The Key

Chapter 25

At the eleventh, Dan assumes a dancing position Casper knows well, his frame sturdy, his eyes on Casper. Without looking away, Dan gestures to the ten person orchestra, and they begin to play.

As close to alone as they’ve been all night, they dance. With no one else to avoid bumping into, they look at each other, and only at each other. Though Casper has learned a preference for the faster songs, the better to spin and whirl and hold tight, Dan has arranged with the musicians for something slower, something lingering. Although their steps are always deliberate in their dancing, now they turn distinct. Despite their lightness, each has weight. They move in unison, each step landing at the same moment, a steady rhythm of now, now, now, together, together.

Dan makes the most of their space, a larger area than the library offered throughout Dan’s lessons. And tonight is another lesson, to be certain. Though the footwork remains the same, their closeness varies. Their holds change, hands upon hands and hands upon torsos. Then, with playful smiles, forearm upon forearm as Dan softly introduces more and more motions better known in unarmed combat.

Seeking to better hold Dan, Casper moves past this whimsy. He pushes closer and Dan readily understands. With less than an hour left to them tonight, Dan doesn’t tease. He pulls Casper close, and when he spins Casper, it isn’t to spin him away but to turn him. A hand beneath each of Casper’s wrists, their arms outstretched to the sides, Dan plays at being Casper’s wings. His breath ruffles Casper’s hair as the wind itself might.

“You really think it’ll take six months?” Dan asks, the longing restrained in his voice but rampant in his hands.

Exposed, held open for anyone to see, Casper closes his eyes. With Dan at his back and his arms spread, Casper is on display. No, more than that: he is being shown off. They should have danced sooner, when the full crowd was still here.

“Cas,” Dan prompts, hooking his chin over Casper’s right wing.

“I can try for faster,” Casper says. The visiting schedule is nothing more than an excuse to keep Dan away from the university, but pretending is a comfort.

“I’m willing to wait,” Dan promises.

“Dan,” Casper begins to say, but Dan turns him back before the protest can fully form. He catches Casper entirely off-guard with a hand against his cheek.

“Do you want me to wait?” Dan asks.

“I think–”

“But what do you want?” Dan interrupts.

“To have kissed you hours ago,” Casper replies, baiting Dan toward silence, to the quiet of soft, wet sounds.

Dan’s hand leaves his cheek for his neck, his neck for his shoulder. “Do you want to be with me, Cas? Screw ‘should’ and all that bullshit. Do you want us to be together?”

“Socially, romantically, or carnally?” Casper asks.

“Yes,” answers Dan.

“Yes,” answers Casper.

Dan grins at him wide and warm, and he shares the joy in his teeth and lips even as he keeps them to himself.

No matter how Casper moves or seeks to move them, Dan turns each push into a turn, each press forward into a retreat. It’s a strange sort of sparring in a style Dan knows far better.

“I wanted to ask you something last night,” Dan says. “Didn’t seem like the time, though.”

Casper tilts his head.

“When you were talking about the world changing,” Dan says, “you mentioned someone named Michael.”

Involuntarily, Casper drops his gaze to the sword on Dan’s hip. Down the small gap between their bodies, the hilt keeps brushing against Hannah’s pouch. “You’ve no cause for jealousy, if that’s your question.”

“Not what I was going for, but good to know,” Dan says.

Casper waits, looking back up at Dan.

“You hadn’t mentioned anyone besides your siblings before,” Dan continues once he sees Casper won’t.

“No, I told you about Michael,” Casper replies, certain of it.

Dan frowns. “Was he… the soldier who trained you?”

Casper nods. “He wasn’t family, but he wanted us.”

“Was he going to adopt you?”

“In a way, he already had,” Casper explains. Tries to explain, but can’t. They were Michael’s soldiers, and Michael trained many of his troops personally. That he had also put down Anna himself after Lucifer had twisted her was a tearing pang of responsibility. In his own distant, coldly righteous way, Michael had cared for them.

