Familiar Demon

by Amy Lane

  Edward bit his lip. “Uh…. Mullins speculated that he might be… uh… fey,” he said delicately. “And the flying thing—not so much human, you know?”

  Leonard raised both eyebrows. “No. No it is not. How does he fly? Does he change shape? Cast a spell? Use elemental forces to—”

  “Put his arms out to balance and levitate into the air?” Edward finished for him. It hadn’t been any less unnerving the fifteenth time they’d seen him do it as it had been the first. “He’s getting better, but you can tell there’s a learning curve.” He’d gotten over 200 feet up twice, and Edward had needed to throw a levitation spell at him to make sure he didn’t hit the ground. The second time, Bel had barked at him for ten minutes and then sulked for a good part of the afternoon, muzzle on paws, tail not thumping once. Francis had promised he wouldn’t go that high again until he got better.

  “That’s terrifying,” Leonard announced after careful consideration. “Lucky, you and Harry getting to help him through that.”

  Edward let out a careful breath. “So, so lucky.”

  Leonard winked, all compassion. “Well, luck in our family is a double-edged sword.” He gave a nod and got down to business. “So, we suspect Francis is fey and we know he and Bel are no longer brothers. And that could be both troubling and wonderful—but ultimately there’s nothing to do about it. They’re both adults. Technically, Francis is more than an adult, but we both know Bel’s the oldest in that relationship, so we won’t split hairs. If they’re not putting themselves in danger—”

  Edward glared.

  “—any more than usual,” Leonard acknowledged, “what’s to do? It would be wonderful if they made an announcement. ‘Mum, Dad, we’re married. Or seeing each other. Or need one of the bigger bedrooms with a king-sized.’ Emma and I aren’t particular. But until that moment, and even afterward, they’re ours. They will never not be ours, so we need to table that subject. Now tell me about the whole African savannah thing, because I find that fascinating.”

  Edward nodded and handed him the list, which he’d set on his bed stand. “Look at the last items.”

  Leonard ignored him and skimmed the other pages. “Aren’t you clever. The substitutions are perfect, by the way. Emma had to do substitutions for my hex bags as well—but she… well, putting them on the list and changing things just never occurred to her. It’s one of the problems of genius, I think. You don’t understand why the world can’t read your mind. Anyway, all this looks normal—and your interpretations of why the ingredients are needed will help you write your own spell. Didn’t know you needed that, did you?”

  Edward looked uncomfortable. “No. We didn’t hear Emma cast one out loud.”

  “All up in her pretty little head, my boy. Never underestimate your mother’s mind. Anyway—you and Mullins will need to have a long talk about what you’ll need to….” He lowered his voice. “It’s not a spell, really.”

  He just let that hang there, and Edward stared at him expectantly.

  “And?”

  “Son, you… of the four of my children, you will know best what it needs to be. Harry was Harry—he picked his one path and charted a straight course. Bel and Francis were simply… themselves. But you have loved and lost. You know what it is to have something important taken from you.” Leonard’s eyes grew shiny. “Losing Dorothy, so soon? We all suffered then, but of course, you most of all. So you’ll know what it needs to be when the time comes to say it. But it’s not a spell. Not really. I heard Emma’s words in my heart of hearts. They’re written there for eternity, in fire and blood. Call it a spell if you have to—but know that it’s more.”

  Edward nodded and swallowed. All the things he wanted to say, all the things he’d thought for so long—those were weighty things, painful, minutely revealed truths about what it was to bind one person to another. He could not say them out loud, not if he had an eternity.

  But he could say them in his heart, and that, apparently, was what needed to be done.

  “So,” he said after a heartbeat. “About the elven king—”

  Leonard gave a brief smile. “That, son, is your mother’s story. She had those three hairs with her when we met, and I was not allowed to ask. But she’ll tell the lot of you tomorrow, I’m pretty sure. What really troubles me is these new ingredients. They’re… they’re here deliberately. And they… they don’t fit into the spell, exactly.”

  “Well, they’re both rare things,” Edward said, but there was something nagging him about that too.

