The Dragon Pool: The Dragon Pool (16 page)

"So what happens if I stay, then?" Hellboy asked, surprised to hear his own voice. "How long are we talking about? A week? Two? 'Cause you know that's the problem, Stasia. I'm here now because you needed my help--the BPRD's help. The minute I'm sticking around just to be with you and not because there's something big and evil I need to hit, that changes things."

Seconds passed. The moonlight played across the night-cloaked lake. They stared at one another, standing on the shore, everyone else so far away.

"I didn't hear a 'no' in there," Anastasia said.

Hellboy hesitated. She was right. He hadn't actually said no. Was what she was asking so terrible? They were old friends who still cared deeply for one another. They were both adults, and they knew how things stood and what the parameters were between them.

He reached out his other hand, and she twined her fingers with his.

Beneath his hooves, the ground began to tremble. Hellboy frowned. He'd felt something before, when they were coming down the hill, but it had been so slight he had thought he'd imagined it or that it had just been loose earth shifting under him.

Stasia's eyes went wide. The shore of the lake shifted and bucked. She let out a scream, and had she not gripped his arm just then, she would have fallen. Hellboy pulled her into his arms and held her as the earth began to shake, and rocks tumbled down the hillside toward them. The surface of the lake churned like an ocean storm. Shouts of pain and terror rang out from the ridge as parts of the dig collapsed. The seconds passed like hours as the whole world tilted, and still Hellboy kept his footing, and held tight to Stasia.

As quickly as it had begun, it passed.

"Bloody hell," Stasia rasped, looking around frightfully. "Earthquakes--what next?"

Even as she spoke, Hellboy stepped away from her, turning to stare out at the lake. The quake had subsided, but the water still churned. And underneath the maelstrom, it glowed a bright orange.

"You had to ask."

The lake exploded in a gigantic fountain of water and fire, and the Dragon King hurtled skyward, erupting through a cloud of his own flames. The serpent had no wings, but still it flew. Its long body was covered with yellow scales, though its belly was a wide red stripe. Its snout opened wide, fire blossoming from its gullet as it twisted and squirmed across the sky above their heads. Upon its skull were the antlers of a stag, and its tiny limbs ended in talons like those of eagles.

"It doesn't make any sense," Anastasia whispered, so close to him.

Hellboy stared into the night sky as the worm wiggled through the air, fire streaming along its body, snorting from its nostrils. He figured it was over a hundred feet long, but told himself that he could kill it, if he could just get close to it. The inability to fly posed a problem.

"What doesn't?" he said, not tearing his eyes from the Dragon King as it twisted and coiled in upon itself, either exulting in its freedom or chasing its tail like a savage dog on a cocaine high. "This is exactly what the legend said would happen. We oughta believe legends more often."

"Legends are usually symbolic. They mean something beyond the words."

"Yeah, this one means we're screwed."

"You don't understand. It doesn't make sense that the Dragon King is here when we've found no trace of the temple."

Hellboy tore his gaze away from the worm snaking across the sky and stared at her. "I don't think not finding the temple is your team's biggest concern right now."

Anastasia's eyes were wide. Hellboy saw reflected in them the yellow-and-red dragon swimming in the sky above them, trailing fire. But then among the shouts and cries from the camp and from the dig up on the ridge, he heard a kind of low whistle. It came from the Dragon King. When Hellboy looked up again, he saw that the fire had ceased to trail from its snout.

Scales and antlers reflecting moonlight, the Dragon King slithered across the sky, then descended upon the archaeological dig.

"Son of a bitch," Hellboy muttered.

He pulled his gun, wondering what good it would do, and started up the rocky slope toward the dig as fast as he could. Someone screamed. The dragon landed on the ridge, talons gripping mounds of excavated earth and fish tail whipping around. Someone shrieked, and Hellboy saw a man clutched in the dragon's rear talon. The shriek cut off as the digger was crushed, bones snapping, limbs splayed from the dragon's grip.

The worm tossed its body around madly, tearing down scaffolding and collapsing the mounds that had been unearthed onto the parts of the city that had been revealed. Several people leaped off of the top of the ridge and struck hard, knees bending, tumbling end over end into a painful roll.

