The Key

Chapter 27

“You gonna fly away while you still can?” Dan goads. The reach of his blade is too short, the reach of Lucifer’s wings too long. If Lucifer comes at him with more than two limbs at once, Dan’s lost. Making Lucifer afraid to risk his wings is Dan’s only bet. “Took you long enough to get those bad boys back, be a shame if you wrecked them now.”

Almost lazily, Lucifer stretches out a hand, and Dan goes flying. He braces for a fall to his death but instead smacks into the tower door, his head striking the stone wall above that stubborn wood. Years of fighting ghosts has trained his grip, but though he still clutches the blade tight, he can’t move his arms enough to use it. He can’t move anything. His clothes dig into his skin, and his ribs force the breath from his lungs.

“It would be a shame,” Lucifer agrees, approaching with four deliberate steps, hand still outstretched. He looks down to Dan’s left where Sam still lies prone, motionless beneath the shield. “You only warded it against angels. Good.”

“What?” Dan taunts, using up more air than he truly has. If he could only move his legs, he’d be at the perfect height to kick Lucifer right in the crotch. “You gonna fly in some demons to help you?”

Lucifer shakes his head as if Dan’s told a passable attempt at a joke. “This castle is too well warded to bring in a demon. No.” Another shake of the head. He does something strange, then, and slides his own blade up his sleeve. There’s another faint light, different from that of bleeding, and the blade is gone.

Smiling slightly, unnervingly calm and willingly unarmed, Lucifer pulls off his gloves and tucks them into his pocket. He reaches up with his left hand and wraps cold fingers around Dan’s neck. He doesn’t squeeze, but it’s more than enough to know that he could. “No, Dan,” he continues, deliberately neglectful of title. “I have a demon right here.”

Held high against the one full-sized wall around the observatory, Dan can see everything. The castle. The city beyond, sprawling in all directions out into their kingdom. Cas, bleeding light on the floor and still fighting to rise. And Sam, Sam most of all, hurt and drained and unconscious. Everything Dan’s human heart cares about.

“I’m burning the door down!” Jo yells, muffled behind him.

“I’m on the door!” Dan yells back, as much as he’s able. Still smiling faintly, Lucifer permits him that much air.

“Only for a minute,” Lucifer promises, calm and level, a tutor with an amusingly misbehaving charge. “And then you’re going to lift that shield, kill the seraph, and return my brother’s sword to me. Do you understand?”

“I understand you’re full of bullshit,” Dan shoots back, and the pain begins.

It begins.

And begins.

And begins.

There is no end to it, only fresh waves that sear across his entire skin before consolidating over his heart. They burn and blaze, a twisting heat that fights to break out of his chest, that strives to burrow inside it. The heat rises, but darkness rises faster.

When Dan can again see, his throat is raw. His skin is tight and his chest still burns, branded in a circle over his heart. Gasping for air, he discovers that the only perk of passing out while facing a clock tower is knowing exactly how long he was out. It wasn’t even a minute, but it feels a thousand years.

“Strange,” Lucifer remarks, frowning at last. Releasing his hold on Dan’s neck, he runs his hand over Dan’s chest. When his fingers land over the anti-possession tattoo, he smiles, somehow sensing it even through Dan’s layers. “So that’s the problem. Easily fixed.”

Lucifer flexes his hand, drops his arm, and when he lifts his hand, he again holds his blade. With the tip, he draws a line from Dan’s neck to the tattoo, and Dan’s jacket and shirts part easily beneath it. In what must be his excuse for bedside manner, Lucifer pulls back the cloth from Dan’s tattoo. Unrushed, unhurried, he presses the side of the blade against Dan’s pectoral, ready to flay off the tattoo in one stroke.

“Time to cut it out,” Lucifer tells him.

“That’s a stupid f*****g joke,” Dan says.

Lucifer shrugs slightly, wings rising and falling, and over that wave of white and pearl, Dan sees Cas lift himself up. Wings still down, lower body motionless, Cas pushes his torso up, his blade beneath one forearm on the floor. His other hand is raised. His eyes are shining, literally shining like wounds themselves, but that isn’t what makes Dan shout.

Before, only Casper’s sleeves were in tatters. Now, his shirt and vest are ripped open, the jagged sides framing a shining symbol, a blood sigil carved directly into his skin.

“Cas!” Dan screams, unable to move, unable to stop him.

“Close your eyes!” Cas shouts, and before Lucifer can finish turning around, Cas slams his hand to his chest in an activation strike.

In a night of blazing lights and raging fires, this blast is the brightest of them all.

