The Key

Chapter 28

The kicker is, Dan’s pretty sure Cas told him, right to his f*****g face. In hindsight, there’s a lot of s**t Cas told him to his face, right down to which archangel he’d originally served.

“He talked a lot about that banishment theory and said he was looking for ‘proof.’ If that tablet counts as proof, it has to do something. I’m thinking they really are all banished or something, and the portal is the only way out. Otherwise, why bother?” It must be ludicrously energy-consuming magic, ripping holes in reality. And they can fly: they’re not lacking for means of transportation.

“If they want it that badly, they’d best be prepared to bargain,” King John concludes.

“When are you drafting the letter, sir?” Dan asks.

“You’ve already reported what happened last night,” King John tells him. “I don’t need to make you go over it again. Your mother certainly doesn’t want me to.”

Dan shakes his head. “I want to send a letter, too. Questions. To work out what was lies and what was, I don’t know. Metaphor.” When King John narrows his eyes, Dan adds, “I can’t know if he slipped up and told me something he shouldn’t have, if I don’t know what was grounded in fact. He told me about the angel warding when he shouldn’t have. There might be more.”

More lies, certainly. There’s no way Cas had a sister who got possessed, for a start. Or that he and his remaining siblings live in a slum. Or that his wings were magicked on, or that he’d write back, or that he was even human.

Dan’s an i***t.

He’s such a f*****g i***t.

“Write it,” King John decides. “I’ll inspect it before I send them both.”

“Thank you, sir.”

There’s a pause before King John reaches for him. They don’t look at each other even while they hug. King John slaps him hard on the back before they part and says, “Don’t leave your brother’s side.”

“Most important job in the kingdom,” Dan replies.

King John nods, his seriousness turning an uncomfortable joke into the purest truth. “Send word when he wakes.”

“Yes, sir,” Dan says, and King John takes his leave. Again out of paranoia, Dan waits for Sam’s warded outer door to be closed before he opens the warded door to the bedroom. There’s going to be some serious door-closing protocol in place for a while, he decides.

Back in Sam’s room, Jess is still in her chair, closest to Sam’s head. She looks up at Dan when he closes the door behind him, and she smiles.

Dan’s legs eat up the distance to Sam’s bed. He looks at his brother and he listens to Sam’s steady breathing, and then he starts to laugh. He smacks Sam on the foot, or at least on a foot-like lump beneath the blankets. He even does it on the uninjured leg. “Dad’s gone.”

Slowly, Sam cracks an eye open. Just the one, as if two eyelids are too heavy a burden. Just as slowly, he pulls in a deeper breath. “Hey,” he says, and his voice is too small for a man so large.

“Hey yourself,” Dan says.

Sam’s mouth twitches, or maybe he tries to say something. It’s either the tiniest of smiles or only looks like one. Gradually, more like falling than turning, he shifts his head to better look at Jess beside him. “Hey,” he says again.

Jess holds on to his sleeve. Not the cuff, but the elbow, the absolute farthest away from his bare skin as she can get while still touching him. “I love you,” she says, sounding about to cry.

“Marry me,” Sam says.

She nods, a half-frantic bobbing of the head, but she doesn’t kiss him.

Sam nudges his chin toward her, his head not even inching along the pillow. His eye falls shut, and Jess still doesn’t kiss him. Sam waits a long sleepy wait before painstakingly opening both his eyes. “Jess?”

“You got a witness,” Dan points out, knowing that the technicalities of proposals aren’t what’s stopping her. “It’ll count. Besides, if you don’t kiss him, he’ll have to do his Last Unwed Kiss again and get his tongue bitten off by a vampire or something.”

Jess is too distraught to take a joke, but Sam snorts, drunk on exhaustion.

“I won’t hurt you,” Jess says, a quiet but firm refusal.

“You won’t,” Sam agrees, still waiting for his kiss.

Jess looks to Dan for help, but Dan just looks back and nods toward his brother. Slowly, Jess shifts her hand lower. She taps one fingertip against the back of Sam’s hand, and she braces against the tiny touch as if expecting it to have the effect of a lightning strike.

Nothing happens. Sam’s breathing remains constant, and he doesn’t even close his eyes.

She touches his hand longer, and then holds it. She holds it hard and then she starts crying. Sam looks up at Dan in the most pathetic way possible, and this is how Dan ends up hugging his brother’s sobbing almost-fiancee. Somehow, they endure the awkwardness. Jess dries her eyes with one of Sam’s sheets, which is definitely an improvement over Dan’s shirt.