  “Yes, but not that rare. I mean, they exist in nature, a few every generation. Pretty much everything else on this list is bloody impossible, unless you’ve got four wizards and an angel on your side, you think?”

  Edward had to nod. “Yes… and these things don’t have anything to do with being a demon, do they?”

  “That’s it!” Leonard half leaped out of his chair and then settled back down. “I am not young anymore,” he muttered. He and Emma presented themselves as being in their forties—apparently just when humans began to realize their bodies would not be young eternally. “But no. They don’t. But they do seem to fit together. Both rare animals, and… I know this is odd, but I keep thinking sword and sheath. Staff of power, thing to hold it. Something along those lines. The rhinoceros is the warrior—always has been. But the snake is stealth, feminine logic, calculation.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Edward burst out. “It’s a… a joke? A message? For me!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Harry always calls me a worrier princess. It’s… it’s like this thing is… a gift?” No. There was nothing about this that said “gift,” was there? Except the word kept ringing in his head. “It’s a gift for me,” he said softly. “That’s got to be it. Who would give me a gift of magic artifacts that we almost get killed hunting down?”

  “I don’t know,” Leonard said softly. “Maybe Mullins would.”

  Edward grunted and rubbed his temples. “I seriously doubt it—he was the one who told me they weren’t on the list.” And he’d been pretty freaked out about it too. “My head hurts,” he said grumpily. He’d finished his sandwiches—it wasn’t hunger. “What time is it?” They’d been kiting around the globe—and beyond—and Edward had no idea how long it had been since they’d last slept.

  Leonard rolled his eyes and took the tray from him. “Sleep, son,” he said, his voice vibrating with the slightest, oldest magic in the world.

  Edward toppled to the bed before he could even get angry.

  Wanderful

  MULLINS SAT in his cell, not even pretending to work, and stared hungrily at the little mirror in his hand.

  The first message that had scrawled across it had been, “Do you want us to summon you?”

  Of course he did.

  He yearned to be summoned. Over the past 140 years, being summoned to the Youngblood living room had kept him sane, reminded him repeatedly that under the trappings of a beast beat the heart of a human being.

  Seeing Edward had started as a bonus, at first. A pretty young man, intelligent, easy to talk to. Intense. Kind. Sober.

  And then, that moment after Dorothy, when Edward had seen him truly, had touched him, had told him that there wouldn’t be another mortal lover. Edward was holding out for Mullins himself.

  And Edward had become more than a “bonus.” He’d been Mullins’s reason to keep existing in hell.

  Some demons—the ones who refused to find glee in inflicting pain—simply shorted out. Mullins had seen it happen. They subsisted, day after day, resigned to the next beating, to the next order, to the next painful act of defiance that would keep their soul their own, and then they just….

  Pfft.

  Disappeared.

  Soul and all.

  Nobody even noticed they were gone.

  Mullins had taken to scratching their names on the various outcropping rocks in his cell, just because somebody should remember them.

  He’d started when he first arrived,
when Leonard had told him, sotto voce, not to say anything—Leonard had scars on his back to this day from the one time he had.

  Leonard had started taking down the names of the ones he’d seen so that Mullins had a more accurate count.

  For the months after he’d helped Leonard and before his first summoning, the only thing that had kept Mullins from becoming one of the truly damned had been the knowledge that if he disappeared, nobody would even scratch his name on the stones.

  So yes—oh God yes—Mullins wanted to be summoned.

  But they were close. So close. And demons still wandered past his cell, sniffing, saying things like, “Merlot? No—chardonnay! No… pinot noir….”

  Edward’s love had settled under his skin, become part of his blood, even. One more trip to the Youngblood’s living room and Mullins would never be able to return to hell, and unless they were ready to go, had the hex bags in his knapsack, he feared bringing the hosts of hell on his heels and into the Youngblood home.

  Not yet, he replied on the mirror. Just keep me in the loop.

  Can you cast a spell to listen?

