The Key

Chapter 24

When Dan takes his leave, he takes the air in the room with him. In Dan’s absence, Casper ought to have a clearer head, a calmer, more objective outlook, but, if anything, the world tightens. If he feels that way with Dan and this way without him, then the obvious answer is that Casper hasn’t had a clear head in days.

He forces himself to focus, a feat that only becomes more crucial as more linguists join them. Whether having overheard snatches of their conversation or having been directed their way by the absent prince, a full five other humans approach to broaden their circle. Casper soon finds himself debating whether a partially surviving text on angels is actually, of all things, a nature guide.

“The word translates to wings,” the newcomer linguist insists, all of them now speaking primarily in the modern tongue for the humans’ convenience.

“To living angel,” Casper corrects.

“It’s the same word for both,” another human of indeterminate gender chimes in, their mask scattering reflected rainbows across everyone’s costumes and faces.

“Because it means the same thing,” Casper says, stating an obvious fact no one seems to realize. A dead angel is wingless, which is why ‘to be killed’ and ‘to be grounded’ are one and the same verb. At least, they are in a sensible language. The separation into two words is superfluous when a fallen warrior is, after all, a fallen warrior. “The pronunciation is even the same.”

A human in the guise of a chimera shakes a head entirely covered by a three-part mask, the lion’s face framed by snake and goat. “We don’t know that for sure.”

Casper knows that for sure. He bites down his first response and settles for, “There’s no indication of differing pronunciation in any of the surviving texts.” Or in any of the texts, at any point during the past twelve hundred years. For information before that span, Casper would have to ask someone older for confirmation, but he’s extremely confident this was never the case during his lifetime.

The debate continues despite Casper’s concrete knowledge of its absurdity. It’s a pointless issue to pursue, and even while he muzzles himself, he knows it won’t last. When his people finally return to this world, these humans will remember Casper and perhaps realize themselves in error.

How many of these people will, upon reflection, discover Casper for what he is? Surely there will be at least the rumor of where Prince Dan’s winged suitor has vanished to. Even should the vast majority of Casper’s people immediately fly to the mountains in the south, to their long abandoned home and, perhaps, the eggs of grace that wait to awaken there, they will be noticed in their migration.

Yes, Casper’s deceit will be known far and wide, but at least he’ll have the final word in this argument.

It’s a small consolation, a poor trade for fifty years of kissing, but it is a trade he’s already committed to.

Casper feels the shift in those gathered around him before he sees the way eyes flick over his shoulder. Postures straighten further. Expressions turn from heated to polite. The woman beside Casper looks over her shoulder and wordlessly steps to the side, into a space another man has already made for her.

Sure to use his mouth to do it, Casper smiles even before he feels the first touch to his left wing. Separation has turned even the leather barrier of Dan’s gloves into a comfort. Casper shifts, pressing into the contact in the pretense of looking over his shoulder. It pulls at the ribbon wound through his feathers, and Casper does not care.

“Are we starting a book club?” Dan asks, grinning back at him, and only him. His words might be meant for the group, but his eyes are only for Casper.

Too busy looking back, Casper fails to reply, and someone else answers for him. He barely hears them. Something about the club already being well underway. Dan responds with a light air, his entire attitude the social equivalent of a sword form committed to muscle memory. There is grace and technique and memorization, and Dan wields them all without needing to stop and think.

Very soon, Dan steers the group to return to their original topic. While physically included, Dan hangs back verbally, taking on the role of an entertained onlooker. Almost absently, Dan adjusts the ribbon on Casper’s wing, sliding it higher here, pulling it taut there. Though Casper easily keeps his wings still, keeping his eyes open is a much harder feat.

He looks to Dan, tilting his head in question, away from the group.

Dan tilts his head at the same angle, but in the wrong direction. He looks surprised at Casper’s willingness to leave.

Socializing with strangers on a topic he knows well but cannot fully discuss is more difficult than dancing with his wings bound. Unable to explain this as well, Casper does the next best thing, and drops his gaze to Dan’s lips.

Those lips quickly quirk, softness pulling firm over teeth. Dan tilts his head the other way, mirroring Casper, and they agree without bothering to nod.

