The Ice Wolves

by Mark Chadbourn

  Worried that Abraham and Sarah would be hurt, at the very least, before he got there, he grabbed hold of a passing man with the pale, intelligent features of one of the north slope’s artistic community.

  “Did you see a man go by with a girl?” Hellboy asked.

  “I seen a man on his own. No girl. Abraham Grant.”

  “You know him?”

  “Everyone knows Abraham Grant.”

  Hellboy realized the tight-knit Boston community was more like a village than an unfriendly part of the rapidly growing city. “No girl?”

  The artist shook his head, but directed Hellboy to where he had seen Abraham. The jumble of streets was still confusing, but Hellboy soon reached a point where the streets were wide enough to allow the snow to reach the ground, and there he could follow the solitary tracks.

  A tile slithered from a roof and crashed near his feet. Glancing up, Hellboy just glimpsed a figure disappearing behind the lip. A shower of snow followed and there was a thud, and another shower, as whoever was on the rooftops leapt across the gap between two houses. By then, Hellboy was pretty sure of the identity of the stranger who had pursued Abraham, and that only drove him on with more insistence.

  The snow gusted hard in the channels between the ramshackle houses, closing off the sky overhead, and reducing visibility rapidly. Behind the bitter cold, Hellboy sensed another mood: an oppressive threat.

  Rounding a corner, he spied Abraham struggling up a steep, cobbled street, the snow so thick it almost reached his knees. Despite what the artist had said, Sarah was still with him.

  “Abraham!” Hellboy called, but his warning was stolen by the wind.

  As he tried to break into a run in the face of the howling wind, a dark shape dropped from the rooftops. Despite the great fall, the stranger from the inn landed with a balletic grace, his frock coat billowing behind him. Instantly, he dropped low, sleekly loping in the lee of the houses.

  Amid the blizzard, Abraham was oblivious to his pursuer.

  “Abraham!” Hellboy yelled again, without any luck. Putting his head down, he raced up the hill through the blasting snow.

  The stranger had stalked within a few feet of Abraham and Sarah when he leapt, his handsome face contorted in a bestial growl. Close enough to intercept, Hellboy threw himself with force and collided with the stranger in midair. They crashed into the deep snow. To Hellboy, it felt like he had grabbed hold of a jungle cat. He was unable to get any purchase as the stranger thrashed wildly, spitting and snarling, and eventually writhed out of his hands. With great agility, he flipped across the narrow street and landed perfectly on his feet before dropping into a crouch. His intense gaze moved from Hellboy to Abraham and back.

  “Who are you?” Hellboy asked.

  Abraham staggered back against the wall of a house, a protective arm thrown across Sarah. Her bright, wide eyes wouldn’t leave the stranger’s face. “Loup-garou,” Abraham whispered hoarsely.

  A slow, menacing grin spread across the stranger’s face. “You know the language of my home,” he said slyly, in rich tones heavy with a French accent.

  “You are the one who followed Mr. Finch from Paris,” Abraham continued. “You want . . . ” The words died in his throat.

  “I want what you have in that chest beneath your coat, yes,” the stranger said. “I have searched for it all my life. And others from the line of Carnifex have hunted the Kiss of Winter long into the past. Never did I believe it would appear in my life, yet here it is. You have found it, and you have brought it out into the light, human lamb, and now you must live with the consequences.” He prowled forward a step.

  “Back off, wolf boy,” Hellboy growled, drawing his gun.

  Carnifex’s grin narrowed slightly, and his eyes darkened. Hellboy saw flecks of gold in their depths. “My bloodline leads the wolves,” he said. “I am now king and guide on the long, winding path to our destiny. Now the Kiss of Winter has appeared in the world again, the Time of the Black Sun is close.”

  “The Rise of the Wolves,” Hellboy said.

  Carnifex nodded slowly, still grinning. “The Rise of the Wolves.”

  “And what does the Kiss of Winter have to do with that?”

  “Everything.”

