Hellboy: Unnatural Selection (6 page)

"You need to leave me here and go back down the mountain," she said very slowly.

"Not now that I've come so far," Dimitris said.

"Dimitris, you really need to go. A phoenix is no dragon; there's no reason for it to be doing this. Fire accompanies its death and rebirth."

"You believe me? Well, then, I can't just leave — "

"Dimitris!" Liz looked at him and saw that perhaps he did care. "Please ... I've handled worse than this. Go back down, and when I come down later, how about I buy you a drink?" She gave him her best smile, the one that made her eyes look as though they were aflame.

"Miss Sherman, if you're sure ... ?"

"I'm fireproof. Usually."

Dimitris uttered a short bark of a laugh, reached out to touch her hand, and then the phoenix landed on the car and started to prove Liz right.

Now
she was hot.

The roar of the fire was tremendous. It had come after a loud clap above them, the sound of the phoenix striking its wings together. Liz wished she had taken more time on the journey over to read up on phoenix mythology, but the drinks trolley had been stocking a good single malt, and whiskey took away her memories.

Shit!

Fire bathed the vehicle like a flaming waterfall, melting the tires, igniting rubber seals, warping and cracking metal, shattering glass, and the sounds were worse than the heat, rocking the car from side to side as every air pocket exploded and the metal shell split in two. They were surrounded by the flames. The stench of burning was awful, a nightmare,
her
nightmare, and Liz opened her mouth to scream against the memories being dredged up. But there was no air in the car, and her scream remained unborn.

Something grasped at her arm, and she saw the skin on Dimitris' hand bubble and blister as he squeezed.

Liz kicked open her door and rolled out into the flames.

The fire stopped. It died out as quickly as it had come, leaving only the ruined car in its wake. Metal pinged and cracked as it continued to expand and rupture. Tires were black puddles in the dust. Glass ran. And at last, Liz found the air to scream.

The phoenix sitting on the car roof looked down at her almost casually. It had curled its claws through the metal, and now it shifted its footing so that it could turn to face her head-on. It was beautiful. Coppery plumage, merging to a gorgeous deep plum color on its wing tips. Huge wings, narrow and graceful, and a long curved beak that looked as finely crafted as a musical instrument. She caught its eye, and it tilted its head to one side, as if waiting for her to speak.

Liz stood, brushing her hands subconsciously over her smoldering clothes. The bird watched, tilted its head some more, and then it bowed three times.
Damn, I wish I'd read more!
she thought again, but regrets could do her no favors. She bowed three times in return, never taking her eyes from the phoenix.

The giant bird opened its wings and stood upright on the car, calling into the blazing sky and shaking its head. Liz cringed down, expecting it to throw its wings together again.
They only conjure fire to destroy themselves.
At least, that was what she seemed to remember. And it was this fact that had been bugging her all day. If this really was the phoenix of myth and legend, how come it was conjuring fire at will?

What had pissed it off?

"We need to talk," she said. The bird looked down at her again and opened and closed its beak. Then it screeched, the sound so loud and forced that its body shook with the effort, claws squealing against metal where they had pierced the car's roof.

Liz looked down quickly, pleased to see that Dimitris was moving. He didn't look too good ... but at least he was not dead. Yet.

And then she had an idea. She'd always hated the saying 'Fight fire with fire', but if this thing was screeching like this to show off — as a display of power — then she, too, could play that game. So long as it didn't get the wrong idea and turn this into a mating ritual.

"Here!" she said. "Fiery ass!" She closed her eyes, picturing Dimitris' skin melting as he had squeezed her arm, and when she looked again, her hand was clothed in flame.

The bird stilled its strident calling and seemed shocked for a few seconds, standing there with giant wings unfurled and head tilted as it stared down at this other firestarter.

"I have this," Liz said. She turned her hand over, and the fire consumed her arm, moving up to her neck and curling around her throat like a pet snake. "It's a true power, isn't it? And it's beautiful. Feels like a cool kiss on my skin." She played with the fire. The familiar thrill came to her, unbidden and mostly unbearable. She hated what this curse had done, yet she loved this gift. Hellboy had once told her that something could be both, and he should know. You only had to open your mind to see the ugliness and beauty in everything.

