by Brian Hodge
But was the thought hers? Was that what they did--pick the brains of those who saw them, reflect what the witness expected to see? A basic tenet of quantum physics: The act of observing a phenomenon alters the phenomenon. Surely it had to be this. The seraph had no reason to look this way, winged and beautiful, a transcendent echo of old stories, old longings, the paintings in lesson books from twenty-five years past. It was a sight to drop shepherds to their knees.
It stood before the zoo as if barring the gates of Eden, the rest joining it by ones and twos, drifting up from the flaming ruin below to appear along the roofline, another perched overhead in a tree beside her, all of them with skin like alabaster and hair like thick spun silk--no conferring about it, they just did it, each one taking on this guise the way birds in a flock will wheel together in the same instant, from first to last.
One, two, three...
Seven in all.
Who could even stand to look at them for long, much less bring herself to kill them? Liz had to force herself to remember: Their appearance isn't real...only their fire.
What a fool she'd been to think she could survive this.
To her right, she grew aware of a chestnut tree crinkling with ice, its leathery golden leaves withering and dropping from the branches, the spiny yellow husks following soon after. The seraph standing before her seemed to waver, then dissolve behind a ball of fire that gathered in the air before it. The roiling mass was launched, rocketing toward her, a meteor of whirling red and orange--
Her body snapped, an involuntary response as survival instincts took over, fueled by fear, I don't want to die, and by rage, How dare they not be what I remembered, or what I needed, and she felt the powerful flex in her core. It surged away from her like a circular wall, and she tried to shape it, funnel it straight ahead, no reason to let it have its catastrophic way, wiping out everything in a radius around her.
They met somewhere in the middle, fires of different origins, each as mysterious to her as the other, one a foe and the other still not truly a friend. Warm winds washed her face, and she felt the tears on her cheeks dry into a stiff salt crust...
Then dug even deeper and poured it on.
Could one fire consume another? No, she didn't believe it could. Instead, she thought of hurricanes meeting at sea, the weaker absorbed into the stronger to generate a new force greater than either one, and maybe this was what happened here. She knew only that when her vision cleared, she was staring at a pillar that twisted and twined like a burning oil well, then collapsed on itself in a final bloom of flames.
More tears, slower to dry. As she stared at the spot where it lay, a blackened heap rapidly cooking down beyond all recognition, there was no victory in this. Even though she knew what it was, what it did, she still wondered when she could forgive herself for having destroyed something so beautiful...
And if she could even begin to do it six more times in a row.
The trees were burning, the house was burning, the zoo and grass and vines were burning. As she stepped forward through the mingled scents of ash and flowers, the seraphim descended to the ground.
"Liz," said Hellboy, sprawled to her right, pushing himself to his feet again.
"Get Campbell out of here," she told him. "He didn't sign on for this."
"Liz..." he tried again, and she knew it wasn't a plea for her to leave, so maybe it was the best he could manage right now at goodbye.
"I mean it."
He was up and gone then, and she knew how he would hate himself for it. He never wanted to run unless it was toward something, not away; she'd at least tried to give him that much.
The seraphim faced her in a crescent, the smoldering body of their comrade lying between their position and hers. In vengeance they seemed patient, even hesitant, looking at the blackened pile before them and then up at her. She could feel the sheath of flame crawl along her arms, ever restless, but against all six she feared it wouldn't be enough. How would it come--an onslaught from all of them at once?
They faced her through the smoke and even now their beauty made her ache, made her feel like a pallid and decaying thing herself. As one of them stepped forward, she watched the air between them, alert for the shimmer of newborn fire, but the angel merely lowered itself to the heap of ash and strange blackened bones at its shining feet. It thrust a hand into this encrusted pile--she couldn't kill it now, not knowing what it was up to--and withdrew it moments later, something clenched in its perfect fist.
