—deeply into Grigori’s abdomen.
With a strangled cry, Grigori dropped to his knees, clutching his stomach as Hellboy towered over him. Hellboy tossed the bloodstained horn aside as the marble slab made a cracking nose; when he looked over at it, the third imprint was sinking into the surface of the stone, spreading and melding with it until it finally disappeared. The wildly flickering lights around them abruptly winked out as the connection between the slab and the moon was broken.
The sudden absence of sound and scarlet light paralyzed them all for a long moment, then from where she lay in the dirt, Ilsa lifted her face to the silent, clearing sky and pulled her bloodied lips back in a silent snarl. The building thunderclouds were gone, the eclipse had ended, and a few feet away, Grigori was crumpled on his side in agony.
Hellboy held up his stone hand and watched the burning glyphs etched in the stone dim and finally die away altogether. He ground his teeth and endured the pain as his features and body smoothed out and resumed their shape, shrinking down from huge to their normally oversized form. Around them, the church room was, at last, quiet, and filled with nothing more than the soft glow of the scattered oil lamps.
Grigori twisted on the ground and turned his face to Hellboy. “You will never fulfill your destiny,” he gasped. Blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth and his fine ceremonial robe was soaked with red grit. “You will never understand the power inside you!”
Hellboy stared down at him dispassionately. “I can live with that.” Stepping over to where Myers was still stranded, a two-fisted yank pulled apart the thick ropes that held the agent. Finally the man was free and he clawed his way up the post until he was standing at Hellboy’s side.
His heart breaking, Hellboy turned and gingerly lifted Liz’s limp body into his arms. He lowered his face to hers and kissed her forehead, then ran his fingers through her hair and breathed in the familiar scent of her—fire and cinders—as he carried her down the steps. Myers followed silently, his insides churning in sympathy for Hellboy, for Liz, for himself. Three steps later, his foot came down on something hard and round, and he looked down.
A glass eye. For some reason, having it there on the ground, looking at them, sent a ripple of dread up the agent’s spine.
Both Hellboy and Myers froze at the sound of a whisper coming from out of the dark behind them.
“Child…”
With Liz still limp in his arms, Hellboy turned stiffly toward the voice. There he was—Grigori, on his knees and sending Hellboy a one-eyed, blood-filled smile. Hellboy grimaced. First of all, Grigori was supposed to be dead; secondly, it was never a good thing when a man-beast like him gazed at you with a smile on his face.
“Look what you’ve done.” Grigori lifted his head a little more, until the top half of his face slid into a shaft of warm light. There was something soft and fleshy wriggling in his empty eye socket, shifting like lazy worms. “You’ve killed me,” Grigori told him with difficulty. “An insignificant man. But you have brought forth a god.”
With that, Grigori spread his blood-soaked hands wide, revealing the deep puncture wound that Hellboy had inflicted with his broken horn. The ends of it had widened into a gaping cavity in the man’s stomach; the instant Grigori let go of his skin, a tangle of long, pale appendages spilled from the opening like pulsing, wet intestines. They undulated frantically on the ground, falling over themselves as more and more of the same poured from Grigori’s abdomen. “Behold!” he wheezed. “My master, Behemoth! Guardian of Thresholds…Destroyer of Worlds!”
Hellboy and Myers stumbled backward as a steamy, slime-covered seven-foot-high tower of flesh with too many tentacles to count erupted from what had come from Grigori’s body. It surged forward and landed greasily on the obsidian slab, squirming and growing, doubling its size as each second ticked past, leaving its once great host to die, disregarded, on the dirt-and rock-strewn floor of the cavern.
Ilsa darted around the infant Behemoth with barely a glance at it, dropping to her knees next to Grigori’s splayed corpse. Crying, she pulled him upright and cradled him tenderly, then bent and kissed him full on his bloody mouth. A shadow suddenly covered her—one of the Behemoth’s gigantic appendages—but she only glanced at it disdainfully before turning her cold, withering gaze to Hellboy and Myers. “Hell will hold no surprises for us,” she said flatly.
And died as the monstrous column of flesh fell and crushed her along with the sad remains of her long-time lover.
Hellboy and Myers had managed to retreat as far as the entrance to a passageway that Hellboy hoped would eventually lead back to Manning and, just maybe, the cemetery itself. Shooting a glance back toward the church room, Hellboy carefully handed Liz’s body over to Agent Myers. He was too injured to get far with her, but anything was better than being in this cavern with that creature. “Keep her safe,” he said hoarsely. “No matter what. I’ll deal with whatever that thing is back there.”
Myers’s eyes widened. “Alone?”
Hellboy gave him a shrug that looked a lot more careless than he actually felt. “How big can it be?” he asked with a caustic little smile. Before Myers could reply, something huge, really huge, completely filled the tunnel behind them. Hellboy inhaled and started to turn and confront it, then the end of it—cold, wet and disgustingly slippery—wrapped around his waist and yanked him back and out of the tunnel at break-neck speed, scraping him high along the ceiling and smashing half of the oil lamps up there on his head. It whipped him around and forward, and finally Hellboy saw what he was up against.