The phoenix was watching the fire twist and coil around her arm, transfixed. Liz could hear its breathing above the sound of the car cooling.
If the fuel tank goes up
... she thought, but there was little she could do about that. Dimitris' best chance was for her to distract this thing, or even to calm it down. Anything else — more fire, more flames, more rage — and he would die.

The bird's breath was like the whistle of a tuned flute. It sang to her, or to her fire.

"No rage or anger here," she said. "Nothing to hurt you, nothing to hate. Just the fire we both know so well. Let's look at the fire for a while ... " Liz stared at her own hand, bewitched. Control was good, but at times like this, she knew that there was really no such thing. She could funnel her power but never truly manage it. It was untamed. Like a wild animal performing tricks in a circus, it was merely obeying her command. Deep down where it really came from, down in the depths of her mind that she had never been able to plumb, it was ferocious.

And as her curiously becalmed mind acknowledged that, the phoenix began to laugh.

Liz dropped her hand and let the fire gutter away to nothing.

The bird was snorting through nostrils high on its beak. It shook, but with mirth this time instead of rage. The car vibrated below it, Dimitris crawled out, and the phoenix looked down at his blackened head, the clothing scorched from his body, his olive skin turned red, split, weeping ...

"Liz," Dimitris croaked, raising his hand as if to hold on to her memory.

The phoenix reared up, clapped its wings together, and conjured the greatest conflagration it would ever know.

Liz retreated into herself. Even the heat of this mythological fire could not mirror the fury of her own memories. She was eleven years old again, living with her family, and something went wrong, and everything was heat and light and pain — physical pain for the people she loved, mental pain for her. Anguish that would last a lifetime, and beyond. Guilt that would swallow her up and spit her out many times over. There was screaming and melting and dying, and it was all because of her and through her.

From outside, other fires came in. They merged with her experience and became memory, and there was a single new scream — brief but intense — that added itself to her gallery of screams, all those exhalations of terror that she had heard through the years, all those cries that came because of her, and what she was, and what she could do. She collected screams, and in her nightmares she viewed this collection.

When Liz surfaced, the new phoenix was rising from the remains of the old. It shrugged itself from the scalding remains, testing its new wings, their colors fresh and vibrant even through the layers of ash. It looked at Liz, and she was sure it was staring down at her hand. She flexed her fingers, and fire danced there.

The phoenix turned away and gathered its mummified father into its claws, ready to launch itself for its fledgling flight to Egypt. Then it took off without sparing Liz another glance.

She stood shivering in the heat, gathering the remnants of her scorched clothing around her, crying. The tears washed a clean route through the soot on her face. They burned.

"No!" she exclaimed. "Oh, no!" She almost went to him, but she knew there was no need.

Dimitris was little more than a greasy stain on the road.

T
HE RUKH DRIFTED ON
air currents high in the sky, its massive wings spread wide to catch the updrafts. Its great beak cut through the air, so streamlined that there was no noise as the atmosphere parted around it. Although it was more than strong enough to carry the weight of the two fully grown cows, each claw hung low beneath it, and wind raged around them. They were dragging it down, and every now and then it beat its wings once and soared a hundred feet higher. One of the cows still bayed helplessly. The other was dead, the bird's talons having pierced its heart upon lifting it from the ground.

Hanging from the rukh's beak were the fleshy remnants of the rest of the herd.

It drifted northward. The slate-gray sea far below offered no points of reference, and yet the bird knew exactly where it was going. Home was a bright point in its mind. The sea was shaded by different tides, varying temperatures, and here and there white smears told where waves had broken and given birth to brief white horses. Clouds wisped the air below and around the bird, and sometimes it dipped itself through the tailing edge of a cloud, reveling in the coolness the moisture bestowed upon its warm body. The effort of flying so far had tired the rukh; even though it had just eaten, the flight had been long, and the cows were growing cumbersome.

