The Key

Chapter 26

“You get him back,” Dan commands. “If you ever said one true word, you bring him back to me.”

Behind Dan, a short woman comes running, well in advance of the few guards still able to stand. Her hair is a pale gold, and if she isn’t Lady Jessebel, Casper can’t be faulted for mistaking one human for another now.

“Can you heal them the rest of the way?” Casper asks her, speaking past Dan, unable to answer Dan.

“Get him back,” she begs, already dropping to her knees beside Dan. “Please,” she adds, but not to Casper: to Dan.

Dan looks to her, and that’s the opening Casper needs to say what must be said.

“The portal is in the hedge maze. It opens at seven and midnight. Send my body through.”

Dan’s eyes snap back to him, but Casper is already on his feet, his wings already spread wide. This is the last Casper will ever see of Dan: shocked and vengeful, powerful even unarmed and on his knees.

Casper turns away and, for the first time in over six hundred years, he takes to the sky.

The throne room falls away behind him, beneath him. The stars slip between shielding clouds and the moon deliberates whether to hide. The wind whips all other sounds from Casper’s ears, but not the half-heard echoes of shouts from his mind.

He climbs.

Wings straining, he climbs. Higher, higher, pushing to see in every direction at once. A minute’s head start would be too much for an unencumbered angel, but Casper knows better. Archangel or not, flight is not about strength, but physics, and Prince Samuel is an awkward burden to drag through the air.

Gaining altitude by the second, Casper banks on Lucifer doing the same and scans the skies above as well as beyond.

There.

There.

Lucifer sees him coming, striking out even higher. In aerial combat, height and speed are the true weapons. Lucifer rises in an ungainly, wobbling line, and Casper fights to pass him in altitude before drawing within reach. They race ever skyward, Lucifer’s arms clenched around Prince Samuel, Casper with Michael’s sword in hand. Preemptively, Casper rips open his own sleeves, prepared to summon his own blade as a feint if necessary. A seraph’s blade may give but a glancing blow to an archangel, but distraction is key.

Casper has speed. He has balance. He must wield them as skillfully as any sword.

White wings beat the sky, pearl undersides glinting in the moonlight. Longing for warm, daytime thermals to lift him higher still, Casper cuts his own path through the air.

Higher.

Higher.

Higher still, they rise.

Lucifer makes for a cloud bank and Casper cuts him off. They wheel past each other, ripping the wind, and at last, Casper pushes above. From this vantage, he can see the way Lucifer’s shirt and jacket bunch high across his shoulders, his spine bare and exposed between his wings.

Blade at the ready, he descends upon his foe, and Lucifer dives. He drops like the dead weight he carries. Knowing the ploy too well, Casper dives after him at only half-speed, and when Lucifer swoops back up, Casper remains above him.

They drop and dive again and again, each time a gamble between a true descent and a feint. If Casper wanted to slice Lucifer across the back, the unending ploys would be excruciating, but Casper knows better than to attempt a killing blow, not while Lucifer can still revive himself with the dying man in his arms.

Down, Casper forces him. Casper herds him and harries him, pushing down from above where Lucifer has to twist and strain to see him. The need to keep his foe in sight turns Lucifer’s already stiff wing strokes into the clumsy fumbling of a fledgling. Swooping from one side to another, Casper presses this advantage, driving Lucifer back toward the castle.

Once above the massive structure, Casper is hard-pressed to keep Lucifer there. He circles tighter, and though they are not yet low enough, he has no choice.

Casper drops.

He plummets in a controlled fall, directly atop his quarry. Lucifer rolls hard to the right, pulling up from a dive, and Casper mirrors him, twisting so they rise face to face, close enough to touch. Even with the larger turn, Casper rises faster, and he snaps out his wings to match pace. In the split second before Casper strikes, Lucifer’s eyes widen, illuminated only by stars and moon.

The second after, a new light shines silver from Lucifer’s upper arm.

Casper slashes again and again, matching Lucifer from one maneuver and into the next. They bank and roll but mostly dive, and at last, Casper cuts him too deep.

