The Key

Chapter 37

Dan lifts both hands from his knees, showing Casper palms and loosely curled fingers. “I meant,” he says, strangely gentle, “do you know what happened to him while you were… out.”

“He’s dead,” Casper says. “Executed for treason.”

Dan nods slowly. “You think he did it? Got you trapped.”

“I think he had both opportunity and ability,” Casper replies. “He was a junior enchanter on the tablet project once it was underway. If he told Lucifer who to kill, who would be carrying the return tablet…”

His eyes grow distant as he speaks, seeing memories in a new, ugly light. “Uriel ‘invented’ the portal we’re using now. The one that only allows one person to pass through. If Lucifer had remained at strength and avoided banishment himself, Uriel could have used the portal to go to him, and never return. It would have used our own plan against us, without hope of escape. But without his wings, Lucifer would have been too weak to trust Uriel, or to truly command him. He needed to find a vessel first.

“Which is why Uriel brought us news of Seer Shurley’s prophecy. Not to find the tablet, but to help Lucifer reach Prince Samuel.”

“Then how come we got you instead?” Dan asks, and remarkably, it isn’t quite an insult.

“We used the excuse of a costume party to disguise our wings,” Casper says. “Uriel thought his proficiency in illusions would secure him the position, but Raphael was concerned someone would reach through those illusions. So he tested us, and I control my wings the best.” This is a statement of fact, not pride. What serves him well in the air makes him awkward in conversation, not at all emotive. That he can’t seem to stop himself now is extremely frustrating.

“That’s it?” Dan asks. “That’s the one reason it was you.”

“We were tested very thoroughly,” Casper says.

“Shield,” Dan calls him, as he often does.

“Yes?” Casper answers.

Dan looks at him in clear expectation. Of what, Casper has no idea, not even when Dan begins to indicate something with the motions of his head and the shifting of his features. “Shield,” Dan says again.

“I have no idea what you’re doing with your face,” Casper admits. “I think I have basic literacy with facial expressions by now, but I don’t know this one.”

“You what?” Dan says.

“That one is confusion, I know that one,” Casper says.

The confusion only increases, as if Dan is demonstrating the look. “You don’t know human facial expressions?”

“We emote primarily with our wings,” Casper tells him. “Joshua – one of the older angels, a principality – was teaching me the basics after I realized that merely mirroring you was a mistake.”

“Mirroring me,” Dan repeats. His mouth grows hard as his eyes grow wide. “You’re telling me, no. You’re telling me you didn’t know you were flirting back?”

“Not until you told me,” Casper confesses. “After the second night, I did know what I was doing.”

“You were constantly staring at my mouth.”

“It was the only unobstructed part of your face I could see,” Casper explains, very reasonably considering his exhaustion and mood.

“Are you f*****g serious?” Dan asks.

“Yes,” Casper says. In truth, outright anger comes as a relief. He’s tired of waiting for it. He’s as ready as he’ll ever be for Dan to yell and shout and denounce him. Though the preparation was agony, the anticipation is worse.

Dan stares at him in a manner Casper readily recognizes as displeased.

“You did want me to be honest,” Casper reminds him.

“Are you telling me,” Dan says slowly, “that you didn’t want any of it?” There is something in his face, weighty and cracking, but it’s not anger. “I took you up to the observatory, and you asked me for time to think, just for Raphael to order you to do it anyway?”

“No,” Casper says, and Dan blanches, his freckles popping to the fore. “Raphael didn’t command my tactics, merely my overall strategy. My actions were my own.”

Color returns to Dan’s face only slowly. The half-lit magelights are little help, and the window conceals the sky outside with a reflected glare. “And you went along with it because…?”

“It was too late to withdraw without offending you,” Casper answers. “And… I didn’t want to.”

“Cas,” Dan says, sounding pained. He rubs a hand across his face. “You don’t kiss a guy just to keep him from getting offended.”

“You misunderstand,” Casper says, unable to look at him any longer. “I didn’t want to withdraw.”

“That’s… a relief,” Dan says. “I mean, it’s a f****d up kind of relief, but that’s where we’re at.”

“I’m sorry,” Casper says, eyes on the floor. The chalk sigil looks up at him from the wood planks, the pattern fully intact despite Dan having walked across it.

“You’d better be,” Dan shoots back.

Casper keeps his head lowered. It is the only act of contrition he has.

“The rest of it,” Dan says, “all that s**t about your patron and your ‘research project,’ that was just code, wasn’t it? You f*****g told me what you were after just to see if I’d give it to you.”

The longer Dan waits for an answer, the louder his silence demands one.