Way overhead, the deep, dark blue of the edge of space. A mile below, the shaded gray of the North Sea. And around it, the wide open sky.

At last, in the distance, a blur appeared on the textured sheen of the ocean. The bird cawed once, cracking the air like thunder. It tilted its wings and drifted lower. The surviving cow, ears shattered by the rukh's call, bayed one more time and then died. The rukh twitched one wing and turned a few degrees to the left, aiming for the blot on the ocean, delight filling its impossible mind.

The blot grew to a spot, the spot to a definite shape. Long, and from this distance still narrow and small. Behind the shape lay a smeared white line in the ocean, evidence of where the shape had just been, pointing at where it had yet to go. The rukh drifted lower and adjusted its grip on the dead cattle. It would have to drop them before it could land.

The shape resolved itself into a boat, and it grew larger and larger as the rukh approached. And larger still. The boat dwarfed even the huge bird. Fifteen hundred feet long, more than two hundred feet wide, the former oil tanker had lost all trappings of its previous existence. No slicks accompanied this vessels movement across the ocean. No port of registration appeared anywhere on its hull, for it was its own home, and it had not rubbed against a dock in almost twenty years. And its true name appeared only in the minds of its inhabitants, human and otherwise. The
New Ark
was a whole new world in itself ... and what a world.

The rukh cried out again in delight and prepared to make its landing run. One set of the ship's great hold doors was lifting, the vessel opening itself up to the bird, and it could see shapes scurrying across the deck in preparation for its arrival. The horn blared as if to answer the rukh's call.

On the parapet surrounding the high bridge, unmoving and yet more visible than any other living shape on the ship, the rukh could see its father.

As it neared the vessel, the bird could make out the hidden protection that had kept it secret for so long. Just as the ocean seen from on high had different shades, so did the sea in the immediate vicinity of the hull. Great shapes drifted below the surface, their direction and speed having nothing to do with temperature, or depth, or the raging currents. These shapes — some of them almost a third the size of the massive ship — dictated their own direction. Some kept pace with the
New Ark
others moved farther afield, and some rose from and dived to depths that light never reached. Their shapes were concealed, their true nature unfathomable. They were shadows on the sheen of reality.

The giant bird approached the
New Ark
hovering lower. Downdraft from its wings disturbed the waters around the hull, creating whirlpools and eddies. When it was directly above the hold, it dropped the two cows down into the belly of the ship — that strangest of places, that dark hole where the light of creation burned fiercely and this world no longer really existed — and looked up at the bridge.

The rukh's father was there. And he was smiling.

The rukh called out once more, its joyful cry winging across the North Sea like a spirit only recently set free, and then it settled itself into its home once more.

The man on the bridge continued to smile as the hold doors closed slowly above the giant bird. A unicorn galloped along the deck, and his smile broke into a grin. A mile to starboard the sea erupted as something huge and bright red broke the surface for a few seconds. A forest of tentacles slapped at the air as the thing dived for unknown depths, and Benedict Blake's grin erupted into a laugh. Nowhere near as loud as the rukh's call, still it filled the sky and winged its way out over the waves. Soon his voice would at last reach the ears of those who mattered. And then it would be his time once again.

I
T WAS NIGHTTIME, AND
it was hot, and Abby Paris should have been back at BPRD headquarters hours ago. Instead she was walking the streets, just another face hiding an anonymous life behind averted eyes. Most people wandered in pairs or groups, chatting and laughing, shouting and giggling. Light and noise spilled from bars and restaurants. The smell of food permeated the air, steak and seafood and sweet stuff all adding their own signatures to the night. She tried to shut out that sense, but she could not. Heightened smell was another part of her curse. As was hunger; but not for this. She stopped by a street vendor and bought six doughnuts, ate them, then vomited them back up ten minutes later. She held on to some park railings and heaved, splashing her shoes. A passerby paused for a moment and watched, then moved on. A police cruiser slowed and sped up again, and she wondered what the policemen had seen that had prevented them from stopping and arresting her. Just another drunk? Or something else entirely?