The Key

Chapter 35

Cas drops his hand. It falls to the bed like a dead weight, landing atop his half-folded wing. His eyes fall shut even faster. “Prince Samuel.”

“Yes.”

Eyes still closed, Cas rises lopsidedly, his right wing pushing him up to a sitting position. His bones audibly grind together, perhaps fusing together, perhaps being injured further. Long feathers splay and shift across the bed. Splinted, his left wing shifts as an awkward burden, not quite fitting between angel and bed. “Where’s-”

“He’s fine,” Sam says, pointing. Sweat shines on his face, and his finger slowly zigzags through the air. “He’s here.”

Head fighting to loll, Cas opens his eyes. They’re the natural dark blue Dan knows best, not the shining white-blue of his magic. They’re also unfocused and even more squinty than usual.

“Dan,” Cas says, staring, and then collapses back down so quickly Dan nearly goes to him.

“You saved us, he’s fine,” Sam promises. He shifts out of his half-kneel, instead sitting next to Cas’ splinted wing on the bed.

“Sam, move away,” King John orders. The archangel blade isn’t yet fully drawn, but it’s a close thing, especially after the grab to Sam’s hair.

“I’m fine here,” Sam says.

“I won’t tell you again,” King John says.

“Sammy,” Dan interrupts before Sam can shoot his mouth off. With that one snapped word, all of Cas’ feathers press down in a rippling wave of retreat. It’s bizarre and mesmerizing, and it takes Dan a second to add, “Put your shirt on.” Dan hands the garment to Jess, who rounds the bed in an instant.

As expected, when Jess holds it out, Sam offers no resistance. Standing behind Sam, Jess slides it up Sam’s arms, and she winks at Dan over Sam’s shoulder, as privy to Dan’s strategy as if Dan had actually told her.

“You don’t look as drained as you did the last time,” Jess says to her husband, “but I’d feel better if you laid down. Reviving two angels in two weeks is too much for anyone.”

Cas makes a faint noise, and it’s louder than anything else in the room. “Two weeks?”

“It’s May sixteenth,” Jess tells him. With a forgiving smile, she adds “You missed the wedding,” as if Cas had actually been invited.

“Congratulations,” Cas says, seemingly of his mouth’s own volition. He tries to lift his head again. His gaze wobbles from Sam and Jess to King John and Bobby without ever venturing toward Dan on his other side. “Your Majesty.”

“Seraph Casper,” King John replies.

“Your Majesty is looking well,” Cas says in an undisguised assault of manners.

“I cannot say the same of you,” King John replies with chilly formality. “Though your blood sigil didn’t treat you as poorly as it might have. Why is that?”

“I… don’t know,” Cas says.

It’s awful, how Dan still wants to believe him.

“Uh-huh,” Dan says instead. “Check your arm.”

Lying on his back, Cas reaches his left hand to his right forearm before seeming to realize his left hand is already full, the hilt of his blade fused with his palm. Frowning with his eyes, his feathers slowly flattening, Cas stares at the blade sunk into his forearm, holding his arm over his face. Slowly, with his right hand, he prods the blade. The line of it shines blue-white, matched by the abrupt blaze in his eyes. Moving against gravity, it sinks into him fully. Though the light fades from Cas’ eyes, his alertness visibly increases tenfold.

Again sitting up with the use of his right wing, this time with no grinding sounds and with his head held high, Cas flexes his bare arm. It makes a loud popping noise. “I still don’t…” He tilts his head. “...Ah.”

“You expect us to believe that was dumb luck?” Dan demands.

“I don’t expect you to believe most of it was,” Cas replies. He meets Dan’s gaze, but only for a moment, no defiance in it. There is more defeat in the lowering of his eyes than there was in every c***k of his breaking bones.

King John’s eyes burn into the side of Dan’s face, and Dan struggles to obey the unspoken order: he must not be swayed. Not by Cas’ words, not by the dignity of his pain, and not by the urging of his own body to hold Cas close until that pain stops.

Dan knows he’s failed when King John says, “Dan, your brother needs to lie down. Help him back to his rooms.”

“I have Jess,” Sam argues, still sweaty, still pale.