“Yes,” Casper says. “And it was simpler than lying.”

“That was still lying, Cas.”

“I’m sorry,” Casper says again.

“Everyone’s sorry, once they’re caught,” Dan tells him. “Amazing how that works out.”

“I was sorry before,” Casper insists as calmly as he can, “but I wasn’t permitted to say it. I never intended this to become personal. I told you, I didn’t expect you. I did not and could not have planned for you.”

“You knew you were going to screw me over, and you were going to go ahead and do it anyway,” Dan tells him.

“Yes,” Casper says, and through the ache, he feels no shame. “I promised my family air and sunlight. I told you I was doing it for them. Would you have done any less?”

“I’m not the one stuck in hostile territory here,” Dan retorts. “If you like telling me things to my face so much, why didn’t you just ask for the thing? Your freedom in exchange for exterminating demons, man, the same deal that’s on the table right now.”

“Raphael decided against it,” Casper says. “Before our banishment, our war against the demons had brought humans to fear us. To slay a demon requires slaying its host, and this was not well-received.”

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but times change,” Dan shoots back. “We’ve got captive demons under lock and key that we’ve been guarding for f*****g centuries to keep them from torturing other people into demonhood, and you think we’d kick up a fuss over putting them both out of their misery?”

Holding Dan’s gaze grows ever more difficult. “That is a dispute you’ll have to have with Raphael.”

“I’m having it with you.”

“I don’t make a habit of disobeying my orders.”

“Maybe if you had, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” Dan tells him.

“I saved your parents and your brother,” Casper counters. “I’d thought I would kill myself, and I protected you both anyway. All of that, when I should have returned. I did disobey, Dan. For you. More than you know.”

“You mean you didn’t steal the tablet when I picked it up out of its box,” Dan says, cutting Casper’s momentum.

“I,” Casper says. “Yes.”

“Raphael thinks it stayed in the warded box the whole time,” Dan says. “I’m not contradicting, so my dad thinks the same, too. But I know better and so do you.” He stares at Casper, waiting.

“What do you want me to say?” Casper asks.

“Why didn’t you steal it?” Dan demands. “I couldn’t have stopped you. It’s f*****g me up, man. You go through all of this and you blow your chance. You just, I don’t know, sat there and pretended to take notes. Why?”

Casper looks down. He looks at his own palms, as if he might gather his thoughts within them. He tries. “Because,” he says, “we had committed ourselves to deceit, but I would not resign us to violence. I do not believe—I cannot believe—that is who we are.” He closes his hands and again looks away. “I could have forced my way out. Not bloodlessly, but I could have.” He shakes his head. “Captivity makes it difficult to think of anything beyond escape, but out here… There are more consequences here than there are in there. I stalled. I considered them.” He trains his eyes on the far wall and refuses to look away. “I realized I could get you to hand it over of your own volition.”

“So that’s it?” Dan asks. “All this, because you didn’t want to hurt a bunch of humans you didn’t even know?”

Casper begins to nod. He stops.

“What else?” Dan asks, a firm demand not so much devoid of anger as simply hollow, empty of everything save command.

“Cowardice,” Casper states. “Pure cowardice.”

Dan scoffs at him, a harsh variation on his otherwise pleasant laugh. “Right. Of course. Because I would have grabbed Michael’s sword out of that box and stabbed you with it, huh?”

“I didn’t have the resolve to betray you in person,” Casper tells him, eyes still fixed on the wall.

After a long, aching silence, Dan replies, “Yeah, you did. You just didn’t have the guts to watch when I realized it.”

Casper bows his head. He closes his eyes, wishes to be gone, and remains.

“Was the rest of it true?” Dan asks, voice rough. “Or any of it. Whichever. I don’t f*****g care,” he says in the voice of a man who sorely does.

Casper nods. “I lied no more than necessary. I know that’s not a comfort.”

“Damn right it’s not.”

“I’m sorry,” he says once again, so many times.

“For what?” Dan demands. “You’re sorry you have to sit there and listen to me be angry?”

“What recompense are you after?” Casper counters, lifting his gaze to match Dan’s. He falters but pushes through. “You don’t want my apologies, you don’t want my reasons, so what do you want?”

“You were this dorky little human guy,” Dan says, as if that follows. “Poor as f**k and smart as anything, and I f*****g believed everything you said. You were gonna move here and we were gonna be happy, and I f*****g believed you.”

“I wanted to believe it, too,” Casper says.

“Oh, boohoo,” Dan snaps. “You don’t get to be sad. You knew exactly what you were doing. You-”

The sharp jerk of Casper’s wings cuts him off. Dan stares, eyes wide, but he doesn’t lean back, doesn’t seek to move away. Whether fury overrides his fear or he has no fear, there is no telling.

