by Amy Lane
“I’m not sure if I can return the favor,” Edward said, depressed. He’d kissed Mullins—had savored it, had wanted more. But they had what? Two more months? Four more months? Before they saw each other again?
Once, they’d gone four years.
It felt like a lifetime, and Edward wasn’t ready to wait a lifetime, not when he’d just decided to be with Mullins now!
“Probably not,” Harry said practically. “But maybe, if we use a little, I dunno, magic, we can make it easier to fix a mirror to be ready for him. So, you know, like buying a phone so he can text us.”
Edward looked at his brother in admiration. “That’s really a good idea! So, like, things of Mullins that will make the mirror more accessible.” Edward had a few things. Thread from the frayed cuff of his customary suit. A whisker that he’d shed over fifty years ago, that Edward had tucked in his pocket for luck. Once, when they’d been practicing spellwork outside, Mullins had looked in fascination at some California poppies and told Edward that, where he came from, they were much bigger, lusher blooms. Edward had plucked one—it hadn’t been illegal then—and presented it to Mullins in jest, in a sad effort to flirt, and told him that these flowers were for his memories of the Youngbloods alone.
Mullins had inhaled the scent delicately and then handed the flower back to Edward with his customary faint smile.
“That’s kind, my boy, but I shall have to trust it to you for safekeeping. It wouldn’t do well in my cell.”
Edward had kept that too—had kept all of the small mementos of Mullins in a carefully hand-carved box made for him by Paul, the first lover he’d dared to take long term.
He’d asked himself, once, if it was fitting to keep the mementos of one man in the keepsake of another, and in the end, he’d decided that it was. He and Paul had spoken a few times about Edward’s long life, and Paul had mourned more for Edward than for himself. He’d wanted Edward to find lasting happiness—and had worried, rightly, at how hard the grieving would be on Edward’s heart.
The box was a promise of sorts, that Edward would more than love again. He would eventually find love eternal.
If he were to truly honor his first love, he would trust Paul to safeguard the treasures of his heart.
Edward pulled the thing from a hidden pocket of his canvas rucksack and dug some more for one of three mirrors he kept for various scrywork.
“A pink compact,” Harry said dryly. “Very stylish.”
“The compact keeps it safe,” Edward said mildly. This particular compact also had a little compartment in the back—meant for a makeup sponge or a tissue, Edward assumed. He opened that and added three of his Mullins treasures. Then he put the rest back into Paul’s box before fitting it into the pocket.
Then he closed his eyes, summoned his stylus, and focused his will. Speak and your words will show.
He gave a little push of will, his words became permanent on the oak gall and parchment, and the compact glowed for a moment—as, hopefully, did the one Edward knew for a fact Mullins carried in his pocket for use in spellcasting.
Edward opened it up to look in the mirror and gasped.
He could see.
“Oh my God, Harry, look!”
Harry braked hard, just as they came to the exit from the Youngblood property to the seafront highway that would take them to the next step in their quest.
“Ouch!” Suriel gasped from the seat behind them. Beltane and Francis—who were in the far back seat—yelped and mrowled. Harry looked back apologetically.
“Sorry, guys, but Edward said ‘Look!’ and I didn’t want to drive us off a cliff!”
“Of course,” Suriel told him. “It would never be intentional.”
“I’m going to vomit,” Edward muttered. “Harry, are you looking?”
Harry looked over his shoulder and gasped. “Oh… Mullins.”
Mullins didn’t discuss the bowels of hell often. In fact, he had a number of verbal tricks to neatly dodge the subject should it ever come up. But there, reflected in the glass, was an image none of them could escape.
Mullins, cross-legged on a clean white bed, in a tiny cave, the rocks that made up the walls jutting out like razors. The darkness around him was choking—even through the small mirror he was apparently holding up to look at—and his discomfort could be felt through the image itself. Edward wasn’t sure if it was a real, physical thing, or if it was simply the psychic residue of so much pain in such a place, but the razored rocks around him seemed to be dripping and crawling with blood.