  “How come you’re not in your wolf form?”

  Carnifex gestured toward the slate-gray clouds. “The moon has not yet risen. But at a different time . . . soon, perhaps . . . you will see me shed these human-skin clothes even by the sun’s rays.”

  “When you have the Heart of Winter,” Hellboy said.

  Carnifex flinched. “You know? Who are you?”

  “I’m the good guy.”

  With a roar, Carnifex launched himself toward Abraham and Sarah. Hellboy fired two rapid shots that threw the wolf man in an arc to crash against the door of the house, which splintered and fell in. Abraham threw his arms around Sarah, protecting her with his body, but he was in such a state of shock, he could barely move, even when Hellboy yelled at him to run.

  Carnifex climbed out of the shattered door. Blood stained the front of his white shirt, but the two shots had done less damage than Hellboy had hoped.

  “Run!” Hellboy shouted again, and this time Abraham was jerked from his fearful stupor. Grabbing Sarah’s hand, he threw himself into the face of the blizzard, but each step in the deep snow was an effort.

  Splattering blood across the virginal snow, Carnifex leapt toward Hellboy again. At the last, he shifted his direction, hit the ground, rolled, and bounded toward Abraham. Unable to shoot for fear of hitting the father and daughter, Hellboy ran toward them.

  Carnifex sent Abraham sprawling in the deep snow. The chest fell from his coat and bounced to half bury itself in a drift next to a wall.

  “Sarah!” Abraham cried, reaching out a hand toward his daughter.

  Backing away into the swirling snow, she said, “Don’t worry, Father.” She cast one haunted glance at Hellboy and said in barely more than a whisper, almost lost beneath the wind, “Please help.” And then the snow closed around her and she was lost to view.

  Abraham scrambled for the chest, but Carnifex was faster. The wolf man dived over Abraham’s head, hands grasping for the prize.

  Wading through the snow, Hellboy fired once, flicking the chest into the air, and then again as it landed. It flew further up the street, beyond Carnifex’s grasp.

  Snarling, the wolf man turned, straight into Hellboy’s haymaker.

  The wolf man flew backward, blood streaming from his nose. Within a second, he had launched himself at Hellboy, snapping and tearing with the fury of a wild beast. All the unrestrained wildness wrong-footed Hellboy and they sprawled in a furious fistfight in the snow, but in human form Carnifex could cause little harm.

  Finally, Hellboy got in a hefty blow with his stone fist, and Carnifex was thrown yards down the hill, slipping and sliding until he came to a halt in a drift.

  “You wanna take another shot, I’m ready,” Hellboy said.

  Watching Hellboy from behind the lank, wet hair falling across his face, Carnifex weighed his options for only a second before he stood and pointed one broken fingernail. Despite the blood oozing from numerous cuts and welts on his face, his grin had not abated.

  “We will come with the winter,” he said. “We will come with the snow. All of us.”

  The blizzard took him in its arms and drew him back, and then he was lost to the swirling white.

  “Not so tough, tough guy,” Hellboy noted.

  Abraham threw off Hellboy’s helping hands, quickly snatched up the chest, and tucked it beneath his coat.

  “Thank the Lord,” he said. “I will take steps now to muddy the water, and make the world believe I have sold the Kiss of Winter on. That thing must not believe I still keep it here.” Another notion struck him. “Sarah?” Suddenly he was frantically running into the blizzard, falling in the snow and picking himself up before trying to run again. “Sarah!” he cried.

  But his daughter was nowhere to b
e seen.

  CHAPTER 11

  —

  In the daylight, the Grant Mansion was less threatening, but an unsettling air still hung over every room. William had stoked all the fires in the ground-floor rooms to try to dispel the bitter chill that leaked through the walls, and it added a homey feel to the large, empty house.

  Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, Brad trailed through the downstairs rooms, struggling to come to terms with what was happening to him. For so long, whole areas inside him had been sealed off, too raw to be examined. But since he had entered the Grant Mansion, it was as if the doors were unlocking one by one, distant memories and fragmentary emotions rising from the dark to haunt him. One loomed larger than most, a half-considered thought many years ago, now growing in dark, destructive power, however much he tried to ignore it. He told himself it couldn’t be true, but still it gnawed away at him.

  He tried to distract himself by thinking of Lisa. His feelings there, too, were gaining life. What he had obliquely thought was a friendship, he now recognized as something much deeper. Seeing her dragged beneath the floorboards by the things that lurked in the lower regions of the house had made him realize he couldn’t bear to lose her, that he loved her. The churning emotions after so long being frozen made him feel like he was spinning off his axis.

  Finally, he could bear it no longer and he cornered his father in the kitchen as he made a pot of coffee.

  He tried to keep his tone measured, but the weight of the question waiting to be asked made the words come out rudely. “What were you thinking when you bought this place? Were you thinking?”

  William ignored him for a moment as Brad paced the room, and then said, “I thought you might have changed since I saw you last.”

  “What did you expect, Dad? That I’d just forget everything you did when I was a kid?”

  “That would have been nice.”

  Fighting with himself, Brad stared out of the snow-encrusted windows for a moment and then said, “Look, I need to get this out in the open. It was something I thought about years ago and then

  . . . buried.”

  “Go on.”

  “When I was a kid, I heard some of the neighbors talking at McNally’s store. They said you had something to do with Mom’s disappearance.”

  “That I drove her away?”

  “That you killed her.”

  Brad watched William intently for any sign of a reaction. But his father kept his back to him, picking up the coffeepot from the stove and pouring two mugs. After a moment, he said, “Do you believe that?”

  Brad sighed. “I don’t know what to believe, Dad. A day hasn’t gone by when I haven’t turned over a new scenario about what happened to Mom. When I was young, it was different ways she could come back into my life—she’d had a knock on the head and got amnesia, she’d been abducted by aliens. When I got older, I started getting more realistic. Then I couldn’t get out of my head all the awful things that might have happened to her. The old neighborhood . . . it was changing. There wasn’t a lot of money around. Lots of shady characters. And after a while, it got so I

  really hoped she’d turn up dead, and I could stop thinking about it. Stop it dominating every single thought. So I could get my life back. And then I had this thought: that’s the normal reaction in a situation like this. Only you didn’t have it.”

  William stirred a large spoon of sugar into his coffee.

  “You worked harder, built up the business, made a stack of cash. You had a life, Dad. You lived it to the full like I never did. I just threw myself into different forms of hell to punish myself for thinking such terrible thoughts about my mother. And then you sold up, and you bought the biggest, flashiest retirement home in the whole of Boston, so you could swap recipes with your neighbor Senator Kerry, and reaffirm what a great, big man you are. Just like you always thought when I was younger. And not only have you got a great home, you’ve got one stacked with the most powerful objects ever. You’ve got your own arsenal, Dad. You could rule the world with what you have here. And now you’re looking for this Kiss of Winter, something that both Hellboy and a pack of werewolves want because it’s so potentially devastating. Could a man like that kill my mother? I don’t know, Dad, and that’s the awful thing.”

  William came over and offered a mug of coffee. After a moment, Brad took it.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “What can I say? My son has just accused me of murdering his mother.”

  Brad searched his father’s face for any sign of the truth, for any emotion at all, but it was unreadable. “Dad, have you ever cared about anyone in your life?”

  William’s stare was cold and unwavering.

  “Did you ever care about me?” The question hung in the air. Brad felt sick for giving voice to it, and for stirring up the big, big question that would destroy him if the answer came in wrong. Why couldn’t he have left it to slip back into the dark?

  The door crashed open as Lisa marched in; Brad had left her dozing in front of the fire in the sitting room. “I smell coffee.” She saw Brad and William facing each other and nodded approvingly. “Well, at least you two are talking.”