The seraph stood again and stepped over the body, moving with the authority of a king. As it stood directly in front of her, Liz knew she was trembling but wasn't sure why. Even the fear had gone, sublimated by a sense of wonder. She remembered her first kiss, and yes, it might have been something like this...the frightening thrill, the fluttering sense that she could die.
Did seraphim mourn? Could they? She couldn't tell. Liz sought its eyes for anything recognizable as human, as harboring feeling, yet saw nothing but base awareness and the seeds of curiosity. It looked her up and down, as though...studying her.
It reached out and waited until she understood its gesture, until she took the lump from its hand.
Though like none she'd ever seen, and much worse for wear, it looked like nothing so much as a heart.
They both held a hand on it for a long moment, and while the seraph spoke in no language she'd ever heard, and hoped to never hear again, she felt she understood its meaning.
No, she thought. It can't be that.
As she held the heart in her hand, hers alone now, the seraph stepped back to join the others.
And as one, before they left, they bowed in silent deference, so low as to scrape the tips of their wings across the smoldering ground.
Chapter 26
Where to go when the roof comes crashing in, to recuperate and regroup?
Familiar ground was always the best bet, and on a day like today, the apartment in the Borgo felt close enough to home. As humble as it was, in its rough-edged Old World way, there was something about this place that Professor Bruttenholm had loved, and in the quiet moments when only the walls seemed to speak, Hellboy could feel it too.
Maybe he was hoping that if he listened closely enough, he could hear the old man's voice advising him what to do next.
Their sources were dead. Before they'd fled the house near the Tiber, with the survivors accounted for and safe in the panel truck, he had gone rushing back into the flames to confirm what he already suspected, but refused to take for granted. Even with the door ripped away, Domenico Verdi had never left his cage. It would take a shovel to get him out now.
Of Burke, there was no question. The man had immolated in his arms.
A month ago, if anyone had asked him if some people deserved to burn to death, Hellboy wouldn't have wanted to answer. But deep down, in the place where he tried to bury the worst of what he'd seen people do to one another, to the innocent, he would have been tempted to say yes. That some probably did. And that someone like Burke, responsible for more deaths than two hands could count--not peaceful deaths, either--may have been one of them. If not for what he'd done, then maybe for whatever lay ahead, that he'd sought to bring about.
Now, though--deserve? It was awfully hard to think in such terms now that he'd witnessed such retribution. The blinded eyes, the charred and splitting skin, the blood boiled in its veins. How limbs thrashed, then contracted as all moisture steamed away. Yet Burke had suffered no more than the others he'd condemned to the same fate, and Hellboy wondered if there had been enough time for him to regret the path he'd taken to this point.
It would be a long time before he could put this one behind him. His own taste of it would see to that, the concussive blast of fire that seared the clothing from his back and sent him tumbling to the ground and through the rest of his day with a fading sense of agony, as though his hide had been stripped to the bone.
But wait--it got worse.
There would be no more of Burke's posses
sions coming from Boston to put in Campbell's hand. More fires. They'd gotten word late this afternoon: Both his home and his office with the Archdiocese had been razed. According to early reports, the devastation was total, and the cause as yet undetermined.
Hellboy knew only that there would be no sweetly astringent smell of flowers in the wreckage. Maybe they'd find evidence of incendiary devices, human conspirators they could track. Or maybe, if he were there, he could walk through the site as he had the Vatican Archives, and this time smell the opposite of holy fire: brimstone and bitumen and something like the roasting of marrow-rotted bones that might blacken but never fully burn. Something he just knew, the birthright carried in his blood.
Comforts, though, large and small? This day was not without them.
Abe had gotten Father Laurenti out of the zoo just before the attack, using the cover of trees and brush to get them down to the Tiber, then slogging along its bank as they flanked the house and worked their way around front.
As well, they were all relieved to learn that the fire hadn't spread beyond the one estate, largely contained by the outer walls, the few outbreaks beyond quickly doused by firefighters.
