Damn, he wished he knew what they were talking about.
Myers watched with concern as Liz shook first one hand, then her other. “It’s freezing, isn’t it?”
But Liz’s answer surprised him. “The coffee’s warming me up.” She turned one palm up and he could see where the skin had pinkened from the heat of the cup.
Now everything was closed up. They walked on, passing the darkened windows of the storefronts, not bothering to look in any of them. After another block or so, they came to a park; it was small and the grass was still green beneath trees that were dropping brightly colored leaves onto the well-manicured lawn. Not far away was a train station, so it wasn’t hard to imagine this park as a little lunchtime oasis, or even a place where friends and lovers might meet after work.
Myers cleared his throat. “What do we do now?” he asked, then grinned. What he was about to say had no doubt been said about every small town in the U.S. of A., but it certainly fit the moment. “Newark, New Jersey. Entertainment capital of the world.”
Liz didn’t seem to mind the cliché. She picked a bench, then ran her hand over the surface to sweep off the wet leaves and grit. “You offered me a cup of coffee. I’ve got one, so just sit down.”
She was pretty good with orders, Myers thought. Well, she was good with just about everything—the way she looked, the way she moved, the nonpretentious way she had of holding up her end of a conversation.
Myers grinned and did what he was he told. As far as he was concerned, Liz Sherman was just good all the way around.
Hellboy hit the side of the building rather than landing on its roof.
His face smashed up against the brickwork and he barely got his hands up there in time to grab the edge of the parapet. He grunted, hanging for a few seconds to get his bearings and let the sting fade out of his nose, then hauled himself up. “Damn it,” he growled as he hooked his tail along the edge to help pull his weight over the wall, then rolled to a sitting position. What if someone had seen—
Oops.
Not ten feet away was a kid feeding a bunch of pigeons in a coop.
Hellboy’s mouth worked. “Uh…hi.” Lame, he thought. Very lame.
Maybe nine years old, dressed in dirty jeans and a shirt with an X-Men logo on it, at first the boy did nothing but stare at him. Smart kid; it was only a matter of seconds until the light of recognition blazed in his eyes. “You’re Hellboy!”
For a moment, Hellboy didn’t know what to say, then he raised one red finger to his lips. “Shhhhhh,” he said in a stage whisper. He inclined his head over the edge, indicating where Myers and Liz sat comfortably—too comfortably—on a bench in the tiny park across the street. “I’m…on a mission.” Yeah, that was good. Kids loved that spy stuff. “Don’t tell anyone, huh?”
He knew by the look on the boy’s face that he wouldn’t say a word.
At least for an hour or two.
Running a hand over the thinning hair on his scalp, Professor Broom thoughtfully examined the ragged hole in the wall. Hellboy had certainly done some damage to his quarters this time, although that could hardly have been avoided because of the size needed to accommodate his huge frame. Broom had no idea how Hellboy could have known about that service shaft; maybe Hellboy’s hearing was more acute than he’d let on, and he’d lain awake nights listening to voices drifting down it, clothes being dropped, God alone knew what else. Or maybe he’d picked up those same sounds unconsciously, then simply picked this spot as the starting point for his escape based on that subliminal knowledge.
And when Broom turned, there it was, of course—Hellboy’s locator belt, hanging on the wall where he’d left it. That meant the big red guy was out there, somewhere, and completely untrackable.
Agent Lime stood behind him, a worried look on his face. He was clearly blaming himself for Hellboy’s escape, but Broom didn’t know what else he could say to set Lime’s mind at ease. It was, perhaps, a lesson they should all learn: if Hellboy wanted to go, there was nothing in this building that was capable of stopping him. “Should we send out some scouts?”
“No,” Broom said, knowing they wouldn’t find Hellboy until he wanted to be found, or until he returned on his own. And Hellboy always returned. The professor sighed. “Enough—he will never change. Always a child…always.”
The old man turned and resolutely made his way toward his office, leaving the repairs to those who would know how to do such things and who would, no doubt uselessly, try yet another method of reinforcing the walls in Hellboy’s living area.