“Sam, don’t worry your wife,” King John orders without a trace of irony. “Dan. Now.”

“Sir,” Dan says. He pushes off the desk and rounds the bed to Sam, moving between King John and Cas to do so. He looks at neither of them, only Sam, the only way to make this manageable.

Sam, of course, looks three seconds away from putting up a fight, but Dan doesn’t expect anything else. Neither, apparently, does Jess. She loops her arm around Sam’s waist, and though he doesn’t lean into her, he doesn’t reject the support either.

“Thank you for bringing him back to me,” she tells Cas.

Cas nods, more tired than gracious. He keeps trying to shift his left wing, the feathers too long to let him sit up comfortably, the way it’s folded. The blatant motion turns both wings unreal, a once-convincing costume rendered uncanny. His coloring is still worse than Sam’s, and not just the bruise still haunting his face. He’s too pale all the way down his chest, a sallow bloodlessness that has nothing to do with skin tone. “Thank you for reviving me, Your Highness.”

“Sam,” Sam corrects, as good as spitting in their father’s face. “You save my life, you call me Sam.”

Squinting his confusion, Cas looks up at the sigils on the ceiling, the walls, the door. “An odd privilege to bestow upon a prisoner, but I thank you for it.”

The room goes quiet, but no one contradicts.

“Dan, your brother is still here,” King John says.

“Sammy,” Dan says, taking Sam by the shoulder.

“We’ll speak more later,” Sam promises Cas, like they’re suddenly friends now. Then, as if he hasn’t defied King John more in five minutes than Dan does in a year, Sam compounds it by turning to Dan and asking, seemingly of his own volition, “Dan, will you help me down the stairs?”

“Yeah, you got it,” Dan says.

Jess gets the door, and on the other side, Jo moves out of the way to let Sam and his cane pass. With the weight of Cas’ eyes pressing down on him, Dan refuses to look back, but his eyes don’t listen. His neck turns and his eyes seek, and there’s Cas. A fusion of nightmare and dream, drained and half broken, he sits shirtless on a bed, looking at Dan like the sight of him is the only thing keeping Cas alive.

Dan follows his brother out the door, and he orders Jo to close it behind them.

When Dan leaves, the world does not fade. No new disaster descends, and Casper gains no fresh physical injury.

And yet.

“I have questions,” King John says to him, “and it would be best if you had answers.”

Beside him, a man Casper tentatively recognizes as Sir Robert stands with his arms crossed. Though he wears a sword, it’s unlikely the blade could truly harm Casper, even in his weakened state. It is King John himself who serves as the threat, Dan’s blade—Michael’s—on his hip.

Casper’s reflexes are slowed. His mobility is hindered and his space to maneuver is sorely limited. His wings are once again bound, more securely than for the party, and even with Prince Samuel’s healing, he doesn’t yet risk moving them. Beyond the bed beneath him, he strongly doubts he can touch any other surface in this room. Manifesting his own blade would expend far too much of his grace, and it’s possible he’s not alert enough if all the dangers he sees are those of an outright attack.

Very possible.

Closer to certain.

He assesses: His head seeks to tilt. His eyes fight to close. His wings feel tender, full of aching joints and itching feathers. The faded shape of the banishment sigil still burns in his skin, irritated even without the covering of a shirt.

He shifts from an awkward position on his rear into a proper method of sitting, his legs folded beneath him, knees together, feet pointing back. The motion is far more difficult than it should be, and both humans look as if they want to back away when Casper’s right wing gives even a partial flap for balance. He leaves broken and cut feathers on the bed. A few more, pushed out by new growth, fall with the flapping.

Through these movements, his body tells him his injuries, though largely healed by Prince Samuel, are otherwise fresh. He only has Lady Jessica’s word that two weeks have passed, a strange detail in itself. Why wait two weeks to revive him? Prince Samuel’s own diminished condition, perhaps? But why keep his body so long instead of sending him back?

“The outcome of this mess hinges on whether I can trust you,” King John continues. “That trust depends on your truthfulness.”

When King John waits for an answer, Casper replies, “I understand, Your Majesty.”

Almost imperceptibly, Sir Robert nods. Quietly coaching Casper, or reinforcing King John’s demands?

The first of those demands: “Why did you come here?”

