Shadow WIngs (Skeleton Key) (15 page)

When she turned, he was already a dozen yards from the pond, in a small clearing surrounded by trees. He appeared to be looking around on the ground.

He sank gracefully to one knee on the wet ground as she watched. Lowering his second knee with that same mechanical precision, he began feeling over the frozen ground with his bare hands. Ilana walked over to him briskly right as he began fumbling around a small snow drift, still without gloves or even using his coat sleeve.

Reaching his side, she frowned at how pink his fingers were already.

“Let me do that.” She nudged his shoulder with her thigh to stop him. When he looked up at her, puzzled, she showed him her gloved hands. “Use your eyes, comrade. I will use these. Get up. Please. My hands are cold just watching you.”

He hesitated, then rose back to his feet with that same fluid grace, allowing them to switch places. As she felt over the ground, he proceeded to stalk around her, making increasingly wide circles as he stared intently at the ground.

“What does it look like?” she said, still using her gloved hands carefully.

He described an old-fashioned lever-lock key, glass in appearance, with a skull in the place of the key’s bow. She gave him a puzzled look at the skull part, and his lips grew taut.

“I realize how it sounds.” He gave her a direct, grimmer look, tinged with a faint smile. “I must say, you’ve taken a lot of things quite well today, Ilana––things that would sound nothing but ridiculous to most humans. In this case, however, I am afraid we must not get our hopes up. Remember, this is likely not an Earth object at all. There is a good chance I won’t see it in this form... and neither will you.”
 

Sighing a bit, he went back to peering at the ground.
 

“...I wanted to come here when you suggested it, because I agree we should eliminate the possibility. But I do not think we should spend too much time with this. Talking to the demon is unlikely to yield anything of use to us, either. But I suppose we will have to do that next, for the same reason. Once we’ve checked the detective’s office for the key, as well.”

“Talk to Golunsky?” Still kneeling on the wet ground, she stared up at him, frowning. “You imagine I could easily arrange a little chat between you and a suspected murderer, Raguel? In a
militsiya
prison? Is that it?”

He looked surprised. “Of course.”

Letting out another humorless snort, she turned back to feel over the cold ground. Even with her coat and the gloves, kneeling on the frozen earth was starting to seep that cold into her bones and skin. She slid forward on her knees, still feeling with her hands, when her fingers closed over something smooth and hard.

She grasped it, lifting it up, more surprised than anything.

“Hey!” she said, sitting back on her heels. “I have it.”

“What?”

Shock altered his voice. He walked swiftly to her, kneeling beside her and resting a hand on her shoulder to peer into her hands. She brushed the object off with her gloved fingers and indeed saw it was a glass key with a skull’s head at the end.
 

No wonder no one had found it. It was completely transparent, so wouldn’t show up much at all against the snow, or even the bare ground.

“It is kind of pretty, do you not think?” she said. “Even with the death’s head.”

“Where?” he said, his voice doubtful. “Where is it?”

Frowning, she looked up, meeting his gaze. His face was only a few inches from hers, his fingers still wrapped around her shoulder.

“It is right in my hand, comrade.”

“Where?”

She held it up, exhaling. “Right here? Are you blind?”

Looking at his face, watching him squint at the key she held in her fingers, his expression bewildered, she glanced between him and the key.

“Can you really not see it?” she said.

“No,” he said.

Staring at him in bewilderment, she frowned harder. “Hold out your hand.”

Obediently, he held his hand out flat at once.

She placed the key on his bare palm...

And it fell right through his living flesh.

“`Tchyo za ga`lima!”
She lurched back, moving away from the key like it had burned a hole through his skin. Sprawling back on the snow, she stared at Raguel’s still-outstretched hand, then down at the key, panting. “That is impossible! Who did this? How?”

He lowered his hand, watching her, puzzled.

“What happened?” he said. “What is wrong, Ilana?”

“The key!” She pointed at his hand, then down at the snow. “It went
through
you! It passed
through
you, like you are a ghost!” Pulling herself back up to her knees, she caught hold of his hand, reassuring herself that it was still there. Feeling over his arm and then his shoulders and neck and face, she met his gaze, only to find him watching her, his gray eyes puzzled, but holding a faint thread of humor.

“I am still here, Ilana.” He smiled. “Do you still see it? The key?”

She stared at him, struggling with his seeming inability to discern the import of her words.
 

“Did you not hear me, comrade?” she snapped. “It passed
through
you! Like you were not there at all! Like you are not made of flesh!”

His frown deepened, as did his voice. “I heard you. Can you still see the key, Ilana?”

She stared from one of his eyes to the other before the words penetrated. Then she looked down at the patch of snow on the dark earth.

The key stood on top of it, glinting faintly in the sunlight that dappled the snow.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then bring it.” He glanced around them, his eyes sharper. “I am thinking I was not meant to have help in finding this, Ilana. We are attracting attention.”

Ilana turned, scanning the trees and the area by the pond.