“What?” Dan asks.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” Casper tells him, bewildered by the notion that he could appear otherwise. “I am in a world that believes I don’t exist, navigating a culture I know only by stories, and in the one thing I was supposed to do, I have failed. This was not a victory, Dan, I am not gloating over having deceived you.”

His wings arch as much as they can in the limits of the room, the wrists raised high, feathers flaring. The wrappings on his left wing strain, but he pulls himself in before they can give way and agitate his regrowing feathers more. Everything, everything, aches.

“If you had me brought back to hunt down Lucifer, I will do it,” Casper promises. “His demons will cluster around him once they find him, and when Her Majesty finds the omens, I will go and kill him before he wakes. I will need Michael’s blade, but I will do it. If that’s what you want, I will do it.”

“First off,” Dan says, utterly unimpressed by Casper’s display, “I didn’t have you brought back. I fished you out of that f*****g lake myself, and if you think five days in a combustion carriage is a picnic, then you got an ass of steel. My people ran themselves ragged finding you, you overgrown feather duster.

“And two,” he continues, “you ain’t going anywhere. I did not let Sam haul you back from death just so you can die and f**k me up all over again.”

Casper’s wings fall lower as Dan speaks. He folds them uncomfortably, awkward from more than his mere physical position. “You… don’t want me dead?”

Dan stares at him, indecipherable.

“I don’t know what that face means,” Casper reminds him.

“No, I don’t want you dead,” Dan says, but he has to mutter it, almost under his breath. “I’m pissed, not murdery.”

“I thought,” Casper begins to say, but he doesn’t know how to think any longer, let alone what.

“Look, on the observatory tower, that was you or Sam,” Dan says. “I wasn’t going to let Lucifer kill you just for shits and giggles. Any coin I flip, the Sam side always comes up on top.”

“I chose my siblings over you,” Casper says. “I expect you to do the same.”

“Yeah,” Dan says, and he looks strange. Abruptly too tired to be angry. “Yeah, that’s…” Heaving a sigh, he drops his head low, elbows planted on his knees, hands pointing limply toward the floor. “If Sam were trapped in a box, I’d do a lot worse than you did to get him out.” Dan rubs at his face. He runs a hand through his hair. His hands twist in midair, as if seeking something else to touch. “f**k, I need a drink.” He reaches over and unhooks the thermos latch.

“I thought that was soup,” Casper says.

“Yeah, it’s what I got right now,” Dan says. He lifts the thermos to his lips, the lid hanging down over his hand, and blows at steam. Dan tentatively sips. Wincing, he shakes his head and caps the container anew. “Soup: not helpful.”

They ruminate in silence. The tap of the thermos against the desk is a loud one. As are Dan’s footsteps when he gets up to adjust the magelights to proper brightness. He walks back to the desk, each step avoiding a line of the warding on the floor. He looks at Casper, and then at the window.

“Are you actually claustrophobic?” Dan asks.

“A lack of moving air is… detrimental,” Casper replies.

Carefully, keeping an eye on Casper all the while, Dan leans back and unfastens the window’s latch. He pushes it open scant inches, the hinges squealing, and night air drifts in. It wafts past Dan, bringing his scent with it, and Casper leans into all of it, his eyes falling shut.

Silence stretches once more.

“Are you all this bad off?” Dan asks.

“It’s not so awful for the older ones,” Casper says, not certain who he’s seeking to reassure. “For the youngest, it’s been half our lives. Longer, for the very youngest.”

“What are they, eight hundred?”

“Nine,” Casper corrects.

“You count as young?” Dan asks. “Aren’t you like twelve hundred?”

Confused by the question, Casper nevertheless nods. He is young.

They look at each other, neither speaking. The pause grows into a temporary truce that words would shatter. Casper grows increasingly aware of his lack of shirt. In strange symmetry, Dan is bare of any obvious warding. Theoretically, Casper could touch him. He could rub his thumbs across the tired bruises beneath Dan’s eyes, starker now in the light.

“What now?” Casper asks before he can do something untoward.

“We need a formal alliance before anything else happens,” Dan says. “Parliament’s involved, which means it’ll take time. Less time with Sam arguing in favor, and even less if we can trust you in the public eye. Trusting each other, that’s gonna be the big thing.” Dan looks at him significantly. “And I don’t just mean politically.”

“I trust you,” Casper says. “It’s a start.”

Dan’s expression shifts. It’s strange, how he almost looks amused. “Cas, you don’t trust me worth shit.”