But while he would take relief wherever he could get it today, it didn't answer the nagging question:
What now?
And then there was Liz.
She'd come through the morning without a scratch, without so much as the pink of a first-degree burn, although only a fool would fail to realize that her worst wounds were never on the surface.
There were times when he could reach her and times when he couldn't, and now he was starting to wonder if the latter wasn't really the rule, if he'd been overrating his influence all along. Twelve times she'd left them. Would she really have left twelve times if he'd been all that effective in dealing with the crises?
For now, he was content to let Father Laurenti be the one to try. Maybe Liz needed a simple priest right now as much as Laurenti needed to be one, rather than a throwback, a fighter of demons in their guises. No priest should be a jailer, he'd admitted earlier, and who could argue with that. He seemed drawn to Liz now the way sensitive children were drawn to broken-winged birds.
They'd been talking for hours, chairs pulled into a corner like a makeshift barrier to signify no visitors allowed, and sometimes he saw her nodding just to be polite and other times he could tell she really meant it. If the two of them held the keys to absolve at least a little of the guilt in each other, then he was happy to stay out of their way.
He knew she felt it. Liz could wear guilt the way Dickens' Marley wore his chains. She may have had no reason for it today, but just try telling her that after the way she'd capped off the morning. Annihilating something beyond age, beyond place, even beyond understanding. Then to be granted a display of obeisance by the survivors--as if they had believed it was something she was owed.
For all he knew, Liz thought she'd destroyed something beautiful beyond words.
He didn't know how she'd seen the seraphim; he'd only had the look in her eyes to guess by, certain that they could not have been seeing the same thing. And he envied whatever spectacle her eyes had made of them. He'd already decided that he would never ask what that was...because if he did, he would be obligated to tell her the same.
To his own eyes, they'd looked like him.
He'd seen them as versions of himself. Not as doubles, but variations, what even might be called refinements...proudly horned and their muscled bodies as exquisitely proportioned as Greek statues, while their faces were the worst, cruelly handsome and majestic, rather than the brutish thing he saw in the mirror. Seven avatars of ruin and destruction. He didn't know why he should find it so disturbing, what it said about him that these were the forms that his eyes had given them. Only time would tell if he could convince himself it was a trick, a hallucination.
But for now, there was still the vital question:
What now?
And, finally, there was Campbell.
The kid came up behind him in the kitchen when Hellboy was wedged in front of the open refrigerator going for another bottle of Moretti. Campbell stood there with his lanky frame folded into an awkward position, as if ready for a fight he didn't want to have, his face looking nine kinds of serious.
"Look," Hellboy said, "if it's about the ravioli last night..."
"No. It's not."
"I know." He put the bottle back, didn't want the beer anymore. "Don't ask me this, Campbell."
"It was your idea to begin with."
"And it was a lousy one."
Campbell stepped closer, leaning in to make his point while keeping his voice low. "From Glasgow to Rome, you come all this way and it's something you can't wait to ask me. Then five minutes on the roof with Liz and it's a lousy idea."
"When I saw how much it worried her, yeah, I started looking at it another way. I can be slow like that sometimes."
"If it was a lousy idea, it was only lousy when we had other options. The last I heard, we're running a little low. So how about another look at Plan A?" Campbell said. "As for Liz...she's not my mother."
"No, but I don't think she'd turn up her nose at big sister."
"And she thinks of you as a big brother. So what's that make you to me--big brother once removed?" He wrapped his arms around his front, standing his ground, as though a wind were going to blow him away. "The genie's already out of the bottle. So quit thinking like a big brother and start thinking like a team leader, open up the safe, and get me the horn you ripped from that thing's head."
Where to go when the roof comes crashing in, to recuperate and regroup?
Sometimes it didn't matter, because the shingles just kept coming down.