Gah!
The creature was the size of a house, and to make matters worse, Hellboy’s head was drenched in hot oil, his horn stumps smoking where they’d run against the stone ceiling. He squirmed in its grip, but the thing was way too strong for—
Wham!
Suddenly it threw him at the ceiling. Hellboy had time to wonder testily if it thought he was a tennis ball, then he hit hard—and crashed harder to the floor. The floor cracked beneath him, sending a wide split several feet in each direction. He blinked and tried to clear his head, then saw the rosary and the grenade belts, only inches away from his outstretched hand. He lunged for them but didn’t make it; instead, one of the beast’s tremendous tentacles slammed down, cutting off his attempt. With hundreds of those things and only one of him, he was way outnumbered.
The weight of the massive appendage sent a shockwave through the floor, bouncing both of the grenade belts that Hellboy had been aiming for right into the widening fissure. As the tentacle pulled up and prepared to strike again, Hellboy rolled close enough to the ground crack to see the belts; they were maybe four feet down, balanced on a dangerously crumbling ledge. Below that and barely visible through the narrowing heart of the fractured stonework was a mesh of turning gears and cogs, some still-running piece of the machinery that Grigori and Kroenen had set in motion.
A splatter of moisture against his face warned Hellboy that the dripping tentacle was coming for him again. He skipped out of the way, doing a tight double-spin that let him yank a heavy, rusted broadsword from the petrified grip of the nearest stone statue. It came free with the statue’s hand still attached. No matter; Hellboy covered that with his own and came back around, swinging the sword with every bit of muscle he could put into it. Bull’s-eye! As old and decrepit as the blade was, centrifugal force and Hellboy’s own weight was on his side; he sliced clean through the thick, fleshy thing grabbing for him, sending the disembodied piece of it rolling aside and into the crack in the floor.
But Hellboy’s victory was pathetically short-lived. The stump of the Behemoth’s appendage pulsed out a disgusting white goo, then a mass of wriggling mini-limbs, like small, rapidly growing fingers pushed out from its wet end. The fingers grabbed for his face as Hellboy raised the sword, slashing again and again, desperately trying to gain some ground, all the while knowing the creature was growing larger with every piece that he chopped off.
But he would not gi
ve up, he would not lie down and call this a lost battle. There was way too much at stake here—the world, for instance. Another cut, and another, and suddenly there was the fissure, finally within reach. Holding off the jabbing, gasping attack with the sword in one hand, Hellboy slid down on his side and leaned into the crack, struggling to reach the belt. Stretching…almost…
No matter how he tried, Hellboy was still a few inches too far. He wasn’t gonna make it.
Screw this.
With a final wild slash, he rolled bodily into the crack, righting himself at the last second so that he landed on the ledge with both feet. And wouldn’t you know, the damned thing crumbled beneath him.
Fighting for balance as a few of the stones buried in the walls of the crack tumbled into the gears below, ducking under the searching tentacles rolling over the edge above him, Hellboy tried to grab the belts as the stones were pulverized to dust in the massive machinery only a few yards beneath him. No good—the collapsing earth and stones sent the belts sliding even farther away. If he didn’t do something fast, soon they’d be toast.
Something cold and nasty slid under his arm and around one shoulder and pulled him upward. Fighting against the tentacle, Hellboy had an instant—just that—while he was airborne to reach out with his tail and snag two of those belts, holding on to them with everything he had as he was swung around like the bucket seat on a cheap carnival ride. And while that was bad enough, what was coming was a whole lot worse.
The Behemoth lifted him high into the air. Hellboy squirmed and pounded on the tentacle, but he’d lost the sword on the way up and this beast wasn’t feeling anything…except hungry. Directly below and opening wide was an orifice that couldn’t be anything but its mouth: way too big, multilayered, ringed with teeth and more moving parts in one place than anything organic had a right to possess, it was a vague cross between an octopus’s beak and the mouth of a spider on nuclear steroids.
And Hellboy was definitely on the menu for dinner.
But he’d be damned if he’d go down without a fight.
He jerked his tail up and grabbed the two grenade belts, but the timers were crushed and useless. He got a tiny spark, but that was all. “They never work,” he grumbled, then gasped and gripped the belts tighter as the tentacle swung him hard in the other direction. His stomach turned one way, then righted itself, throwing a flash memory of going over the bars on a swing set when he’d been a child. Now there wasn’t much time left, so he wrapped the belts around his stone arm and gritted his teeth as the Behemoth’s mouth loomed in front of him.
“Ugh!” Instinct made him try to jerk away, but he was held fast. He sucked in a final lungful of air. “Now this is gonna hurt!”
Squeezing his eyes shut, Hellboy pulled the pins on all the grenades at once right before the monster dropped him into its open mouth and swallowed him whole.
24
DARK.
Wet.
Burning.
And then—
Noise filled Hellboy’s ears, a massive, strange gur-gle. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, he was surrounded, smothered, and enveloped.