They bow out of the conversation, Dan figuratively, Casper literally. Dan promises all gathered that they can have another long chat with Casper when he’s a Man of Letters, and Casper pretends this is correct.

It occurs to Casper, belatedly, horrifyingly, that Dan has sought to provide him with a circle of acquaintances. Potential friends, in the expectation that Casper will move here and integrate into Dan’s life. This was no challenge or dare, but a gift.

He holds fast to Dan, and they exit the great hall entirely. Arms linked, steps synced, they walk. When prompted, Dan explains his plans for the evening in greater detail: advocating for his brother and knights, rewarding reasonable people with his clear approval, and a thousand other tiny things Dan implies simply by the way he mentions people where he can be overheard.

“You’re not much on current events, huh,” Dan says as they near the open doors to the courtyard. Even in the hall, the fresh air makes itself felt, and Casper consciously keeps his strides from lengthening.

“I stopped paying attention approximately seven hundred years ago,” Casper replies, a foolish risk made entirely for a laugh.

Dan merely grins, the crinkling corners of his eyes barely seen through the holes of his mask. “You’re stupidly focused, you know that, right?”

Though they step out through the high doors to the courtyard, Casper doesn’t look up. To feel the air is enough, and to see Dan’s reaction is better. “I didn’t think you found that a problem.”

“Not when you’re focused on the right things,” Dan says.

“‘Fixated’ is the word my siblings use.”

Dan’s grin softens into a smile, and Casper can’t decide which he prefers, to be the cause of joy or the object of tenderness. “Is that the word you’d use?”

“Perhaps I have a wider vocabulary,” Casper replies. He uncouples their linked arms, shifting to hold Dan by the elbow. He merely means to look at Dan, not turn fully toward him, but their feet shuffle, and there they are. “Go on. I can entertain myself.”

Dan remains with him, standing beside a waist-high urn full of growing flowers. He sets his hand on the stone lip, his arm a barrier, as if Casper is the one who might choose to leave. “You’re not in the way.”

“I’m too tempted to distract you,” Casper admits.

“You think you can distract me?” Dan challenges.

Casper steps forward. There is no air between them, only heat. He sets his hand on the lip of the urn, almost atop Dan’s. Casper lifts his chin in a dare. He closes every inch between them, save for the final one. The only part of him that touches Dan is his breath as he says, once more in the language of his youth, “You wish to be mine as I long to be yours.”

All the telltale signs are present. The dilation of the eyes, black eclipsing green. The wet shine of the lips, dampened by the flick of his tongue. The flare of the nostrils, inhaling Casper’s scent alongside his words.

That one last inch remains between them, and Dan doesn’t close the gap. The corner of his mouth pulls to the side. Casper tracks the movement, waiting for more. He holds position, save for the creeping motion of his hand atop the stone urn. His thumb touches leather, the human warmth of Dan’s hand hidden beneath it, and still Dan doesn’t move.

Casper lifts his gaze from mouth to eyes and remembers, much too late, that he is not the only tactician here.

In front of a crowd entertained solely by music and gossip, Casper has flung himself at this man in the most blatant way possible. More than that. He is currently flinging himself.

Dan smirks at him knowingly.

Casper steps back, and Dan’s free hand shoots out to hold him at the waist. He draws Casper close, somehow closer than before, and Casper allows his body to be led. Dan’s other hand covers Casper’s on the stone, holding him between sleek warmth and rough chill. His face down-turned, Dan brings his lips to Casper’s ear.

“They’ll know better than to ask you to dance, now,” he explains in a voice rougher than the stonework, as if this was for Casper’s benefit.

“And if I wanted to dance?” Casper bluffs.

“Then I’d be surprised,” Dan answers plainly. “And I’d make it up to you later.”

“You’ll make it up to me later anyway,” Casper tells him, ordering a prince.

Dan pulls back to smile at him, as slow and lingering as the circles his thumb traces into Casper’s side. “And you’ll let me.”

They stare at each other too long.

At the same time, Dan starts to say “I gotta” and Casper begins to say “You should.”

