brother like the child he’d never been allowed to be.
“Edward?” Harry all but begged as Francis wound down on his chest. “Could you…?”
“All we’ve got is hand-me-downs,” Edward apologized, eyeballing the guards Harry had taken out. “Do you see one you’d like?”
“The less blood the better,” Harry told him. “That one there, with the basketball shorts, looks like my best bet.”
Edward grunted and started pulling off the guy’s boots. “Silly thing to wear to illegal activity,” he muttered, tugging hard. “This is why it pays to put on combat gear.” The guy moaned, and he hit the thug in the face with the boot, then threw the boot at Harry. The second came sailing over before he pulled the shorts down the guy’s thighs.
“Oh thank God,” Harry breathed. He shifted Francis to Leonard for consolation and found he could function in this place, in the non-panic, the non-freaking-out place in his head.
“What?” Edward glanced at him before chucking the shorts.
“He’s not going commando!”
Harry snagged the shorts as they smacked against his chest and put them on, then started on the boots, which didn’t fit half-bad. Edward worked the tank and the plaid shirt off, and while Francis took deep breaths and got himself under control, Harry finished dressing.
He wrinkled his nose. “This asshole smokes,” he muttered. “As soon as we get out of here, this shit’s getting burned.”
“Yeah, Harry, that’s our priority.” Edward tried to sound insouciant, but Harry got a look at him—he was worried and angry, his jaw locked, a few terrible bruises healing on his face while he helped Harry get situated.
“Well, it should be,” Harry sallied. “I got pulled out of bed, and you didn’t let me kill anybody.” They needed him. His family needed him. Beltane Youngblood was somehow in Cass’s clutches, and that could not stand. Francis was barely human and Edward was coldly furious enough to summon a hurricane, and Harry needed to keep that from happening too.
Francis pulled away from Leonard, his heart-shaped face distorted by a bloodthirsty snarl. “I’ll do the killing,” he purred, and Harry didn’t even need Edward or Leonard to tell him that had to be stopped.
“I’m going to ground you right now if you don’t pull back your whiskers, Francis Youngblood. Bel needs you human, and so do we. Now somebody tell me what happened!”
At that moment Emma trotted up to them from the two battered SUVs parked about a hundred yards away. “They left the keys in the ignition,” she said happily. “Because they’re not that bright and they’re destined to die in some mobster’s bathroom, drowning in vomit.” The air shimmered around her as she spoke, and all the men grimaced.
“Did you see that?” Edward asked rhetorically. Of course they’d seen it. They’d been studying for a century to know exactly what that shimmer meant. “Did you see what our mother just did? Way subtler and crueler than turning them into kibble, Francis. That curse isn’t going to just go away, you know.”
“That was perfect,” Francis said humbly. “Thank you, Emma.”
Emma patted his cheek. “He’s my son, sweetheart. I would have done the same for any of you. Now come along, boys—we can talk in the car.” She frowned. “Dammit. Leonard, be a dear. The leader—next to the one in his underwear—he’s got a great roll of cash on him. Can you see it?”
Leonard eyed his wife irritably. “And you want me to….”
She rolled her eyes. “If I touch him, I’ll ne
gate the curse. I’m not being squeamish, I’m being practical.”
Leonard arched sand-colored eyebrows in a rather long, tanned face. He was not handsome, by any stretch of the imagination, but the way he and Emma doted on each other could not be doubted. Of course, that didn’t mean they hadn’t had their squabbles.
“And the dead possum under the house, was that a curse too?” He wrinkled his nose as he rolled the thug over and rooted through his jeans.
“The dead possum was an unfortunate victim of a storm grate,” Emma said, shifting her weight as she lied her ass off. “And it was….”
“Unfortunate,” Leonard supplied dryly. He pulled out the wad of cash, his face screwed up in distaste. “They’re covered in cocaine and… fluids.”