But even that wasn’t as consuming as the white-orange light that abruptly boiled through the Behemoth’s body system when the grenades began to ignite in a marvelously hot chain reaction.
It lit up the creature from the inside, silhouetting internal organs that until a millisecond ago had still been growing. Alien body parts and twisted structures, a massive, shuddering throat, the huge, hanging sack that functioned as its gut, swinging free within its body cavity with Hellboy’s form, curled like a fetus, silhouetted within it and looking small and insignificant in relation to what had eaten him.
The Behemoth burned from the inside out, screaming hellishly and thrashing as explosion after explosion pounded its center, and section by painful section completely and utterly ripped it apart. The final trio sent fire, stinking pieces of burned flesh, and white body fluids in every direction, and out of the middle of it—
Hellboy, landing with a sickening, bone-bruising thud, just as the Behemoth gave a final, mighty bellow and toppled sideways. Hellboy saw the mass of dead-weight tentacles falling straight for him, but he was too dazed to move, too shocked and incapacitated by the creature’s digestive fluids to get his limbs to respond to his mental commands. His eyes had been pulled open with the final explosion and now he wanted to squeeze them shut again, didn’t want to see the things that were destined to pulverize him, but even that tiny movement was impossible—his eyelids simply wouldn’t obey.
Eyes wide, Hellboy stared at the oncoming appendages—
—as a foot away from his face they disintegrated in a blaze of sparkling energy, leaving nothing to drift down on him but a few leftover flesh-colored cinders.
Liz.
Myers.
Hellboy rolled to the side and groaned, then forced his arms to push him up, his wobbly legs to curl under and lift. Two more heavy shockwaves of light rolled across him, the beast’s final death song; then there was nothing in the church room but empty, blessed silence; even the gears in the cavern below had at last stopped their grinding and ticking and turning. When Hellboy made it to his feet at last, he was covered in the slimy white sludge that had been the Behemoth’s lifeblood, every pore of his body marinated in the ugly stuff. He cleared his throat, then spit out a wad of ash and goo. Yuck.
“Ouch,” he croaked. “It did hurt.”
—there were still working vocal cords in there. In fact, it seemed that everything was good and in working condition, even if on the surface he was slightly well done.
Finding his balance was tricky but not impossible. Hellboy lurched away from the smelly remains of Grigori’s monster and headed for the passageway in which he’d left Myers and Liz. Her body was on the floor and the agent was still there, crouching protectively over her, his face full of shadows and shock. Relief shone in his eyes when Myers lifted his face and saw that it was Hellboy dragging himself painfully toward them.
Uneven footsteps from the other direction made Hellboy and Myers freeze, then Manning limped into view. Apparently he’d gotten tired of waiting and found his way to where the noise and action was. Hellboy was glad the man hadn’t found them before now—he’d had all the people to take care of that he could handle.
Myers scooted aside to make room for Hellboy, and he crawled over to Liz’s body, then delicately lifted her head in one big hand. He pulled her to his chest and held her there; wherever she was, she had to be able to hear his heartbeat, to know that it beat only for her. He wasn’t ready to let her go, not yet.
Not ever.
Hellboy bent his head and put his lips next to her ear, then whispered something that the other two men couldn’t hear.
But he wasn’t really talking to Liz.
He raised his head and stared at her face.
And waited.
Five heartbeats, then ten.
Liz moaned softly, then opened her eyes.
He wanted to jump, run, bellow with joy, but there would be time for things like that later. Because now there would be a later. Instead, Hellboy smiled down at her, running his fingers ever so lightly through her hair.
Liz blinked at him, confusion filming her eyes. “In the dark…” she said. Her words were so weak they could barely be heard. “I heard your voice. What did you say?”
Hellboy kept stroking, marveling at the silky feeling of her hair despite the dust ground into it, the softness of her skin when his big fingers brushed against her cheek. Finally, he answered. “You, on the other side,” he told her. “Let her go. Because for her, for her, I’ll die. I’ll cross over.”
Hellboy looked away for a moment and when he finished, there was a shade of the emotion that must have been evident to whoever, or whatever, had been listening to his message.
“And you’ll be sorry I did.”
At his side, Myers couldn’t help but smile. Liz’s eyes cleared a bit more and she smiled up at Hellboy
. The expression on her face said it all—everything Hellboy had ever waited for and wanted to see when she looked at him. She didn’t have to say it, now or ever; he could see it in the way her eyes sparkled when she gazed at his face, in the firm, loving set of her mouth when she smiled.
And, of course, there was the gentle ring of yellow-orange fire that rimmed her body.
Manning watched without saying anything, but Myers looked away, half embarrassed, half saddened, his dusty face illuminated by the flames.
Liz found her strength and pushed up to her elbows, then slipped a hand around Hellboy’s neck and drew his face to hers. As their lips met and they finally kissed, Liz’s fire haloed them both, making the two of them the only ones in the world….
…who mattered.
Hellboy Page 20