Hellboy was almost at the top. He paused and leveled his hand cannon.

The Dragon King slithered into the air, darting almost too fast for him to follow with the barrel of his gun. He squeezed off a round and it boomed across the sky, but the way the worm twisted, the bullet didn't even come close.

It seemed about to head north, toward distant mountain peaks, but then abruptly coiled in upon itself. A yellow-and-red blur, it snaked down from the sky toward the camp. Hellboy froze a single instant, then he ran, hooves pounding as he hurled himself down the slope, shouting warnings in words he didn't even hear coming out of his mouth. The gun dangled uselessly in his hand.

The dragon opened its maw, and the night lit up with fire once again. The tents set up by the archaeologists and by his fellow BPRD agents caught fire, and the blaze roared, licking at the night sky. Black smoke raced up from the camp. Holes circled in burning black widened as the fire consumed two out of every three tents.

Hellboy gritted his teeth and glared at the dragon as it slunk away across the sky. He did not call out his father's name, or Abe's, or anyone's. He simply ran toward the burning tents. As he reached the camp he saw a woman on fire staggering out of a tent. Hellboy pulled her to the ground and started to roll her roughly on the dirt, clawing up handfuls of soil to throw onto her. He doused the flames. She screamed in terror, though she was not badly injured. As he rose, he whipped aside the flap of the burning tent, checked to make sure no one else was inside, then he tore it down.
Safer if it burns on the ground.

But he didn't slow down.

People shouted all around him. He saw a burning man run toward the lake, his hair ablaze.

Two of the BPRD tents were on fire.

Silhouetted against them, Hellboy saw Abe Sapien standing with his legs apart, holding the slender, white-haired figure of Professor Bruttenholm in his arms.

He heard Anastasia calling out to others somewhere nearby. She was seeing to her people, calming them down, getting them organized and seeing who was injured. Hellboy felt a vague, distant relief. With Anastasia there, he didn't need to worry about saving everyone. All he needed to worry about was his father.

"He'll be all right," Abe said.

Hellboy took the old man from Abe and carried him away from the burning tents, away from the camp, and set him down at the bottom of the slope that led up toward the dig. His father murmured something, and his eyelids fluttered. Parts of his white goatee had been singed. A portion of his jacket had been burned along one arm, but Hellboy put off trying to remove it. The flesh would be burned under there, and he didn't want to look just yet.

"What happened to him?"

"I went into the tent to get him. Pinborough kept the flap clear, but when we came out, the professor was on fire. He kept swiping at his eyes, the smoke stung him, I think. When he dropped to try to put the flames out, he simply passed out. He may have struck his head."

But Professor Bruttenholm was already coming around. He blinked several times, opening his eyes wide as though clearing his vision. For a moment he seemed disoriented, but then dark understanding etched a grim expression upon his face.

"What happened to you?" Hellboy asked.

"Too much smoke and excitement, I suppose," the professor replied, touching the side of his head. "Got a bit of a bump, that's all. I'll be fine. Look to the rest of them, now. There'll be a lot of wounded. And where's the damned dragon gotten off to?"

Hellboy stared at his father, then looked up into the sky.

The dragon had headed north, toward Nakchu village. It crossed his mind that he'd promised that he would keep the village safe after stopping them from sacrificing Kora. So much for that.

"North," was all he said.

"Damn it," Professor Bruttenholm whispered. He tried to rise, but swayed and lay back down. "Help the rest. I'll be all right here."

"You're sure?"

The old man fixed him with a determined stare. Hellboy nodded and pulled Abe away from him. "Where's Pinborough, now? Where are the others?"

Abe gestured toward the burning tents. "Neil went to help them. Sarah and Meaney were up at the dig."

Hellboy felt a cold knot in his gut. "Take care of the professor. Work with Stasia and Pinborough to coordinate down here. I'm going up on the ridge. Anyone sees the dragon, they should start screaming."

A visible shudder went through Abe. "Somehow, I don't think that's going to be a problem."

Koh crouched just inside the mouth of the tunnel that led into the burial cavern of his people. Twenty feet away his father's body lay burning, flesh flaking like black parchment, charred bones still on fire. Koh wept tears of fire. Behind him, deeper inside the tunnel, dozens of men, women, and children of his village huddled together in grief and fear.