  Oh. That was…. Mullins closed his eyes and thought, writing the spell, erasing it, again and again, to make it perfect, silent, like a set of magic earbuds, listening to the movie on the little mirror.

  Done.

  “Okay, he can hear us,” Edward said, his voice in sync with his mouth as he set the mirror on a window ledge. He set up a couple of mirrors feeding into the mirror so that Mullins had a panoramic view of the Youngblood living room.

  Very clever, Mullins scrawled across the mirror, and Edward looked directly at him and grinned, then bowed with a flourish.

  Oh gods, Mullins missed him.

  “You know he’s the cleverest,” Harry said, and Mullins spared a glance for Edward’s brother.

  Harry looks like hell. Will he have time to rest?

  Harry rolled his eyes and tried to sit up a little straighter. He looked pale and thin, as though boomeranging around the world was a heavy-duty spell that even Emma took time out to rest from, and he’d been doing it several times a day. “If this little search party ends up on a faerie hill, I’ll sleep in the bloody car,” he snapped. “No way I’m missing that!”

  Mullins fought a smile, and Edward winked at him. “Told you,” he said mildly.

  Have Emma teach you to boomerang.

  Edward’s face fell. “Not for this mission,” he said, obviously put out. “Everybody’s afraid the mirror will pull me toward you. But once we get you back, I’ll make it a priority. Now we need to make this quick, because you don’t have that much time. Leonard, do you want to tell him what we talked about?”

  Leonard stood up then and moved to the center of the room so Mullins could have a good look at him. Gah! Middle-aged fatherhood looked good on his old friend and protector. Mullins had seen it many times in the past century and a half, but now, as he grew sharp and purposeful and brilliant, Mullins blessed his luck that he’d fallen under the protective wing of the one decent demon in hell.

  “So,” Leonard said with a little smile, “we have almost everything on the list—including a couple of things that weren’t there originally. We’re short the three hairs from the elven king—and Emma will talk about that shortly, but first, let’s talk about the things that got added.”

  Who added them?

  The question had been bothering Mullins like an abscessed tooth.

  “We haven’t the slightest,” Edward said, sounding irritated. “But given that was the mission that got Harry shot, I’d like to have a few words.”

  “So would I,” Suriel said, and for once he sounded far from serene.

  “I’m fine.” Harry glanced over at Beltane then, who was sitting cross-legged, Francis purring in his lap. “You two, go fetch those last two items. You’re the ones who had them with you when we landed.”

  Bel nodded, and Francis spilled out of his lap. Together they sauntered off toward the bedroom.

  “And don’t dawdle!” Edward called after them, and everybody exchanged uncomfortable glances as “dawdle” assumed a completely different meaning.

  “Good idea,” Leonard said quietly, and Emma just shook her head.

  “So Leonard and I were trying to figure out why these two items,” Edward continued. “And the conclusion we came to was that they don’t have anything to do with the demon potion, but they do have some sort of significance.”

  “We think they become a wand,” Leonard told him shortly, and Mullins wasn’t sure his expression could convey his surprise.

  I’m sorry?

  “Here, son—give me that.”

  Beltane came back from the hallway and handed his father the snakeskin, looking so virtuous, Mullins wondered if they’d had time to have sex in the brief moments they’d been out of the room. Francis came right behind him and was reaching into a satchel, pulling out the horn as Leonard took the skin.

  “So what we have here is a sword and sheath,” Leonard said, “Male and female, staff and cover—”

  Francis and Beltane burst into laughter, and Leonard pinned them with a dad-glare.

  “Say it,” he told them, sounding bored. “Come on—your inner twelve-year-olds are dying to say it.”

  Their laughter faded abruptly.

  “Not if you’re going to take the fun out of it,” Beltane muttered resentfully.

  “It was really much funnier before he said that,” Francis agreed.

  Leonard gave Mullins one of those equal-to-equal, long-suffering looks, straight through the mirror, and Mullins didn’t even try to fight his smile. God, he loved them. All of them. So much. He wanted with all his heart to be in that room.

