Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (29 page)

He'd heard it said before that its hinges turned most easily on hatred.

Plenty of that out there already, just waiting for a cause.

Its power doesn't reside in whose hand really put the ink to it,
Father Simon had told him.
Its true power lies in what human beings--and
other
beings--choose to make of it.

True enough.

But the devils could never pull it off without the help of all the goddamn hateful men.

He gathered up his gear and put it back on, chained the giant cuff to his wrist. And just before they left, he paid one last visit to Matthias Herzog, who lay in a rasping heap at the foot of the throne. Hellboy glared down at the man and didn't care if he could understand his words or not, just knew he could never walk out of here before delivering the worst curse he could think of.

"I hope you live another thousand years."

T
hey were back on the cavern floor, the houses of the unholy far behind, when they began to voice what Liz knew each of them had to have been thinking for almost the entire time they'd been here: What should they
do
now that they knew of this place? It was all well and good to have recovered the scroll, for whatever brownie points that would earn in the long run, but it didn't change the fact that Tartarus existed. Such a realm, once made, could never be safely
un
made.

On the one hand, there was so much to explore here, so many secrets it might reveal to those who could stomach the place. But would this even matter? Expeditions might be conducted safely, but in the meantime, and maybe ever after, Tartarus would lie there like a bomb waiting to go off. It existed solely as a shortcut between worlds, and she feared that one day it
would
fulfill its purpose.

As well, it might continue to swallow innocents who blundered into it in those places where the barriers were thin.

Noemi Kivits--that was the name on the student ID. Liz reached one hand around to her backpack, felt the bulge of the girl's belongings, recovered for...well, she couldn't say why right now, only that it felt like something that had to be done.

Next to them, she felt a harder lump, the gift--if it could be called that--that she'd accepted yesterday in the middle of the blaze at the house near the Tiber. She'd brought it for no other reason than knowing from the first moment she'd touched it that she would have to carry it everywhere, until there was a reason to be rid of it.

Better sooner than later.

"We need to go back to the left hand," she said, and if Abe or Hellboy doubted this, they kept it to themselves.

They retraced their steps from the earlier crossing, ascending the rounded stairs at the tip of the nearest finger, and once they'd mounted the platform, continued toward the ring of suffering and the turbulent well it surrounded.

The closer they drew to the area where they'd last been before setting off for the statue's other hand, the more apparent it became that something was different this time. Liz knew it even before she was close enough to see the small, subtle movements, the parody of life. She knew it the same way someone walks into a room and notices the chair that's out of place, the hallway door standing open that should have been closed.

That's not the way we left her,
Liz thought.
We left her lying down...

And so they had. But now Noemi was sitting upright with her back against the flat edge of a girder supporting one of the infernal machines.

"Oh, that's wrong," Liz murmured to no one in particular. "That is
so
wrong."

It was the French girl's body, obviously, but Hellboy knew she was no longer the one behind those eyes. When he was close enough, he looked deeply into them and saw the same simmering magma of malevolence and scorn that he'd last seen in a basement flat in Scotland. The same midnight sneer of junkies and cutthroats.

On the one hand, Moloch had not worn her skin long enough to truly make it his own. On the other, he was halfway to home turf here, and would be all the stronger for it, that much more
present
. Hellboy could feel it, a crawling sensation in his gut, the involuntary disgust most people felt when they switched on a kitchen light and saw the floor alive with roaches.

Noemi's hands toyed with the nylon strap that they'd removed from around her throat. It was back in place, a noose again, and her hands slid the slipknot up and down...tightening, loosening, tightening again.

Hellboy reached back to touch Liz's hand; felt her trembling with anger that she'd been able to suppress until now. He gave her palm a slow, reassuring squeeze.

Noemi's eyes lit on the case shackled once more to his wrist. Seeming to concede the loss with the merest tic of indifference.

"Do you know why you'll still lose, in the end? Why you
have
to?" The voice was a skinned-raw croak. "It's because what you count as victories are such
small
things."

Hellboy hoisted the case, made it impossible to ignore. "Small victory, big ripples, the way I read it back in your war room."

"Big ripples, vast ocean." The Moloch cocked its head, taunting. "You should know. You were hauled through enough of it. At my behest."

For all it would accomplish--nothing--he still wanted to smash its face in. But to do so would only play to the demon's sense of amusement. It was already defiling the girl's body by its presence. He refused to make it worse, to let himself be drawn into that game. Moloch's kind had already had their fun and the streets of Tartarus were slick with blood because of it. No more.

He could feel Liz pressed against his shoulder. "I'm going to go ahead and do what I came back here to do in the first place," she said. "I think you'll like it."