“To secure a tablet.” They must already know that much. He did ask Dan for it, explicitly.

“What does this tablet do?”

“It completes the second half of a ploy to combat Lucifer’s demons,” Casper replies with the safest phrasing he can muster. “We had thought the first half would banish Lucifer himself as well, but a loophole in the enchantment allowed him to remain in this world. Where is he?”

“You answer my questions,” King John states. “Not I yours. Again: what does this tablet do?”

“The first tablet banished angels and demons in equal measures of power, in opposite directions. Needing to hoist them into oblivion, we used ourselves as ballast. The second was meant to free us, and us alone, trapping the demons but returning us to the world we were born in and fought for,” Casper answers. “Our own banishment was meant to be perhaps an hour in length.”

He forces his mind away from the desperation of that day. The disorganization and the bereavements, the assumption that the return tablet had been carried by a freshly deceased angel and thus left behind by pure accident. Their horror. Their despair. All of it, perhaps, on Uriel’s shoulders. And so he forces his mind away.

He focuses his eyes instead, and he studies King John to the best of his limited ability. “But you already know this,” he concludes. “I told Sir Dan of the portal, and it should allow for some degree of communication.”

“It does,” King John agrees. The hard look to his eyes is at once identical to Dan’s and entirely different; there is nothing attractive to it. “It allows me to verify the truth of your answers.”

“Given that I have just woken from near death-”

“You will answer what I ask,” King John orders. “Did you come here to steal from us?”

“I came to reclaim what is ours,” Casper answers. “Though I do not have intricate knowledge of human property laws, I know the tablet is still ours, according to our own.”

“If your claim was legitimate, you would have made it directly,” King John counters. “Instead, you came here by use of subterfuge.”

“Within seven centuries, you forget us,” Casper says. “What direct claim is to be made when our existence itself is considered a claim, and an unfounded one?”

After combating an archangel, watching a human attempt to loom, even Dan’s father, is laughable. Unaware of Casper’s mental comparison, King John makes the attempt all the same. “Did you or did you not seek to infiltrate my castle?”

“I came by order of Archangel Raphael, under the invitation of Seer Shurley,” Casper answers. “I presented that invitation to your guards each night. If that is how you term infiltration, then yes, I infiltrated.”

“You approached my son to aid you in this theft.”

“I was approached by Your Majesty’s son,” Casper corrects.

“You used him,” King John states, landing the first solid blow. “Do you deny that?”

“I asked for his aid,” Casper replies, refusing to lower his eyes or duck his head. “I couched my request in euphemisms of humanity, but I did not lie to him and I did not force him.”

“You told him this stone tablet would unleash an army of powerful creatures upon our world?” King John demands.

“The night I met him, I informed Prince Dan there was a tablet that could return angels to this world,” Casper replies. “It was he who dismissed the idea.”

“And it was you who begged our resources under false pretenses,” King John replies. “Tell me, how am I to trust you? How am I to trust a species of you when all I have seen is the father of demons and a liar who would make my son a fool?”

The binding on his left wing grows tight as his feathers seek to flare. Control over his body too difficult, Casper focuses on control over his tongue. “Are you alive, or dead?” Casper demands in return. Sir Robert’s eyes grow wide in warning, but Casper persists. “Is the queen alive, or dead? Your sons? You may regard my dispute with Lucifer as separate from your own, but I did not need to save you.”

“I know damage control when I see it,” King John tells him. “I’ve had to do enough of it these past weeks because of you.”

“Without me or another angel in my place, you would be dead, and Lucifer would be growing strong off Prince Samuel’s vitality,” Casper continues.

“One happy coincidence does not repair a deliberate deceit,” says King John, and Casper knows the anger in the set of his jaw.

“Are you defending your kingdom or your son?” Casper asks.

“You answer my questions, seraph. Not I yours.”

“I have heard no questions, human,” Casper replies, tired and wounded as much with regret as injury. “I have heard accusations, and I have answered these. If you seek solutions going forward, I do not have the authority to negotiate on behalf of my people. If you seek the specific reasoning behind my orders, I can only presume to know it. But if you wish to know the rationale behind my actions and my actions alone, that I can answer.”

