Shadow WIngs (Skeleton Key) Read Online Free Page B

see where he took off his clothes? Where are they?”
    “No.” Tension vibrates the second voice. Is it excitement? Fear? Disgust? Raguel cannot tell. “He is only here, like now... naked. Look at how white he is! He is like snow! Do you think he is sick...? Some kind of mutant? An albino?”
    A third voice holds humor, a stronger slur of alcohol. “Who cares?”
    A fourth voice speaks up––excited, jabbering. Too excited.
    “Did you see that? Did you see it? This guy... he is just here suddenly! Like, poof! He appears out of nowhere! Then he is lying there like that, looking like demons scratch at his eyes... like something tore his lungs out!”
    Raguel flinches at the mention of demons. When he looks around though, he sees nothing, feels nothing, good or bad.
    If demons are there, they are invisible to him.
    The voice grows more shrill, more excited. “I swear it! I saw it with my own eyes! It was magic that brought him here! Magic! Did no one else SEE that?”
    Another man laughs, and it is a cold laugh. Disconnected.
    “Been drinking turpentine again, Dmitri?” he scoffs.
    “No! I swear upon my heart I saw it! I did! I saw it!”
    Raguel is still trying to feel his way through this world. But there is no way to do it, not in this form. He is blind deaf and dumb––lost inside this suit of meat and chained to the earth.
    He hears something, loud, coming out of his chest.
    It pounds into him, slamming into bone and flesh and blood.
    “Look at him!” the first one slurs. A face looms over Raguel, red and puffy and wrapped partway in a scarf. “What is wrong with this fool? He is scared out of his mind!”
    That thing in Raguel pounds harder.
    Whatever that thing is, it hurts.
    The pain is something new as well, new as the cold snow on his bare skin, the shocking blue of the sky, the heaviness of his arms and hands and the loud voices from people whose faces look blurred to him, and who he can’t feel with any part of his mind or spirit.
    His wings are gone.
    Suddenly, he understands. It is his heart, he realizes.
    That thing that hurts inside his chest is his heart.
    Something in that simple realization breaks the dream.
    Lying on the frozen wet ground, staring up at a high, winter sky, his skin burning from the first cold he’s ever felt––
    Raguel begins to scream.

ILANA

    ILANA KOPOVICH FROWNED, staring over her shoulder at the grinning officer standing behind her. He clearly wasn’t CID, or Moscow Criminal Investigations. Militsiya, sure, but she pegged him for patrol, possibly mounted police.  
    Which made her wonder what he was doing in this part of the building at all.  
    He had walked up behind her while she bent over the borrowed desk she’d been temporarily assigned at Petrovka 38, the main building of the city’s militia. From the way he grinned, staring openly at her ass as she turned around, she could only guess this man had no idea who she was.
    Not only in terms of her undercover role–– none of the regular law enforcement officers should be aware she worked for the KGB. No, he clearly had not heard even who she was officially, meaning the title she passed as her general cover.
    Only a complete jackass would leer at an official of the Party like this. Particularly a high-ranked official here to assess the political ramifications of a gruesome crime committed virtually on the front door of the Kremlin.
    Of course, this hungover-looking country boy with the scraggly beard and the bad body odor might be just such a jackass.
    In Ilana’s experience, they definitely existed.
    She strongly suspected he did not know her alias, however. He must think she was militsiya too, and assumed she held a lower rank than he, that she worked in social services or some other clerical capacity, like most women in the Moscow police.
    Either way, his eyes raked down her like she was some woman on the street he wanted to pay for sex. He blew on his hands without taking his eyes off her figure, stamping