Finally, Jess stands from her chair and leans over the bed. Sam makes the mistake of trying to sit up, and mostly just shifts his arms on the bed, trying to push himself upright. Jess leans down all the way. As engagement kisses go, it’s brief. Dan probably kissed Jo for longer yesterday morning, and that’s not a thought he needs right now.

When Jess sits back down, Dan sits as well, watching Jess hold Sam’s hand now with both of hers. She brings it to her face and cups her own cheek with Sam’s hand. Sam smiles.

“You don’t look all that confused,” Dan says, interrupting before things can take a turn for the truly gross.

Sam’s smile fades. “About that,” Sam says. It shouldn’t be possible for him to sound more tired, but he manages it.

“You having visions of the past now?” Dan asks, because of course Sam is. Why not.

“No,” Sam says. He takes a deliberately slow breath before adding, “I think I saw it as it happened. From the outside.”

Dan hears Jess swear for the first time, and she’s better at it than he would have expected.

“Pretty much,” Sam agrees, stroking her face with his thumb. The effort looks monumental.

“Next time you get drained to death, how about you don’t keep using your magic through it,” Dan orders. He doesn’t have the authority, but he orders it anyway.

“Kinda involuntary, Dan,” Sam says, which is not the f*****g point.

“Don’t care,” Dan says. “Don’t do it. And no more visions until you rest up.”

“I’m with Dan on this,” Jess agrees.

Sam looks between the two of them with a happy sort of muddled confusion. He only moves his eyes, but even this seems to take too much energy. Dan kind of wants to shake him, but only a lot. The urge fades as Sam’s mouth sags, Sam too tired to properly yawn. “All right,” Sam slurs.

Watching him, unable to stop watching him, Dan says, “I’m gonna let Mom and Dad know you woke up. And then went right back to sleep. Yeah?”

Sam groans quietly. “Fine.”

“Look, not even Dad’s gonna lecture you while you’re this pathetic,” Dan says. “You’ll get a half-lecture, tops, and that might even be it.”

For someone pretty much made of exhaustion, Sam manages a surprisingly solid expression of disbelief.

“Yeah, I know,” Dan says, but he stands up anyway.

“Wait,” Sam says, making a different face, one that hasn’t much changed since he was a toddler. It’s been a long, long while since Dan was asked to do anything about it, though. “I, uh.”

“You want me to haul you to the toilet?” Dan asks.

Evidently too tired for embarrassment, Sam blinks his eyes yes .

“I’ll send word to your parents while you help him,” Jess tells Dan.

“I dunno,” Dan says. “If anyone’s holding his d**k for him, it should be you.”

“Dan,” Sam says, and apparently he isn’t too tired for embarrassment after all.

Jess pinks considerably, but she does shrug and say, “You’re not wrong.”

In the end, Dan just plunks his overgrown little brother down on the toilet and Sam goes sitting down. Dan keeps snickering to stay sane, or maybe he’s already lost it.

By the time Dan gets Sam tucked back into bed, Jess has summoned a servant and sent out the message. Jess sits back down while Dan sets the shield lower over Sam, now across his thighs so Sam can sit up. It’s redundant and doesn’t look comfortable, especially not with the break and the cast, but nobody questions or complains.

“Dan,” Sam says, propped up against the headboard, and he’s about to ask.

Dan shakes his head.

Sam asks it anyway: “Where’s Cas?”

Dan keeps shaking his head. “We’re not doing this,” he says. “We’re just, we’re not doing this.”

“Was there ash?” Sam asks.

“What?”

“He said their wings burn when they die,” Sam says. “So if there wasn’t ash…”

“Sammy, he’s dead, all right? Carved a blood sigil right into his chest. His corpse got flung somewhere, so the i***t went and scattered his own damn ashes. Real polite of him. Very thoughtful.” His volume increases, too loud, too fast, and Dan snaps his mouth shut before he can rant even more.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, and he looks it in more ways than one.

“Yeah, well.” Dan forces his fists back into mere hands. “You should be sleeping. Or eating. Resting.”

“I sent for food,” Jess says, and Dan could really warm up to this whole sister thing.

“Did either of you sleep?” Sam asks.

“Yes,” both of them say in half-guilty unison, their new siblinghood off to a strong start.