  “And what we figured,” Leonard continued, working hard to keep the corners of his mouth from turning up, “was that we’d let the items function as intended.”

  “Really?” Bel perked up. “You’re going to have hard-core rhino-anaconda coitus, right here in this very living room?”

  Francis burst into laughter, rolling on his back, and every other adult in the room looked horrified.

  Right up until Harry gave a tired snicker. “Oh my God—I’m glad someone else said it.”

  “You are so immature,” Edward snapped, but he was fighting not to grin too.

  “Fine,” Leonard told them, obviously disgruntled. “Oh, baby, baby, do it like that, make me feel good, put the rubber on the staff and wield it!”

  All of them collapsed—all. Suriel, Harry, Edward—even Emma smirked and hid it behind her hand. It didn’t help that Leonard was rolling the snakeskin over the horn—all nine or ten inches of it—as he spoke. He made a few suggestive thrusts and finished covering the “sword” with the “sheath.”

  Abruptly, the rhino horn and the snakeskin ceased to be.

  In their place was a staff, stiff and unyielding, but covered with the soft, silkily plated skin and flesh of a truly magnificent albino snake.

  Leonard stared at it, and the rest of the family stopped their own antics, attention firmly on the relic in front of them.

  “Ouch!” Leonard dropped it suddenly, shaking his hand.

  “Please tell me it didn’t bite,” Edward said, drawing closer.

  He extended his hand tentatively, as though drawn to the thing, and Mullins felt a wave of outright need swamp his body. He reached to the mirror, feeling the staff pulsing through the glass.

  “No,” Leonard replied. “It just got… hot. Uncomfortable. Is it hot for you?”

  The family’s attentiveness to this new development could be measured by how not a soul in the room laughed at the easy bait.

  “No,” Edward said thoughtfully, taking the thing by the middle. He tossed it lightly from hand to hand, frowning in concentration. “It feels… living. Like it has a will of its own,” he murmured. “Like there’s power just pulsing under the… skin.”

  “Well, those were pretty powerful artifacts,” Harry cautioned. “But if it wants you to hold it, I’m not g
oing to argue. Anything else it wants you to do? Conjure a new minivan? Order takeout? Can it do a boomerang for us?”

  What happened to the minivan? Mullins scrawled. Dear God, Emma—will you be able to get a new one? Edward?

  Edward was pointing the staff directly at the mirror. “What will happen,” he mumbled. “What will happen if I….”

  And then the end of the staff bridged the gap between hell and earth, and popped out of Mullins’s mirror and tapped him on the chest.

  Mullins grabbed it in sheer surprise, and Edward gave a shout and yanked.

  Mullins kept hold of the mirror with all his strength in one hand and clung to the staff with the other, and Edward used a thing that should not be to turn reality inside out.

  Mullins slid through the mirror like coming through a waterfall, ending up on the Youngblood’s living room floor and dropping the mirror to the rug.

  “Oh Good Lord,” Leonard breathed. “Mullins, is that you?”

  Mullins squinted at him in confusion, and then Edward, his boy, launched himself into Mullins’s arms. “Mullins!” he sobbed. “Oh Lord. I missed you so bad!”

  Mullins wrapped shaky arms around Edward’s shoulders and bent to kiss his forehead.

  His very human lips made contact, and for the first time he tasted the sweetness of Edward’s skin without disguise or magic between them.

  “Sweet,” he croaked, shaking. “So sweet. Everything I dreamed it would be.”

  Then Edward raised his face and Mullins took his mouth, falling into the taste of the man he loved.

  It was glorious.

  THE KISS had to end—it had to. But for a few brief moments, Mullins remembered… everything. Human emotions. Love without fear. The joys of unfettered flesh. He moaned slightly, his groin tingling, growing heavy, and that attention made him aware of one more thing.

  He pulled back and grimaced.

  “What?” Edward asked, sounding dazed. His green eyes were heavy-lidded, his pupils blown with passion, and his cheeks blotched, freckles standing out clearly against the pale patches. With his mouth—plush pink lips—swollen and red, he was all that was gorgeous about lust.