“Was he the one who named you?” Dan asks. “Noticing a bit of an angel theme going on.”

“He didn’t name us, no,” Casper replies. “But.” He smiles at Dan to make it a joke, but the motion cannot hold, not even weakened as it is upon his face. He remembers the char of Michael’s wings too well, the havoc Lucifer had wrought upon him. Pain turns his words wistful. “He was my archangel. I was his seraph.”

Dan shifts his hand upon Casper’s hip as he admits, “When I was a kid, my mom used to call me her little angel, too. Nowhere near that specific, though.” The words are an offering, and one well-received.

“Really?” Casper asks, holding back what Dan might consider disproportionate amusement.

“C’mon, it’s not that funny,” Dan complains, as if he hadn’t been trying to buoy Casper’s mood.

“I apologize,” Casper says, unrepentant. “What else did Her Majesty call you?”

“How about,” Dan suggests, “we don’t talk about my mom right now?”

“I’m curious what it’s like to have parents,” Casper explains, and Dan’s expression shifts. He holds Casper closer and the length of their steps shortens.

“Not sure I’m the best person to ask,” Dan says quietly, mouth again by Casper’s ear. One of his hands leaves Casper’s waist to gesture off to the side, and the music transitions soon after, slowing even further. Before, there was lingering. Now, there is wistful longing.

Dan returns his hand to Casper’s hip and guides Casper to where he wants him. Their feet barely move. The hilt of Michael’s sword knocks against Casper’s side. They hold their clasped hands between their chests, cradling that touch, and Casper’s other arm soon slides around Dan’s shoulders entirely. Casper’s mask shifts against his face as Dan presses his cheek against Casper’s.

“Even before Dad was king, he was king, y’know?” Dan murmurs, close enough that no one could overhear them. “Mom’s more of a mom. Grandparents, though, that’s where it’s at. Grammy Millie was something else.”

“Queen Mildred?” Casper checks.

“To everybody who wasn’t me, Sam, or Grandpa Henry,” Dan says. “You gotta pick people to be yourself with, and she picked us.”

“She sounds wonderful,” Casper says.

Dan laughs low against his ear. “She was f*****g terrifying, Cas,” he says, and this seems to be praise. “She’d have liked you, though. Grandpa Henry was a Man of Letters, too.” He speaks as if Casper has already taken the position, as if it is inevitable instead of impossible. “She was big on that. Grabbing the support she needed and holding on.” To emphasize, Dan squeezes Casper’s hand between their chests. “I’ve tried to learn from that.”

“You’ve done well,” Casper says. “Even having only met Dame Joanna and Sir Robert briefly, that much is clear.”

Dan shakes his head, the slow drag of this evening’s stubble a pleasing contrast to the smooth face of his mask. “Don’t have my full team yet. Soon, though.”

Casper closes his eyes and says nothing.

“I want that,” Dan continues. “What they had. What Sam’s getting with Jess.”

If Casper pulls back, he will have to face Dan, and so he presses closer.

Dan slides his hand free of Casper’s, only to cup the back of Casper’s head.

They are no longer dancing. They are embracing with the pretense of music.

“Do you want that, Cas?” Dan asks, warm and solid and so very fleeting.

His mask thoroughly in the way, Casper nods against Dan’s neck. Dan’s fingers card through his hair, Dan’s other hand hot and steady on Casper’s hip.

“I want you with me,” Dan continues. “I can wait a few measly months for that.” His hand lifts from Casper’s hair to pull at the band of the feathered mask. He guides Casper to lift his face, and to let Dan remove the mask entirely.

Casper looks up to the clock tower rather than meet Dan’s eyes, and too much time has passed. “It’s almost eleven thirty,” Casper says with something very much like despair. He lifts his arm around Dan’s shoulders to better remove Dan’s mask as well, a cumbersome creation of metal and cloth and leather.

His face bare, Dan looks down into his eyes. Casper strains up for a kiss that doesn’t come.

“I gotta tell you something first,” Dan says, his forehead against Casper’s, his mouth withheld much too far away.