Released, Prince Samuel falls.

Casper dives anew, still faster than even an unencumbered Lucifer. His arms close around the prince’s torso, pinning one limp arm to his side, and a faint surge of power flashes through him when the back of the prince’s head strikes him in the chin.

He strains away as hard as he can without letting go. Any more direct contact will kill Prince Samuel, of that Casper is sure. He dives with Prince Samuel held beneath him, one bare hand tight on the prince’s jacket, Michael’s sword carefully angled away in the other.

Close behind him, Lucifer descends, their airborne battle reversed.

This time, the dive is no feint. Casper plummets toward the closest tower, the only one that glints in the moonlight. At the last instant, he doesn’t pull up but instead turns over, striking the glass ceiling of the observatory tower with his body, his wings spread wide to absorb the impact and slow his fall.

He crashes to the tower floor all the same, a fleshy c***k joining the shattering of glass and snap of metal. Prince Samuel lands atop him, still held against Casper’s chest, and for the first time tonight, Casper hears him make a sound. It is low and pained and incoherent, but it is a sound. The prince is alive.

Tucking his wing close to his side, Casper rolls Prince Samuel off him. In the moment Prince Samuel passes over his wing, another pulse of energy shoots through Casper, this one even weaker than the first. Two nights ago, the merest touch of the prince’s hand was enough to energize Casper for hours; tonight, there is next to nothing.

One-handed, Casper pushes harder on Prince Samuel’s jacket, shoving the human up against the lower stone portion of the wall as Lucifer circles above them. Casper brandishes Michael’s blade as he takes up a defensive posture above the prince, his feet planted on either side of Prince Samuel’s. One of the prince’s legs is twisted the wrong way beneath the knee, but to heal him would be to touch him, and to touch him would surely kill him now.

Dragging Prince Samuel to the nearest wall rapidly proves to be a mistake. Lucifer lands before him, his own blade at the ready. His wings strike down the remaining glass and the twisted wreckage of the metal frame that once held it. Shards crunch beneath Lucifer’s feet, but Casper is without the luxury of maneuvering.

The door down into the tower is on Lucifer’s right, Casper’s left, and it opens toward Lucifer, not Casper. To force Prince Samuel down through it, Casper would need to drag the prince’s body past Lucifer clockwise before pushing him back through the other way. Even if he managed that much, there’s no time to carve angel warding into the door, no matter how well it will work on Lucifer now, with his wings regrown.

The tower was still the best option, he knows. Better than the throne room with the ruin of a window, better than any area with a wide space. The stairway down is a cramped source of safety, if only Casper can get the prince to it.

But with Lucifer before him, that doesn’t matter now.

Carefully, as gently as he has time for, Casper slides Prince Samuel’s legs out of the way with stiff flight feathers. He holds his other wing before him, ready to strike with the wrist or shield with the rest. He eyes Lucifer’s wings with as much caution as he does Lucifer’s blade.

“Are you going to be like this all night?” Lucifer asks, as if Casper is boring him.

“Yes,” Casper answers.

They stand facing each other, more illuminated by the wounds on Lucifer’s right arm than by the stars above. He still prefers that arm, wielding his blade right-handed. The posture of his wings makes them look injured instead, both held back from the threat of further pain.

Neither Casper nor Lucifer moves. Air whistles through the few cracked panes of glass still standing, and neither angel moves.

“There’s still time for you to fly away,” Lucifer reminds him.

“Leave him, and I will let you go,” Casper counters.

“Mm, no.” Lucifer smiles in the human way, his expression slowly twisting into a glare like a human soul into a demon. “I’m sure you know exactly how long I’ve waited for something that could restore me. And after all, Sam and I have grown so close, these past few nights.” The glare does not so much soften into a smirk as meld into one. “You understand how it is, with these humans.”

The allusion to Dan is meant to weaken him. It’s meant to harm him.

Knowing this doesn’t make it any less effective.

Grimly, Casper readies himself for Lucifer’s attack.

Lips quirked, Lucifer continues to wait, and Casper slowly understands.