She stepped around him, stared down at Moloch inside his puppet.

"You
won't."

She left their company for now, the good and the evil alike, needed to get off by herself for the next few minutes. This was going to be one of those things best done alone, without others, even your best friends, looking over your shoulder.

Hellboy had no choice but to stay behind, still engaged with the vile thing whose likeness loomed above them. But Abe wanted to follow, clearly uneasy with the idea of her straying too far, and she loved him for it because so few loved her the same way, like family...but still, she had to tell Abe to let her be. And he did, but he was such a
guy
about it, you know, shuffling where he stood and scowling in that baffled way of warriors who've been sidelined before everything's been killed or laid waste.

Liz walked along the outer ring of the abattoir, closer to the machines than she really wanted to be--not close enough to touch them but still close enough to feel their presence, barbed with vicious potential, aware of that cold metallic smell coming off them. When she decided she'd gone far enough, for privacy's sake, she turned to put them at her back--no need to see them, anyway.

She shrugged out of her pack and set it on the stone; opened it and dug past the MRE food packets, the water bottles, the ammunition, the last worldly possessions of Noemi Kivits. From the bottom she withdrew the hard, cloth-wrapped bundle, a third again the size of her fist; unwrapped it and held the ash-streaked seraph's heart.

They would never have given it to her as a trophy, she was sure. They had no need of trophies, probably didn't even understand the concept.

But why did they have hearts at all, why bodies that could be destroyed, she had asked Father Laurenti during those long hours they'd talked, as she'd felt burdened by the weight of having killed one.

He told her he didn't know, just his own conclusions: that where they came from they may have been creatures of spirit, but when they came here as slayers, avengers, destroyers...this was brute work, for a world of fists and blades and searing flames. The world of flesh and bone. They had to descend to the level of their work.

He couldn't have missed how she'd taken no consolation in this, and tried to soften it for her, relating something he'd been told by the captive Father Verdi:
They are the perfect manifestation of His wrath, and nothing more. And for so long, they have had nothing to do.

In other words, they were obsolete, Laurenti said. And wasn't it interesting, wasn't it comforting, he asked, to recognize how this paralleled the Bible, and the way it showed God's evolution from a god of jealousy and wrath to one of love?

Well, okay. Maybe. But not as comforting as it could be, as long as the wrath was still lingering in some form, waiting to be tapped.

She held the heart in her hand, touched her lips to its greased and sooty crust. Were they hers to call now, free of rites and blood and symbols...because was she
one
of them, in their view? She couldn't think of a single other reason why they would have given this to her, then bowed, if they hadn't expected to see her again.

I don't want this power,
she thought.
I have more than enough trouble with my own.

But here, things were different.

She let the flame come, just a little, flickering down the length of her arm like a glove, until it wreathed the heart as well. The crust began to slough away and reveal the raw pink meat beneath--none of this planned, just going by instinct and impulse, but sometimes that was where the strongest magic hid. She had no words for them, either, nothing to call them with other than pure, unscripted yearning.

It was enough.

They came in glory, if not in grace, and this time she was glad to see them.

Winged and achingly beautiful, they looked the same as before--no reason they shouldn't, her memories and dreams were still the same--but now there were only six. They faced her in a semi-circle where they'd descended onto the statue's hand, waiting, as the distant cavern walls went pale, sheathed in a rime of ice.

From the corner of her eye, she saw H.B. give Abe his coat. Abe was shivering, and Liz imagined she would be too if the fire was not upon her.

With the heart now burning in her hand, she shut her eyes and saw what she wanted most--a fever dream of devastation, this place of cruelty and hubris humbled and brought low, machines melted, cathedral walls shattered, carvings broken into rubble, and the bodies of the near-dead granted a last kiss of mercy before the pyre...all but one--Hellboy had spoken his wish for Herzog, and she would have it granted, along with any other wishes he might have.

She saw safe passage for herself and her friends.

After that, and
only
after, did she see the portals sealed, all of them, large and small. And if they couldn't be sealed, then guarded, like the east gate of Eden.

Could they do it? Would it be too much even for them?

Maybe. But if they had anything, the seraphim had time.

She turned her back to them and threw the heart as hard as she could, over the ring of ugly machines. She'd never thrown like a girl in her life, even her brother had said so, shaking his stinging hand in those better days before the fire. High praise--it just didn't get any better than that.

Like a shooting star, the heart fell from sight, a tiny blaze swallowed by the dark. Maybe it would tie them to this place. She could imagine worse outcomes than that.

They took to the wing then. They prepared for war.