“Dan, we don’t have time.”

“Yeah, we do,” Dan tells him with conviction. He pulls back and runs his empty hand down Casper’s arm. He retrieves his mask before moving away to discard both Casper’s mask and his own on a stone urn, slipping them in between the flowers. He doesn’t need to return, as Casper follows on his heels.

“Dan,” Casper tries to argue.

“Hear me out,” Dan interrupts.

“We have ten minutes.”

“Then stay the night,” Dan tells him, very nearly a command. Holding Casper’s upper arms, he loops his thumbs through the ribbons woven down his sleeves.

“I can’t.”

“Then hear me out.”

Fighting down every instinct, Casper nods. Without his awareness, let alone his consent, his hands have found their way to Dan’s hips and seized him there. There is something wrong here, something more than a job left unfinished.

“You’re afraid I’m going to change my mind,” Dan begins, renewing their argument from last night. “That you’re going to leave and something will happen, and then I won’t want you anymore.” He keeps his voice low and lifts one of his hands higher, the better to cup Casper’s face.

Casper closes his eyes against the sight, against the words and the kindness. “Please just kiss me,” he asks, begging for one final piece of selfishness.

“I can’t until you listen,” Dan says. He strokes his thumb beneath Casper’s eye until Casper looks at him. “Because I’m serious about you. Have been since before the first time you asked me if I was, up in the observatory.” Dan nods up toward one of the towers, and Casper follows his gaze for the excuse to look away. It’s the tower to the right of the clock tower, which now proudly displays the time as eleven thirty-two.

“I believe you,” Casper says, rushing Dan toward reassurances. “I do trust you, Dan.”

“You believe me for now,” Dan corrects. “You mistrust the world, I get it, but I don’t want you leaving while you only believe me for now.”

“There are misgivings that only change over time,” Casper counters. “I appreciate the effort, but you can’t accomplish it in one night, and not in ten minutes.”

“Maybe I can,” Dan says, “because I started this morning.”

Ribbons shifting through his feathers, Casper frowns with his face.

“Sam’s doing his thing right now,” Dan continues. “His Last Unwed Kiss, for that doctor we danced with two nights ago. When he kisses Jess at midnight, that kicks off their engagement, but there are other ways to go about it too. Some people give away their last kiss to make a longer promise. Not to be married, but to be together. You get that a lot on the coast, before their partner goes out to sea. Or off to university.”

“Dan,” Casper says, but he cannot stop him.

“I’ve been jealous of Sam for so long,” Dan says, “but I’ve always known that I do get one thing he doesn’t. The Mage Prince has to have a noble mage for a spouse, but me? All I need is someone who wants me back.”

What Dan is about to say looms ahead of his actual words. It towers over them as the seconds slip past.

“That’s what this comes down to, Cas,” Dan says. “Not who your family is, not where you’re from, not who would be a ‘more appropriate’ match for me. Do you want me back? That’s all there is to it.”

“What are you saying?” Casper asks, knowing full well what Dan is saying. He jerks back from Dan’s touch upon his face, but holds still as Dan pursues, returning that hand to Casper’s shoulder.

He needs more time, he needs more time, he cannot think and he needs to escape. Seven minutes and a swift walk will bring him to the portal, but Dan will want to follow. Dan must plan to walk him back to his accommodations tonight, Dan must think he can keep Casper late and use his royal authority to command open an inn’s locked door, but that won’t happen, that can’t happen.

“I’m saying I did mine first,” Dan tells him, voice low and calm. He leans in now, wrapping around Casper without a blanket of wings, with the mere force of his presence. “That’s why Sam doesn’t mind me staying out here while he kisses Nick Lightbringer. He saw me give mine to–”

“What did you say?” Casper interrupts, at last with enough force to make Dan pause.

“I gave Jo my Last Unwed Kiss,” Dan says, hands tight on Casper’s shoulders.

“No, the other part,” Casper says, already pulling back.

