Hellboy: Unnatural Selection (16 page)

But she would find out.

She had gone to the Memory seeking Blake, and something he had left behind had given her a map. She should have been pleased, but she knew what was to come. This information only took her one quick step closer to her doom.

Abby left Baltimore in the dark, rain still sheeting down, and as she sat in the back of the taxi, the world opened up to her. At the airport she would buy a map and sit drinking coffee until she could figure out where her sketch would lead her. Then she would fly, and during the flight she would prepare herself for whatever was to come.

She looked out the rain-smeared window and saw the moon peering from behind the thinning clouds. Her nemesis and her hope, her devil and her comfort. Her breathing was shallow, and she was terribly aware of the taxi driver's hot blood coursing through his veins.

She could hear the beating of his heart.

Time was running out.

H
ELLBOY AND LIZ
returned to HQ at daybreak. They stood in the parking lot and watched the sun rise, sharing a silent moment.

As they entered the building and signed in, Tom Manning hurried across the lobby, coffee cup in one hand and sheaf of papers in the other. "We think we know!" he said. "It's flimsy, but it seems to tie in with what's been happening. Come on, Kate's waiting."

"Have you told Abe?" Hellboy asked.

Tom paused and glared at Hellboy. "Considering he's gone off on his own, I'm not sure that's relevant."

Hellboy reared up, rising onto the tips of his hooves, tail swishing at the floor. "Of course it's relevant," he whispered. "Tom, don't piss me off on this one. You know where Abe's gone, and you know why. And it's not as if he's avoiding anything. Do you really think he'd want to be dropped into the Caribbean to fight a kraken the size of Iceland?"

"It's not right," Tom said. He stood his ground without averting his eyes, and Hellboy was quietly impressed.

"It
is
right, it just doesn't follow your rules."

"Rules are what make us — "

"Don't screw with me, Tom. Kate's classy
cryptid
word can apply to anyone here, you know that. Even you, Tom. Honorary cryptid. Like that?"

Tom shook his head, but he smiled tightly, and it did something to drag the exhaustion from his face for a while. "I'll call Abe and fill him in. Of course I will. But you're wrong, Hellboy."

"About you being — "

"No, that's good. I like that. But you're wrong to lump yourself in with the things screwing up the world today. I'm a human being. So was Hitler. See?"

Hellboy growled at the name and everything it conjured, but he knew why Tom had used that analogy. And
yes,
he saw.

"So let's work out what we can do about all this. If what Kate's come up with is right, you and Liz will be jetting off again very soon."

"London?"

"London. But we wanted to talk it through with you first, show you some more pictures that have just come in. If you and Liz agree we're on the right track, I've got lots of phone calls to make while you're en route."

"Selling your shares?"

"I wish. No, I'll be speaking to the president and to the prime minister of the U.K., asking them to mobilize their armed forces."

"What'd I tell you?" Hellboy said to Liz. "Lots of very big guns."

Liz lit a cigarette and offered Hellboy a light. "Why do I feel we're going to have a busy few days?" she said. "Damn, all I want to do is sleep."

Tom waved them on with his handful of papers. "No rest for the wicked," he said. "Let's go."

Kate Corrigan had changed her clothes since their meeting the day before, but her eyes held the same tiredness. If she had slept, Hellboy thought, it had been a rest troubled by dreams and images that would haunt her for a long time.

The footage of that ocean liner being taken apart was enough to disturb anyone's sleep.

"Hellboy, Liz," she said in greeting. "Have a coffee."

"Caffeine," Liz said. She stood at the coffee machine in the corner of the conference room, poured and drank a cup, then prepared another one.

"Are you all right?" Kate asked. She had evidently seen the scratches and scrapes across Liz's face and forearms, evidence of her scuffle with the New York banshee.

"Just dandy."

"How was the banshee?" Kate asked.

"Old, ugly, and pissed," Hellboy said. "And smelly."

Kate frowned, Tom walked in, and Liz took a seat beside Hellboy. He leaned toward her and sniffed, then smiled. "But you'll be pleased to know that its scent doesn't linger."