"Is it still out there?" asked a little girl, a daughter of his cousin.

He could only nod, staring at the figure slithering across the sky in flames. It seemed as though the heavens themselves were burning. Nakchu village crackled and raged with fire, all of the beautifully constructed wooden huts swallowed by orange flame and black smoke. The winding river disappeared into the rolling smoke. He could see only the arch of the bridge, on fire.

In the sky, the Dragon King seemed to grow bored with them. It slid lower and glided, twisting, above the village in search of anything that might be moving--might still be alive. And then it whipped up toward the heavens again and turned southward, slithering away over the hills, toward the lake.

But Koh knew that the Dragon King would return. Its reign had begun anew.

A
ll of the archaeologists' work had been destroyed. Almost nothing remained undamaged. Areas that had been cordoned off and sectioned with rope and stakes had been churned up by a combination of the earth tremor and the Dragon King's arrival. Mounds of earth had been spread back across excavations as though no digging had ever occurred. The hole in front of the preparatory room had collapsed in upon itself or been torn asunder by one of the dragon's talons. The steep hillside above the entrance had caved in, sealing the chamber with the corpses of Sima, Rafe Mattei, and Dr. Conrad inside.

Two more people were dead--a digger named Kufs and one of Danovich's men--and the archaeologist that Professor Bruttenholm had befriended, Dorian Trent, was missing. It seemed obvious Trent had been buried in one of the cave-ins, but Hellboy couldn't be sure.

Hellboy had sent Sarah Rhys-Howard, the BPRD medic, down to help at the camp. She was rounding up supplies and helping Ellie Morris treat the burns of those at the camp. They were priority one right now. That, and getting Kora Kyichu away from this place, just in case there was some way for the Dragon King to sense her--to sense that she had been intended as a sacrifice to him.

Danovich stood beside Hellboy, his arm in a sling made of torn strips of his shirt. The engineer's arm was broken, but the man was tough as nails. He and Hellboy had been checking on everyone else for nearly half an hour. Hellboy was amazed that the death toll had not been worse. There were injuries, people with scrapes and bumps from tumbling rocks and earth, but mostly they were not serious.

"Time to leave all this," Hellboy said.

"What about Trent?" Danovich asked.

"Wherever he is, he's not going anywhere."

The engineer flinched. "That's cold."

Hellboy shrugged. "He may still be alive down there. But that dragon could come back anytime. We've got to get the injured treated and find some kind of shelter. Redfield and Meaney won't be back with the chopper--and our friendly Mr. Lao--until morning at least, and trying to evacuate people that way will take forever. We need to figure out how to fight this thing."

"Fight it? Fight the damn Dragon King?"

"You got a better idea?"

Danovich didn't.

They started down from the ridge. Some of the tent fires had been put out, salvaging part of the camp, but many of them had burned to the ground. In places, all that remained of tents were the bottom edges, strung from one stake to the next, still burning. In the moonlight, the flickering of those flames seemed unearthly. To Hellboy, it looked like a battlefield, and they were the army that had lost the war.

The Dragon King, he could handle. The trouble was going to be keeping the big worm from killing anyone else in the meantime.

The sky filled with a shushing noise. Hellboy and Danovich exchanged a glance. Then Hellboy left the engineer behind, running down the slope toward what remained of the camp.

"Cover!" he bellowed. "Everyone take cover! Don't let it see that the job isn't done!"

As they scattered, some into the tents that remained intact and others behind rocky outcroppings or beneath equipment, trunks, and blankets that had been salvaged, Hellboy stopped to stare upward. The red stripe of the dragon's belly coiled across the sky above him, silhouetted against the yellow flesh of its body. He thought of the dead and the injured and of the way his father had felt dead when Hellboy took the old man into his arms.

He drew his gun, raised it high, and pulled the trigger once, twice, a third time. Hellboy could have sworn at least two of the bullets punched into the Dragon King's belly, but the worm was so swift that there was no time for a fourth shot. It swept across the sky above the ruined camp and hit the surface of the lake. The water roiled around it, and the Dragon King dived, vanishing beneath the surface. Small waves rolled out from the place it had gone under, but the dragon was gone.