Dan stares at him, grip loosening even as he follows Casper into his retreat. “What?”

“The healer, Dan, why is he called ‘Lightbringer’?” Casper demands.

“Are you f*****g serious,” Dan says. “I’m f*****g proposing here, and you–”

“Yes.” Casper wants to shake him. Casper wants to shake himself. “Why is he called that?”

Dan releases him, turning away and throwing his hands up in the air. Beyond him, the music cuts out in jerking bursts of silence as the musicians spot his ire. “What the f**k , Cas?”

Casper stalks after him, forces Dan to turn back to him with a hand on his shoulder, and demands, “When he heals, does light shine out of the wound?”

“How is that important right now?” Dan yells at him, heedless of servants and musicians. He throws out an arm, for some reason pointing up to the observatory tower. “This is not how this goes!”

“Does light shine out?” Casper demands, charging forward into Dan’s space.

“Yeah, fine, it does!” Dan shouts. “He’s a fancypants touch healer with everybody jizzing themselves over him, and he makes wounds f*****g glow. You happy?”

“No,” Casper says, and he touches Dan one final time, a sorrowful squeeze of the shoulder. It’s all he has time for. It’s more than he has time for. “No. I’m sorry, Dan.”

He seizes Michael’s sword, pulls it free, and runs.

There is a split second, just one, before Dan gives chase. Dan shouts, now more in confusion than anger, but still full of both. His footsteps pound the stone floor.

If Casper is wrong, he has ruined everything.

If Casper is right, everything is already ruined.

He runs faster than any angel with bound wings has a right to. Guards move to block him, each abandoning posts at doors and stairways, and Casper barrels through them. Behind him, closer than a human ought to be able to manage, Dan shouts, “Don’t hurt him!” Casper keeps the blade angled down in a backhanded grip, attacking none but refusing to be slowed.

He turns the final corner in the path to the throne room, and the rug covering the stone floor slides beneath his feet. For the first time in this world, the first time in centuries, Casper balances properly, one wing ripping out through its bindings as a counter-weight.

He rights himself and keeps running, his wings finally conducive to movement. Behind him, he hears the smack of hands slapping a wall, hears startled shouting, and he doesn’t look back. This part of the hall is taller, the barrier of chandeliers removed to a greater height.

Ahead of him, through the open doorway to the throne room, screams ring out. The guards framing the door run inside instead of at Casper, but a flood of costumed humanity streams out in their place.

Too late, already too late, Casper casts himself into the air. Hard flaps bring him over human heads, barely. Below him, more screams. Behind him, more shouts.

Ahead of him, Lucifer.

White wings erupted from his back, Lucifer stands tall and proud amid the magical fires of a mage battle. He cradles the limp body of Prince Samuel against himself, one wing looped forward protectively against King John’s flames. They fight upon the dais, King John positioned between the thrones, Queen Mary taking shelter behind him.

The king wields his fire with tight control, spears of blue flame stabbing Lucifer’s other side, never coming close to the younger prince. Lucifer bats each away with his free hand, a bored conductor displeased with his orchestra. All the while, guards fight to rush in while guests rush out, only some of their costumed number remaining to fling spells at Lucifer.

More than one mage looks up, sees Casper, and fires on him as well.

Casper dives before he’s ready, his aerial assault ruined before it can occur. Not enough height inside human buildings, not enough windows save for the one behind the dais. The stained glass window will be Lucifer’s exit, and only King John separates him from it.

Casper lands hard, legs kicked forward, wings flared back. Twenty feet away, with Prince Samuel drooping against his side, Lucifer looks Casper full in the face. He holds out one hand and restrains each of King John’s spells without looking. A barrage of spells – flame, ice, water, lightning, more – strike at both angels, and they both block them with ease, their wings serving as shields.

“Run!” Casper bellows to the humans. “Leave him to me! Run! ”

“What a peculiar arrogance you have,” Lucifer remarks, still holding off the king with one hand. He tilts his head in regret, in boredom, and he pushes out a blast of grace.

