Shadow WIngs (Skeleton Key) (10 page)

It worked well with her cover as a low-ranked Party analyst and investigator, but it also suited her personality. She’d never been one with much interest in accumulating things.

When she turned around, placing his coffee in front of the other chair at her kitchen table, the gray-eyed man was watching her, that tauter look on his face.

“What?” she said, unthinking.

“It is very frustrating, feeling nothing from you,” he said at once.

She started a little, even as she’d been straightening from setting down his mug.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“––It does not help very much to touch you,” he said, instead of answering her question. He still sounded frustrated. “Although I keep wanting to do that, as well.” He raised his eyes back to hers. “Is that normal? To want to touch so much? Is that a normal impulse for one living in these realms? Or is it specific to humans? For I find I am having trouble not doing it. It is almost a constant compulsion with you. I want to touch you even as I say these words...”

Thinking, he tilted his head, again as if listening to some faraway sound.

“I did not want to touch that
militsiya
officer,” he muttered, speaking more to himself. “So this wanting to touch is perhaps specific to only some persons? It is distracting, whatever it is. But I cannot seem to push it totally from my mind.”

Caught between amusement at his utter honesty and discomfort and embarrassment at what he’d actually said, Ilana decided she wouldn’t press him for whatever the hell he was talking about. Not right now at least. She sat back in her chair by the kitchen table, then hesitated only another breath before gesturing towards the chair opposite hers.

“Sit,” she said. “Please.”

He walked over, stepping carefully. She watched him evaluate the space around him with every move he made, as if he thought his body took up about five times the space it actually did.

Pulling the chair out gingerly with one muscular hand, he sat in it equally carefully, as if afraid it wouldn’t hold his weight.

He picked up the cup of coffee with a precision that made her smile.

“Who are you, comrade?” she said, watching him smell and then sip the strong coffee cautiously. He grimaced openly at the taste, which made her fight not to smile wider. “Who are you, really? Is this an act, this thing you are doing?”

He glanced up. “What thing?”

Still smiling, she shook her head, puzzled. “This.” She waved a hand at him, as if his very presence should be obvious enough. “You. What is this? Is this a joke on me?”

He studied her face for a few seconds more, then let out a kind of grunt. “Is it the name again? You people are very hung up on the names of things.” Thinking, he took another sip of the coffee. He grimaced less that time, but still seemed shocked at the strong taste. Staring out over her kitchen, he subdued his voice. “I suppose my people are concerned with what to call things, as well. Names are important where I am from, too.”

“‘Your people?’ ‘My people’?” She frowned, but still more in puzzlement and frustration than anger. She picked up her own coffee, blowing steam off the surface. She did make it strong. It was how she liked it.

“If you’re going to constantly reference being from elsewhere,” she said. “You are going to have to tell me where it is you are from. You have no accent. Can you explain this to me?”

“You would not believe me if I told you,” he said.

She stared at him, believing him for some reason about that, too. Well, she believed that he believed it––well enough that she wondered if that wasn’t the best place to start.

“What do you know about Golunsky?” She leaned back in her chair, her voice more official, cop-like. “You say you can help me with this case? How?”

Those stunning gray eyes focused on her, and she swore she saw clouds in them, like they were alive as separate beings, different somehow from the rest of him.

He seemed to come to a decision as she watched.

“He is one of The Fallen,” he said.

She stared at him. “The Fallen?”

“Yes.”

The name meant nothing to her. Even so, something in how he said it, or perhaps what she felt behind his words, hit at her in a way she couldn’t articulate––just like when he’d spoken Golunsky’s name in that jail cell. Just like how his eyes hit at her now and that strangeness about him and the overly calm expression on his face.

Forcing herself to smile, she shook her head minutely as she sipped her coffee.

“What does that mean, Raguel?” she said.

“It means a lot of things, Ilana.” He leaned his muscular arms on the table. He gave her another of those bottomless stares. “But right now, more than anything, it means it is absolutely imperative that you not let him die, whether by his own hand or another’s.”

When she only sat there, staring in puzzlement, Raguel leaned closer. Reaching out cautiously, he rested a heavy hand on her arm, closing his fingers around her skin. The contact caused her to flinch, but she didn’t pull away and he didn’t let go.

He studied her gaze, his gray eyes serious. “I’ll never find him again, not in this form. And without him, I doubt I will ever again be what I was. Not until this body dies, at least.” He made his words more deliberate. “If that happens, then whatever this is, Ilana, whatever he is doing or about to do... I won’t be able to stop it. And neither will you.”

ANGELS AND DEMONS

MOST OF WHAT he said after that made little sense.

He told her he was an angel.

An Archangel, by the name of Raguel.

He told her Golunsky had once been an angel, too.

