Shadow WIngs (Skeleton Key)

by JC Andrijeski

  She also knew it was a message.

  She had not yet decided what kind of message... or for whom.

  Raguel wished he could talk to her––directly, that is. Despite the gaps in how they perceived the demon handcuffed to that chair, Raguel suspected they both would benefit greatly from such a conversation. After all, they were both law enforcement.

  They simply worked for different realms.

  “Won’t you talk to me, Raguel?” The demon raised its voice, its pale blue eyes bloodshot above the smile, its lips cut from repeated blows to the face by militsiya batons and fists. “Stop trying to figure out how you might get into this woman’s pants and talk to me. Won’t you pass the time with me, my painfully earnest friend, while you wait for your Master to call you home?”

  Raguel met the demon’s gaze, in spite of himself.

  The demon grinned, pleased it had forced Raguel to pay attention to it.

  “I know how it must soil you so, to be down here, mingling with the lowlifes and the filthy worlders.” Lahash smiled wider. “I know what a sacrifice it all is... how you simply cannot wait to get back to that pious circle-jerk in the sky so you can all congratulate one another on your wondrousness and fluffy feathers. For nothing’s half so fun as looking down on the rest of us with your smug, sermonizing bullshit, is it? Better than sex, I’m told. Regaling the other dick-less wonders with tales of how you try so hard to save the poor animals from their own blindness and excess, but they simply will not listen...?”

  Raguel didn’t respond.

  There was no risk in responding, of course. The woman wouldn’t hear him, any more than she felt his fingers or wings, or saw his body standing just behind her or his face hovering next to hers. But Raguel saw no reason to answer the demon’s taunt.

  There was simply no point in engaging these creatures.

  Moreover, they enjoyed it a little too much.

  Also, despite its pretending to ignore her, Lahash was using Raguel to jab at the woman, to unsettle and unnerve her, mainly because it wished to annoy Raguel. To some extent, it was even working. It worked for the simple reason that the demon was right.

  Raguel liked her.

  He liked her very much, truthfully.

  Shelving that thought a second time, he went back to trying to determine the creature’s angle on allowing itself to be caught.

  “Maybe I am sorry,” the demon grinned at him. “Maybe I am so very, very sorry, my lovely Raguel. Maybe I want to see myself sodomized repeatedly in a Soviet gulag to atone for my sins. Perhaps I am hoping to give some humans pleasure in this sad, darkened world they have inherited, just like I tried so very hard to please those children. I tried to please them again. And again. And again...”

  The woman grimaced for real that time, stepping back from the demon as she raised a hand to her nose. From her expression, it was like she had smelled something rotten.

  The male detective stared at the demon with open repulsion on his face.

  “You admit it then?” he said. “You confess to this crime?”

  The demon looked only at the woman.

  Raguel tightened his grip on her, pulling her closer to his light form. Even so, he more or less ignored the demon’s exact words, trying instead to read the intent he could feel within the shifting sands that made up the demon’s mind.

  It was not easy.

  The Fallen were still angels, after all, still cut of the same, more complex cloth. Therefore, reading a demon’s mind wasn’t anything like reading a human’s. It was more like reading one of his own, only no openness lived there, no willingness to share, no transparency, no affection. Rather, Raguel found himself faced with flickering, multi-faceted mirrors, interested in him only to better learn how to confuse and misdirect his thoughts.

  But Raguel was an archangel.

  Because of that, the demon couldn’t make much headway with him, either.

  It ended up a stalemate of sorts, with their minds simply too incompatible and yet evenly matched to connect.

  Raguel puzzled over why the demon let itself be caught.

  The demon’s body could go to jail, like any other human body.

  It could die.

  The difference was, if its human host died, the demon would continue on. It would find a new home, either in another living being or in some other temporary vessel. Lahash had no reason to fear incarceration or its end. If the demon bored of this particular form, it could merely arrange for its body’s death.

  Still, that fact alone did not answer the question at hand.

  It did not explain why the demon would waste its time being caught in the first place––particularly given how easily bored a demon was by nature. Moreover, Raguel had no doubt Lahash had enjoyed torturing those poor children. Why would it willingly stop?

  Surely, it would not do this simply to puzzle him?

  Lahash was a higher-tier demon––the equivalent of the archangels, only twisted into a frequency that consumed rather than generated light. Hater of truth. Bringer of chaos and despair. A demon like Lahash lived to delude, enslave, disempower... darken. It had accomplished those things, in part, through the commission of these crimes.

  Yet the results struck Raguel as anti-climatic at best.

  Why here? Why now?

  Demons did not normally murder like this.

  They persuaded and coerced others to murder and cause harm... but rarely did they bother with the act themselves. The closest they came normally was to consume their hosts until they killed themselves, often in a manner calculated to do as much harm to as many loved ones and family members as possible.

  But the human Lahash possessed had little to destroy.

  The man had been a mental ward patient. Discarded by a society that mostly wanted him dead. Before the hospital, he’d been a pedophile... so already ostracized and causing harm. He’d suffered from a mental disease that kept him in a near-constant and permanent state of delusion. He had no family, no friends––no one even to torment by proxy.