Slowly, as though alerted by a sound, Mullins went from squinting at the mirror in puzzlement and gazing straight into Edward’s eyes. Edward bit his lip. He looked so vulnerable—so lonely.
Across the mirror came a stately cursive. Very clever. The words disappeared, to be replaced with It grew warm in my pocket. Handy. Those words disappeared after a moment, replaced by I’ll check in on your progress when I can.
Edward summoned his own stylus, and across the mirror, in Edward’s blocky print, appeared I will try to show you beauty.
Mullins’s eyes widened in surprise, and then he gave a beast’s grimace.
Someone’s coming.
Edward shut the mirror quickly and shoved it in his rucksack.
“Can I go now?” Harry asked after a moment of Edward trying to control his breathing.
“He looked… awful,” Edward said, although there had been no mark upon him. It was hard to read past the pig’s snout and the horse’s forehead and the ram’s horns—but even the darkness of hell, the beastly features, and the distance of magic couldn’t obscure the fact that Edward could still see the human eyes.
“Tired,” Harry said softly, surprising him.
“How could you see that?” For a moment, Edward felt betrayed—Mullins had always been Edward’s.
“Edward, do you love Suriel?”
Edward blinked. “Of course.” Suriel had been a beloved family member, a much older brother or a young uncle.
“Does seeing him without his wings pain you?”
Oh. He had to close his eyes and swallow. In the months since Suriel had slid through the fabric of time and space from heaven into Harry’s bedroom, back bleeding from the lashes of heaven, the scars of his absent wings still healing, none of them had been able to see the lack of that vast chaperone behind Suriel without feeling an empty wound.
“Of course.”
“We all love him. You just want to….”
Edward had to laugh. Harry’s face—oh, his brother didn’t blush often, but it was almost worth the price of admission.
“For which I’m reassured,” Edward said dryly. “Okay. So I get it. You’re not just doing this for me.”
“Nope. The sooner you and Mullins have your own cabin on the property, wafting bursts of sulfur and wine, the happier I’ll be. Our friend is in hell, Edward.”
“Let’s get him back.”
Harry held his hand out for a fist bump, and Edward didn’t leave him hanging.
“Okay, here we go. Everybody ready for the boomerang?” Harry had been practicing sending more than one person—or a large object—including himself, into space for the last two months while Edward had been sneaking off to go on his hunt. Harry did have his own little ways of preparing for a challenge.
Beltane whimpered and Francis hissed, and Edward closed his eyes. “Let us know when we’re on the ground, okay? You sure you know where we’re going?”
“Of course I do—you remember that stretch of highway near Coos Bay?”
“The one with the blackberry bushes almost completely obscuring the road?” On the one hand, it was brilliant—if the minivan just appeared on a deserted country road, odds were good the van could just keep going on the road with no problems whatsoever.
On the other hand, it was madness, because what if someone was there. You’d just drop out of the heavens onto their car or their horse or their bare-assed crunchy skull!
“Yeah, that’s th
e one.” Harry checked the rearview mirror and sighed when he saw lights. “Dammit! What’s the use of leaving at o-dark-thirty when fucking tourists are going to dog me?”
“But Harry, how do you know someone won’t be there!” This stretch of road had been deserted even in the daylight until twenty years ago. Now the cows that fed there were frequently disturbed by cars driving too damned fast.
“Because I’ve taken precautions,” Harry muttered, glowering as the car geared up to pass them. Harry had pulled back on the speed to force this maneuver, but Edward was pretty sure that irritated him too.
Harry didn’t like to lose.
“Precautions.” Oh Lord. That could be anything, from a spell dissuading any traveler from lingering in the area to a dragon who would eat them if they did.
“Oh my God, you’re a worrier princess!” Harry burst out. “Just sit there, shut up, close your eyes, and hold on!”
