MULLINS HAD been born 300 years before the idea of a television had even been conceived. He’d never known the illicit joy that came with watching grown-up cartoons when parents thought their sweet little boy was watching SpongeBob, or of going to a friend’s house to see horror movies that had been expressly forbidden.
But working in hell, doing what he always did, which was laying low, and sneaking glimpses through Edward’s portal mirror, taught him that sometimes, watching something on a little screen could be just as absorbing as living it himself.
It wasn’t that Mullins was unaware of the peril he was in.
Vanth had never been found, and the buzz over where he’d been before he’d gone missing occupied the halls of hell for many weeks. Mullins was keenly aware that one trip to the Marketplace and somebody would place Vanth with the Youngbloods, and the jig would be up.
His only hope was to keep his countenance as serene as it had been since Leonard had left, his face as impassive, his emotions as tightly under lock and key as always.
At first he was terrified.
Menoch was dressing down the scribes of hell, choosing his daily victim, and Mullins—who knew logically that he must fall under the lash at least every eighteen months—was taken by surprise by the pounding of his heart, the sweat under his suit.
It was like unlocking his heart to hope, to the taste of Edward’s passion, had unlocked him to the fear that Leonard had helped him stomp to death in his first month in hell.
Fear only made the pain worse. The demon who was unafraid was the demon who would never truly sacrifice his soul.
So as he stood in line, trying desperately not to attract Menoch’s eye and knowing that desperation had its own stench that would draw Menoch even faster, he found himself remembering Edward’s hunting the day before.
The night in the desert had been beautiful—Mullins had been truly captured by that moment, but he hadn’t expected another that lovely.
The next day he’d been surprised to get a vista of pounding surf against black volcanic sand through the opening of a cave. The tide would eventually rise, blocking the entrance, but for that moment, he could see his family, even Suriel, searching about the sand very deliberately, on hands and knees, sifting every grain.
It was Harry who burst out in a characteristic temper. “Dammit, does anyone have a really ripping illumination spell that will help us find this goddamned grain of red sand before we go blind or drown or both?”
Suriel had stood as Harry was ranting, and spread his arms. Mullins had never really known what to think of Suriel, largely because he’d never been sure what Suriel thought of him. The two had only ever known of each other—until Suriel had fought for his own freedom from heaven, he and Mullins had never actually been in the same room.
It was the stories from the boys that gave them their grudging respect of the other. Harry always spoke so glowingly of Suriel to Mullins, and, Mullins was beginning to suspect, Edward had only spoken of the good of Mullins to Suriel. Over the past century and a half, the two beings who had never met had learned to trust each other as allies because they’d learned that the other one shared their singular devotion to the Youngblood family, one member in particular.
Fortunately, it had been a different favorite, or a terrible celestial conflict might have ensued—or even just hurt feelings and bitterness when the boys’ lives hinged on every family member working in concert.
So seeing Suriel in action these days, watching him quietly and competently taking care of things such as food, sleep, making sure everybody was wearing a jacket when it was cold or had water when it was warm, had given Mullins the same sort of protective feelings over Suriel that he’d developed for Beltane after he’d been born.
Not quite as deep as for the three original Youngblood boys, but that was only because he hadn’t known them as long.
In this particular instance, as Suriel stood apart from the boys, arms spread, Mullins was confronted with Suriel’s lack of… wings.
Suriel needed wings.
He’d known that Suriel had allowed them to be ripped off his back as penance for leaving the duties of bondage he’d given himself to for millennia, but the loss had been… intellectual for Mullins.
Now that he saw what appeared to mortals as a very beautiful man with long fire-gold hair spreading his arms as though to embrace all of humanity with compassion, he recognized the loss of wings on a gut-deep level and mourned, just as Edward had.
And then he gasped, because apparently, while the wings had been ripped away, not all of Suriel’s powers had suffered the same fate.
Suriel began to glow.
Subtly at first, and the quality of the light that came from his body made everything else in the cave as clear as cut crystal.
Every rock formation in the ceiling was revealed, some of them grotesque and some of them a tracery of limestone and lava. Every grain of sand was revealed, the obsidian black of them thrown into rainbow relief.
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.
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.