Aickman looked suddenly frail and unsteady on his feet. He put a hand on the back of a tall chair to maintain his balance. Pernilla looked as though she might try to steady him, but she held back. Hellboy figured she was getting tired of the old man spurning her efforts to take care of him. Not that it was any of their business.
“Father, you ought to get some rest. We can continue in the morning,” the woman suggested.
“In a moment,” Aickman replied, staring at Mjollnir again.
“We think there may be some sort of trace memory attached to the hammer that Hellboy’s picking up on,” Abe explained. “I spoke to our field director at the Bureau, and she thinks it’s woken some sort of psychometry in Hellboy that he didn’t know he had.”
“Psycho-something,” Hellboy muttered.
“Just with this one object?” Pernilla asked. “There’s no real precedent for that. Psychometry is usually an inherent ability. Either you have it or you don’t.”
Hellboy was getting a bit creeped out by the way Aickman was staring at him. The old man had not taken his eyes off him while the others were talking.
“Perhaps there are other things at work here?” Professor Aickman suggested. “It could be no more than an echo. Or it could be something more purposeful.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Hellboy asked, growing edgy.
The old man quivered slightly and lowered his head. When he raised his gaze to them again he seemed somehow far, far away from that room. Almost as though he had remembered some appointment he was late for.
“My daughter is correct. I must rest now. But please, if you do not yet have other accommodations, spend the night here. There is a great deal more for us to discuss, and I will want to go to the university first thing tomorrow.”
Hellboy glanced at Abe. He didn’t want to stay in this creepy old bastard’s house. Aickman had always been a little off center. Sure, they needed his help, wanted his input, but he would rather not sleep under the same roof with a guy who almost got him eaten by a giant mythological were-hound. On the other hand, though Professor Aronsson had offered to put them up at the university, it had gotten late, and he wanted to get an early start in the morning.
Abe shrugged lightly.
“Please. It will take me only a moment to make up your rooms,” Pernilla insisted. “It’s a very large house. Plenty of space. And it’s no trouble.”
A clock ticked on the wall and invaded Hellboy’s sleeping mind.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tickticktick. Tickticktick. Even in his sleep, he frowned. That was not right. Tick-tock, that was the sound the clock made. And it chimed every damn half hour too, which was annoying, and roused him slightly each time. That other sound insinuated itself into his unconscious mind—not the clock, but an intermittent chittering noise.
He rolled his huge bulk to the side, bed creaking underneath him. The hammer, still clutched in his right hand, slipped off the bed and thumped loudly to the floor, dragging his arm with it.
His eyes snapped open. For a moment he only lay there, tired and waiting for sleep to claim him again, mentally cursing the damn hammer for being so inconvenient.
Tickticktick.
The sound again, and now he was wide awake. It was definitely not the clock. Hellboy turned and slowly raised himself up from the bed, nerves on edge, muscles tensed. But he was not surprised. He had sensed something wrong tonight, and in the back of his mind had been expecting something odd to happen.
Then he saw it, sitting on the window sill, snapping open nut shells and nibbling at their innards. A squirrel.
Hellboy relaxed, feeling a bit ridiculous. He shook his head and sighed, began to settle back down on the pillows. “Shoo, buddy. You chew too loud. Go bother someone else.”
“He is fleeing, Hellboy. You must stop him. The fate of Midgard depends upon it.”
With his eyes wide, Hellboy bolted upright and stared at the squirrel. He pointed at the rodent with the hammer.
“Say that again.”
“You must stop him,” the squirrel said, staring right at him.
Hellboy stared at it, and then something clicked in his mind. Something familiar. “Oh, crap. You’re Ratatosk, aren’t you?”
“Hurry,” the squirrel said.
Then it turned and fled out the window, leaping to a nearby tree branch and disappearing into the night. It took Hellboy only a moment to realize that there was only one person the squirrel could have been talking about.
“Aickman,” he muttered as he got out of bed. “You son of a bitch.” Without pajamas, he had self-consciously worn his pants to bed. Now he was glad as he ran out into the hallway, hooves cracking the wood floor in a couple of places.
“Abe!” he shouted.
But he did not wait for his friend. Instead he ran for the stairs and went down them two and three at a time, holding the ornately carved rail with his left hand, the hammer swinging at his side. It was dark downstairs, and there was very little light, and no more music, coming from outside. Hellboy raced through archways and past antiques on the first floor, did not even pause at the book-strewn parlor. If Aickman was truly fleeing, he would not be lingering there.
The thick oak front door was open just a crack.
“Damn it,” Hellboy muttered.
As he passed a broad stretch of glass, he saw movement in a splash of light outside. Hellboy went to the window and there, out on the sidewalk, he spotted Aickman hurrying away along faster than a man his age ought to be able to go. There was a hitch in his step, no doubt, but he moved away from the house with stunning alacrity, such that his departure could not be confused with something as innocuous as nocturnal wandering. He had a destination in mind. Professor Aickman was running to something.
Determined not to let the old folklorist abandon them, Hellboy went for the door and threw it open. Flashes of silver gleamed off distant street-lamps and a razor-edged blade whistled through the air and sliced his left shoulder. Other blades—long and thin as fencing swords but unnaturally sharp—danced toward him.