Casper frowns, remembers himself, and frowns again, this time with his face.

Dan watches him, sees the conscious correction, and shakes his head. “You stole a sword off me and ran in alone rather than ask for help.”

Casper blinks.

“Didn’t even cross your mind, did it?” Dan asks.

“How would I have asked you?” He can think of no way.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dan muses. “Maybe something like ‘Nick killed Michael, keep him away from Sam’?” Dan smiles in a way that’s no smile at all. “C’mon, man, we both know I would have believed anything you told me.”

“There wasn’t time to argue. Dan, there wasn’t time to think .”

“Bullshit,” Dan says with strangely little force. “I’ve seen how fast you think.”

“You would have tried to protect me,” Casper says, “and Lucifer would have killed you. I took the blade because I needed it, but I hoped you would stop somewhere long enough to get a new weapon.”

“I’m not defenseless,” Dan says, the force behind his words growing.

“Neither was your father,” Casper counters. “Or Michael. Or Gabriel, or Anna, or any of the countless others.”

“So you have to fight him one-on-one?” Dan shoots back.

“It was the only option,” Casper says. “Had the combat been solely aerial, I would have had him.”

“Because you control your wings just that well, huh?” Dan demands.

“Because his were brand new and wrecking his balance,” Casper answers. “On the ground, he destroyed me, just as he would have destroyed you.”

“You still could have asked. You could have said something, man.”

Casper doesn’t display or posture. He keeps his body as controlled as his words, which is to say, not very. “So you could have rushed in without knowing - without believing in - what you were attacking?” Casper demands right back. “Forgive me for valuing your life over your pride.”

“Forgive you?” Dan echoes, standing from the desk. “Forgive you?”

Casper backs down, lifting his hands. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

Taking a breath, Dan rubs at his face again. His shoulders rise and fall, twin slopes of tension. He leans, but he doesn’t sit. “Cas, you may not have noticed, but I rushed in anyway,” Dan states. “Except I thought I was chasing my panicking… you, and every guard who joined in thought they were after the guy who’d stolen the prince’s sword. A lot of people got hurt. And, yeah, if you hadn’t drawn his attention so fast, a lot of people probably would have died, but we were all rushing in there blind because you couldn’t take one second to warn us.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Casper says, head bowed. “I’d had a bad feeling all week, but to have it confirmed… I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Yeah, well, we gotta work on that,” Dan says with a sigh.

Casper narrows his eyes and c***s his head. “‘We’?”

“Yeah, dumbass. We.” He sits back up on the desk, bumping the books, which in turn nudge the bag. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we’re kinda stuck together now. Covering for other people’s lies will do that.”

Casper nods, even as the king’s demand hovers over them, circling in position and ready to strike. “Is that the only way we’re stuck together?”

“Depends on how far I can trust you,” Dan says. “I mean, Sam’s a big fan now. He liked you when you were just an angel expert, and the whole snatching him out of the sky thing, y’know, major points for that.”

“I am an angel expert,” Casper replies. “I’ve now met and spoken to every living member of my species.”

Dan looks at him with raised eyebrows. “Yeah, all right, I guess that counts.” His eyes slide to the side, the way an angel’s would when watching Casper’s mood. “Sam said you came down on your back. On the observatory tower.”

Casper permits himself to frown. “He was unconscious. At least, I’d thought he was.”

“Yeah, the guy has visions of near-death experiences while having them now,” Dan says.

Casper’s frown grows more pronounced, enough that the bandages pull at his feathers. “Using magic at that point could have killed him.”

“Right?” Dan demands, an abrupt accusation leveled at an absent party. For the briefest of instants, Dan and Casper are allied. Dan looks at him as he once did, vibrant and enthused and very nearly his, and then Dan remembers. Having the window shut would have been easier to endure.

“You were saying,” Casper prompts. “About the tower.”

“Sam said you, uh. Shielded him,” Dan says. “From the glass, coming down. Spread your wings, crashed through the whole thing to slow down before you hit the floor.”

“He broke his leg on the way down,” Casper says, presuming that this is what Dan is circling his way toward. “I had him-” he gestures against his chest “-but his leg was to the side, and it hit one of the metal supports.”

“Yeah, he said that too,” Dan tells him. “And that you stood over him and… all that. Got yourself stabbed when I came up.”

“He was going for you, of course I ‘got myself stabbed’,” Casper says, too tired to predict where Dan is going with this.

“You shielded us,” Dan says, using the word as if he knows its particular meaning where Casper is concerned.

Casper nods, waiting for a question.

The one Dan asks is entirely unexpected.