Dan falls from the door, falls through empty space, falls to the floor. His legs cry at the impact, their pain immediately lost beneath the screaming of his skin. Blinded through the insubstantial shield of his own eyelids, he sweeps his head back and forth, fighting to see. Something hard strikes him in the foot and Dan scrambles away in a twitching crawl, the angel blade still clenched in his right hand. He scrambles to Sam, to where he thinks Sam is, and it takes too long to recognize the voices trying to calm him.

“Dan,” someone says, keeps saying, the word too urgent for a mere name. “Dan, where’d they go?”

“Jo?” Dan asks, squinting into the absolute darkness of the night.

“Right here,” she says, putting her hand over his clenched fist. Gently but firmly, she pulls the angel blade out of his hand before he can stab someone by accident.

“No touch healer,” Dan says, holding on to Sam with both hands now.

“Yeah, he was a f*****g angel,” Victor says somewhere from above.

“No,” Jo says. “He means Sam needs a breath healer. Has to be a breath healer for Sam. Dan, where are the angels?”

“Don’t know,” Dan says, feeling over Sam’s dim shape until his hand finds the shield. He hears more feet, more voices, all of them ready to protect Sam. “Can’t see.”

“Did they fly away?”

Dan shakes his head, the shape of the blood sigil still seared into his eyes.

“No,” he says, holding his brother tight. Sam lets out a particularly loud breath at the squeeze, because he, at least, is alive.

“No,” Dan says again. “They’re gone.”

In the morning, there is training, and Dan does not go.

He’s still awake. Has been all night. Maybe. It’s hard to tell. He might have dropped off at some point. He’s not sure if the ache in his back and neck is from getting slammed into doors or from an impromptu nap leaning over Sam’s bed.

Jess took one of those earlier. Her chair wedged in next to Dan’s, she holds Dan’s hand tight because she can’t risk taking Sam’s. Dan’s reminded her that she is, after all, primarily a breath healer, but each time, she shakes her head and says she can’t trust herself not to try to heal him. If she touches him, she will try to feel for his condition, and even that small act of magic will drain Sam further. They’ve brought in more senior healers, medics without Jess’ level of attachment, to fix Sam’s leg as best they can.

At some point, Dan’s own wounds have been taken care of. He’s not sure when he lost them. He’s not even sure when he gained all of them. He had bloody shins and badly scraped hands, a small piece of broken glass in one of his knuckles. There’d been a bruise on his head and a scabbing line across his chest. Above the anti-possession tattoo, there was a deep cut, the beginnings of being skinned, and Dan had forgotten even that pain until it was taken away, as gently removed from his chest as his weapon had been from his hands. He retrieved it from Jo as soon as he was able to see, and now the angel blade rides again at his hip.

The shield still lies across Sam’s chest, and only its slow rise and fall prevents the image from being that of a funeral pyre. More warding is already etched into the doors, making the shield redundant, but no one moves it. Since about one in the morning, so much of that warding has gone up across the castle, copied off the boxes from the vault.

“Need to get him new shirts,” Dan says.

Jess looks up at him, eyes red and bleary. She blinks a few times before nodding. “With the warding on?”

“Yeah. Woven in.”

Jess looks back at Sam. They both do.

“Hold his hand for me again?” Jess asks.

Dan does. “He’s a lot warmer.”

Jess draws her legs up, the toes of her dress shoes on the edge of Sam’s bed, and she hugs her knees. She’s out of her costume and what passes for her casual clothes, but her flagging energy turns the dress into a nightgown. Jess’ chin lowers as her head and eyelids fight to fall. “He’s normally a furnace.”

“Believe me, this is loads better than he was,” Dan says, even though he knows Jess already knows. It’s been looping conversation for hours, on only a few topics. Jess’ fear when first hearing the commotion in the throne room, for example. Waiting to be brought out for her engagement kiss at midnight, she’d been in the side room, the same space King John had interrogated Cas in, so very long ago. Two nights ago? Three? Dan forces the thought aside, along with all the rest.

When the musicians panicked and fled from Lucifer, they’d left chairs scattered in front of the side room door. Jess is still furious about it, but when Sam wakes up, he’ll be pleased to know Jess was kept safe, if only by a pile of furniture.

“The king and queen almost looked well when they went to bed,” Jess says, a return to another well-trod subject.

“Yeah,” Dan says, and he forces this thought away too. The image. The smell. He clears his throat and makes himself breathe. “Thanks for that.”

“There actually wasn’t much left to heal,” Jess says, skirting around the one subject Dan’s made clear they’re not discussing. “If there’s any internal damage, it was too deep for me to get to, but… Besides being a little balder than usual, I think Their Majesties are going to be fine.”