Hellboy raised the hammer in his huge right hand and blocked them. One thrust at his chest and stung him there, in the middle of his breast bone, and he took a step backward, peering into the darkness, eyes focused only on the glimmer of silver on the swords. It was as though they came out of nothing, as though these weapons were wielded by the night itself…
Then something leaped in at him… several dark, leathery somethings. Lanky, bony things with long, tapered talons for fingers and glowing eyes of stunning, dark, frozen beauty. They drove him to the ground and others emerged from the shadows of the foyer to claw at him, hissing.
They were going for his eyes.
Chapter Five
Even buried beneath blankets and dreams, Abe was cold. Though he slept, there on the broad mattress, bordered by the ornate posts of the bed, his unconscious mind continued to investigate the phenomenon of the chill he had been feeling ever since arriving in Scandinavia. In the landscape of his dreaming mind, he stood on a broad, flat plain with nothing but brown scrub grass as far as he could see. No snow, nor any other precipitation. But no water, either. In the depths of sleep, Abe’s brow wrinkled, his mind troubled at this absence.
The sky was clear and robin’s-egg blue, the sort of sky that comes once a year, if that often. At its apex, the sun hung directly above, blindingly bright, washing the ground in a kind of burnt hue. He ought to have been sweltering, but Abe shivered with an icy breeze that blew across the barren plain, rustling the scrub grass.
Abe Sapien had never been what one would call a sensitive. He was one of a kind, no doubt. He had proven himself a more than capable field agent for the Bureau, with some talents they taught him and others that were unique to him.
But he was not, by any means, psychic. In truth, he had never even really been particularly curious about what it meant to be sensitive to the whorls and eddies of thought and emotion that lingered in the ether.
&nbs
p; But he did not understand why he had felt so damned cold, and that troubled him.
On that scorched but chilling plain, he stood and gazed at the horizon, felt his skin drying out, felt the yearning for water. And he heard the thud of hooves in the distance, heavy footfalls. Hellboy was near. Abe could not see him, though there was nothing for miles around, but he could hear his friend shout his name.
Hellboy… , Abe thought.
His dreaming mind was focused on the waking mystery, and so was not far from the conscious surface. He opened his eyes without a start, without even the confusion that normally accompanies waking. The echo of Hellboy’s voice calling his name still resounded off the sage and knowing wood of the halls and doorways of the Aickman home.
Abe heard the pounding of Hellboy’s hooves downstairs and almost without thinking he shot his hand down to the floor to snatch up his pants. He had left his shirt on for warmth, and now he slipped his pants on even as the sounds downstairs subsided for a moment.
Then, as he stood, he heard Hellboy shout again, though the words were not intelligible this time. Abe had shut the window tight, not even a crack to let in fresh air, and now he felt parched in the stuffy room. On the bedside table was a glass of water his hosts had been kind enough to let him take to his room, and he drank it down now in three gulps.
Wiping his hand across his long, thin lips, Abe rushed from the bedroom. The corridor was dark but some light filtered in from the windows. As he ran for the stairs he glanced further along the hall and an apparition appeared, a pale gauzy thing that made his mouth go dry once more and made him falter, nearly stumbling over his bare feet. The long claws on his toes scratched wood and he reached out to steady himself on the balustrade above the stairs.
The apparition flew closer and resolved itself there in the darkness. It was Pernilla, ebony hair falling around her marble flesh, body draped in a silken shift and gown. For a moment longer, Abe could say nothing, so stunned was he by how very like a specter she seemed.
Then there came more shouts from below, and a crash.
“Your father?” he asked.
Fear was etched in the lines of her face. “I checked his room first. He’s not there.”
“Stay here.”
Abe started down the stairs, hand on the carved wooden rail, studying the shadows at the bottom. His eyes were keener than others’, but there was nothing in the dark there. Nothing he could see.
A whisper of silk made him glance back. Pernilla followed him, unmindful of the railing, moving down the steps as if floating. Abe was about to admonish her, but she looked at him then and there was a silent communication between them, a moment of understanding when their minds seemed to touch.
“Watch the shadows,” he said.
But the horror that waited below was no longer hiding in the shadows.
They moved so fast, flailing limbs and blades flashing, that Hellboy could not even tell how many of the little weasels there were. Five… maybe six. Even that might be wrong, given the way they seemed to merge with the darkness in the foyer of the old house.
A reed-thin sword sliced through the air and clanged off one of the stumps on his forehead where his horns had once been. Though it did not cut him, it sent a spike of pain into his head.
“Thanks,” he muttered. “And me without Excedrin.”
One of them leaped on his back, and Hellboy tore it off, threw it across the room where it crashed out the window through which he had seen Aickman fleeing. The glass shattered, shards exploding into the night, reflecting the moonlight off jagged edges.
He swung his tail at another of the things. It slashed the thick hide of his tail, the blade slicing a gash there just before his tail cracked its skull against the wall. The thing collapsed to the ground, head split open, and shadow leaked out, a black mist that enveloped the things entire body. And then it disappeared.