Dan points at his bound wing and asks, “How is it? Still need the splints?”

“No,” Casper hazards, gently flexing to be sure. “But I can’t reach.” His right wing, he’s taken care of. Each feather regrown had pushed out its broken or cut predecessor, and he’s had ample time to finger comb them free.

Dan nods and says, “Hold still.”

He rises. He approaches. He stands at the end of the bed, beside Casper where his wing hangs over the edge, bound and folded.

“You tell me if this hurts,” Dan commands, and Casper cannot do other than obey.

At Casper’s answering nod, Dan’s hands touch him. Through the bandages only, but they touch him. They unbind him slowly, carefully. First go the wrappings holding his wing folded. The padded splints shift beneath, but there is no pain, only the irritation of itching growth and broken feathers.

“Can you stretch it out?” Dan asks.

“In here?” Casper asks, the question ridiculous.

“As far as you can,” Dan amends.

Casper stretches. Dan moves with him, two guiding hands on his wing, and Casper flinches away, folding back in.

“Sorry,” Dan says.

“The warding,” Casper explains, and Dan looks down. He’s standing on one of the chalk sigils.

“Oh,” Dan says. “Right.”

Dan considers the floor a few moments longer before looking up at Casper. Casper sits lower in his kneel, the sensation of being taller than Dan unpleasant and ill-fitting.

“Scoot,” Dan orders, shooing Casper with both hands. When Casper c***s his head, Dan adds, “Get to the head of the bed, Cas.”

Casper obeys, moving sideways on his knees. Before he can stretch his wing again, Dan climbs onto the end of the bed, kneeling to face Casper.

“Let’s try that again,” Dan says.

Casper unfolds. He keeps the underside facing Dan, a display of trust whether Dan recognizes it or not.

Dan removes the splints on his forewing first. He unwinds bandages. Watching Casper’s face, he brushes out loose feathers with his fingers, and Casper strives not to close his eyes.

“You don’t need to do that,” Casper tells him, unable to directly refuse this intimacy.

“They need to come out,” Dan says. He presses his palm against Casper’s primary coverts, beneath his wrist. The skin there is still tender. “This where he stabbed you?”

Casper nods.

“That’s looking a lot better,” Dan says. Using his thumbs, he parts the feathers there. “A puncture wound, and not even a scar.” He keeps brushing through, looking. Casper does the selfish thing and refrains from mentioning that angels don’t scar. If he moved his alula, it would be a simple thing to hold Dan’s hand, but there, he has at least some restraint.

Having finished with the underside, Dan inspects the back solely by touch. He does not linger, he does not caress, but the relief from itching is not the only bliss Dan leaves in the wake of his hands.

“Next splint,” Dan says, perhaps warning him. He shifts further up the bed, closer to Casper. In freeing Casper’s upper wing, the backs of his hands brush against Casper’s bare upper arm, and Dan freezes.

“I, uh,” Dan says. “I got a shirt in the bag. I was gonna… but I got sidetracked.”

“I’m not cold,” Casper tells him quietly.

Rather than look at his face, Dan looks at his chest. Dan’s eyes trace the shape of the healed sigil. It’s faint now, barely visible and only irritating when Casper focuses on it. In a few hours more, it should be gone entirely. Dan stares at it, and he looks lost.

Casper does not reach with his hands. He does not wrap his wing around Dan. He waits and he wants, holding down an ache worse than all the rest.

Dan removes the remaining splints, one on the front, one from the back. Again, he combs out the fallen feathers, his hands surer than before and just as warm. His wrist brushes Casper’s arm, smooth skin followed by the unwelcome cuff of his jacket. Even after his work is done, Dan keeps his fingers buried in Casper’s coverts, feeling the flesh beneath in a motion half-inspection, half-massage. Dan finds the bone and squeezes along it, his eyes back on Casper’s face, watching for pain, seemingly oblivious to the pleasure.

“Think you’ll fly again, then?” Dan asks.

“Yes,” Casper rasps. He clears his throat. “Thank you.”

“Can I see the other one?” Dan asks.

“It’s fine,” Casper promises him. “You’ve done enough.”

Watching the motion of his own hand, Dan continues to stroke the border between gray coverts and black flight feathers. His expression turns distant. “Black, with an ashy underside,” he muses, as if quoting something.

“Cinder,” Casper corrects, just as quietly. When Dan looks at his face, he explains, “Ash is the color of death. Cinders still have life in them. Even if the shades are the same, the distinction is important. My wings will only be ashen when I am dead.”

Dan looks at him, into his eyes, and Dan shakes his head in a way that is strangely unrelated to denial or rejection. “How are you still you?”