“I thought they were dead,” Dan says without meaning to, holding Sam’s hand tighter than he should.

Jess takes Dan’s other hand, squeezes it hard, and, as simple as that, becomes his sister. “I thought so, too. When, when I heard it. Them. But.”

“Yeah,” Dan says. He clears his throat again. “Sam tell you about the dream he had?”

“The one he was sure wasn’t a vision?”

“Once he wakes up, we’re giving him so much s**t for that.”

Jess looks at him, close to chastising. Dan expects it for the light profanity, but what Jess says is, “He said it felt like a vision where he wasn’t there, except he knew he was.”

“So?”

“So now we know he can have visions of himself being unconscious, and he knows how they feel,” Jess concludes.

Dan thinks about that. “Huh,” he says.

Leaning forward, Jess sets her feet back on the floor and says, “Sam, if you’re having a vision of this right now, squeeze Dan’s hand.”

Sam doesn’t squeeze back, but that’s fine. That’s going to be fine. Sam’s going to wake up and he’ll be thrilled that Jess has dropped the “Sir” that’s long haunted the front of Dan’s name.

“Y’know, you can hold his hand too,” Dan insists, a creeping awkwardness at their position overtaking him. “I can find you gloves, keep you from running a health check on him.”

Jess shakes her head. “If I can’t control the impulse, I shouldn’t be touching him, ever.”

“Think Sam might disagree there,” Dan points out.

Blushing more than a little, Jess lets go of Dan’s hand in a hurry. Dan releases Sam as well and stands, stretching his legs with more than a few aching pops accompanying the motion. He doesn’t mean to pace, but it keeps him awake despite the cracking yawn that keeps taking over his face.

“We should be doing shifts,” Jess says.

“We are,” Dan says. “Once our parents are up, one of them will be in here.”

Jess looks like she’s about to debate the merit of them being up and about so soon, but can’t find the thread of the argument.

Dan keeps pacing around the room, but mostly in front of the door. His hand doesn’t want to leave the hilt of his angel blade. His brother’s sword, Lucifer had called it. Which would make it Michael’s or Gabriel’s, if common myth is actually common fact. It’s an archangel blade, at least, and powerful enough to wound another archangel.

He forces his hand to his side. He forces his steps away from their prowling paranoia in front of the door. He forces his body and mind to obey and stop wandering, because he’s not thinking about any of this right now. Not until Sam wakes up.

Yeah, there’s potentially a pissed off archangel somewhere in the kingdom. Maybe he was blasted away even farther or hurt or maybe even killed, but until they see a body, they can’t know for sure. They don’t know anything, beyond that the warding works, that this blade is powerful, and that the tablet is important enough for an angel to—it’s important.

They won’t know anything more until midnight, and they won’t even get a chance to ask for over twelve hours yet. The portal opens next at seven in the evening. Provided they find it in time to throw a letter through, there’s no telling if that piece of communication will actually make it across, or that the other angels will be willing to reply.

“Will you please sit down?” Jess politely demands, tired annoyance lacing her tone.

“No,” Dan says, because he is an asshole. He does stand still in front of Sam’s shelves, though. He stares at books and bits and baubles he stared at yesterday, after Sam’s training session with Jo. Wait, no. Two days ago.

That was two days ago.

They found out Sam was a vessel three f*****g nights ago.

And, says a pesky thought, somehow Lucifer already knew.

“Jess,” Dan says, staring sightlessly at one of Sam’s legal tomes. “When did ‘Nick’ show up at the Royal Hospital?”

He hears her shift around in her chair, and it might be the first time she’s fully looked away from Sam in hours. “Beginning of February,” she says, and Dan ignores the guilt in her voice. As much as Dan wants to scream at every healer in the capital for falling over themselves to kiss that guy’s ass, Sam’s the one who actually went and kissed f*****g Lucifer.

Sammy’s gonna have to live forever if he’s ever going to live it down.

“So,” Dan pieces together, “basically right after Jo drew from Sam the first time.” The fireball incident had been at the very end of January.

A pause. “I think so, yes,” Jess agrees.

There’s always more s**t along the border. All that crap they chase out of the center of the country, it all winds up on the outskirts, and that applies as much to disembodied demons as it does rampaging rugarus. He’s considered those demons as threats for a very long time, but not necessarily as spies.

Lucifer must have been looking for a vessel for a long time. Six and half hundred years, give or take, probably thwarted by the fact that he’d already turned the ones he’d had into archdemons. It’s exactly the kind of vindictive irony Dan is petty enough to savor.