  CHAPTER 12

  —

  Carnifex loomed large in Hellboy’s mind as he helped Abraham scour the narrow streets in the north-slope maze. The leader of the werewolves was a threat in that time, and Hellboy was sure his descendent would prove even more so back in his own time. His bestial nature and intelligence were a dangerous combination.

  After half an hour of searching, there was no sign of Sarah. It was more an act of charity than anything, for Hellboy had already started to suspect the truth.

  After a while, he had to point out the obvious. “Abraham, there aren’t any footprints.”

  Baffled, Abraham examined the snow around the area where Carnifex had attacked them. The only footprints, now filling with snow, belonged to the three adults. “How can that be?” Abraham said.

  “I don’t think she was really here.”

  “Are you demented? We both saw her. I held her little hand.”

  “Okay, forget what I said. Let’s head back to your place. She might already be there.”

  Hellboy recalled how he had found Sarah in the middle of the blizzard, oblivious to the cold, with her knowing smile, her comment that she had been waiting for him. How the artist he had encountered only saw Abraham making his way back from the inn.

  “She is not well. She should not be out in this unseasonal cold,” Abraham said desperately.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Her constitution is weak, her strength fading. Many days she cannot bring herself to climb out of bed.” He swallowed, steadied himself. “The physician says there is nothing he can do. She is now in the hands of the Lord.”

  Hellboy could see how Abraham’s concerns for his daughter had consumed him. The depth of his love was etched into his face beneath the lines of worry. “I’m sorry,” Hellboy said.

  “We do what we can in this cruel world.”

  Heads down into the gale, they trudged back toward the house in silence for a while, though Hellboy didn’t let his attention waver. Carnifex would not rest.

  “Now that you’ve found the Kiss of Winter, what are you gonna do with it?” he asked.

  “Use it.”

  “For what?”

  “I am grateful for your help, but this is a personal matter of great import. I cannot discuss it. But the Kiss of Winter has peculiar, individual qualities, apart from its relationship with the Heart.”

  “So you’re not looking for the Heart as well?”

  “I have no need of that. It brings only cold and death.”

  Hellboy pondered this for a moment, and then asked, “And when you’re done with it?”

  “If it works, I will no longer have need of it.” He smiled hopefully. “And I pray to God that it does all I have heard, and all I hope. If it does not . . . ” He fell silent for a while. “Then I
will keep it safe within my house, for it is too dangerous, and too seductive, to be at large in the world.”

  “Where are you going to hide it?” Hellboy pressed.

  “I cannot say. No one must know, ’cept I. But my house is more secure than any bank. If I so decide, it will remain hidden for all time. For to discover it would mean knowing my mind, and when I am gone, who can possibly know it?”

  A woman wrapped in a large black shawl forced her way toward them.

  “Emmie?” Abraham said. The woman was clearly his servant.

  “Mr. Grant, Mr. Grant, come quick,” Emmie said. “It’s little Sarah. She’s not well, Mr. Grant. Not well at all.”

  “I knew she should never have been out in this cold.”

  Emmie gaped for a moment. “She ain’t been out in this cold, Mr. Grant. She been in bed since you left.”

  “But . . . I saw . . . ” Unnerved, Abraham glanced at Hellboy. “Then you were right, my friend. What strange things are happening here this day. I must care for my daughter.”

  Hellboy caught a fleeting shadow across Emmie’s face, and realized the servant thought the little girl was dying, perhaps already dead. “Good luck, Abraham,” he said. “I hope things work out for you.”

  Abraham hurried into the blizzard with Emmie struggling to keep up; Hellboy was already forgotten. It was obvious now that this wasn’t some random time slip. It was almost like he was being guided to understand the mysteries of the house. But why? Some quality of the Kiss of Winter, maybe? That didn’t matter right now; what was important was that he had seen connections between the Kiss coming to Boston, Abraham, and his daughter.

  Hellboy had half a notion that he should go back to the house and try to find out where Abraham intended to hide the Kiss of Winter, but when he pursued the pair, the tracks ended suddenly and only pristine snow lay ahead.