Even braced for it, Casper ought to have been thrown into the far wall, but the blast is weak, and Casper remains standing. The humans do not, flung back hard, save for two.

Each hand tight on a throne, Queen Mary holds her husband upright, her arms beneath his, her chest to his back. Paused for only that single moment, King John renews his assault. Each blast halts before Lucifer’s gloved palm, and none of the flame dissipates. Seeing what is about to happen, Casper charges forward, but, again, he is too late.

The inferno erupts first.

With each assault, with every fireball, Lucifer wrested control of the magic flames from the weaker human mage. He gathered them. He made them his. And in one blast, he turns them on their maker.

Behind Casper, Dan screams. For his parents. For his brother. Endlessly, for his brother.

With the king removed, Lucifer halts Casper’s charge with another blast of grace. Again, it is enough force to check him, but far from enough to do Casper injury. The scent and sight of charred flesh is a stronger attack on his senses. Screams fade into labored breath, the agony of a body not killed outright.

Eyes coolly flitting past Casper, Lucifer shifts the direction of his gloved hand. Casper hears the rapid, running footsteps, and he snaps his wing out to the side. The concentrated blast catches him low, in the flight feathers instead of the meat of his wing. Muscles strain; the remaining ribbons are flayed to tatters. He spins with the impact in one fast, complete turn that he takes control of. Mid-turn, he catches one fleeting glimpse of Dan’s face, full of rage and surprise and unshed tears. In the human’s hand, there is a knife, a single knife against an archangel, and Casper has never loved him more.

He lands in a fighting stance facing Lucifer. Without delay, he shifts to the side, sweeping one wing back to herd Dan behind him.

Head lightly tilted, his facial expression jarringly human, Lucifer observes this with a deceptively casual interest. Wings held back, he no longer protects Prince Samuel, instead using the man as a shield. Rather than hold Prince Samuel against himself, he allows the prince to droop over the bar of his arm in what must be an awkward hold. Prince Samuel’s bare face is pale, and his arms hang as limply as his hair.

Casper takes it in: the set of Lucifer’s wings, the overall posture, the caution not to touch Prince Samuel directly.

He makes a plan, and the hardest part will be getting Prince Samuel back alive.

With his free hand, Lucifer snaps his fingers and points to Casper. Were Lucifer his deceased brother Gabriel, something awful would have happened to Casper, but Gabriel’s method of magic was distinct. No, that gesture was merely conversational.

“Now I recognize you,” Lucifer remarks, as calm and collected as if they were once again upon the dance floor together. “You were one of Michael’s. It was hard to tell without seeing your colors.”

At the mention of the undersides of his wings, Casper flares his wings higher, flight feathers splayed. He shields Dan even while announcing his intention to fight. “Let him go.”

Lucifer responds to neither Casper’s words nor his threat display. Is it control that keeps his wings steady behind him, or something else? With a quiet voice and a faint smile, Lucifer asks, “Tell me, how is my brother?”

“The brother you didn’t kill?” Casper needles, and there it is, the arch of Lucifer’s wings. Lucifer shifts his grip on Prince Samuel, a balancing motion that ought to be unnecessary.

“Send Raphael my regards,” Lucifer continues, still playing at composure. “I’ll let you leave with that message. I’m sure he’ll want to hear how well I’m doing.”

Casper pulls his wings close, a shielding position. He raises the wrists of his wings high, his flight feathers ready to whip around to the front of his body. Readying for battle, he shifts Michael’s sword from a backhanded grip.

From behind, a hand presses against his spine, between the base of each wing. That hand fists in fabric.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Casper says for Dan’s benefit. “And neither are you.”

“It’s almost midnight,” Lucifer cautions, speaking as if concerned for Casper’s sake.

A tremor goes through Casper’s body. He keeps it from his wings, but it must travel up Dan’s arm.

“Cas?” Dan rasps behind him, voice raw from shouts and screams.