“You will keep a civil tongue,” King John orders.

“I awoke minutes ago from a fight to the death,” Casper reminds him. “Forgive me for a difficult transition.”

Sir Robert clears his throat.

Without looking to the other human, King John gestures for Sir Robert to speak.

“About that fight to the death business,” Sir Robert says. “The other angels say it might take Lucifer months to wake up from what you did to him, but they’re guessin’. How long would you say?”

Casper stares at him. He readjusts much more slowly than he should. He calculates with rough estimates, the simple mathematics of it as difficult as intricate enchanting. “No longer than two months. Had I been at full strength against his diminished state, it could have been as many as five. Perhaps six. No longer than that.”

Sir Robert hooks both thumbs into his belt. “Do you know how to find him?”

Casper shakes his head. “I imagine his demons are searching for him. I also imagine Her Majesty is using her talent to track the omens of their activities.”

“We already got that part,” Sir Robert confirms, nodding. “But you got nothing of his? Nothing we could use to track him down the way we did you.”

“You…” Casper remembers to frown with his face, for added clarity. “You ‘tracked me down’?”

“Blasted your fool self most of the way to the coast,” Sir Robert tells him.

For a moment, but only a moment, Casper’s mind stalls with questions of his own. Had the grace in his blood pushed against the grace in his blade? It’s the only explanation he can think of.

Instead of asking the humans their thoughts on the matter, Casper states, “Then you can use that distance to estimate how far Lucifer fell. He should be closer, perhaps significantly.”

“‘Perhaps,’ he says,” Sir Robert remarks to King John.

“If my body had stayed where it should have, I’d have a better estimate,” Casper explains. “But it’s likely the power that would have thrown him alone was lessened by throwing us both.”

Sir Robert simply nods. “It’s a smaller range than we had.”

“Your plan is to find him and slay him before he wakes,” Casper assumes, taking a significant look at the blade King John wears. “You would risk your own people rather than release us in exchange for our assistance?”

“To free you is to risk my own people,” King John states, a truth Casper would prefer not to admit to.

“My people, or me?” Casper asks. The humans’ current language doesn’t differentiate between plural or singular second person, and this is abruptly more irritating than it has the right to be. Conversing is difficult enough without these complications.

“Both,” King John says in the tone of a man stating the obvious.

He is.

“If it has already been two weeks, then you have six more before he wakes, at the very most,” Casper reminds the king. Needlessly, judging by the set of the human’s jaw. “I posit that we are a better risk than he is. You know how to ward against us. If you copied the sigil from my chest, you know how to throw us great distances. At present, the only member of my species who bears you ill will is the one we would aid you against.”

“At present,” King John repeats. “And when Archangel Raphael wishes to take my son?”

“Does he have cause to take your son?” Casper asks. He glances to Sir Robert, who seems to follow the conversation and therefore must already know of Prince Samuel’s ability.

“He has been asking questions,” King John says. “And so I ask you again: why should I risk another archangel taking my son?”

“In such a situation, Prince Samuel would be warded,” Casper states, having already seen the pattern on the shirt Dan had carried for his brother. His bones had grown heavy at the sight, thinking it belonged to Dan. “If he has refused to have himself tattooed for my sake, His Highness no longer need refrain. But if we can swiftly put an end to Lucifer, Archangel Raphael will have no cause to look to your son.”

“If you think to tell me that an angel with power does not seek further power, I need only point to Lucifer,” King John says.

“Lucifer is Archangel Raphael’s only match in strength,” Casper replies. He sits more heavily on his heels, and he fights the urge to roll his shoulders against the healing ache of his wings. “The only blades in existence that may kill him are Raphael’s and Sir Dan’s, the one you currently carry.” The distinction is important. It was Michael’s. It is Dan’s. It will not be King John’s.

Casper continues, “With Lucifer gone, to take a vessel to bolster his power would smack of insecurity, and for any other angel to attempt to take Prince Samuel would be a flagrant indication to usurp.” Unless another set of archangels are ready to hatch, Raphael’s power over Heaven should be undisputed. “Archangel Raphael would strike down that angel himself, in his own defense.”

“You will understand if I don’t take you at your word,” King John says.