They stop. They don’t quite smile.

Dan squeezes Casper’s hip and Casper squeezes Dan’s hand.

They part, staring all the while.

Dan nods toward where he plans to go. Casper nods in acceptance, or perhaps permission. Beyond this, neither of them move. Not even the music taking a turn toward liveliness stirs them.

Casper feels the shift in those gathered around him before he sees the way eyes flick over his shoulder. Postures straighten further. Expressions turn from heated to polite. The woman beside Casper looks over her shoulder and wordlessly steps to the side, into a space another man has already made for her.

Sure to use his mouth to do it, Casper smiles even before he feels the first touch to his left wing. Separation has turned even the leather barrier of Dan’s gloves into a comfort. Casper shifts, pressing into the contact in the pretense of looking over his shoulder. It pulls at the ribbon wound through his feathers, and Casper does not care.

“Are we starting a book club?” Dan asks, grinning back at him, and only him. His words might be meant for the group, but his eyes are only for Casper.

Too busy looking back, Casper fails to reply, and someone else answers for him. He barely hears them. Something about the club already being well underway. Dan responds with a light air, his entire attitude the social equivalent of a sword form committed to muscle memory. There is grace and technique and memorization, and Dan wields them all without needing to stop and think.

Very soon, Dan steers the group to return to their original topic. While physically included, Dan hangs back verbally, taking on the role of an entertained onlooker. Almost absently, Dan adjusts the ribbon on Casper’s wing, sliding it higher here, pulling it taut there. Though Casper easily keeps his wings still, keeping his eyes open is a much harder feat.

He looks to Dan, tilting his head in question, away from the group.

Dan tilts his head at the same angle, but in the wrong direction. He looks surprised at Casper’s willingness to leave.

Socializing with strangers on a topic he knows well but cannot fully discuss is more difficult than dancing with his wings bound. Unable to explain this as well, Casper does the next best thing, and drops his gaze to Dan’s lips.

Those lips quickly quirk, softness pulling firm over teeth. Dan tilts his head the other way, mirroring Casper, and they agree without bothering to nod.

They bow out of the conversation, Dan figuratively, Casper literally. Dan promises all gathered that they can have another long chat with Casper when he’s a Man of Letters, and Casper pretends this is correct.

It occurs to Casper, belatedly, horrifyingly, that Dan has sought to provide him with a circle of acquaintances. Potential friends, in the expectation that Casper will move here and integrate into Dan’s life. This was no challenge or dare, but a gift.

He holds fast to Dan, and they exit the great hall entirely. Arms linked, steps synced, they walk. When prompted, Dan explains his plans for the evening in greater detail: advocating for his brother and knights, rewarding reasonable people with his clear approval, and a thousand other tiny things Dan implies simply by the way he mentions people where he can be overheard.

“You’re not much on current events, huh,” Dan says as they near the open doors to the courtyard. Even in the hall, the fresh air makes itself felt, and Casper consciously keeps his strides from lengthening.

“I stopped paying attention approximately seven hundred years ago,” Casper replies, a foolish risk made entirely for a laugh.

Dan merely grins, the crinkling corners of his eyes barely seen through the holes of his mask. “You’re stupidly focused, you know that, right?”

Though they step out through the high doors to the courtyard, Casper doesn’t look up. To feel the air is enough, and to see Dan’s reaction is better. “I didn’t think you found that a problem.”

“Not when you’re focused on the right things,” Dan says.

“‘Fixated’ is the word my siblings use.”

Dan’s grin softens into a smile, and Casper can’t decide which he prefers, to be the cause of joy or the object of tenderness. “Is that the word you’d use?”

“Perhaps I have a wider vocabulary,” Casper replies. He uncouples their linked arms, shifting to hold Dan by the elbow. He merely means to look at Dan, not turn fully toward him, but their feet shuffle, and there they are. “Go on. I can entertain myself.”

Dan remains with him, standing beside a waist-high urn full of growing flowers. He sets his hand on the stone lip, his arm a barrier, as if Casper is the one who might choose to leave. “You’re not in the way.”

“I’m too tempted to distract you,” Casper admits.