To win, Casper must kill Lucifer outright.

To lose, Casper need only falter once.

There will be no reinforcements, not here. The portal supports only one angel at a time, and he is that angel. Human might is ineffective against Lucifer, and no one knows where Casper has landed.

Save for one unconscious man, weakened almost to the point of death, Casper is alone.

“If you want him, take him,” Casper goads.

Eyes on Michael’s blade, Lucifer hangs back. He stands tall but unbalanced, unused to his own body. He won’t attack until he is more secure in the opportunity than he is unsure of his balance.

Good. Until Prince Samuel can drag himself to the door, Casper resigns himself not to make the first move.

“Is this about, what was her name?” Lucifer asks. “The one who came to ‘rescue’ Uriel from me.”

Casper is in control of his body. He is, above all other things, in control of his wings. Of himself.

He does not attack. He does not posture.

He does not move.

“The flamewing,” Lucifer adds in a helpful tone, as if Casper could possibly need to hear his late sister described. “She refused, too.”

After Michael struck down Anna, Casper had thanked him for doing what he himself could not. They were the appropriate words and he said them with his own mouth, unprompted, when Balthazar and Hannah would not.

Compared to that, this is nothing.

“You’re not very talkative, are you?” Lucifer remarks. “Then again, she wasn’t either. Refused to join me, refused to even talk. Very contrary.”

The longer Lucifer speaks, the more Casper regrets not preparing his back-up plan in advance. Between the choice of preparation and the choice of healing Dan’s parents, he ought to have prepared. And yet, thinking this, the regret grows distant. It’s a distraction, and he puts it aside.

A hard noise hits his ears, the jarring rhythm of the clock tower proclaiming the hour. It’s too late to turn back, has been for some time, but those immense bells confirm it.

Lucifer strikes under the cover of that distraction, but his wings telegraph each motion. Right-handed, Casper parries Lucifer’s blade with Michael’s, and he punches forward with the wrist of his right wing. With battle well and truly joined, bruises darken and cuts shine. A flurry of motion elapses between each long toll of the deepest bell, a slow count up to twelve.

At two, Casper switches hands beneath the diversion of his wings.

At three, he has Lucifer unbalanced.

Four and five have their blades locked, hands grappling, wings pummeling.

Six through eight find Casper retreating, one foot pressing back against Prince Samuel’s leg.

Nine is nearly his undoing, and ten is his recovery.

Eleven is the turning point, Lucifer unwilling to shield his body at the expense of his wings.

The twelfth toll echoes, louder than their pained breaths, and there, beside Lucifer, the tower door opens. There, shield in one hand, a bar of magelight in the other, is Dan.

Legs aching, lungs burning, Dan slams the observatory door open and steps into the ruins of a private battlefield. He reacts before he knows what he’s seeing, and what he sees is this:

Two dark figures, shining with stripes of silver. A third shape, crumpled at the base of the wall. An immense set of white wings, the flash of a blade, and the sudden rush of a shadow between Dan and it. The blade pierces through the shadow, Dan its clear target, and the blade stops, embedded to the hilt from the other side.

His left wing impaled, Cas screams, and Dan does the only thing he can do.

Dan darts behind him, dropping down, and grabs Sam. He skids on broken glass, shredding the knees of his thin dress pants. The magelight clatters to the floor, casting a thin glow of illumination onto the legs of the battling angels. Dan keeps the decorative shield up, keeps it turned toward Cas and the archangel beyond him, and he hopes beyond all other hopes that he carved the warding sigil correctly into its gilded surface. In between snagging it off the wall and running up here to fulfill Sam’s prediction, he hasn’t had much time to check his work.

One-handed, unable to even risk looking down at his brother, he wrestles Sam’s arm over his shoulders. Before him, Casper twists his wing around, disarming Lucifer at the cost of rending his own flesh. His scream is unending, a quaking cry of effort and agony, and Dan can’t allow himself to listen. The blade whips through the air as Casper stabs Lucifer in the shoulder, and Lucifer strikes at Cas in return as if his wings had fists in the middle.