"London," Tom said. "You sure that's what it was saying?"

Hellboy looked steadily at Tom. "Well, it had my fist down its throat at the time, but yeah, I think that's what it said."

"Sorry," Tom said, shaking his head. "Look at these." He slid some photographs across the table to Liz and Hellboy and sat back with his hands on his head and his eyes closed. Hellboy thought he looked exhausted. There was only so much stress a man could take.

"So what new delights do we have here?" Hellboy said. He separated the pictures on the table and leaned over them. "Oh, nice."

The first picture showed a sea of bodies bobbing against a boat's hull. They were broken, ruptured, and leaking. Hellboy guessed there were more than a hundred dead people there, bloated and pathetic. "Another kraken?"

"Sea serpent, off the coast of Gibraltar," Kate said. "A sergeant from the Gibraltar police contacted us, but we've had to put him on standby. He's not happy. The serpent has sunk several pleasure boats and a police launch. It seems to kill people for pleasure, no reports of any eating yet."

"Charming," Liz said. She was scanning the picture closely, as if looking for someone familiar. Hellboy knew she took this all so seriously, making herself a part of each tragedy instead of just coming in from the outside. She claimed that being able to empathize gave her an edge. He thought that sometimes it just gave her a head full of grief.

"It capsizes boats and thrashes around until all the passengers are dead, either drowned or ... "

"Torn up," Tom said. He leaned across the table. "This one was taken in the Egyptian desert: fire dogs, scorching everything they come across. Dozens dead so far, but the death toll's probably a lot higher because of all the Bedouin settlements that haven't been reached yet."

"Fire dogs," Hellboy said. "Damn!"

"There's lots more," Kate said. She nodded at the pictures. "Lots more cryptids, so many more dead people. Hundreds. Thousands. You can look at them all if you want, but it all amounts to the same thing."

"Were under attack," Hellboy said.

The room fell silent. Liz was still studying the photographs, but Hellboy knew she was still listening, waiting for someone to speak.

"What?" Hellboy said. "You don't agree with me?"

"I'm not sure what I think," Kate said. "We've been asked for help from more than forty places across the globe, and most of them we've put on hold. The military of several countries have had contact with cryptids, and mostly they've come out worse. Jets weren't designed to fight dragons; machine guns can't harm wraiths. This is technology versus mythology, and the unknown has always been stronger."

"Well, dammit, let's go! Liz and I can leave right now, and I'm in the mood for a fight. That banshee pissed me off."

"London," Tom said. "Don't you want to hear about that?"

"So what's tearing up London?"

"Nothing." Tom flicked through the papers he still clasped in his hand. "Nothing yet. But there's a meeting being held there day after tomorrow, a conference of world leaders spending a week talking about environmental issues. The plan is, at the end of the week they'd have come up with an action plan to save our planet." He smiled grimly.

"Yeah, right," Hellboy said. "So long as it doesn't cost too much, eh?"

Tom shrugged. "Not our problem right now. What is our problem is that if the banshee was right and Blake is targeting London, it could be he's planning to take them out."

Hellboy frowned. "So ... everything else is a distraction?"

"That could be why London has escaped thus far."

"World leaders, you say?"

"Some of the biggest."

"Hmm. So we leave these monsters all over the world to get on with their killing and murdering, and we fly off to London — where nothing has happened so far — to baby-sit some soft-assed, smooth-skinned politicians?"

"Hellboy ... we're not trusted. You and I aren't trusted, the BPRD is a shadow organization to many people, and what we do here is often questioned at the highest levels. We make our own choices because we're allied to no one. Do you think I'm going to come off the phone this afternoon having convinced NATO that they need to mobilize their armed forces? Protect London? What do I say when they ask for proof of this theory?"

"Tell them I beat the truth out of a banshee in Central Park."

"Precisely."

"Abe," Liz said. "Abby!"

"I was going to come to that," Kate said.

"What?" Hellboy asked.