“You think you can distract me?” Dan challenges.

Casper steps forward. There is no air between them, only heat. He sets his hand on the lip of the urn, almost atop Dan’s. Casper lifts his chin in a dare. He closes every inch between them, save for the final one. The only part of him that touches Dan is his breath as he says, once more in the language of his youth, “You wish to be mine as I long to be yours.”

All the telltale signs are present. The dilation of the eyes, black eclipsing green. The wet shine of the lips, dampened by the flick of his tongue. The flare of the nostrils, inhaling Casper’s scent alongside his words.

That one last inch remains between them, and Dan doesn’t close the gap. The corner of his mouth pulls to the side. Casper tracks the movement, waiting for more. He holds position, save for the creeping motion of his hand atop the stone urn. His thumb touches leather, the human warmth of Dan’s hand hidden beneath it, and still Dan doesn’t move.

Casper lifts his gaze from mouth to eyes and remembers, much too late, that he is not the only tactician here.

In front of a crowd entertained solely by music and gossip, Casper has flung himself at this man in the most blatant way possible. More than that. He is currently flinging himself.

Dan smirks at him knowingly.

Casper steps back, and Dan’s free hand shoots out to hold him at the waist. He draws Casper close, somehow closer than before, and Casper allows his body to be led. Dan’s other hand covers Casper’s on the stone, holding him between sleek warmth and rough chill. His face down-turned, Dan brings his lips to Casper’s ear.

“They’ll know better than to ask you to dance, now,” he explains in a voice rougher than the stonework, as if this was for Casper’s benefit.

“And if I wanted to dance?” Casper bluffs.

“Then I’d be surprised,” Dan answers plainly. “And I’d make it up to you later.”

“You’ll make it up to me later anyway,” Casper tells him, ordering a prince.

Dan pulls back to smile at him, as slow and lingering as the circles his thumb traces into Casper’s side. “And you’ll let me.”

They stare at each other too long.

At the same time, Dan starts to say “I gotta” and Casper begins to say “You should.”

They stop. They don’t quite smile.

Dan squeezes Casper’s hip and Casper squeezes Dan’s hand.

They part, staring all the while.

Dan nods toward where he plans to go. Casper nods in acceptance, or perhaps permission. Beyond this, neither of them move. Not even the music taking a turn toward liveliness stirs them.

Very deliberately, Casper closes his eyes. He opens them, the two motions distinct and too slow to be called a blink. With that, Dan is released.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Dan orders.

“I had planned to fly away,” Casper deadpans.

“Smartass,” Dan calls him, a restrained kiss held in all the lines of his body. Though already no longer touching, they relinquish each other.

Casper keeps to the walls of the courtyard, the stone path encircling patches of flowers and sculpted shrubbery. On the far side of the courtyard from the doors, musicians play on, and before them, filling the circle framed by those spots of plant life, dancers whirl and spin together. Casper is not alone in keeping to the periphery, and he avoids any clusters of humans who look at him as he passes.

He finds a good spot, out of the way without being blatantly hiding. A castle tower rises at each corner of the courtyard, one a bell tower turned clock tower, an alarm system long ago converted into a simple means of telling the time. He keeps his face upturned toward it, using the excuse of squinting at a distant clock face as he instead watches the sky.

Far above the lights of the party, the clouds linger, dark and damp. They move slowly, airborne shadows shifting beneath moon and stars. With no small amount of excitement, he realizes it might rain later. That’s what this smell is, this taste.

He’d forgotten it.

His wings fight to flex beneath their trappings of ribbon. His feet want to shift, his knees to bend, his shoulders to brace. The empty sky beckons, but Casper will not fly.

Instead, he closes his eyes and drops his face. Looking for Dan serves as a distraction, but only for his mind. He may know the tension of his body better than the clench of his heart, but he does know he can’t fight longing with longing. No, he needs something else.

The reassurance resides inside his borrowed belt pouch, in Hannah’s. Instead of his battered invitation, he withdraws the second note page from last night, the one he couldn’t give to Raphael without exposing himself. He focuses on it now, rereading the incantation slowly. Spellwork has a different structure from ordinary speech – it must, to prevent mere conversation from casting enchantments – and he doesn’t know it as well as he now wishes he did.

