The Dragon Pool: The Dragon Pool (2 page)

H
ellboy barreled down the mountain trail, breaking a new path through the trees. Branches slapped at him, scratching his face and generally pissing him off. He let out a thunderous shout of frustration and annoyance as he hurtled between a pair of tall trees. The space was too narrow, and his shoulders scraped the trunks, tearing off bark. His hooves pounded the hard earth beneath him, maneuvering over rocks and upraised roots, sliding in moss.

I came to Chile for this?
he thought.
Coulda gone to Rio, watching some half-naked girls on parade.

He came to the edge of a ravine, but his momentum was too great. No way could he stop. Instead he leaped, throwing himself toward the opposite side. His arms pinwheeled, and he pulled his legs up, sure he would make it...then sure he would not.

"Ah, crap." He crashed into the wall of the ravine, a few feet shy of the top. Vines hung down, and he tried to get his hands tangled in them, tried to get ahold of something, but it was too late.

He landed in a heap at the base of the ravine, legs buckling beneath him, and sprawled across the richly smelling earth. Something ripped, and he hoped it was the tear in his jacket getting worse and not the seat of his pants. This whole mission was humiliating enough already.

Hellboy stood, bones aching from the sprinting he'd done, and brushed leaves and moss off of his long, brown jacket and shorts. He pulled some kind of weird fuzz off of his cheek, where it had stuck to his bristly stubble.

"This was a stupid plan," he muttered, even as he warily looked up at the edge of the ravine twenty feet above him.

A shape darted into view, dark against the gloom of the forest, wings beating the air as it circled above him. In the shadows, it could have passed for an owl. But he wasn't that lucky.

The thing let out a flesh-prickling cry and began to circle faster.
Calling all its little buddies,
Hellboy thought.
Fantastic. All according to plan. Use the big, indestructible guy as bait.

Even as the thought went through his head, he saw other shadows flitting out of the trees, wings fluttering as they joined the first, gliding above him like vultures.

"All right, buzzards. Just had to catch my breath."

With a sigh, he drew his gun, a huge, heavy pistol with a barrel four times the width of any ordinary handgun. Growing up, training with the BPRD, his marksmanship scores had never risen above pitiful. But if he got close enough, and with a gun this big, he could hit just about anything.

They dived toward him, dropping out of the sky, wings pinned as they came in for the kill. Hellboy took aim, squeezed the trigger, and one of them exploded into gristle and red mist. Then the others were swarming around him, and Hellboy gritted his teeth in disgust.

Flying heads,
he thought.
That's what my life has come to? Flying heads?

They had a name, he knew. The locals--the Araucanian people of Chile--called them Chonchonyi, but Hellboy couldn't take the damn things seriously. They were huge, monstrous heads with hideous, elongated faces. Their narrow fangs jutted up from black, ropy lips, and black, ridged wings stuck out from the sides of the heads like grotesque ears. Despite their ridiculous appearance, they were as vicious as any other strain of vampire, feasting on the old and infirm and relishing the blood and flesh of small children best of all. They never would have come after Hellboy...but he'd gone after them first.

"It's nothing personal," he said. He leveled the massive pistol again and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore a wing off one of the bloodthirsty heads, and it fell to the ground, convulsing. "It's my job."

Hell of a way to make a living.

They swarmed him. Hellboy swatted at them with his huge, stone hand. One of the Chonchonyi landed on his left shoulder, fangs tearing through his jacket, sinking deep into his flesh. He cried out in pain, swore loudly, then slammed purposefully into a tree, scraping the thing off on the rough bark. It left a stinking, bloody smear and released a stench like skunk cabbage. He knew he'd never get the smell out of his coat.

Another bit into his tail, and he whipped the appendage up, tossing the bloodsucking predator into a tangle of bushes.

"That's it," he muttered. "The tail's off-limits."

He ran again, wondering why he'd stopped. Sure, the fall down the ravine had slowed him down, but trying to make a stand against a swarm of ravenous, flesh-eating, flying heads was just stupid. He had crap aim and not enough bullets, and anyway, that wasn't the plan.

Stick to the plan,
he told himself.

He ran, hooves punching through soft soil now, years of detritus that had built up at the base of the ravine. When he emerged, he spared a quick glance upward and gauged his direction by the location of the sun. Typical vampires didn't come out until after dark, but the BPRD records included dozens of offshoot breeds or related species, and they all had their own rules. These things preferred the dark and the damp, but they'd go where the food was if necessary. Or if someone had stirred up their nest with a thermite charge and burned down a couple of acres of Chilean forest.

Whatever worked.

"Come on, come on," he muttered as he ran. The gun felt heavy in his hand. Several of the disgusting things flapped around his head, trying to take a bite of him, but they couldn't latch on while he was in motion. One snapped its jaws at his right temple, and its fangs struck the filed stumps of his horns, raising sparks. Hellboy slapped it away with the barrel of his gun.

Annoyed, he got off another shot, but the bullet plunged harmlessly into the forest. He had a hard enough time hitting a target when they were both standing still. With both him and the target in motion, the idea was absurd. He fired another bullet, just because it made him feel good to get out some of his frustration. The things were like giant vampire mosquitoes, and they were annoying the crap out of him.

Not for much longer.

His chest started to burn. Exercise was his friend and all, but this was ridiculous. His hooves pounded the earth, and he was practically in free fall, whipping down the mountainside, dodging through trees. He holstered the pistol on the run and stumbled over a rock, nearly falling. The heads started to shriek, calling to one another again, and he thought he knew what that meant. It was a good sign.