"Abby killed a werewolf in Baltimore," Kate said. "And Abby
is
a werewolf. She disappears just as the cryptids pop up ... and maybe I'm adding two and two to make five again. Or maybe I'm not."

"Hang on," Hellboy said. "You're suggesting that Abby is one of Blake's?"

"I don't know," Kate said. "Dammit, we know
nothing
But it just seems to be strange timing, and I wouldn't be surprised if what's happening now is relevant somehow to Abby. Why else choose now, when shit the size of Nova Scotia is hitting the fan, to do a runner?"

Hellboy stood. "This is all too much," he said. "Too clear and convenient, and too woolly. Where do these things come from? The Memory? What
is
that? Somewhere described by a book that probably doesn't exist? How can Blake — if
he
even exists — pull them through? You say he'd be over ninety. That's old for a magical criminal mastermind. Where is he hiding? What are his reasons? Where are the other things he's created out of mythology and legend? Where, what, how, why, who, and why am I so damn
pissed
that I can't put any of this together?"

"Way I see it," Liz said, "is that none of that matters," She stood and walked over to Hellboy; He was resting his forehead against the window, scraping the glass with his right hand as if trying to score his way through. "What matters is this, HB." She showed him a picture of a dead child, throat ripped out by a monster. And then a photograph of a building smashed to pieces by something big. Another one, a tank on its side with its crew spilled out like soft red innards. They were all dead, and black things with membranous wings were eating them.

He turned and pushed past her, going back to the table. "Let Abe know," he said. "And tell him about London. If there's any truth in all this, Abby may somehow know where Blake's going. And for whatever reasons she may have, she could be going there to meet him."

"Hellboy, I don't think Abby — "

"We just can't tell," he said. "Dammit, Abe." He shook his head and wished more than anything that he could take off after his friend. But Liz was right. She had shown him what mattered. Conjecture aside, there were certain truths that could not be denied. BPRD could not fight this whole new world of chaos, but if there was the slightest chance that they could tackle its cause, its core, then that was where he should be.

"London?" Liz said.

Hellboy nodded. "London. Let's see if we can talk some sense into those Brits."

"I
T WAS A LONG TIME
ago," Richard said. "Almost five hundred years. Around that time there were few records being made of the world, few histories written down for future generations. But our friend Zahid de Lainree has those histories, and they're as certain in his book as any I've ever read."

"So what does he say about the werewolf?" Galileo Blake asked.

"Nothing too obvious," Richard said. "That wasn't his way." He was tired and angry, and having to hike across the moors in the dark had set him on edge. He had been to many strange places — underground tombs, forgotten temples, graveyards to myth and memory — but these misty, mysterious plains really got to the heart of him. Perhaps because everything was so of the here and now, yet they could have been walking across a landscape ten thousand years old. The fears of the moors were timeless. And that was why he and Gal were here.

"But he says something that led us here, now, to this pissing place? Yes?" Gal was obviously tired and edgy as well.

Richard smiled at his brother, but perhaps the moonlight distorted it into a grimace. "It's obscure," he said.

"Isn't it always?"

Richard closed his eyes and let the coolness of the moor wash over him. He felt the breeze whispering secrets, felt the age of the land beneath his feet, sensed the mysteries it contained if only he were prepared to dig. He
would be
digging, but not here and now. Later. This evening probably, the following morning at the latest. And if the
Book of Ways
turned out to be as accurate and trustworthy as they had found it over the years, by tomorrow lunchtime his brother would be sending a trace of werewolf back to their father.

His brother. Galileo had aged over the past few years. His hair had thinned, its remnants turning gray, and his face had taken on the contour lines of a map of sad places. His eyes still showed the heart of him, the pain there, the anger, consuming and as rich as the day they had found their mothers body in the burning house. But there was something else there that Richard had grown to fear. He had suspected it for several years ... but this was his brother, his own flesh and blood, and the last thing he wanted to believe was that Gal was mad.

"Well?" Gal said.

"It tells a tale and draws a map," Richard said. "I can follow both, given time."

"Good." Gal groaned and pulled his coat around his shoulders, trying to shield himself from the breeze.