There is comfort in reading the words. He may not have the tablet in his hands yet, nor all the power stored within, the combined efforts of their greatest, and now deceased, enchanters. But he will. They will. Soon.

He looks up at the sky again, and knows that in less than a fortnight, he shall fly.

It’s a thought he holds dear, a thought he wields against the sickening worries of how Dan will react. His mind seems a mess of fears. He fights to dispel the ones he can.

The strange behavior of the demons in regards to the tablet, for example. If they could, they would have unsealed themselves with it. Therefore, they couldn’t. No matter how Uriel reassured him, something rang false in his brother’s explanations, and the more Casper reads and rereads the incantation, the more the reason why becomes clear.

The incantation is specific, as any effective incantation must be. Ambiguity leads to unintended results, and there is no ambiguity here. The tablet should only be able to unlock the angels’ realm, not that of the demons. Casper recalls enough of the first side of the tablet to be certain. This cannot be altered, either. Once set into the stone and imbued with power, the spell cannot be changed.

And yet, Uriel was certain the demons could use the tablet. He’d been the youngest member on the team that had crafted it, was now the only surviving member, and would surely remember the spell, even centuries later. Casper must be missing something. Perhaps it’s a matter of double-meaning, the same way that human was convinced that a text about angels could apply to birds.

He renews the effort, searching for any mention of twisted or turned or corrupted , for anything that could be a name for a demon. A demon is, after all, a human twisted beyond the scope of their life force’s natural form. Lucifer’s immense power as an archangel allowed his healing abilities to stretch past the limits of nature, allowed him to create where a lesser angel would be constrained to mere mending.

With this in mind, Casper seeks.

He finds nothing but confusion.

The tablet isn’t the key to freeing Lucifer and his greater demons. No, that isn’t quite right. Had the demons remaining in this world managed to banish the tablet into the demon’s realm, they might have been able to use it to free Lucifer, and only Lucifer. The spell refers to plural angels, but the word is indeed the same for wings, meaning that even a single angel is referred to as a plural, having two wings.

Except, Casper realizes, this is also wrong. Wingless, Lucifer no longer fits the word.

This tablet can’t be used to free Lucifer either.

Casper fights his wings smooth, frowning internally.

If the tablet is useless to the demons and Lucifer, what of Seer Shurley’s prophecy? If the key to freeing both angels and demons is, in fact, two different keys, then what else is in this castle? What key is there that the demons know and Casper does not? If the key isn’t locked away as the tablet was, if the demons’ key leaves the warded castle, one half of their problem remains.

When Casper squints up at the clock tower, it is very nearly eleven. He doesn’t have the time to find out. Is it, somehow, Michael’s sword? The idea makes no sense, and yet the warding on the boxes continues to bother Casper. Was it simply because the demons were aware of Uriel’s spying and feared him as a thief? But if they knew Uriel was a threat, why not wield the sword against him?

“What are you—are you serious?”

Casper looks up from the paper, blinking at Dan. The magelight set into the wall behind Casper makes the silver horns shine with a golden glow. “What?” Casper asks.

Shaking his head, Dan gestures for Casper to put his notes away. “Are you ever not in research mode?”

“I won’t be at eleven,” Casper replies, nevertheless folding the page and returning it to his belt pouch.

“Yeah, screw that,” Dan says, and he holds out his hand.

Casper very nearly hands him the paper. He catches himself in time, but not too late for Dan to see and smirk. At least they’ve less of an audience this time, many of the party-goers heading into the castle proper. In the time Casper was reading and thinking, the majority had left. The musicians have even stopped playing, somehow without Casper noticing.

His hand raised above Dan’s, Casper pauses. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go in?” he makes himself ask.

“Sam told me I’d be out here,” Dan says. “Can’t make my brother a liar on his birthday, now can I?”

Casper takes Dan’s hand, and as Dan guides him to the center circle of the courtyard, the clock tower begins to toll. Besides Dan, only the musicians and a few servants remain. Every other human in the courtyard hastens inside at the long peals.