  He had no free will to corrupt.

  There was no win in this possession for Lahash. Not a direct one, anyway. This man had been all of those things before Lahash ever went near him. Nothing in the world was changed, for good or for bad, in inhabiting one so tormented. Raguel felt compassion for this body, but he also knew it had long been beyond his help.

  They would try again to reach him––in the next life perhaps.

  Or perhaps, the one after that.

  For an angel, time stretched and contracted differently, made up of longer waves. Those waves were broken less by death and life than by nodes and windows and forks and detours. Those disruptions and opportunities might break up and shift courses within a single lifetime. Or, conversely, they might take several lifetimes.

  Or a dozen. Or millennia.

  Demons thought in similarly elongated patterns, tesselations of black and white, mirrored on the human chess board where pieces were traded and won back and traded and won back again, ad infinitum... or so it would seem to a human. It wasn’t forever, though.

  It wouldn’t be––couldn’t be––forever.

  Like everything with a beginning, this too would end.

  Raguel, like the demon handcuffed to the metal swivel chair in the lower levels of a Moscow police station, remained ever-mindful of that end. He was still watching Lahash, studying those currents darting between them, comparing them to the waves of time and light and infinity that endlessly wove overhead...

  When he saw it.

  It appeared on a gray metal desk, right before his eyes.

  It had not been there––but now it was.

  That singular fact drew Raguel’s interest. Held it. Things did not simply appear out of nowhere in the human realm. If they did, it could always be explained. But Raguel had no explanation for this.

  No one had placed the object there. Raguel was sure of it.

  The object glowed from the metal desk closest to where the female
KGB officer stood. Had she reached out a hand, she could have stroked it with her fingers.

  The object shone at Raguel. It pulsed at him.

  A cold white when he first saw it, it changed as he moved his head, as his angelic eyes altered their perspective. At times it contained faint shimmers of colored light, but when he leaned closer still, it appeared transparent, like glass. He decided it must be of a material that caught the florescent lights strangely, confusing his angelic vision.

  It was a key.

  He blinked at it, studying it again.

  It was most definitely a key.

  A glass human skull made up what would be the key’s bow.

  Raguel could not stop looking at it, or wondering how the key could have gotten there. Only himself, Lahash, the militsiya homicide detective and the KGB agent were in the room, and the door was closed. Raguel knew the woman had not put the key there. The male police detective was too far away and had not moved from his chair.

  The demon itself was certainly too far away.

  It struck Raguel, the longer he looked at the key, that it must be a celestial object, not a physical one. The realization came not only from the strangeness of its colorless colors; Raguel felt presence lingering around it, the way that objects carried presence in his home world.

  Stepping around the human woman he had been protecting from the demon’s wings, he walked closer to the metal desk. He could have walked through her, of course, to reach the same end, but stepping around her constituted a gesture of politeness. Passing through someone was an intimate act––one he did not wish to engage in without being asked.

  Angels exchanged their essences with one another all the time, and more or less freely, but humans were different. Humans were meant to establish a modicum of individual spirit, of free will, of individuality. All of those things required difference––meaning an ability to differentiate oneself from other beings. Humans needed to know themselves as separate, as unique.

  That required boundaries.

  It also required asking their permission before those boundaries were violated.

  It was an understanding Raguel rarely thought about, it was so ingrained.

  Minimal interference was always the rule with humans. Minimal to no unrequested contact––unless the call came from someplace higher up the angelic hierarchy. Those rules formed an explicit contract for angels working on this plane. Interactions of any kind were a form of influence, whether they sought a specific outcome or not.

  Raguel, like all angels, must wait to be asked.

  The fact that Raguel thought about that rule now is something that would occur to him later.

  It would also feel like less of a coincidence, less of a footnote, than it had at the time.

  At the time, Raguel’s sole focus remained the glass key.

  He looked down at the unusual object, trying to interpret the conflicting impressions it evoked. Given the skull’s head making up the key’s bow, he might have thought it would emit darker energies than it did. The fact that it appeared on a table within wing’s-touch of a high-ranking demon only supported that supposition.

  But the key didn’t feel dark, per se.

  What Raguel felt on the key was significantly more complex.

  It felt old to him.

  Of course, even that feeling of it being timeless––ancient––might be illusion.

  Illusion was a demonic specialty.

  In its current form, Lahash would be constrained by the limitations of its human body, however. The demon could not summon a celestial object without leaving its human body, either––which the demon could only do if that body died. Once a possession took hold, a demon was bound, in one way or another, to see it through.

  Even knowing all this, Raguel did not touch the key on the desk.

  “What is this?” he asked the demon.

  Neither the female KGB agent nor the policeman at the scuffed wooden desk looked up when Raguel spoke.

  The woman did glance over when the demon answered, however.

  “I found it, my feathery friend,” the demon told him, grinning. “As you rightly surmise, I cannot pick it up in this form. Yet it follows me. It follows me, brother. Are you quite sure it is not yours? For I cannot help but wonder if this is so...”

  Raguel frowned, staring at the demon’s human face.