“I’m here, I’m here,” Dan thinks he might be saying as he tries to drag Sam higher than a slump. His own mouth escapes him at the feel of Sam’s wrist, clammy and cool, under his fingers. “I’m where you told me to be, I’m here, I got you. Got you, Sammy, got you.”

He looks for Jo, for Victor, for anyone who was right behind him on the stairs to follow, and then, beneath the volume of Casper’s dwindling cries, Dan hears the pounding on the door. It’s somehow closed, impossibly barred. Somebody did that, and there’s only one suspect, the one summoning a blade back through the air and into his waiting hand. Those strange energy blasts Lucifer sent out in the throne room must be more capable of fine motion than Dan had thought.

Rising into a crouch, Dan drags Sam with him. He can’t lift his overgrown brother any higher, not without setting down the warded shield. Still a limp weight, Sam lets out a pained grunt, his first sound of life, and it’s the most beautiful noise in the world.

Cas shifts with him, keeping his back to Dan, his left wing sagging with its shining puncture wound. Even with the surreal addition of wings, his fighting tactics are clear, motions designed to unbalance rather than overwhelm. Lucifer is the one who overwhelms, pushing forward with harsh blows that force Casper back. Casper fights left-handed now, compensating for the weakness of his wing. His right wing turns more shield than weapon, and Lucifer strikes with his own wings only on Cas’ right, away from the stolen blade.

“Afraid of getting those wings hurt, you f*****g pigeon?” Dan taunts.

Eyes blazing white-blue, Lucifer looks past Cas and down at him, just for an instant. Shattered glass rolls away from Lucifer’s feet in concentric waves. The fallen magelight bursts into glinting shards, but that pulse of power does nothing to Dan this time. A red glow emanates from the front of Dan’s shield as the warding takes effect. Sam, on the other hand, gets shoved back toward the wall by an invisible force, but then, he’s not touching the shield directly.

Good to know.

Dan tightens his grip on his unconscious brother, renewing his struggle toward the door. His only light is from the moon and stars and the angels’ wounds, but that is enough to see by. Sam’s legs drag behind, one unnaturally twisted. Never looking back at them, Cas nevertheless covers their progress, responding to where Lucifer presses him hardest. Blocking Lucifer’s blade, his right wing to Lucifer’s wrist, Cas comes in with a double assault on the left, blade high, injured wing low. Lucifer knocks Cas’ blade aside only for that low wing sweep to strike his knee.

Lucifer staggers. Cas kicks him farther from the door. Rather than press the advantage, Cas plants himself between them and Lucifer. “Go, now!”

Dan drags Sam in front of the door, Sam’s lower body trailing behind in a long line of defenselessness. Through the door, he hears Victor and Jo. His shoulder against it, he feels the pounding force of his knights trying to break it down. If he throws the bar now, they’ll shove him and Sam forward into Cas, and Lucifer will be on them in an instant.

His balance regained, Lucifer renews his attack, redoubling his assault on Cas’ left. Cas’ puncture wound blazes light as he defends himself, a glowing surge that distinguishes Cas’ dark wings from the night sky beyond. The wound widens and widens, light spilling from it in an uncontrolled rupture. This is nothing like the gleam of his parents’ injuries closing. That had been a healing light, innately recognizable as such, but this, this is light meant to stay inside, meant to be as internal as blood. This, too, Dan knows by sight alone.

But he also knows asshole tactics enough to predict them and shouts “Cas, on your right!” just as the onslaught shifts. Too late to parry, Cas blocks the blade with his right wing. He bleeds shadows in slow motion, the fall of black feathers discordantly soft, but he bleeds light all at once.

Retreat pulls Cas back, but it puts him where Dan needs him. Again, Dan hauls his brother to the side, Cas shielding their new position on the handle side of the door. Still crouched, shield raised not to Cas but to Lucifer beyond, Dan shifts down Sam to tug Sam’s legs out of the way. His left leg is definitely broken, but only below the knee.