“What the hell?” Hellboy said, staring at it, even as he backhanded another of the things.
His attention diverted, the things moved in. One blade sliced across his thigh while another slipped just under his ribcage. Sharp as it was, its point could not go very far through the muscle there. But it hurt like a son of a bitch. It shouldn’t have—after all, that was what made him such an effective field agent for the BPRD—he was incredibly durable; hard to hurt, even harder to kill.
Shouldn’t have, but it did.
Hellboy raised the hammer and brought it down in a sweeping arc. As he did, a kind of exhilaration rushed through him, filled him up; his right arm felt as though it were no longer even in his control. It was, in that moment, as if that ancient war hammer rushed toward his enemies of its own accord. Hellboy swung so hard that the hammer obliterated the head of the nearest creature, its decapitated body tumbling toward the floor as the hammer shattered the torso of another.
Three of the creatures remained and they backed away from him in horror, staring at the hammer, whispering its name in an ancient, guttural tongue.
“Mjollnir.”
Hellboy raised it again and the three hesitated, backed up. Hellboy glanced at the open door, at the dark night beyond. Aickman, he thought. Damn it! The. old folklorist clearly knew more about what was going on here than he let on, and these greasy little monsters had not arrived here by coincidence. The hammer knew them. Fighting them was… familiar.
Again he swung Mjollnir, advancing on the creatures. One of them was crushed under that blow and the other two scattered to either side. Their glowing crystal blue eyes widened and they looked almost pitiful, but the sting of their blades was still fresh in his skin.
“Hellboy!”
He turned and saw Abe rushing down the hall with Pernilla Aickman trailing behind, their hands clasped as they ran. Abe came to a halt at the edge of the foyer, stopping the woman as well. The things hissed at them, even more on edge, eyes darting around as they tried to figure out their next move.
“Where’s my father?” Pernilla asked, her accent thicker now that she had panic in her voice.
Abe looked up at Hellboy abruptly, his focus off the creatures. Then he crouched and picked up one of the long, thin blades and tossed it to Abe, who snatched it, wide eyed, from the air.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Abe demanded.
Hellboy stared at him grimly. “I’m going after him. Watch yourself.”
Abe glanced dubiously at the blade in his hand, then at the weasels. He nodded once. “Under control.”
Aickman, Hellboy thought again. He could mash weasels all night, but what he needed was knowledge. Information. Once more he turned to the door, but now he ran toward it. The weasels would either follow him or go after the others, but Abe would have no trouble handling the two that remained.
As he rushed out the door, the remaining weasels tried to jump him. Behind him, Hellboy heard Abe shout at them and attack, diverting their attention. Then he was out in the cold Stockholm night, hooves clacking on the stone steps, then on the cobblestones. This was supposed to be a part of the world where the sun never really went away, but this night was as dark as any he had ever experienced. The sickly glow of the street-lamps did not stretch far enough, their influence like distant beacons in lighthouses along a rocky coast.
A silence fell over the Aickman home, broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock against the far wall and Pernilla’s hitching breath. Abe did not notice his own breathing, but he was surprised to find that after their dervishing attacks upon Hellboy, these creatures were not winded at all. That was a bad sign.
The two intruders stood off to the right, crouched side by side, their slender blades at the ready. In that moment of indecision, Abe could see that they had not come there to attack himself or Pernilla; it was obvious that the creatures did not want them to follow Hellboy.
Their eyes glowed a bright crystal blue that ought to have been beautiful to see if it were not set into the long, cruel, almost jaggedly thin faces of these creatures. At first Abe had thought
they were naked and hairless, but he found as he looked at them more closely that they were neither. Both of the creatures had black hair that was slicked back across their skulls as though oiled, and they wore clothes of some sort of leather, some stretched and treated animal skin, with black iron buckles and buttons, but no zippers. Just as they seemed almost to disappear in deep shadow, so too did their carriage—the way they bent over all the time and never attacked directly—create the illusion of nakedness. Their skin was not much different from the texture of their garments.
Pernilla broke the silence, the standoff. “What have you done with my father?” she asked in thick English. Then, with a step forward, she rattled off more words in Swedish.
Probably the same question, Abe figured. And it was a good one. The way it looked, these things had abducted Professor Aickman. Unless Hellboy could get him back, the only way they were going to get any answers was to capture one of these things.
The woman spoke through gritted teeth, her words choked with both panic and anger. She moved closer to them, slightly in front of Abe.
“Pernilla,” he cautioned her.
Which was when the creatures moved. One of them darted for the door with that inhuman speed and agility. Abe might have been able to catch it, to reach the door and slam it shut before the thing could escape, but the other lunged at Pernilla with its blade in that very same moment. Its point whispered through the air with a subtle, deadly hush, and though she stumbled backward, the blade sliced down toward her throat.
Abe slipped past Pernilla and parried the creature’s attack with a twist of his wrist. The thing became enraged and leaped at him, its blade flying through the darkened foyer, glimmering with dim light from the moon and the city outside, as though it were the ghost of a sword rather than the weapon itself.
The Bones of Giants Page 6