  Next to him, the woman also frowned, exuding even more puzzlement. Conversely, the male policeman at the desk slumped back into openly bored frustration. He stared at Lahash now as though he’d decided the demon had utterly lost its mind.

  Thinking for a few seconds more, Raguel aimed his presence elsewhere.

  Mik’hil? He made his words polite. I could use a second pair of eyes.

  The familiar presence of the senior archangel pooled around Raguel. Raguel felt Mik’hil understand immediately why he had been summoned. He felt the instant that Mik’hil zeroed in on the strange, glass-like key with the skeleton’s face.

  What is it? Mik’hil asked, curiosity whispering off his long, gray and white wings.

  Raguel smiled. I had hoped you might illuminate me on that point.

  Is that Lahash? Mik’hil focused briefly on the demon handcuffed to the chair.

  It is, Raguel affirmed.

  What is he doing?

  Raguel exhaled celestial dust as he glanced at the demon. I have not yet determined that, he admitted. This body murdered children. Orphans, after sexually abusing their bodies. He left them in a public and very political place, in the middle of Red Square, so conceivably with some more incendiary goal in mind. He left no witnesses, which suggests he used lower demons to erase memories and confuse minds... or else that he has human recruits. It is a lot of trouble to go to, only to allow this body to be caught by humans right after the crime is committed. It is a terrible crime, of course, but does not follow their usual pattern in a case such as this...

  Raguel trailed, realizing he was telling Mik’hil what he already knew.

  Unfurling his wings, Raguel shrugged.

  ...Any one of those children might have been a recruitment opportunity in this life, given the trauma inflicted. Instead, Lahash killed them, wasting the opportunity. Then he covered up his tracks, again wasting effort for no direct benefit I can see. It is...

  Raguel sought a different word, could not find it.

  ...Wasteful, he repeated. It does not follow in my mind yet, what Lahash’s greater purpose is. Nor do I understand why he did not simply kill this body prior to it being captured by authorities. It will be more difficult for him to kill it now...

  Mik’hil nodded thoughtfully. Could Lahash have wanted these children in a future life? He looked at Raguel, dark eyes shimmering. ...Or just one of them, perhaps?

  Raguel sighed. It possible, of course. But I feel some other game here. Something more immediate. Also, it is a risk that we would not get there first. Why waste a sure thing on a risk, when recruitment would be so much simpler now?

  What other game do you feel? Mik’hil gave a harder flap of his wings, his mouth firming. What immediate purpose?

  Raguel had no answer to that.

  Glancing at the woman, he said only, Things are not... stable here right now.

  Mik’hil followed his gaze to the KGB officer’s face. Expressionless, he exuded an angel’s grunt, still looking at her. When are ‘things’ ever stable in the human world, Raguel? That is hardly evidence of a difference in this matter.

  True, Raguel conceded. Yet more clouds than usual are gathering of late. Gabriel feels the same across the ocean, in America. There is talk of war. He gave Mik’hil a meaningful look. Nuclear war, perhaps.

  Mik’hil acknowledged that as well, but did not comment.

  Raguel could feel that his silence did not reflect disagreement, more a lack of additional information regarding Raguel’s concerns.

  Mik’hil returned his mind to the glass-like key.

  You’d better bring it back, he said, after a few more increm
ents. It is definitely not an object created in the human world. This might be some game by the demon, as you suspect. In either case, we cannot simply leave it here. Not without knowing what dangers it contains.

  Is it demon-made, do you think? Raguel studied the object with some curiosity, still unable to reconcile the conflicting impressions it emanated. Or is it ours?

  He wished the latter to be true.

  It felt more true somehow, but he could not trust his impressions of the thing.

  Unclear, Mik’hil replied. Perhaps neither.

  Raguel nodded, but felt his curiosity deepen.

  He felt Mik’hil follow his glance to the woman a second time.

  After another pause, he felt Mik’hil smile.

  We will satisfy your curiosity, dear Raguel. Bring it back, and we will examine it together. Uriel will have an interest in this too, I suspect.

  Yes, brother. And thank you. I will do it now. Raguel reached for that glimmering and glass-like key as he spoke. And perhaps afterwards, I could speak to you and Gabriel about––

  But before he could finish that thought...

  Everything disappeared.

  NEVER COLD BEFORE

  RAGUEL GASPS IN pain, eyes open.

  He does not know if he opened his eyes, or if they had simply never been closed. He’s never been aware of his eyes before, open or closed, not like this. He’s never been aware of such blinding, white light. He’s never before felt so much and yet so little.

  He’s never been so aware of something as time-encapsulated as birth.

  His mind fights to assimilate all of those feelings––to make sense of them.

  His skin burns. It hurts like fire––like knives forcing their way through a too-thick membrane, forcing him to feel. He feels numb inside that membrane, cut off, abandoned, even as it screams at him. He feels locked down, bound... but the pain forces him into HERE into NOW in a way he’s never experienced either before.

  NOW! NOW! NOW!

  It hurts NOW!

  He had never thought in terms of skin, in terms of hard lines and firm edges. He’s never felt his fingers as individual things, as things that could hurt, individually, that could burn with that same cold and pain, as separate from the rest of him.