“That shouldn’t mean anything to you,” Casper says to Lucifer, filled with one inevitable, horrific conclusion. “You turned Uriel.”

Lucifer’s manner is almost kind, almost compassionate. When he speaks, it’s close enough to an apology to be mocking.

“I didn’t need to.”

Halting Casper’s immediate urge for forward motion, Dan tightens his grip on the back of Casper’s shirt. “Don’t let him bait you.”

Casper touches Dan’s flank with his flight feathers, a wordless agreement.

“Now, now, I don’t want a fight,” Lucifer chides. “I want a messenger. I suppose I could stick a note on your corpse and toss that through, but it’s not really the same, is it?”

“I don’t serve you,” Casper replies, blade ready in his hand.

Lucifer smiles in a pinched human way Casper can’t read. “You might want to consider it. Just a thought.”

“Put him down,” Casper orders. He presses his flight feathers low against Dan’s shins, urging Dan to stay put.

“Or what?” Lucifer gathers Prince Samuel closer, still taking care with his gloved hands and long sleeves to not touch him skin-to-skin. “You’ll die on my blade? Come now, Casper, you must know better than that. What will a seraph’s knife do against an archangel’s sword?”

Casper steps forward into a firmer fighting stance. He arches his wings high in the most pronounced threat display of his life, and still Lucifer barely responds when it should be reflexive. Casper bares his teeth. “This isn’t mine.”

Lucifer’s wings snap high, towering with rage. His eyes narrow, locked on the blade kept not as a demon’s trophy but as a brother’s memento. He adjusts Prince Samuel yet again, going so far as to need to step to keep his balance.

Casper has him.

Casper has him.

He lunges forward, propelling himself with the push of his legs and a hard flap of his wings. Lucifer’s reaction is tellingly slow, an ungainly retreat of foreign limbs. He takes to the air unscathed, but it wasn’t a blow Casper had intended to land. With another blast of grace, Lucifer blows out the stained glass window behind the thrones. He lumbers through, flailing into flight.

The moment Lucifer flies out the broken window, Prince Samuel a drooping, dead weight in his arms, Dan dives between the thrones. His knife clatters to the charred dais. “Dad!” he shouts, shaking one charred body and the other. “Mom!”

One of the bodies makes a noise.

Wings spread for flight, Casper snaps them in. There’s no time, but he stops all the same.

Michael’s sword tucked into his belt, he darts around the thrones. With the broken window at his back, he drops down to kneel at the heads of the burned king and queen. The metal of their crowns has run and still pings, cooling, continuing to burn already seared flesh. Casper begins there, restoring the crown as easily as he restores his own clothing. He pulls it free so it may do no more harm.

From feet away, from far away, he hears Dan yell at him. He hears Dan curse him, rage against him, and Casper is distantly glad to have prepared himself for this moment. The rest of his focus goes to his hands, framing the king’s face. He feels around for the faint flutter of life force and, finding it, shoves his grace inside. The spark grudgingly grows. Hard, fast, Casper stretches it to the point of risking further tearing. He pulls it taut across the scaffolding of the king’s body, and he pulls it tighter still.

King John gasps. Casper’s light shines from only the worst of his burns, too much of his grace tied up in the internal damage.

Dan’s cursing stops immediately. He clutches his father’s burnt hands as Casper moves on to his mother, her wounds at once extensive and far less severe.

“Answer me,” he hears Dan command, and so Casper looks up. He heals by touch, not by sight, but even so, keeping his concentration is nigh impossible.

Kneeling over his father, Dan might as well be towering in his fury. He is rage and betrayal. He is anguish, controlled and unbroken, and Casper will never kiss him again.

“Are you the Seraph Casper?” Dan demands.

“Yes.”

“Was that Lucifer?”

“Yes.”

Each word bites at the heels of the one before. “Is he gonna make Sam into an archdemon?”

“No,” Casper says, denial without comfort. Beneath his hands, Queen Mary begins to breathe steadily. “He’ll keep him alive to drain him. Your brother will be human until Lucifer is fully healed.”