He was right. They were being watched, and by more than one pair of eyes.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose, even as she scrambled hastily back to her feet. She felt something sinister in those stares, although she couldn’t pinpoint why. She also got the feeling of more eyes on them than she could see––like most of the things watching them were as invisible to her as the key was to Raguel.

Looking back at the snow, she reached out tentatively with her hand, picking the key up gingerly in her gloved fingers. It remained solid.

“Try to touch it again,” she said to Raguel.

“Ilana, not here.”

“Just quickly,” she insisted. “Just try to touch it. I am holding it out right now.”

She held the key towards him, her palm flat, so that the key’s teeth faced him, the glass skull resting on the mound of her hand. Raguel laid his hand flat on top of her fingers, grasping her wrist as if the key wasn’t there at all. The added pressure should have pressed the glass key deeper into her skin and flesh, but it did not.

Where his hand was, the key simply... wasn’t.

She let out another string of curse words in Russian.

“How is that possible?” She breathed out clouds of steam, feeling like she was breathing too much, feeling light-headed again.

She met his gaze, and his puzzlement returned.

“I told you I was an angel.” His voice came out deliberate, calm, patient. “I told you I was an Archangel, Ilana... and that this key is likely what turned me human. It is not an Earth-made object. It cannot be. It will not behave as one, either.”

“So why can
I
see it?” she said. “Why can I touch it?”

He exhaled. “I do not know.”

“Is it the demon? Did he do this?”

“It could be gods or demons or angels,” he said simply. “There is no way to know. Not right now, Ilana.”

He rose gracefully back to his feet.

She waited for him to say more, to explain more about what had just happened, but he didn’t. He was still looking down, studying her expression with no expression of his own, when he politely extended a hand.

She hesitated only a breath before she took it with the hand not gripping the key. Forcing out a held breath, trying to get her thudding heart under control, she let him help her to her feet.

She didn’t let go of him once she was standing.

“Put it in your pocket,” he advised her. “The key, Ilana. You should not hold it where it is visible. I suspect that is what is attracting attention.”

Again, she found herself looking around.

Seeing the number of people now watching them, alarm exploded in her. It was not rational. It was gut-level, visceral. She had a gun. She was KGB. They would not dare to attack her if she flashed her credentials, and if they did prior to that, chances were, she could handle it unless they were truly overrun, or if some of them happened to be armed––which was highly unlikely. Even
militsiya
were not allowed to carry guns off-duty.

Even knowing all that, she found herself looking from face to face, recognizing some from the clusters of vagrants they’d passed in the trees, as well as a few of those pedestrians she’d seen earlier, walking their dogs. Her panic didn’t lessen––although again, it was totally irrational.
 

These were just ordinary people.

Even those who likely lived in Gorky Park looked less like hardened criminals and more like addicts and vagrants. Noticing that didn’t calm her, however––if anything, it heightened her paranoia. Seeing them all together, people who would never normally interact or even stand so closely to one another, now clustered together in mismatched, motley groups––staring at them silently––she felt her alarm turn almost animal.

Still following the strange crowd with her eyes, she backed out of the clearing instinctively, moving closer to the trees as her breathing began to accelerate.

Raguel followed her silently.

“Who are they?” she said as she walked with long strides. “What do they want?”

“Who those people are does not matter, Ilana,” he said.

“But what do they want? Why are they staring at us?”

“I suspect one or more demons is using them to keep an eye on this place.”

“Why?” she snapped. “Because of the key? Why not just take it themselves? Throw it in the lake, if they don’t want anyone else to have it?”

“I do not know. But I suspect it is because they can’t.” Raguel’s voice hardened, growing grim, more warrior-like. “I also suspect they are not happy at all that you found the key for me... that I did not come back here alone.” He gripped her hand tighter. “Come, Ilana. It is unlikely they will attack, but I do not wish to risk it. Not while I am in this form. Let us go. Faster,
da?”

When he picked up his pace to a brisk jog, she did the same.

She glanced around them a second time, her eyes stopping on a few more faces that she could now see pacing them on the path parallel to where they walked through the trees.

Ordinary people. They were ordinary people, but something was wrong in those stares. Some of them were too far away from her to see their eyes clearly––some were so far away all she saw were dark wool coats and hats––but she could feel it. She could feel that wrongness, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, she was afraid.

She heard footsteps from closer then and turned. A group emerged from a different path, one that led to the small school behind the pond. They looked like they might even belong to the school in some way, and wore clean coats and boot. The closest of these, a gray-haired woman with a slack face, stared openly at Ilana, her mouth strangely ajar.
 

Raguel broke into a run, pulling her at an angle to avoid them.

“Ilana, come.” Raguel’s voice grew urgent. “Run faster. Please!”

She did her best to do as he said, although she struggled to keep up with his longer strides. It didn’t help that her shoes were not the best for this terrain.

“How can they even see us from there?” she panted. “How can they know I have this key?”

“The humans do not. Although they might try to take it from you anyway, if they can... and if the demons push them to do so.”