There was a collective grunt as the entire car was encompassed in a wave of vertigo, and then a thump, like they’d just gone over a speed bump. The car swerved hard, and Edward opened his eyes to see Harry wrestling with the wheel, struggling valiantly to keep the car on a properly deserted road.
“Edward!” Harry gasped as they went up on two wheels around a particularly sharp curve. “If you could maybe—”
Edward centered himself and muttered Grow ever on and on in Latin, and two things happened.
The first was that the road spread before them, wider, straighter, better paved than any stretch of it for a hundred miles.
The second was that the blackberry bramble began to spiral out of control, like Jack’s beanstalk except more inimical to the paintjob on Emma’s brand new Honda Odyssey.
“Dammit!” Edward burst out, trying to control the road before it spread off the side of the cliff they were heading for. “Francis, a little help with the fucking bush!”
A bubble of space appeared around the car—fortunately not under the wheels—and as Harry rocked the car back to a smooth passage on the road, Edward managed to make both the sudden advance of tarmac and the writhing bushes themselves recede.
“Whew,” Edward said, feeling the panic sweat seep through the pit of his sweatshirt.
“Bloody marvelous!” Harry cackled. “I can’t believe that worked!”
“What did you do!” Edward couldn’t see a car in either direction for maybe ten miles.
“Oh—that? I put out detour signs and illusions of road construction that just bypassed a good ten-mile stretch of road. Looped right around some pot farmer’s territory and gave us room. It was the landing I was worried about, but you two just stepped right up! Good job!”
Edward let out a groan, and behind him Francis did the same.
“I’m going to kill him,” Francis said, in that frighteningly alert way he had when he was about to pounce on someone in human form.
“You can’t,” Edward told him practically. “For one thing, he’s driving. For another, he’s the only one with that damned spell. If we don’t go bouncing around the planet in this damned minivan, this quest will take us years!”
“Years?” Beltane said, sounding as though he’d been awakened from a sound sleep. “That’s no good. Mum said I have to go back to Oxford in two months!”
Francis let out an unhappy grunt, and Edward didn’t have to look into the back seat to know he’d changed form.
“It’s not going to take years,” Harry muttered. “I don’t think it can.”
“What do you mean?”
Harry settled into the driver’s seat now that the car wasn’t going to buck them off the twisting highway and into the pounding surf below.
“Okay—you went to talk to Mullins, and I’m sure it was all very tortured and him trying to be noble and you trying to be practical and both of you thinking you want sex and neither of you actually saying anything—”
“Oh God—get out of my head, you pervert, it’s like you were there!”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I know you, brother. Deal with it. But the thing is, neither of you talked about the demon we had to chase from the Market, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t mention it if he had to kill the thing and bury what was left.”
Edward thought of the times he was pretty sure Mullins had gone above and beyond in his attempts to protect the brothers and murmured, “I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t either.”
“Well, see? That only proves what I’m trying to tell you. Hell could be positively buzzing with where the demon went, and we don’t know if the fucker told anybody what he’d seen, and frankly, Mullins has a hard enough time keeping his head down as it is.”
Edward nodded glumly. This wasn’t news. Leonard spoke sparingly of his time in hell, but when he did speak, there was always a punishment involved for dodging out on the commands. They couldn’t kill a demon for refusing to kill or seduce somebody—but they sure could torture them.
Leonard said frankly that he’d given in for a span of years.
But he had held firm again when Mullins came to hell. He’d never said why, but Edward had always figured it was because Mullins had been cheated into hell—every bit of lore he’d read spoke of slick-tongued demons who would trap a human with even their purest emotions.
“I have the feeling he’s hurt a lot,” Edward rasped, hating that.
Harry’s hand on his shoulder reassured him. Suriel had endured his share of torture to visit the Youngbloods as well—watching someone suffer for your love was about the hardest thing to endure.