“Asshole knew what he was doing, I’ll give him that,” Dan says. Appearing as a miraculous doctor with unfathomable abilities right as Sam’s gearing up toward marriage and heirs and pregnancy risks.

“Can we talk about something else please,” Jess says, firm for all her voice is strained.

“Yeah, all right.” She’s avoided another topic well enough for him. He obliges her before she can stop obliging him. He plucks that old stuffed horse off Sam’s shelf. He returns to their chairs, holds it out, and says, “This is Sully.”

Jess looks at it, biting her lip. “Tell me about her. Him?”

“Him,” Dan agrees, and he lets every embarrassing story flood out. Every single thing Sam would want to interrupt, Dan says. He talks and talks, and Jess almost laughs. Just the once, she almost laughs, but then she almost cries, and neither of them try laughing again after that.

When Dan’s voice is more exhausted than his body, Jess takes over, sharing the parts of Sam’s life Dan wasn’t there for. He doesn’t know even a fifth of the stories, and then, he only knows those from Sam’s side.

It’s almost a distraction, but only almost. The moment Sam shifts in his bed, abruptly closer to sleeping than merely unconscious, both of them fall silent. Dan grabs Sam’s hand and Jess grabs Dan’s elbow. “Sammy?”

Sam doesn’t move again, but they don’t go back to talking. They sit and wait in their vigil. Sit and do nothing while someone else lays fresh warding into the walls of the castle. While Bobby organizes the knights and Rufus devises better ways of fighting angels than Dan’s disastrous attempt last night. While so many things happen that Dan should be doing. It’s still too early in the day for Parliament to be in session, but with the sheer number of people in the throne room last night, most of Parliament must already know what happened. Must know some version of what happened, at least.

It’s not as if Dan could go before Parliament anyway, but with King John recovering and Sam out cold, Dan worries about it for them. What are they going to tell people? More importantly, what are people going to believe?

The answer to that comes soon enough, borne on remarkably steady legs. King John doesn’t knock before entering, because he never knocks before entering. Dan’s on his feet in an instant; not respectfully, but with his blade half-drawn. Behind Dan, Jess stands far more appropriately, but Dan still gets the sense she was an instant away from flinging herself bodily across Sam.

King John waves them both down. Jess sits. Dan offers his father his chair before sitting on the side of Sam’s bed. It puts Dan back in his rightful spot, between the door and his family.

Without prompting, Jess tells King John about Sam’s breathing and color these past hours. His own color good, his singed hair now cut very short, King John nods along, eyes never leaving Sam. He’s still looking at Sam when he says, “Dan, your mother and I have discussed this, and we’re telling Parliament we knew Casper was an angel the entire time.”

Dan looks at his father, who doesn’t look back, and says, “Yes, sir.”

“We’ve already sent off a retinue to bring Seer Shurley in. If he freely gave his invitation to that creature, he’ll corroborate our version of events or face the charge of treason.”

“What story will he be corroborating, sir?” Dan asks, voice flat.

“Seer Shurley caught wind of a threat he couldn’t identify,” King John informs him. “He somehow procured an angel to protect Sam, which is what Casper was here to do. Every time you and he went off on your own, it was to discuss security matters, is that clear? The... rest,” he settles on, “was a pretense. You said he cut a blood sigil on himself?”

“Yes, sir,” Dan says.

“Then he’s too dead to contradict,” King John concludes. “If he died protecting Sam, then that’s what he was here for.”

“Dad, he was after a f*****g rock in the basement,” Dan snaps, as abrupt and as discordant as a string that refused to be tuned.

King John looks at him coolly. “Did you tell anyone this?”

“No. Sir.”

“Did you ever hear him tell anyone this?”

“No, sir.”

“Then he was here to protect Sam,” King John tells him. “You said that portal opens next at seven?”

“And then midnight,” Dan confirms, his mouth back under control. “He, uh.”

He’d asked. For Dan to send his body back, but there is no body. There was nothing left of the angels on the tower after that blast of light. No bodies, no feathers. Not even blood. Nothing biologically angelic. A couple scraps of shredded clothing don’t count.

There’s a ragged piece of ribbon in Dan’s pocket, and he’s not thinking about it.

“He what?” King John asks.

“He said it was in the hedge maze, but he didn’t say where. And we should send word that they have at least one traitor working with Lucifer.”

“Unless they send that traitor through,” King John counters. “We have to assume the seven o’clock portal is an entry portal.”