At some point, way back in the ancient times of their race, the being that now inhabited Golunsky had chosen a different path. Now it was a demon, what Raguel called one of The Fallen. According to Raguel, that demon and those like it wished to destroy what their brethren had created––namely, humanity itself. They wanted this partly out of revenge for being expelled from the angelic realms. They also wanted it due to an ideological split––one centered around how much of the angelic realms they were willing to share with the younger races once they came of age, and views on free will and its importance.

The Fallen wanted the angelic realms back, of course.

They were also a bit more fuzzy on the concept of human free will.

But––and this part was less clear to Ilana––the Fallen had to destroy the newer races to re-conquer the heavens. According to Raguel, The Fallen viewed human destruction as a form of “recruitment.” It was as if, by its very extinction, humanity would somehow swell their ranks.

In other words, Ilana’s new and very beautiful friend, Raguel, was crazy.

It disappointed her, that he would turn out to be a regular lunatic.

It disappointed her a lot, truthfully. Enough that she listened to his elaborate narrative for far longer than she should have done, given what she had on her plate.

She only thought of the practical problems his insanity presented afterwards.

She’d let a crazy person into her house. She’d fed and clothed a bona fide lunatic, one who definitely couldn’t help her with Golunsky.

Moreover, she’d taken him from the
militsiya
cell block without papers or documentation of any kind. She’d basically told the arresting officer to “lose” any evidence of his initial arrest, as well as the fact that he’d been found in Moscow without identification papers.

That meant she’d have to bring him in to be assessed by mental health personnel under a different pretext, and inform them they would have to investigate his identity themselves. None of that posed an insurmountable problem, or even particularly difficult one. Yet it would cut valuable time from her day––a day she’d already wasted a good chunk of by bringing him here in the first place.

Worse, she felt that strange but intense empathy for him still.

She didn’t want to see anything bad happen to him––which meant she couldn’t just dump him somewhere and make him someone else’s problem. Given how the KGB often used mental hospitals to manage dissidents, she was well aware of the system she’d be leaving him inside. He might never get out, not without help.

No, she could not do it.

She needed to try and discern if he had family somewhere. Which meant more time wasted, more time from her investigation while she figured out what her options were without putting him somewhere terrible, from which he might never return.

She knew what she probably
should
do with him.

Meaning, she knew what Karkoff would say.

Karkoff would tell her to bring him in to KGB headquarters at Lubyanka.

Given what he’d known about her and about Golunsky, they would question him, even if she told them he was mentally ill. If her new friend refused to talk, or gave them gibberish answers like this, about angels and demons and heavenly realms, they would torture him.

They would do it for days perhaps, hoping that might loosen his tongue.

As for how he knew those things about her, she might never know the truth. It was possibly Uri, or possibly someone else taunting her through this man’s insanity. Either way, keeping him here was out of the question, given his state of mind.

Or it should have been, at least.

Even as she sat there, thinking all of these things with utter certainty, she did not act. She only sat there with him at her kitchen table as he told her his crazy stories. She didn’t escort him to her door, or back inside her dingy yellow
Lada.
She listened, not nodding or answering, while her coffee sat at her elbow, slowly getting cold.

She didn’t want KGB interrogators getting their hands on this man. Despite his obvious insanity, something about him still struck her as deeply kind.

So when he finally fell silent, she spoke before she knew she meant to.

“What makes you think this... demon... did this...” Ilana hesitated, fighting for words. “...This
thing
to you? Turned you human? Was it not due to this strange key you found, as you said? What makes you think the demon is behind it?”

The man calling himself the Archangel Raguel shook his head.

His gray eyes met hers, and again she struggled to retain her objectivity. The intensity behind his stare made it difficult to hold his gaze without falling into it.

“I do not know.” He exhaled, leaning back in his chair. “...Not for sure. But I think I am right that he is behind this somehow. It is the only thing that makes sense.”

Raguel’s perfect lips curved in a frown. He continued in that equally precise Russian, which still sounded more like it came from one of Ilana’s University professors than from a lunatic found naked and screaming in Gorky Park.

“...But I think I am right,” he continued. “Lahash wished for me to pick up that key. He taunted me, trying to get me to take it. I did not see it at the time, but it is clear now. I would never have thought any demon-created object could have that kind of power, though. Not over one such as me. I was more concerned for the danger it posed a human who might find it.”

“And this...
Lahash
...”

“You call him Golunsky, yes,” Raguel said, giving her another of those penetrating stares. “This has to be part of some larger plan of his. He is plotting something. Perhaps something big.” He continued to hold her gaze, his eyes serious. “I think you were wrong in that, Ilana. I know you did not think his motives were political during the interrogations, and I understand why, but you are only half right, I suspect.”