Forty feet from where he stood, Abe Sapien knelt beside the expedition's M.D., Ellie Morris, while the two of them helped treat a burn victim who lay on a thick blanket.

"Abe!" Hellboy shouted, running toward him even as he holstered his gun.

The amphibious man stood and turned toward him.

"Go! Get in the water, now!" Hellboy barked at him. "You've gotta go after the dragon."

The fin ridges on Abe's neck rippled as though in a strong breeze, and he regarded Hellboy oddly. "Did you suffer some kind of head trauma?"

Hellboy skidded to a halt in front of him, staring down intently. "I'm not screwing around, Abe. Go after it. Now. I don't want you to fight it. Just track it. Figure out where its lair is down there. Without that, all we're doing is sitting here waiting for it to come back and kill us."

Abe cursed at the logic, turned, and ran swiftly but awkwardly toward the water.

The water did not soothe him. Abe Sapien knifed beneath the roiling surface of the lake, the water unnaturally hot. It slid across his flesh with the clinging film of mercury. Given a choice, he would have swum for shore, but he had a job to do.

He kicked and swam with all of his strength, propelling himself as swiftly as he could in pursuit of the great serpent. In the darkness of the deep lake bottom, he could barely make out the tail of the dragon whipping back and forth ahead of him. Its yellow scales gleamed only a little this far under water, at night. Instead, Abe relied upon the displacement of water, the disturbance of the Dragon King's passing, and the heat it generated to guide him.

The dragon sped up, swimming so powerfully that Abe felt himself caught and pulled along in its wake. He had to fight to keep from tumbling end over end in the water, and the Dragon King pulled ahead.

Alarm rippled through Abe. If he lost the thing's trail long enough for it to enter its lair unseen, his pursuit would be for nothing. Desperation raced in his blood, adrenaline surging. He gritted his teeth and swam harder, gills pulsing.

In his mind's eye he saw images of the Dragon King bursting from the lake in a spray of fire and water, saw the tents burning and the fear in Professor Bruttenholm's eyes as the old man had choked on the smoke and stared at the fire spreading along his arm.

A flash of yellow flickered through the water ahead--too close--and Abe drew back quickly. Somehow he'd caught up, and the terror of the Dragon King's nearness struck him. Catching up to the dragon was the very last thing he wanted to do.

What are you thinking, coming down here after it?

But even as the thought struck him, he pushed it away--pushed away all fear and hesitation, and the knowledge that this flying, burning engine of destruction was way out of his league, and maybe out of Hellboy's as well. They needed way more firepower than they'd brought up here, to the top of the world.

And what about when they got that firepower? The only way to destroy the Dragon King or seal him under the lake again was to figure out where he'd been sleeping and how he got out.

He darted through the water again, redoubling his efforts. The heat and wake of the dragon's passing was simple enough to follow, but it would fade if he slowed down any further. Abe's heart thundered with the effort as he struggled to catch up with the Dragon King. Even as he did, he scanned the dark smoothness of the lake bottom, the soft, shifting, almost featureless terrain. There was so little plant life that the fish population of the lake was also quite small. But he had searched the lake twice already, by night, then by day, and he had seen nowhere that the dragon could have hibernated.

Yet he had come from the water, so there had to be an answer down here somewhere.

Long seconds of frantic swimming went by before Abe felt the real pull of the dragon's wake again, then he saw the flash of its yellow hide up ahead. This time Abe did not slow down. The dragon slithered upward and darted down again. Abe swam too close and nearly collided with the serpent as it twisted toward the lake bottom, eagle talons pulled up tight to its body.

Abe treaded water, eyes wide, peering into the gloom ahead. Where was the dragon going? It darted toward a place where the sandy bottom gave way to the rocky basin of the lake, sloping upward toward the surface. There was a cloudburst underwater, dirt swirling in the lake, and when it had sifted down enough Abe stared in astonishment.

The dragon was gone.

Heart racing, he swam toward the place where he had last seen the Dragon King. The water began to clear, the wake to diminish, and Abe saw that between the slope on the side of the lake and the sandy bottom, there was a dark crevice. An orange glow of fire flickered once in that darkness, then it was gone.