18
WHITE WALLS, WHITE CABINETS, WHITE LIGHTS, A white tile floor; sterility and silence, except for the faint ticking of the industrial clock on the wall over the door. Not a bit of warmth or movement in the room, and the gray-skinned, lipless, lidless cadaver of Kroenen on the table went right along with everything else.
Until his chest began a slow, rhythmic rise and fall, air filling dried-up lung cavities and sending oxygen to the desiccated limbs.
Until he sat up.
Kroenen turned his head, bulging eyes searching until he spotted the object he wanted on the table a few feet away. Ah, yes…there it was. He stood and made his way over to the table, letting the sheet fall carelessly to the floor. He shoved his arm stump into place against the prosthetic hand; there was a click as the mechanical parts automatically tightened around the scarred end of his arm, making it throb with delightful pain. He flexed the shiny fingers, watching each of them work perfectly. Yes, that was much, much better.
Kroenen glanced around until he spotted his clothes, which had been carelessly folded and dropped into a plastic medical tub at the end of the longest counter. He retrieved them and spread them out on the examining table, dressing with care in the leather outfit and making sure to fasten all the shiny buckles as tightly as possible and with the same precision as he had worked on his silver hand.
The last thing he put on was his mask, and Kroenen drew the zipper closed with a mixture of reluctance and relief. He wore the mask only because his appearance made others…uncomfortable. On the other hand, he’d become so accustomed to the feel and smell of leather against the mummified flesh of his face that the tickle of air against his skin—or what was left of it—was no longer pleasant, or even desirable. Something was always wrong with the stuff—it was too cold, too hot, too moist. Yes, he was definitely glad to put the mask back on.
That done, he found his Ragnarok knives on the bottom surface of the tub and held them up for inspection. Good—everything was as it should be. He’d been afraid that idiotic Professor Broom would clean them with acetone, then assign one of his agents to take the knives to the B.P.R.D.’s machine shop and have the edges dulled, perhaps permanently ruining them. But they were nice and sharp, and they had, at least, done a passable job of cleaning Agent Clay’s blood off the one without damaging it. As he turned one over, it reflected the bright overhead lights, then the flat of the blade picked up a shadow. When Kroenen held it just so, he could see the clear reflection of the room’s other occupant standing behind him.
Grigori.
Hellboy smelled the chocolate chip cookies before he saw them. He’d did know how long he’d been staring morosely down at Myers and Liz; one moment his mind would be blank, the next it would be filled with a hundred, a thousand possibilities about those two, and none of them were good. The smell of the warm chocolate brought him out of his reverie and reminded him that he’d skipped dinner; his stomach was grumbling and unhappy, although it was nothing compared to what his heart was going through. When he turned and looked at the boy, the kid was holding a tray with two glasses of milk and a plate sporting a nice half dozen of the chewy and gooey kind.
“My mom baked ’em,” he said proudly. He set the tray carefully on the wall next to Hellboy, then climbed up and sat on the other side of it.
Hellboy’s head swiveled back to the view below and his mouth turned down. “That’s it. She’s laughing—I’m done.” He grabbed thr
ee cookies and scarfed them down, barely registering the smooth chocolate taste, the crunchy walnuts. Their goodness came to him more in the sweet aftertaste that spread through his taste buds.
The boy looked from Hellboy to the two on the bench below. “They don’t look like spies,” he said doubtfully.
“Come on!” Hellboy exclaimed. “Look at him—those shifty eyes. That phony grin.” His stomach rumbled and he glanced at the last cookie on the plate. “You gonna eat that?” When the boy shook his head, Hellboy started to pick it up, then froze. He squinted, making sure he was seeing what he was seeing—was Myers yawning?
He was.
Hellboy slapped his forehead. “Oh, the yawning trick. That’s so nineteen-fifties!” He poked the boy in the side and pointed at the duo below. “Watch his arm,” he instructed. Before things went any further, Hellboy turned and quickly scanned the rooftop behind them. There—a good-sized pebble. It was just what he needed.