“Me too. But see? That only proves my point—they don’t like him already. Either that little bug spy spilled the beans or Mullins got him first, but either way, they’re going to be more suspicious than usual. We need to keep the mirror trick to once a day—at the most—or he’s going to get caught looking for us, and not only will he have to suffer the consequences, but we will be contending with the hosts of hell and we won’t be able to help him.”
Edward swallowed. “Do we have a time? A limit? A—”
“Jesus, stop it. I can’t quantify fucking hurry, and neither should you! We go as fast as we can and be as careful as we can and contact Mullins as little as we can—”
“Maybe I should just throw the mirror away!” Edward began to search his rucksack, appalled, as both Harry and Suriel snapped, “No!”
Edward stopped. “Why not?”
“It gives you both hope,” Suriel said softly. “Oh, Edward. You had a front row seat to Harry and I. You must assuredly know how important hope can be.”
Something in Edward’s chest settled then. “Hope,” he said quietly.
“Yes, hope.”
Okay. Edward could hope.
TWO HOURS later, he was hoping he didn’t fall to his death.
“What are we getting here again?” Harry called up to him, one hand clasped firmly around Edward’s wrist while the other scrabbled for purchase on a cliff face over the Oregon coast.
Edward was hanging upside down from his knees so he had a better grip on Harry’s arm, and he had to concentrate over the blood rushing in his head.
“An eggshell from a black oystercatcher’s nest on a cliff,” he yelled.
“Why a cliff?” Bel called from his place securing Edward’s legs so he didn’t fall.
“Because….” Edward clapped both hands around Harry’s wrist as Harry tried to find his footing. “The spell called for a thing of seabird in the air, an old thing from the young, one who watches over instead of dwells in the crowd.” Edward practically had the poetry memorized by now. “These birds make their nests down among the rocks!”
“Not this one,” Harry muttered with grim satisfaction. “Let go, Edward, I’m going to need both my hands.”
“Secure your piton,” Edward gritted.
“Do you really think—”
“Secure yourself, idiot! My head’s gonna explode!”
“Fine.” Harry took his hand back and pulled his piton and his hammer out, then slung the rope at hi
s waist through the carabiner on the piton, and then wrapped the end around his arm. Thus secured, he grunted at Edward, who allowed Beltane to hoist him, feet first, up over the cliff.
Of course Bel let him dangle for a minute once he had Edward to a safe patch of grass.
“Nice, dumbass,” Edward grumbled, arms extended so he could catch his fall on his hands. “You’re a foot taller than all of us. Must be nice to be born in the twentieth century.”
“Twenty-first,” Bel said happily, setting Edward down so he could execute a neat tumble. “I mean, it’s close enough. In a couple thousand years, who’s going to care about such a pittance?”
“Is Harry back?” Suriel asked, turning from a cat as he walked with Francis at his heels. They’d been on watch for any other visitors to the overlook—or at least that’s where Harry had asked him to serve. Edward was pretty sure it had been a ruse to keep the two of them from seeing the dumb-shit thing the three of them had just done.
Francis, at least, was not fooled. He hissed, pulled himself upright, and spat.
“Did you think we wouldn’t see that? Not one of you thought to learn how to fly?”
Bel and Edward exchanged looks. “We can’t fly,” Bel said logically. “There’s whole texts about how wizards and witches don’t have the power to fly. Sorceresses, yes. Wizards, no. I’m not sure why.”
Suriel looked carefully, neutrally, over Edward’s shoulder, and Edward narrowed his eyes.
“This is one of those God/Goddess things, isn’t it?” he asked. “And other. There’s a rule here we don’t know about. Like, God’s children can’t fly but Goddess’s can?”
“Hm, I’m going to go check on Harry,” Suriel said, as though he hadn’t heard.
“I can fly,” Francis said, because couldn’t everybody?
“Really?” Bel didn’t sound jealous, even a little. “Show us! Then you can go help Harry.”
Francis took a deep breath and held his arms out as though to balance, and then ascended slowly into the air. “It doesn’t feel like other magic,” he hollered, his white-blond hair a furious tornado around his head.