The family groaned, and Emma pulled a small bottle of handwash out of her fanny pack and handed it to him. “It’s blessed,” she reminded him. “Maybe you can just smear some across the whole bundle. Now come on, boys. I don’t think Bel is in immediate danger, but that’s only because they think he’ll fetch a good price. The minute he gets too troublesome to be useful—”
“Remember, he’s been studying too,” Leonard said softly, his earlier pique gone. Keeping his hands away from her, he leaned over and kissed her temple. “We’ll get our boy back, my darling. In the meantime, let’s get going and brief Harry.”
“Who showed up in not even his briefs,” Edward quipped.
Harry rolled his eyes. “You’ve been waiting to say that, haven’t you?”
Edward looped an arm over his shoulders, and Harry looped his around Francis’s. “I warned you. Did I not warn you? I told you to start sleeping in your clothes.”
Harry eyed him with brotherly distaste. “You’re the one who’s done long-term relationships. Were you ever forced to say, ‘Hang tight while I get dressed so I don’t get pulled away naked to take out henchmen with a hard-on’?”
“The henchmen had hard-ons?” Francis asked, giving Harry some hope. “Because they were about to kill us, Harry. That’s pretty gross.”
Harry got another whiff of the clothes he was wearing and held on to the contents of his stomach. “Those guys were all bad. I don’t know what to tell you. Emma’s curse was too good for them. Now is anybody going to tell me how this whole mishegas went down?”
“Into the car first,” Emma muttered tersely, the time for playfulness and relief over for them all. “We’ve got some miles to cover, and I don’t know when you last ate, but we’re going to need some fuel for what’s to come.”
Harry allowed himself to be herded into the foul-smelling SUV—but not before he and Edward did a thorough search for drugs. They found two keys in the door panels, three in the wheel well, and three more duct-taped to the inside of the engine compartment. Edward pulled a hunting knife from a loop on his belt and made short work of gathering the lethal little bundles and dumping them next to the SUV they were leaving behind.
“Should we dispose of them?” Francis asked uncertainly. “Someone could find them driving along—”
“Or the wind could come whipping across the road and blow cocaine for miles,” Emma said tartly. “None of us blows lasers out our asses, Francis, and we’ve got to get a move on!”
“Wait,” Edward muttered thoughtfully. He walked toward the pile of drugs and inscribed a pentagram around them, then grabbed twigs off a nearby tumbleweed and lit them on fire with a simple spell, placing a tiny burning taper at each of the five points. Harry watched him, trying to get a bead on the magic he was using, and Edward said, “Any of your knuckles still bleeding?”
Harry grunted no. “But you’re welcome to open up a cut,” he said. “It can’t be yours?”
“No—sorry. Spell caster and sacrifice. It’s old magic—before Christ, and damned near before paganism. But here.” Harry squatted down beside him and gave his hand over. Edward sliced the side of his wrist, far from a vein but easy to control. The expression he wore struck Harry as remote and unattached as his brother drew his blood and sprinkled it over each of the five burning points. He released Harry’s arm and muttered some Latin before pulling what was probably all the moisture in his body into his mouth and hawking a gob of spit into the center.
The flames heightened, tiny explosions of blue heat, and a small bubble formed over the top of the pentagram. The product inside turned brown, and the plastic wrappings over it melted away. What was left when the fire had burned down was a few cups of crumbly, oily residue. The bubble of protection disappeared, and the remnants of a drug run disintegrated softly in the middle. Harry swore and stood, holding his hand out for Edward to take.
He looked his brother—his beloved, tart-tongued, practical brother—square in the eye. “Suriel is worried about those spells, Edward. Next time we’ll just put it in the gas tank, deal?”
Edward wrinkled his nose. “You hook up with the love of your life and you’re suddenly a hundred percent old maiden aunt. Lighten up!” Edward grimaced. “I mean, darken up. We have some people to kill!”
“Yeah, just don’t send their souls to Kalamazoo or turn them into frogs or anything, you understand? I’m all for killing anyone who laid a hand on Bel—but this black-arts stuff has got to stop.”