He felt positive the crevice had not been there before. He would have seen it. Somehow the rumbling underground had shifted the lake bottom, releasing the dragon. Or perhaps the dragon could have come out whenever it wanted, and it had made the exit itself. As Abe swam toward it, a chill went through him.

The loose soil of the bottom was sifting into the darkness of that crevice, spilling away into nothingness. Abe wanted to know what was down there, in the gloom, but trying to find out alone would be foolish. Hellboy had asked him to find out where the dragon went, and he'd done that.

If Abe went down there after the Dragon King, he wanted to make sure he knew how to kill it. In his time with the BPRD, he'd learned such things were never simple. Killing a legend was difficult business.

The breeze off the lake made Professor Bruttenholm shiver. To feel cold in the aftermath of the dragon's inferno cut him with the bitterest of irony. Even the burn on his left forearm no longer felt hot. It stung and pulsed, but the pain made him shiver, as though the flesh had been frozen instead of seared.

"You still with me, Professor?" Sarah Rhys-Howard asked.

Bruttenholm blinked and smiled up at her. "No more chest pains, my dear. And whatever knock I took to the head doesn't seem to have addled my brains any worse than they already were."

He hissed through his teeth as she moved his arm and tried not to wince. "That, however, is quite painful."

"I'd imagine," Sarah replied. Moonlight and the dim glow of the small fires that still burned limned her with an angelic light.

But she was an agent of the BPRD, not some angel of mercy. Sarah had cut away the sleeve of his jacket and shirt, and now she held his arm steady as she pulled bits of burned cloth away from the seared flesh. Bruttenholm hissed through his teeth. Sarah was not a doctor or nurse; she did not spare him so much as an apologetic glance. Though she had medical training, she was a field operative for the BPRD, and bedside manner was not her forte. She had retrieved her medical kit from the tent she'd been sharing with Agent Meaney, who was still off with Redfield, bringing help back from Lhasa, and now she squirted an antibiotic ointment onto the second-degree burn on his arm and began to bandage it.

"You were quite fortunate, really."

"I'm aware of that," he replied.

Sarah frowned and glanced at him, then surveyed their surroundings. Smoke still rose from the ruined camp, and tiny flames still lingered in places. Two people had been burned to death. Several others were badly injured, including one young man who might well wish he had died by the time real assistance arrived or he expired from complications due to the severity of his burns.

Anastasia's team had Ellie Morris. Every major archaeological expedition had a doctor on staff, but Ellie served double duty as both archaeologist and medic. Neil Pinborough had given them a report on the condition of the camp, the wounded and dead, and his admiration for the way the woman was dealing with the crisis had been evident. Then Bruttenholm had sent Neil off to lend a hand. There were lives to save. The dig had come to a disastrous conclusion, and now their only concern was getting everyone away from Lake Tashi before the Dragon King resurfaced.

"There you are. That's you, done," Sarah said, standing up and brushing herself off.

Bruttenholm glanced at the bandaged arm. The burns sang with pain, but already it had begun to recede to a throbbing ache, thanks to the topical anesthetic she'd used with the antibiotic. There would be other painkillers to come, he was sure. But not yet. He needed his mind clear.

"Thank you, Sarah."

She nodded. "Not at all, Professor. "You've got a plan, I take it?"

"Not a good one," Bruttenholm replied. "Would be a damn sight better if we didn't still have a day or two yet before reinforcements arrive. For now, we'll simply--"

He caught sight of Hellboy, and all thoughts left his mind. Professor Bruttenholm had barely been aware of how worried he was until that very moment. Now, as Hellboy and Anastasia strode toward him across the remnants of the archaeologists' camp, a grim satisfaction filled him. When Hellboy had run off after the dragon as it made its return, firing his ridiculously enormous pistol, Bruttenholm had feared he would do something foolish--something that would cost his life. But, no, Hellboy was fine. Others had died, but not his son. It was dreadfully selfish, but he was only human.

Sarah turned toward the new arrivals.

"The dragon's back in the water?" Sarah asked.

Hellboy nodded toward his father in greeting, then turned to Agent Rhys-Howard. "Yeah. For now. I sent Abe down after it. If we're going to deal with this thing, we're gonna need to know where it's hiding out."