The space is clear. Dan throws off the length of metal barring the door and shouts, “Victor, take Sam!”

Although unbarred, the door doesn’t open, and not from lack of effort. The pounding from the other side continues. Dan grabs at the handle and yanks, but to no avail.

“It won’t open!” Victor shouts through the heavy wood.

“Get back, I’ll burn it down!” Jo orders.

With the smoke of his parents’ charred bodies still in his nostrils, Dan recoils, fighting to keep his head. “No, he’ll turn it back on you!”

“No magic!” Cas commands in a strained rasp. “He can twist it.”

Lucifer strikes Cas to the side and Dan drops back down, hunched over Sam with the shield. He grabs Sam’s limp hand and presses it to the back of the shield, not knowing how much of Sam, if any, this will truly protect.

Lucifer sighs at them. Actually f*****g sighs before Cas is back on him. The door shifts all of half an inch, not enough for the edge of the door to even clear its frame, and then it slams back all the way shut as Lucifer throws out a hand.

That’s going to be a problem.

The fight rages on, inhuman. Despite what the epic ballads and poems might say, combat is bloody and fast, in each moment and overall. This is as long and ragged as Cas’ light-rended wings, as unending as the night sky beyond them. The decline is impossibly slow, but Dan can still see it: Cas is losing.

Stripes of blue-white line them both, each bleeding, each panting. They clash and strike, block and counter. Shattered glass scatters with every step of their feet and sweep of their wings. Cas holds his own as best he can, devoid of any trace of an awkward human scholar. He is something else, something not real, something too real. He is buying them time, and Dan has to find a way to use it.

With Cas still keeping Lucifer off them, Dan risks lifting the shield away from Sam. He holds it against the door, warding sigil first, and shouts, “Push!”

The door gives slightly but only slightly. Between the dark wood and the shield, a patchy red glow rises. Too much door, not enough sigil.

He lowers the shield onto Sam, tucking him beneath it as much as possible. Then he pulls Jo’s iron knife back out of his boot and begins to carve the door. Maybe the angel wounds glow brighter, maybe the clouds cover more stars, but the moment Dan’s life—Sam’s life—depends on fine detail, the ambient lighting decides to take the night off. Holding the pattern in his mind, he drags the knife down over the wood, into the wood. Heart pounding in his ears and hammering in his chest, he forces his motions slower, surer. Too big a mistake and he’ll have to start over.

Cas cries out and Dan turns, ducking down for Sam and shield both. Cas’ left wing hangs down from his shoulder, the beginning of the end. There’s still time, maybe only a handful of moments.

Dan carves faster. The square. The shapes within. How many lines? He drags the knife through each, as straight as he can manage against the grain of the wood.

The knife sticks, a knot in the wood too thick. Dan wrests it free and tries again, but he can’t go around the knot, not without risking blatant imprecision. The line has to go through there, and only there.

Behind Dan, there is a crunch.

There is a shout.

There is Casper, bludgeoned to his knees. Arms crossed over his head, he holds off Lucifer’s blade with two of his own, a second angel blade having appeared out of nowhere. Not once tonight had Dan felt it on him, and Dan had plenty of opportunity.

Cas had told him. Cas had f*****g told him that angels summon their blades like spells. What else? What other crucial piece of information had Dan dismissed as a scholar’s theory?

There’s no time to remember, not with Cas so close to falling. Their blades locked, Lucifer pummels at him from either side with both of his wings, and Cas can only defend on the right, his left wing now entirely limp. He takes the punishment on his left, his arm shaking hard where he tries to block.

The shield on Sam and only Sam, Dan carves for both their sakes. The knot in the wood gives way stubbornly, and when Dan pulls hard on the knife’s handle, the blade turns the wrong way, scratching one long ruinous line.

Dan curses, the bellow erupting out of him, but even this noise is lost beneath Casper’s screams. There’s no time to start again. In a desperate rush, with futile hope, Dan completes the rest of the sigil, but the door still doesn’t give way. Every effort, ruined by that one errant line.

“Dan!” Cas shouts.