Edward gave a grunt and then grabbed Harry’s wrist, looking at the cut that would heal normally and not magically. “Well, yeah—it’s not like you don’t shed enough blood without my help, yeah?”
Harry allowed a small grin to escape. “Nobody ever accused me of that.”
THE SUV hadn’t been tuned for a while, and the roar of the engine almost precluded conversation. After fifteen minutes of yelling at each other from the front and back seats, Leonard scowled and said, “Fuck this! Wait until we can switch cars!” before nudging Emma to stomp on the gas a little more. “It’s going to die in a hundred miles anyway!” he shouted. “We may as well get as much out of it as we can!”
Harry was left in the back seat, sweltering because the air conditioner didn’t work and they were apparently driving through hell. Francis sat in the middle, tucked awkwardly behind the seat belt, tail twitching, mouth parted as he panted away his anger and fear, and Edward gazed moodily out the window.
Since everybody’s shutting up, Harry prompted him, tell me what happened.
Edward glanced at him, arching an eyebrow. You first.
Harry shivered and stared outside again. A sign proclaiming they had two hundred miles before entering Las Vegas told him they were on I-15, heading east.
Vegas? He was dismayed but not surprised. It would figure Cass’s—or his boss’s—base of operations was in Vegas, since that’s where Cass had first gotten wind that the three boys he’d let escape more than a century ago were just as alive as he was.
Yeah. We lost Bel in Chula Vista—he saw the truck loading up and changed shape to go investigate. The guards were going to shoot him—
As a dog? Because only the most jaded of bad guys ever went after them in their animal form.
Yes—which tells you all you need to know. Francis shouted his name, they turned, and Bel changed into a goofy college kid, wondering where he was. They loaded him into a truck, and we followed.
What happened to the minivan?
You first. Edward didn’t sound like he was in the mood to play around.
What do you want me to say? For the first time since Harry had arrived to the rescue, he let the true import of that morning—coupled with the last few days—sink in.
But Edward surprised him. I want you to say you were happy.
Harry’s throat swelled, and his next breath was so labored, Francis slid out of the seat belt and rested his chin on Harry’s thigh.
“I was happy,” he said aloud, stroking Francis between the ears, the way he liked it best.
“Good,” Edward said, just loud enough to be heard. Happy enough to stay? And because they were mind to mind, without the wind and the engine noise and the general chaos, Harry could hear the pleading in his voice.
I promised him I would. I promised him I’d be stay alive so he could come back to earth and we could live side by side.
Good.
He looked over at his brother and saw Edward wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
And you, brother?
Edward’s mouth flattened. I am not prepared to accept defeat.
And then, because Harry wasn’t sure if Edward had known either…
Did you know about Bel and Francis?
Edward’s eyes widened, and he scratched Francis at the base of his tail. You little shit, he said to both of them.
Francis spread his paw pad and began to clean thoroughly, as though he had no idea what on earth Edward could be talking about.
I’m glad for you, Harry said for both their benefits. But you can’t let it get in the way of rescuing him, you understand?
Francis gazed at him, cross-eyed, not giving away a thing, and Harry flicked his nose.
Don’t be bitchy. We love you both.
Francis clawed the back of his hand, drawing it to his chest and kicking out with his back paws, until Harry scooped him up and held him fast against his chest. “Stop it,” he said aloud. “This isn’t going to change that we know. You’re going to have to be human for us, Francis—and that doesn’t mean changing in my lap.”
It’s ours, Francis said clearly in his head. He’s the only thing in my life that’s been just mine.
Harry sighed and rubbed his cheek against Francis’s whiskers. We don’t want him that way. We just don’t want to lose our brothers.
Francis went limp in his hold, and Edward reached out and stroked his flank as it drooped over Harry’s body. I’ve got my own demon lover, Francis. You’re welcome to a Labrador retriever, no worries.
Harry half laughed and rubbed his cheek against Francis’s again for good measure. So, he said deliberately. Are we going to tell me about the minivan?
Edward glared at Emma, who was driving like the SUV had offended her and she was trying to kill it.