Chapter 27
They'd made him as comfortable as possible, but it didn't take a lot. Nice plush chair, a footstool, a couple of blankets. Soft surfaces all around. You'd think they were worried he was going to catapult straight into epileptic fits. No cerulean blue walls, but mottled umber wasn't bad either. He thought about asking Liz to go out and find a can of paint and a roller, just to see which she'd get--the goods or the joke--but decided that now wasn't the time. She looked like she was stressing plenty already.
Handling it well, though. She'd pitched a twenty second fit when she found out, during which she gave Hellboy the mother of all dirty looks, but that was it. No more objections, no more worst-case scenarios, no reminders that he didn't have to do this and could back out any time he wanted.
"Remember what I've told you," was all Liz would say now that he was in the chair, secure as an astronaut before launch. "Remember what I've told you every single time."
He pretended not to remember. "Look both ways before crossing the void?"
Tough room. Not a flicker. Just three of them standing around him like dental hygienists, three grave faces looking down at him, red, white, and green, and the priest in the background clearly unaccustomed to milling around with nothing to do.
Hellboy hunkered down beside the chair. "You ready?"
Campbell gave a terse nod. Knew what he was supposed to look for--the trick would be to try his best to isolate it and keep the rest at a distance. Get in, get what they wanted, and get out, a psychic smash-and-grab. Easier said than done? Well...yeah.
He peered at the horn as Hellboy held it at the ready. A familiar thing, he'd seen plenty of cattle drives in movies, yet at the same time unnatural. Ten inches long with a ragged, blood-caked base more than two inches in diameter, tapering in a gentle curve until it hooked sharply at the tip. It looked a thousand years old and loathsome, the texture dark as mummified skin and full of fissures.
He braced his hand along his thigh, palm up but tightened into a fist. Easier to keep it steady that way.
"Okay," he said. "Just...put it in my hand."
Hellboy moved it closer. Waiting. The thing was just inches away now. "Uh, Campbell...your fingers? You gotta open them..."
He knew that. Just wanted to keep his fist jamme
d against his leg for as long as he could. Damned if he would let them see his hand tremble. He sprang his fingers open like a trap and snatched the horn away before anyone could notice.
In that final moment, when he could still think of the outer world, the world he knew, the experience was like plunging a hand into a kettle of boiling water. Not in temperature but in time, that fraction of a second before the nerves get the message, the water even feeling cool at first, and then the shock, the all-consuming shock of it rocketing up the arm and into the brain that can't believe what the hand has been stupid enough to do, GET OUT OF THERE!, except there was no pulling out yet, it had him, as though another hand at the bottom of the pan had latched on and yanked the rest of him in, where boiling alive was just the beginning.
The man first--the horn made of Gilmour's bone after all, Gilmour's flesh, and how he'd hated them, their fragility, their mortality, their tendency toward weakness and dissolution. There had to be something more, and there was, he'd found it, or it had found him, the path paved with the rabbit-fast hearts and blackened bones of--
ENOUGH
Nothing to learn here, only contamination, the toxicity of a life long since given over to the theory and practice of suffering. The man was only the tool; there was still the hand that swung it. The man was but the outer skin over the layers of the horn.
And the gates of Hell creaked open.
It roared up beneath him and he tried to dodge it, as futile as dancing on the breath of dragons--a vast and towering entity with a shadowed head that blotted out the sun and moon, and horns that gored the stars--not its true form but this one served it well, a gift from ancient tribes carried on the smoke of sacrificial fires. Screams from the embers were its symphonies, and sour tears its wine, and if it had been drunk on them before, in the next age it would bathe in salted rivers.
He was in a firestorm of its hatreds and its appetites. Nothing could demand this much, nothing could consume this much, but it did, and had, its heart a chasm that the history of human anguish had barely begun to fill. And so it wanted more, a world not destroyed but overrun and subjugated--the human race would never go extinct as long as it suffered so exquisitely. New jihads and genocides? A good start, yes, and worst of all was understanding that Moloch spoke for legions.