Dan ducks and turns in the same motion, almost swept away in another surge of power before he grabs hold of the shield. The sigil on it, correctly carved, glows a violent red. The knife jerks itself out of Dan’s other hand, proving that one small sigil isn’t enough to protect two grown men. The knife lands beyond Cas, behind Lucifer, and it might as well have fallen off the tower entirely.

With his right wing high and shielding over his own head, Casper buckles beneath the blows Lucifer rains down upon him. Another sharp c***k bursts through the night air, originating somewhere around Cas’ knees.

“Dan!” Cas shouts again. One hand grappling with Lucifer for the archangel’s blade, he throws his other hand back. One of his own blades slides across the glass-strewn stone floor to Dan, hilt-first.

Dan snatches the blade up as Casper goes down. Lucifer wrenches Cas’ right wing around, both grabbing and skewering him. Twisting one wing and stepping on the other, Lucifer pins Cas down on his stomach. A fresh burst of light shines out between Cas and the stone floor: he’s fallen on his own blade.

“Cas!” Dan yells, and Lucifer spares him a glance. Even with bloody wings and shining defensive wounds down his arms, he looks as if he’s above it all, uncaring, but his invisible hold forcing the door shut is proof enough of that lie.

Tutting, Lucifer runs his blade through Cas’ longest feathers, clipping the wing as casually as shaving his own face. Cas fights to rise and Lucifer stomps down twice, once on Cas’ limp left wing, and once on Cas’ head.

The c***k splits the air. It flays Dan open before his eyes can inform his brain.

The stone, his eyes say. The floor.

The stone floor itself is cracked. Cas moans, low and pained but alive.

“Hey, Nick!” Dan shouts.

Lucifer looks at him, eyebrow raised, as if to rebuke Dan for the rudeness of his volume.

Leaving the shield on top of Sam, Dan stands tall in front of his brother and brandishes the angel blade. “He’s warded now, b***h,” Dan continues, because that is the important thing. That is the only thing, even with Cas dying on the floor. Even with Dan about to join him.

Blade now digging into the meat of Casper’s wing, Lucifer pauses as much as he ever pauses. Each time Cas struggles to rise, Lucifer kicks him again, and another surge of light flows out from beneath Cas.

“There’s no point,” Dan adds. “Kill him, kill me, you’re still not getting Sam. You need me to move that shield off him.” Because that’s what Cas really taught him about angels, even if he didn’t mean to. Cas going on about needing gloves for artifacts, knowing full well that skin oil wasn’t about to harm an angel blade, or stone. “But I’m not going to take that warding off.”

With a faint smirk, holding Cas’ wing pinned with both of his own, Lucifer plucks something out from Cas’ wing. Dan assumes feathers before he sees it for what it is: a scrap of ribbon.

“How cold,” Lucifer remarks in the same compassionate tone he’d used to tell stories of the Royal Hospital. “Poor Casper.” He strokes one hand up Cas’ wing in faux-sympathy, again tutting. “You’d let your lover die?”

Dan looks Lucifer in the eye and speaks the truth of his life. “No one’s more important than Sam.”

Lucifer sighs and pierces Cas’ wing. He twists the knife and speaks over Casper’s gasping cries. “I’m not going to kill Sam, you know. I think it would be wonderful to keep him around, don’t you?”

Dan holds his ground as Cas’ wounds light up the broken observatory tower. He holds his ground as Cas screams. He holds his ground, and his blade, and his heart behind his teeth.

“Remove the warding now,” Lucifer offers, “and I will give you back your seraph alive.”

“No,” Cas groans before Dan can answer. Whether in refusal or to beg an end to the torture, there should be no way of telling. But maybe, maybe, Dan does know him just well enough.

“You heard the man,” Dan says.

Lucifer looks upon him with his face in the shape of pity. “If it won’t be the carrot, it’ll have to be the stick,” he warns in a half-singsong. With that, he cracks Cas’ wing with the resounding snap of bone. Dropping the limp limb, he steps over Casper, again kicking him to the side with the debris of bent stools and broken telescopes.