Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (25 page)

And as Verdi's voice suddenly turned from a whisper to a shout, he feared they waited for just one thing.

He shoved Burke out of the way and sprinted forward, was ripping through the cage door when Verdi took his right thumb and made a twisting slash high on his gut, between the bottom of his ribs, and the blood pulsed bright and red.

He lunged and caught Verdi's wrist, but the man's arm was unresisting, his smile beatific.

Too late.
Too late.

He dropped Verdi and tore back out of the cage to the corridor, grabbed Burke by the shoulder. Squeeze a little harder and the collarbone would snap.

"You were a part of them too," he said. "Can you call it off?"

Burke started to laugh. "Why would you think people like that would ever have a reason to change their minds? No, you're about to be privileged to see something that few ever have."

He let Burke go and snatched the radio from his belt to call back to the house. "Liz! Stash Campbell somewhere safe, tell anybody else to take cover or run, and get over here. We're about to need you."

He sent Abe rushing off with Laurenti, anyplace out of the line of fire, then turned a withering glare on Burke.

"You wouldn't call it off even if you could, would you?"

Burke huffed a little laugh through his nose, then looked toward the floor as if it too were full of riddles. "I dream in German sometimes...isn't that the oddest thing?" he said. "For years now. I dream I'm growing back an arm that I lost. I doubt even you could believe the feeling of power in that." Eye to eye now. "A confused monstrosity like you will never know what it means to evolve."

"Or maybe I'm perfect just the way I am," Hellboy said, then threw an arm around Burke, hoisted him off his feet like a bag of potatoes, and started running as the air around them turned cold.

T
hey came in glory, if not in grace, and she did not run to meet them.

Out the doors, down from the patio, past walls where thick vines and ivy had sunk their tendrils into rock, Liz kept a measured pace across the flagstones. To run when the fire was upon her seemed not only wrong, but dangerous, as though she might run too fast, outpace the uncertain point at which they joined. She occupied the fire's center now. She belonged to it, and it was hers.

Past the arbors and through the trees--so much brown instead of green, this place like a tinderbox--and she knew they were here because the zoo was burning already. Until now, she didn't realize that a red clay roof
could
burn.

Fire'll never lose a fight,
the opening line of a song she'd first heard a few years ago and liked, and thought of it now because it seemed like an epitaph, even if she didn't know for whom. Was it even in her to survive such an encounter? Hellboy had thought so, too late to second-guess now, and she could only pray his faith was not misplaced.

The zoo was a long building, like a stable of gray marble blocks, its walls veined with vines as well. At the near end, a door burst open and out came Hellboy in full sprint, someone tucked beneath his arm--Monsignor Burke, she realized. Moments later they were followed by a ball of flame that hit Hellboy from behind and exploded around him like a nimbus, the corona of fire blasting the trench coat from his back, sending it whirling away in flaming tatters. He staggered as if kicked, and the man beneath his arm simply erupted, there was no other word for it, whole one second, and in the next a squirming mass. They'd been near enough in front of her that she could feel the heat even if she couldn't feel her own, but in her zone no worse than a snap of wind on a desert summer day. It gave her a surge of hope--she
could
live through this.

Their eyes met as he fell, and she ached to see in them so much anguish, Hellboy living through the kind of damage and pain than no mortal could bear. But she couldn't think about that now. Couldn't think about the charring bundle of limbs he dropped, or the long shriek trilling from inside the zoo, or who might be making this sound.

And the work of angels sent smoke boiling to the sky.

It stepped from the darkness of the doorway ahead of her, taking shape from behind the shimmering heat-haze between them. At first it appeared indistinct to her eyes, a shadow and a sigh, but as it stepped into the sunlight it seemed to coalesce all at once, gathering its body like a forgotten thought.

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.

W
here 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 possessions 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.