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.”
“Push them?” She stared at his back as he ran ahead of her, and he seemed even larger to her now, more formidable. Protectiveness practically emanated off him. And yet, for the first time, he genuinely frightened her. “Are you saying they can manipulate their minds, Raguel?”
“The Fallen can do many things,” he said only.
Still fighting to make sense of his words, she let out a gasp when he yanked on her hand again, harder that time, to avoid another cluster of people approaching them from the other side. A few of them were half-running now too.
Luckily, none of them ran very fast or very well.
Even so, the sheer fact that they were truly being chased by unrelated strangers made Ilana’s heart thud crazily her chest all over again.
“We are getting closer to the gates,” he said, his voice low. “But be ready. There is some chance they will be waiting for us there, too.
She felt her panic start to recede, replaced by her military training. Reflexively, she touched the gun hidden inside her coat, still running just behind Raguel as he wove them through the thick-branched trees.
“It will be all right, Ilana,” he said, glancing back at her. “As I said, it is unlikely they will attack us here. But we must be careful... they could do other things.”
“Like what?” she panted back, wary.
He didn’t answer, but tugged her harder again when they ran into another cluster of people sitting around a campfire in a small clearing. Watching those dead-eyed stares turn to focus on them––the cluster of bearded, unwashed faces reflected in firelight––Ilana didn’t argue, but only sped up her pace. She felt that panic closing in on her once more as the trees thickened, when suddenly...
They emerged from the trees totally.
Ilana found herself looking up at the columned gate of the Stalinist entrance portal.
No one waited for them there, as Raguel feared.
No one stood there at all.
Exhaling in relief, she didn’t slow her run, but rather sped up, now that she was on asphalt and concrete rather than uneven ground. Within seconds she was nearly pacing Raguel as they both sprinted out of the park the way they’d come.
ANOTHER VANISHING
GIVEN THE INVISIBLE key that passed through solid flesh and then being watched and followed by dead-eyes strangers––to the extent that she and Raguel fled Gorky Park––Ilana found herself agreeing with Raguel.
They needed to go see Golunsky.
They needed to go see him now.
If this was something that could affect so many people, they couldn’t wait.
Mere minutes after they emerged from those trees, they were inside Ilana’s car, with the doors slammed and locked. When she looked through her dingy windshield though, no one appeared to have followed them out of the park itself.
The parking lot, if anything, was even more empty than it had been when they arrived.
Taking a breath now that she didn’t feel in immediate danger, she found herself thinking about Golunsky, about what they would do next.
She wasn’t sure how she would get Raguel in there, but unlike before, when she scoffed at the very suggestion, she was now firmly convinced that she must. Her mind was already turning over the problem, finding ways she might frame the request without putting Raguel on the radar of the authorities.
At this point, she didn’t want him known by KGB at all.
She intended go back later to make sure the militsiya officer had done what he said he would do, and purged Raguel’s arrest file. If she had to, she would share some information about Raguel with Karkoff, but she was leaning towards not doing that, either.
She also needed to get him papers, and soon.
She knew someone who could handle the papers angle for her on short notice. He did jobs for the KGB on occasion, and in return they let him ply his trade––within certain strict limits, of course––for those with the money to afford him.
That would need to be her first priority, even before they went to visit Golunsky. She could not again bring Raguel into a police station without some record of who he was.
As she thought through the logistics of these things, it hit her suddenly that she believed him––she believed Raguel. Perhaps she had believed him before they went to Gorky Park, even as her mind told her she was reserving judgment. Watching that key pass through his bare skin and flesh, not once but twice, was enough to shake her out of that denial.
If Raguel was telling the truth about himself, then he was telling the truth about Golunsky.
The need to hurry felt like a physical force now, like something let loose in her body once her mind admitted this was really happening. Urgency shook her hands as she started up the Zhiguli, revving the engine to warm it.
Even so, he found herself just sitting there a few moments while she caught her breath.