Sure enough, Myers was saying something to Liz and doing the old stretch-the-arms-up-and-over trick. When he was through stretching, one arm came down behind her and rested on her shoulders. Hellboy eyed the pebble, judged the distance, then let her fly.
Thunk!
Hellboy snickered and both he and the boy rolled backward and ducked behind the parapet as Myers jerked his arm away and rubbed at the top of his head, then stood and looked around. The agent’s annoyed “Hey—what the hell?” was loud enough to be carried on the breeze—both Hellboy and the boy heard it. As the boy giggled, Hellboy stuffed the last cookie into his mouth and he and the kid gave each other a sturdy high five.
Beneath the lens of his micro-scanner, the two pieces of paper Broom had taken from Kroenen’s pouch were being meticulously aligned by the computer’s document regeneration program. The professor sat and watched patiently, not letting himself think about how much he despised computers, and he didn’t give a damn how much easier they supposedly made things. Anyone with a quarter of a brain could understand that computers also made the world harder and more complex. More dangerous. He was sure he could make a list—handwritten, of course—that would stretch all the way across New Jersey and contain all the things that now had to be done and watched over and protected, and all those because of the invention of the computer. The idea that nowadays nearly every home had at least one sometimes frightened him almost as much as the occult and its endlessly dark possibilities.
There—at last the program was finished filling in a couple of missing areas and he could finally read the Cyrillic letters. “Hmmmm,” the professor murmured to himself. “Sebastian Plackba #16, Moscow.” He turned away from the damnable machine and dug around in his filing cabinet until he came up with a folder full of photographs; he extracted several and spread them on the desktop, treating the older ones with care while he mulled over the shots of Grigori, standing tall and proud in a German uniform. He lifted a book from a nearby shelf and flipped through it until he found what he was looking for: another picture of Grigori, this time decked out in an Orthodox priest’s black cassock. The man had certainly gone from one end of the spectrum to the other, hadn’t he?
Still, these photographs were telling him nothing truly important, nothing he didn’t already know. He had one last place to try, tucked away in the locked bottom drawer of his desk. It had been some time since he’d taken this particular tome from its old wooden box, and when he did so now, Broom had to blow the dust aside to see the hand-tooled leather cover. He opened it with extreme care, mindful of the creakiness in the book’s spine, the dryness of its pages. His fingers ran across the text delicately, picking out Rasputin’s date of birth, his date of death, and finally, the line he had somehow known would be included:
His mausoleum is at SEBASTIAN PLACKBA #16.
Broom nodded to himself. “It’s Rasputin’s mausoleum.”
Tchkkk.
Broom jerked around in time to see, of all people, Kroenen descending the spiral staircase in the corner. The dead man—how could he be anything but?—was fully masked and dressed, gripping his blade with a sickening familiarity. Broom had seen a lot of things in his time—spells, demons, men who could breathe underwater, and women who could walk through fire and come out the other side unscathed—but this was…unspeakable. A man of dust and metal, with no blood or heartbeat or, likely, soul. There were few things in this life that had truly terrified him, yet this…
But he’d be damned before he’d show it.
Broom forced himself to look steadily at the zombified Kroenen as he came toward him. “I see the puppet,” he said blandly. “But where is the puppet master?”
“Very good, Professor Broom.”
Broom ground his teeth and willed his old body not to flinch at the hissing voice behind him. Loath to turn his back on Kroenen, it seemed he had no choice if he was to face Grigori. As Broom swiveled to meet him, Grigori stepped from the shadows next to Abe’s unoccupied tank.
Broom studied Grigori with false composure. “It was you—the scraps of paper, Liz’s sudden relapse and return—”
“Bread crumbs on the trail, like in a fable.” Grigori smiled darkly and folded his hands in front of him in a gesture that almost made him seem about to give benediction. “They both distract and guide him exactly where I need him.”
“Moscow,” Broom said, knowing Grigori was talking about Hellboy.