“I promised Dan I would tell no one of Prince Samuel’s second talent,” Casper says. “I have not, and you have inquiries from Archangel Raphael to prove it. Perhaps my word is worth taking.”

Both of the humans watch him with their expressions shifted. The nuances are lost on Casper.

Sir Robert rocks forward on the balls of his feet and King John again indicates for him to speak.

“Odd thing for a spy to promise,” Sir Robert remarks.

“It would be, were I a spy,” Casper replies. “I seek to restore my people, not to destabilize yours.”

“For someone who just woke up, your speech is very fine,” King John says, his voice laden with mistrust. “One might even say practiced.”

“I had thought to apologize to your son, once my people were free,” Casper says, not lies. Even with his cowardice still burning inside him, even with his resolve to never see Dan again after the end of Prince Samuel’s party, it is not a lie.

Consideration is not the same as intention.

“And what exactly are you saying sorry for?” Sir Robert asks without securing the king’s permission.

“I encouraged his affections,” Casper says, at once admitting the obvious and confessing what he considers his only true crime. “I sought his assistance in my task and I could not risk losing that aid to rejection.”

“Just say you used him,” Sir Robert instructs. “It’s shorter.”

“I used him,” Casper agrees, and despite his exhaustion, despite the ache and the itch, he keeps himself steady. His feathers don’t flatten in fear or flare in defiance. He is in control.

“He deserves better,” Sir Robert says, as if daring Casper to disagree.

When Casper’s head ducks in shame, he turns it into a nod. His body wants to fall forward out of his kneel into a better position of rest, his wings spread to soak up the sun, but he cannot and so he does not.

“What kind of apology would you be willing to make?” Sir Robert asks.

“What apology are you asking of me?” Casper counters.

“There is a rumor,” King John says, “spreading through my kingdom. When you were lost and presumed dead, it was well enough in hand.”

“Then I will fly south under cover of night, and no one need know I live,” Casper replies, accepting whatever reputation it is that he has earned. Among humans, it will hardly last. “I have no business within Your Majesty’s kingdom. No true angel does with the lowlands.”

“You were hunted too visibly,” King John tells him. “Your recovery was too public.”

Casper settles back on his heels, his head c****d to the side. “Then what is this rumor?”

Standing tall, his face a treatise on human expressions of displeasure, King John states, “It is said that my son proposed to you.”

If Casper’s bones had grown heavy at the sight of Dan warded against him, that is nothing compared to what they do now. They are stone. They are metal. They are magnets in a world of iron.

His feathers stationary, Casper looks from King John to Sir Robert. He looks to King John once more. He looks to the blade on King John’s hip and at the fire in the mage king’s eyes at the question.

He gambles.

“I took the blade from Sir Dan,” Casper replies. “He did not give it to me.”

King John frowns with his shoulders as well as his face. He looms with the tempered anger of the dignified when mocked. “That is not what I asked you.”

Casper looks between the two humans again in mimicry of confusion. “You ask me if your son proposed, and I tell you he made no offer of his blade. It was not freely given. And I did not take in it some… overture. As I told you, an archangel’s blade is required to slay an archangel, and I knew it to be Michael’s when I touched it. That is all.”

The two humans look at each other, and back to Casper.

Casper continues, “If my fighting with his blade has been misconstrued… Is that why Your Majesty wears it now? To distance Sir Dan from it?”

“Angels propose by swapping swords,” Sir Robert half-says, half-asks.

“It’s how we wed, yes,” Casper replies.

“The king is asking,” Sir Robert says, “if Sir Dan proposed in the human way.”

“Wherein he would kiss someone else, and then me,” Casper says, as if needing to confirm.

“That would be it, yeah,” Sir Robert says.

“I observed him kissing no one that night, myself included,” Casper states truthfully, if not honestly.

“And yet the rumor persists,” King John says, “and has made its way into policy.”

Turning his head, Casper remembers to frown with his face. Like most movement, this causes pain, but as with most pain, he endures.

“Humans have ways of cementing treaties that I have learned angels do not,” King John continues. “If any agreement between us is to exist, I require collateral.”

“We have no material possessions,” Casper informs him. It is how humans barter, and Raphael is too proud to become a debtor.