“The sigil doesn’t work like a devil’s trap,” Dan says, following his father’s mind with ease. “If we’re going to keep an angel contained, we need a tent over the entire hedge maze with the sigil painted on the whole thing.” And if they’re still planning on throwing a letter on through… “Anyone inside should be warded, too, and if other angels can appropriate magic the way Lucifer could, no one can be permitted to cast spells.”

“I’ll get someone on it,” King John says without correcting any feature of that plan, which is borderline praise.

“Anything else, sir?” Dan asks.

“Stay with your brother,” King John instructs, though even he seems to know this order is redundant.

“Your Majesty,” Jess says. She waits for King John to look at her before she asks, “What will we tell people about, about Lucifer?” The name is still difficult for her to say. “He grew wings by draining Sam. Almost everyone with political or economic pull in the country saw it.”

“They saw him turn my own flames on me,” King John says, barely a flicker of wounds or wounded pride in his face. Dan sees it in the rest of him, the way his father’s hands flex with the ache for a sword. It’s a motion Dan knows well, from the inside. “He can wrest magic from mages, and a seer’s magic is a powerful tool. He concealed his wings and knocked Sam out with angel magics we aren’t familiar with.”

“He wanted Sam for status and power,” Dan adds, fleshing out the story with ease. “Plus the bragging rights for having gotten the Last Unwed Kiss. He didn’t need it for his wings to regrow, he wanted it just to show off.”

King John nods along as Dan speaks. “Exactly,” he says. “He insinuated himself into the Royal Hospital for that purpose, and we’re going to take the director to task for her grievous oversights. First for failing to realize an employee wasn’t human, and then allowing him use of her invitation.”

Dan nods back. “It’ll show Seer Shurley what we’ll do if he doesn’t cooperate.”

At that, King John faintly smiles. Not at some vindictive thought of punishment, no. Just at Dan, talking politics. The expression is there and gone in an instant, but it will linger in Dan’s mind for a long time to come. “Exactly,” King John says again, and stands. Dan and Jess stand with him, but rather than see himself out, King John gives Dan a pointed look.

His feet heavy but not dragging, Dan follows his father into Sam’s sitting room. He closes the door to Sam’s bedroom and doesn’t immediately understand what’s happening when his father embraces him.

“Never be that stupid again,” King John commands, voice mercifully lowered in Dan’s ear. It’s possible Jess can’t hear him, but without the barrier of embarrassment, rage flashes through Dan’s body.

“I won’t,” Dan grits out, hands clenched at his sides, trying to preempt the lecture on his love life.

John hugs him tighter and chastises, “Dan, you weren’t even armed, I taught you better than that.”

Dan’s mind stalls like a combustion carriage with an exhausted mage. “I,” he says, and swallows. He hugs his father in return, arms looping around his back. Fighting down the urge to apologize, he holds his ground and his father at the same time. “I had a warded shield, and Cas had the only weapon that would have done anything anyway.”

John doesn’t say anything in return, not until after they pull away. “You have it now,” he says, looking down at the archangel blade on Dan’s hip.

“He slid it back to me,” Dan says, shoulders back, chin high. “When he couldn’t protect Sam and me from Lucifer anymore, he gave it back.”

“A common enemy does not guarantee an ally, Dan,” King John lectures. “Whatever agenda he had, he didn’t disclose it and we can’t trust it. He wasn’t protecting you and Sam, he was attacking Lucifer. For all we know, he was going to take Sam himself.”

“With respect, sir, you didn’t fight alongside him,” Dan says. “If he wanted to kill Lucifer, he didn’t need to bother bringing Sam down out of the air, safe. I saw how they flew: he would have had the advantage in the air, but he came down for Sam’s sake. And if he was going to use Sam, he could have healed himself, but he didn’t.”

“You still want to see the best in him,” King John says, both observation and accusation.

“No, I want to see what the f**k actually happened,” Dan says. Not shouts. Or shouts only a little. “He was after the tablet in the basement. He wanted Lucifer dead or defeated enough to kill himself over it. That’s all we know.”

Except, they do know more than that, if he can trust anything Cas said.

Seeing the hesitation on Dan’s face, King John asks, “What else?”

“He thought Lucifer was banished into some other ‘realm’ or something. I pressed him on it a couple of times, and it was weird. Every other angel thing, he talked about it like a scholarly debate, citations and all, but Lucifer’s banishment, he’d just, I don’t know, assumed. Nothing to back it up.”

“As if repeating something he’d been told,” King John supposes.

Dan nods. “Unless his higher-ups were deliberately screwing him over on a mission they sent him on, none of them expected Lucifer to be here.”

“And what do you think that mission was?” King John asks.