When the food arrives, the servant bringing it finds an odd sight. After all, it’s not every day the future queen and her eventual brother-in-law haul a couch out of the crown prince’s sitting room and into his bedroom. Dan sits up blearily on the couch, but at least he doesn’t draw his sword on the poor woman. Curled together on Sam’s bed, Jess on top of the sheets and Sam below, the newly engaged couple sleeps on. Dan directs the tray to Sam’s desk, thanks the servant, and then goes back to sleep, too exhausted to dream.

Getting the letters through the portal is an undertaking of massive proportions.

Hours in advance, a massive pavilion tent is painted with warding sigil after warding sigil. The same goes for a vast number of coats and jackets. The stated reason behind the warding is the simple fact that the angels have a traitor in their midst, and, lacking a description of Uriel, any angel who appears from the portal is to be regarded as a threat. The pavilion tent will keep an angel trapped inside, once it’s put up over the entire maze.

While all of the warding dries, every knight and guard available is prepped for the seven o’clock transfer effort. Someone is stationed at every corner or intersection of the maze, and everyone can see at least one other person. Anyone seeing the portal open is to immediately point at it with one arm and raise the other; anyone seeing this performed is to echo the motion, pointing toward the instigator. With this chain reaction, a runner with the letter can quickly navigate the correct path, guided by a line of human signposts.

The opening drills are promising, but just in case the portal closes within half a minute, they distribute four runners throughout the maze.

After all, Dan makes very clear, it is vital they inform their allies as to what’s happened.

Someone raises the very valid question as to why Dan doesn’t already know where the portal opens.

Dan responds with a hard look, a purposeful sigh, and the words, “You ever try to get ground-based directions from a guy who flies?”

There’s a smattering of muffled laughter among those gathered, and Dan knows he has his soldiers on board. From there, he sternly instructs all mages not to fire upon any angel they may see. Be it alleged ally or known threat, some angels know how to turn magic back on its wielder.

“That’s not a risk I want any of you taking, not without Casper here to heal you up,” Dan continues, forever drilling in that falsehood. They knew what Cas was, of course they did, and now that the traitor has been exposed, the royal family can trust the rest of their staff with that knowledge. “You see anyone with wings on, you tell them I’m on my way, and you signal same as you would for the portal.”

They run the drill a few more times before dispersing until that evening. There’s still more to do: Lucifer to ward against, lies to tell, letters to draft.

Plus, Sam’s wedding is still on schedule for the ninth. In the week between engagement night and the actual day, it’s time for the nobles of the city to throw their own parties. Normally, Sam would be going to these as well, bestowing blatant favor via his choice of party for the evening, but both he and Jess have a solid reason to stay in.

They’re not the only ones. On duty and in an ill mood, Dan dedicates himself to the letter transfer rather than a less productive distraction. Now’s not the time to throw himself into booze and dancing, no matter how much he needs a drink, no matter how tempted he is to take someone to bed just to spite the dead bastard.

In any case, all the parties keep the guests from Sam’s five day birthday gala in town, tiding them over until the wedding. With the rumor mill set ablaze, the bucket-chain to put it out needs to be filled from the correct source. Letting loose the guards to gossip over their important duty tonight, is an important duty in itself.

In the meanwhile, Dan works on drafting his own letter. He does it at Sam’s desk. That is to say, he doesn’t do it at Sam’s desk. He sits and stares at paper, ink drying on his pen. He does this a great deal, persisting in inaction until his mother enters the room.

Sam doesn’t wake, his arm thrown across Jess’ lap. Sitting atop Sam’s blankets, against the headboard, Jess lowers her book. Dan stands and goes to Mary, who hugs him even harder than his father had.

“Not a word about my hair,” she warns him. Like King John, Mary’s missing hair around the crown line, where Cas somehow restored melted metal before pulling the once-ruined crown free. Though the burns have vanished, so has her hair. “Until the ghost-prevention legislation goes through, I can’t get a wig,” she explains, or perhaps complains. “Not without undermining the push for labeling by donors.”

Gauging her exhaustion by the degree she’s explaining things he already knows, Dan shrugs in return. “It’ll be a fashion statement by the end of the week.”

“That might take longer than a week,” Mary says as they pull apart. She looks to Jess, and Sam, and the unit that is Jess-and-Sam, and Mary smiles. “Besides, it’s rude to be more beautiful than the bride.”

“Her Majesty is far too polite, and I hope she shall stop,” Jess says, using the title like an endearment, and Mary crosses over to hug her too. Much like Jess before Sam had woken the first time, Mary doesn’t dare touch him. Vaguely, Dan wonders if he’s going to be the only person left in this family unafraid of bumping shoulders with Sam.