She fought to level her mind, but kept going back to the key, to what she still clutched in one hand inside her jacket pocket, even as she gripped the steering wheel with the other. She leaned over to crank up the heater, then pulled her hand off the key to rub her hands together, blowing on them for warmth. She told herself she was waiting for the engine to finish heating, for the windows to lose their thin layer of ice while the car’s motor settled into its normal, slightly-wheezing gait.
“What do we do?” she said.
She didn’t look at him as she asked it. She wasn’t even positive she was speaking to him.
Even so, he answered her.
“We must find out where Golunsky has been for the past few weeks,” Raguel said.
She glanced at him. Raguel was watching her, his eyes faintly concerned.
His voice remained calm as he spoke, however.
“...I suspect most of what he’s done, he did not do in this body. To jump bodies, his previous body and the new body must be in the same room. We need to determine if anyone died recently around Golunsky, and who they were. We must also know who he spent time with in the period prior to his escape from the mental institution. It is very possible he was groomed in some way for this role by a third party...”
She nodded, forcing her mind to turn around this problem. “Yes,” she said, clearing her throat. “Yes. This makes sense.”
“Are you all right?”
She looked up, surprised. Then she let out a humorless chuckle. “No, comrade angel. I am not ‘all right.’” Wiping her face with a gloved hand, she fought to relax. “I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
“They are still watching us,” Raguel said. “We should go, Ilana.”
She looked up in alarm––first at him, then out the dirty windshield of her car. He was right. They had followed them out of the park by then. Just past the Stalinist arches of the park’s entrance, Ilana saw a crowd emerging from the park. It was a larger crowd than what they’d encountered by the pond. Some she recognized from there. Some she had never seen before.
Like before, some looked like vagrants, drunks. Others wore an expensive-looking coats. One of the nearer ones had a small dog at the end of a leather leash he gripped in one gloved hand. The dog strained at its leash, yapping, but the man didn’t glance at it.
He never took his eyes off the windshield of her little gold Zhiguli.
The crowd continued to move towards them as she watched.
“Ilana,” Raguel said, his voice warning. “They are real. They can hurt us.”
Something about his words snapped her out of her daze.
Fumbling frantically for the key, she turned it, making the starter screech. Realizing the car was already running, she jammed the gear-shift into reverse. Disengaging the hand break when the wheels spun, she peeled out, skidding and fishtailing in the snow and ice.
Cranking the wheel around, she jammed her foot back on the gas and aimed them back towards the main road, fishtailing again when she hit the gas too har
d.
She was panting again. She found herself looking compulsively in the rear-view mirror once they had the park behind them.
The line of men in black coats and hats just stood there, watching them go.
The little dog at the end of the expensive leather leash yapped at her car’s tail lights as she and Raguel left them behind.
Ilana didn’t start to breathe normally again until they’d entered the post-lunch traffic of Krimsky Val. Only then did she look over at Raguel. He was watching her, that concern etched even more prominently into his smokey crystal eyes.
Avoiding it, she looked back at the road. “I must get you papers.”
Her voice shook slightly as she wiped her face with a gloved hand.
“...We will go now.” She made up her mind even as she said it. “We will go to see Golunsky as soon as that is done. We will talk to him, you and I.” Her jaw firmed, and that time, she glanced at Raguel, who still watched her cautiously.
“...After that,” she continued. “We will go speak to those at the mental institution. They will know if anyone died around him recently... and if he had any visitors. Perhaps this change happened in him right before he escaped.”
She glanced up at Raguel, looking for his approval.
The angel only nodded.
Then he reached over, placing his hand cautiously on her leg.
Exhaling, Ilana looked back at the road. When he didn’t remove his hand, she felt herself slowly start to relax. After a few seconds more, she placed her own hand on top of his, clutching his fingers as she drove.
Neither of them spoke.
THEY PULLED UP to the front of the militsiya station after passing through the main gate.
They had already visited the forger.
Ilana kept that stop as brief as possible, and told the man nothing about Raguel. The forger was used to that, of course, and did not ask. He gave Raguel a choice from several names, took photos for the current picture and sorted with them through younger photos to use for the obligatory photo for age sixteen, which most Russians had, since sixteen was the age they first got their required propisky documentation and internal passport.
Shadow WIngs (Skeleton Key) Page 10