Until they started suicide runs. One of them slammed into him, fangs tearing the sleeve of his jacket before it fell, and he trampled it underhoof. Another came at his face, and Hellboy raised his ancient, massive left hand and punched it without slowing down. It spattered his face and body like a bug on a windshield, that skunk stink all over him now.

"Oh, great. That's just freakin' great," he shouted at the forest around him.

One got its fangs into his right thigh before he swatted it away. Two more were trampled. They were frenzied, now, as they tried to stop him from reaching open ground.

Then it was too late. Hellboy burst from the woods with the Chonchonyi darting all around him, their dark wings slapping the air, jaws gnashing, shrieking in fury and alarm.

The village lay ahead, a pretty little settlement on a lake. But the dwellings were quiet, empty. The villagers had other plans today. As Hellboy tromped into the clearing with the leeches flying around him, chanting filled the air. The words were an ancient spell, passed down through generations of Araucanians. Hellboy kept running until he'd passed the Seal of Solomon that he and the village elders had drawn in the dirt in the middle of the clearing.

The chant grew louder. The creatures began to falter in the air, flying in strange, wandering patterns, disoriented by the spell; then one by one they flew shakily toward the Seal of Solomon. Several fell to the ground and had to flop there, dragging themselves toward the Seal, scuttling like crabs on the ridges of their wings.

The villagers looked on in amazement and horror. One little boy screamed, and his mother covered his eyes. Several other children turned and fled toward their homes. But most of the people remained, mesmerized by the sight, chanting and watching as the malevolent, bloodthirsty things that had preyed upon them throughout the ages gathered in the air and on the ground above the Seal of Solomon.

Hellboy looked around for the rest of his team, two professorial types and a pretty, red-haired young woman with her arms crossed and a look of defiance etched upon her features.

"Liz," he said, "come on. It's time."

"You know I can't do this," she said, with an insouciant toss of her hair, glaring at him as though damning him for his expectations. "Did you not notice the village, all the people, and oh, maybe the nice, flammable
forest?"

Hellboy stretched, bones popping. His shins ached. He yawned as he plucked leaves from his jacket.

"You're fine," he replied. "We're in a clearing, hundreds of yards from the village. All the people are behind you, out of the way. Scorched earth policy, Liz. You don't have to control the power of the burn, only direction."

Something in her face gave way, and he saw in her again the little girl she'd been when they'd first met--the little firestarter who'd accidentally roasted her family and neighbors alive. The tough facade was gone, and all that remained was the fear of the fire inside her. It'd been years since the last time the flames had gotten the better of her, burning uncontrollably, but she could never forget. The fire was the enemy, even when she needed it--especially when she needed it. He hoped she'd make peace with it someday, but for now--"Liz..."

She tucked a lock of red hair behind her ear and peered past him at the abhorrent, absurd creatures flying in drunken circles above the Seal of Solomon. More of them were dragging themselves on the ground; they would remain disoriented as long as the villagers continued their chant.

Gnawing her upper lip, Liz raised her right hand. White flames danced on her fingers and began to spread to her wrist. The fire blossomed from her hand, a churning inferno that rolled across the ground and engulfed the creatures.

The chant grew louder, so that the villagers could hear one another over the roar of the fire and the screaming of the burning demons. Liz closed her hand, snuffing the flames on her fingers and palm, then put her hands over her ears. Hellboy turned her around and led her back toward the village, wishing he had never come to Chile.

"Flying heads," he muttered. "My life's a circus."

Professor Trevor Bruttenholm sat at his enormous cherrywood desk among shelves upon shelves of scrolls and manuscripts and leather-bound tomes of arcane lore. Most of the books ought to have been stored in the archives of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, along with the artifacts and magical talismans that lay on his desk and on the mantel of the fireplace, gathering dust. But Bruttenholm had been one of the founders of the BPRD, and spent fifteen years as its director. Even the parade of bureaucrats who had headed up the Bureau after he'd resigned that position understood that the man deserved a bit of indulgence.

No one disturbed Professor Bruttenholm's office. Every artifact and manuscript existed as a mystery he had yet to solve. Some of them might take him years to decipher, and others he might never figure out, but he never stopped. Each of these he considered open cases, and they never remained far out of his mind, or out of reach.

This morning he sat in the high-backed chair behind his desk and smoked his pipe, the air redolent with the sweetness of his Turkish tobacco, and leafed through the pages of a German text he'd had in his possession since the Second World War. He easily translated the words, the strange prophecies, within, but had never been able to make sense of them. In almost fifty years, not a single prophecy from the book had come true. Every other agent or researcher in the employ of the BPRD he'd consulted over the years had presumed it must be a fraud, but something about it troubled him.

Trevor Bruttenholm trusted his instincts. Everything in his office held secrets yet to be unlocked. That was why he had given up the position of director so many years ago, and why, though he was an old man, he still functioned as a field agent for the BPRD. Life was brief, and he hadn't time to waste on the sort of politics that the director's job required.

Dust motes swirled in the morning light that crept across the room through the trio of tall windows on the eastern wall. Bruttenholm had never been a sound sleeper, and age had only exacerbated the problem. This morning he had come into his office just after four o'clock, long before dawn. Such hours were not uncommon for him. He rubbed his eyes and went back to deciphering German prophecies. The lamp on his desk was still on, but the morning sunlight had faded it to a dull glow.

There was a knock at the door, and Bruttenholm raised a bushy, white eyebrow as he glanced up. He slipped a finger into the book to mark his page.

"Come in."

The door opened immediately, and Dr. Tom Manning took a single step into the room, one hand on the knob. In his other hand, the BPRD's Director of Field Operations held a case folder. The man's pallid complexion seemed almost jaundiced in the morning light.

"Why is it always so dark in here?" Dr. Manning asked.