Mary sits down on the couch and only then questions how the piece of furniture moved.

“Sam’s bed got lonely,” Dan says.

“Of course it did,” Mary says before Jess can explain more seriously. “Would it prefer a trundle bed for company? They could have themselves a little party.”

“What do you think, Jess?” Dan asks.

Mary looks at him with a surprised little smile, but she very nearly beams at the lack of titles when Jess replies, “Your choice, Dan.”

Dan catches Jess’ eye more deliberately and sees the quiet confirmation there: they’re purposefully bonding for his mother’s comfort.

Jess takes over the conversation while Dan returns to pretending to write his letter. He keeps an ear open, and it’s all stuff that smacks of normalcy. That’s always been his mom’s thing when she’s stressed, but Dan doesn’t know when Jess learned it. King John is the exact opposite way, crunching down on anomalies until either they’re crushed or he’s consumed. It’s why Dan makes such a good buffer between his parents. Maybe Jess will fit in there with him from here on out. She and Mary are already close, enough for Mary to play the wedding role that Jess’ late mother could have.

Eventually, Mary leaves Jess to her book and Sam to his sleep. She touches Sam’s blanket-covered knee – the shield is now off the bed – before coming over to Dan at the desk. Standing behind him, she puts a hand on each of his shoulders and kisses the top of his head. Even knowing it’s her, Dan’s hackles fight to rise. He’s too damn jumpy.

“Your father wants that done soon,” she says.

“So he can look over it, yeah,” Dan says. It’s the reason why he can’t write it. The reason he’s blaming, at least. “What’s Dad sending?”

“A list of questions and demands. A summary of last night, with some exceptions,” Mary says. “We’re saying Casper died thwarting a k********g attempt on Sam, but we’re not calling Sam a vessel.”

Dan closes his eyes against ink-stained paper and crossed out words. “Seeing how much they’re going to spill themselves, huh.”

“There are a lot of direct questions. We need to know how severely wounded Lucifer might be by that blood sigil.”

“Where he was blasted to and when he’ll show up next, yeah,” Dan says.

“And their own intentions,” Mary adds.

“Yeah,” Dan says again. Not yes. Just yeah.

Mary doesn’t even correct him. She squeezes his shoulders instead, only serving to bunch the tension in them tighter. Leaning down, voice lowered for the benefit of more than Sam’s rest, she asks, “What do you want to say?”

“I don’t…” Dan shakes his head. “I don’t. I just, I don’t.”

Another squeeze of the shoulders. “What do you want them to say?”

That’s just it. They don’t have the answers he’s looking for. They might know if Cas set out to play him, but they won’t know how much he actually meant. Was that fuss down in the vault a ploy to get Dan to heap promises on him? To hand over the tablet faster? Or was that guilt bubbling over? Those other angels can’t know that.

They’re not Cas.

Not that Dan ever actually knew Cas, but.

But.

“I want to know what was true,” Dan says, throat rough, voice steady.

“Then ask them to answer what you already know,” Mary says, as if it really is that simple. She rubs his back where the top of the door frame had dug into it last night. This morning. “Frame it as a way of establishing trust.”

“Yeah, all right,” Dan says, and Mary flicks his ear. “Yes,” he corrects.

Again, she presses a kiss to the top of his head. “I’ll leave you to it, but you’ll want to hurry.”

In the end, Dan writes out his answer sheet first. The questions for tonight are simple, and he labels the envelope in his clearest handwriting. For Casper’s siblings .

When King John inspects the letter, he looks at Dan askance. “Innocuous things to ask,” he says.

Dan shrugs and says, “I’m starting small.”

With thirty minutes to go, everyone is in place in the tent-covered hedge maze. Beneath that warded canopy, everyone carries a magelight, the better to point through the dimness under the thick cloth. Dan himself has chosen to act as a runner. He has a copy of his father’s letter and his own envelope inside the first. The archangel blade rides proudly at his hip. He positions himself by the covered entrance.

The tent shifts against the hedges. A few birds didn’t escape when it enclosed the maze, and they begin to complain in harsh, trilling cries. Standing next to Jo and her magelight, Dan stretches his legs. He doesn’t look at her, doesn’t talk to her, and she doesn’t try to engage him. She only stands there and knows, privy to the truth of so many lies.