“His destiny.” With his hands still folded primly, Grigori glided forward until he stood directly in front of Broom. “You raised the child. Nurtured him. So in return, would you permit me? A brief, brief glimpse of the future.” Before Broom could pull back, Grigori stretched out one thin-fingered hand and lightly touched the center of the Professor’s forehead.
There was nothing left of New York.
Everything from horizon to horizon was charred and smoldering, once-tall buildings reduced to rubble and metal supports twisted in upright positions like plastic bag ties. Bodies and body parts were everywhere in the streets, hanging from tree limbs, draped across the spiky tops of the few remaining fences like a tribute to Vlad Tepes. In the not-too-far distance marched an apocalyptic army of monstrous beasts; huge and lumbering and unstoppable, their deformed bodies were silhouetted against a blood-red sky.
And lording over it all, sitting on a throne mounted atop a mountain of rotting skeletons and festering skulls, was Hellboy, the version of his son that Broom had never seen nor hoped to see. Huge, muscular, and unearthly—his horns had grown back longer and stronger and their tips were dripping with the scarlet blood of mankind, while from his mouth and eyes spilled a never-ending flood of unearthly fire.
Broom yanked himself out of the hideous vision and stumbled backward, too shaken to hide the effect of the horrible prophecy.
Grigori’s finely manicured hand dropped back to the front of his robe and once again folded with his other one. “If only you’d had him destroyed sixty years ago,” he said with false sympathy. “None of this would have come to pass. But then, how could you have known?”
Broom’s mouth worked, but God help him, he could think of absolutely nothing to say.
A corner of Grigori’s mouth turned up, as if he knew exactly what was going on in the professor’s head. “Your God chooses to remain silent,” he said. “Mine lives within me.”
Grigori stepped back a little, and it took more will than he’d exercised at any other time in his life for Broom to suppress a shudder—he would not show fear to this creature—as Grigori’s neck and shoulders visibly heaved and twitched beneath the thin layer of clothing he wore. “In the frozen waters of the Malaya Nevka,” Grigori told him, “in the darkness of the void, every time I died and crossed over, a little more of the Master came back with me. He disclosed to me the child’s true name.” Grigori paused and looked questioningly at Broom. “Would you like to know it?”
“I know what to call him,” Broom said tersely. “Nothing you can say or do will change that. I call him son.” While he was speaking, the professor disc
reetly pulled his rosary from his pocket and placed it on top of the book he’d retrieved from his desk. Broom couldn’t see Kroenen as he took a position behind his back, but he could feel the man—Kroenen was like a monster, a walking vat of poison in dead human skin.
“I’m ready,” Broom said simply.
Grigori’s night-filled smile reappeared. “Good. Now I’ll add two more crumbs.” He watched appreciatively as Kroenen unsheathed his knives, not realizing that Broom could see them, too, reflected in the glass of Abe’s tank. “Grief,” said Grigori softly. “And…revenge.”
Professor Broom gasped as Kroenen’s knives went in, and in, and in…
Without warning, a dozen pigeons sprang into the air and flew erratically in every direction.
Hellboy jumped at the sudden movement, then refocused on Myers and Liz, ready to return to his brooding. They were still sitting down there on the park bench, talking about who knew what, but at least Myers’s arm was where it should be and not across Liz’s shoulders. No more of that funny business.
“Just go down there and tell her how you feel,” the boy said impatiently. When Hellboy shook his head, the kid rolled his eyes. “My mom says—”
Hellboy’s eyes flashed. “It’s not that easy, okay?” He took a deep breath, then reminded himself—and the boy—of something else. “Plus, you’re nine. You’re not old enough to give me advice.”
The boy opened his mouth to argue, then instead gave Hellboy a shrug that clearly meant he was giving up. Hellboy was still watching him when the boy looked down at the street and frowned. “Who are those guys?”
When Hellboy turned his attention back to the park, he felt every muscle in his body tense. Rolling to a stop in front of the spot where Myers and Liz sat were two black sedans, clearly B.P.R.D. vehicles.
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