An agony of time later, a cry goes up. It travels in a quick relay of motion, and Dan shoots off down the route he knows best. After all their preparation, the reality is jarringly easy. Dan barrels down the dead end closest to the entrance, and there it is. Shining and golden and unfurling, like sand turned into smoke. He wastes no time in tossing the letters through, a small stone inside lending enough weight to make his aim true.

The letters vanish. Dan hadn’t been entirely sure they would, but they do. The portal remains for the time it takes for the clock tower to stop tolling the hour, and it dissipates without anyone or anything coming back through.

Even after the final wisp of light vanishes, Dan waits, squinting into the dark, hand on his weapon’s hilt. Even then, nothing.

They mark the area and recall everyone to the front of the maze. Dan collects the unsent copies of the letters. They exit and wait. Some are dismissed. Some remain anyway. Bobby stands at Dan’s side, then at King John’s, then at Dan’s again. Jo comes over and they continue to not talk. Victor comes over and proves that even a silence can shift in tone. No one can manage respectful suspicion quite like Victor.

Maybe King John is right, and Dan does confide in his knights too much. Like so much else, it’s too late to fix. In this case, at least, the repercussions aren’t fatal. Neither Victor nor Jo will buy the story they’re selling, but they won’t contradict it either.

Over the next few hours, enough people come up to him to offer their condolences that Dan’s not sure who started it. Somebody who thinks what he had with Cas was real, maybe. Somebody he needs to punch in the face, definitely. But unwanted or not, the condolences come, and Dan quietly thanks his supporters in the hopes that each time will be the last.

His father hears. His father watches. And still people seek to console Dan over Cas.

Finally, Jo, Bobby and Victor engage Dan in enough deliberately closed off conversation that no one else approaches. Apparently, Rufus is already trying to put together a contraption to simulate combat against an angel, because they’re going to need to know how to fight something with a human shape and shielding wings. Though Rufus might have enough of the basic shape for a sparring dummy, the motions are still unknown.

In explaining them, Dan relives the fight yet again. He speaks of Cas’ tactics. He demonstrates Cas’ motions. He instructs Jo how to move her arms before standing behind her and mimicking Cas’ wings with his arms, saying things like, “This, but longer.”

Once he does that, it’s more than clear that everyone is listening in. Yet again, he’s made himself into a spectacle. Dan looks to his father and King John looks back evenly, and so Dan continues, this time intentionally. He talks about Cas the way he shouldn’t let himself, the way he would if they were really allies who knew and trusted each other. He talks about Cas holding his own against Lucifer, how Lucifer was bleeding brighter right up until the moment Dan arrived and Cas protected him at the expense of his own wing. He fixates on the way Cas stood over Sam, and he plays up all the angles.

Seraph Casper faced down Archangel Lucifer. He stood against the man who’d slain his childhood mentor, Archangel Michael, and given Dan that fallen mentor’s blade before he himself fell. A blade that could slay any angel, and Casper bestowed it upon Dan before he sacrificed himself.

For every guard who keeps quiet out of loyalty and respect, five or ten more will tell their families. Families will tell friends who will tell strangers who will gossip across the country, across borders. The wave is only just begun, but Dan is already drowning.

Dan says his part all the same, and when he finishes, King John comes to stand by him and sets a hand on his shoulder. They stand there together like they both respected Cas the same, like King John didn’t distrust him as a mere human, like Dan isn’t ready to scream and claw out of his own skin.

Midnight can’t come soon enough, but it does, eventually, come. They’re ready for it in their warded coats, gathered in the maze. The portal’s light gathers and shines. An envelope spits out, and the portal vanishes before the clock tower tolls twice, let alone the full twelve times.

Dan retrieves the envelope, which is the exact same one he’d thrown through himself. The weight is different, the rock removed. The seal has been broken and melted back into place. Frowning more deeply with every step, Dan dutifully returns this reply to his father. King John thanks everyone gathered for their diligence and bids them return to their typical duties or leisure, whichever is appropriate at this time of night.

They head inside the castle proper, King John and Bobby. Dan follows, and Jo trails him, a stubborn set to her jaw that Dan’s too tired to argue against. Once inside, even King John accepts Jo’s presence. In knowing Sam’s second talent, she knows Lucifer’s true motive. In knowing Dan and knowing Dan well, she knows Casper’s true role. Either out of trust toward her or to the memory of her late father, King John permits her to stay, to a point. She stands guard outside the door, the only person permitted to remain within eavesdropping range.