Abe had talents and abilities he had brought to his work as an operative for the BPRD. He also had skills they had taught him, things he had found an aptitude for. This was not one of them. He was a decent shot with a pistol or a rifle, but swords were archaic things and he had only ever fenced once before, on a lark, with Professor Bruttenholm who had seen one too many Errol Flynn films.
As the thing lunged for him again, Abe dodged quickly. That was his best bet in this fight… avoiding getting cut or stabbed long enough to get lucky. He managed to parry another thrust. The clang of the blades was tinny, not like the clash of steel at all, and he wondered what metal they were made of. The weasel lashed at him; Abe took a step back, turned away the point of the thing’s blade… and it lunged in with talons raised and scratched at his sword arm with a hiss.
“Ow!” Abe snapped, fighting back the choice epithets that came to mind. He switched hands with the blade and advanced on the thing. It scuffled backward on the floor, glowing blue eyes locked on him.
“Guess after doing this job so long I should expect dirty fighting from creatures of darkness,” he said as he pressed his attack. “Call me an optimist.” Anger made him foolhardy and his own blade flashed downward now, then across, forcing the creature to jump back, surprising Abe himself most of all.
It practically quivered with energy, whether anger or fear Abe did not know, and its gaze darted toward the open door. For a second, the thing seemed about to bolt. Then Pernilla ran across the room and slammed the door shut tight. She bolted it for good measure and then turned to face the combatants, her back against the door. Again she shouted at the thing in Swedish, demanding, Abe figured, to know where her father was.
Its eyes were on her.
Abe slashed his blade down and cut its sword hand off at the wrist. Black mist poured out of the wound as it screeched in an ear-splitting wail of pain and clutched its stump. It staggered backward, staring at him with wide eyes as though stunned that he had dared to hurt it. Abe followed, the point of his blade only inches from its chest.
“Where is Professor Aickman?” he demanded of the thing.
Pernilla came up behind Abe, one hand on his back in an intimate gesture of alliance. She said nothing more, only stared at the thing expectantly.
It began to gibber in a singsong voice, some language neither of them understood. Abe pressed the point of the sword against its chest, puncturing the clothing and the skin beneath, and that black mist swirled out.
“I’m going to ask you one more time. What have you done with—”
His words were cut off by a loud pop as the creature simply disintegrated—clothes and all—right in front of their eyes. One moment it was solid and the next little more than a fine scattering of black soot and a swirl of ebony vapor.
Abe sighed. “Now what?”
Hellboy turned left, away from the cathedral, in the direction he had seen Aickman hurrying. The old man had been hustling, no doubt about that, but Hellboy was certainly faster. Even with the odd, unnatural swiftness the man had revealed, Hellboy had to be faster. He ran along the cobblestones and passed through the first splash of yellow light from above. There was a buzz of electricity that wavered, the light flickering as he ran beneath it.
It went out.
Just one of those things that happens, Hellboy thought as he ran on toward the corner ahead. A couple of blocks away was the subway station he and Abe had arrived at earlier. As if he had Aickman’s scent, he was suddenly sure that was the man’s destination. Another street-lamp loomed ahead, somehow deepening the shadows beyond the reaches of its illumination.
Hellboy passed through the pool of its influence, eyes adjusting to the dim glow and then to the night again. When he was swallowed once more by the shadows, there was a sudden skittering on the cobblestones, an eerie, clicking counterpoint to the heavy clack of his hooves upon the street.
The darkness came alive with motion. For a moment he was uncertain if they were the same creatures he had fought at the house, but then he saw the flash of thin silver blades all around him and he knew they were. Weasels. Whatever the things were, they were a damned nuisance. One of them leaped in front of him and he swung the hammer through its chest, so that its corpse was hung on his wrist a moment, and Hellboy had to shake it off.
Hellboy shuddered as he knocked the others out of his way with a blow of his left hand. The hammer was suddenly heavier in his grip, and yet it seemed to tremble with a power of its own. What the hell is this thing? he thought.
They continued to attack, lunging and loping about like slender, deadly monkeys. But these things were taller, of course. Most of the time they were crouched, but when they stood to their full height they were easily five feet. Their blades cut the night, stung him, but he ignored them now. Weasels were trying to keep him from catching up to Aickman, that much was clear. Why, he had no idea. But there was only one way to find out at the moment.
Hellboy ran. Blades cut his arms and legs; a silver point scratched his face. When they got in front of him he ran them down, trampling them under his hooves or crushing them with Mjollnir. But he did not slow, did not fight them as they wanted.
At the corner, he turned left and saw Aickman alone on the sidewalk a little more than a block ahead. Beyond him, at the end of that second block, was the subway.
“Jeez,” Hellboy said aloud, still baffled by the old man’s speed.
A wave of sudden cold rolled down the street and it felt as though the air itself had frozen. Hellboy breathed in and felt ice in his lungs. A few flakes fell around him, tossed by the breeze, and it was as though the sky itself had conspired to slow him down as well. Hellboy ignored it. The cold would not deter him, no matter that it seemed to cut him deeper than these creatures’ blades ever could, down to the marrow, so that his very bones hurt.
He did not slow.
With his sights set upon Aickman, he ran after the man. He could see the white wispy hair under the dim glow of a street-lamp halfway up the next block, and he picked up speed. Now the creatures lunged for his legs, tried to throw themselves under him to trip him up, willing to be shattered against the cobblestones for their trouble.
He gained.
“Professor Aickman!” he shouted, his bass voice resounding off the buildings he passed.
Lights went on inside several homes, but he did not see a single door open, a single face at a window. He wondered if they knew better, the people of the northland, than to look out their windows at strange sounds late at night. There were parts of the world where people understood that sometimes it was better not to know what lurked unseen in shadow. Perhaps this was one of them.
Hellboy lashed out, cracking skulls, breaking bones, but still the things kept pace with him, even dancing ahead of him, like dogs nipping at the heels of a paperboy on a bicycle. What he wouldn’t have given for a bicycle right then.
He closed the gap. When Hellboy hit the block Aickman was on, the one with the subway station at the end, Aickman was three quarters of the way down it. Now he lashed out at the things with less interest. They cut him, they struck him, one of them landed upon his back. When he ripped its sword away and tossed it aside, the thing tried to choke him. Hellboy ignored it, focused on Aickman.
“Aickman, don’t screw with me again!” Hellboy roared.
But he should have known better. The truth of it was, in a way, he had. Aickman had not been someone he would have put his trust in, but he could not have predicted that the man was wrapped up with the weirdness in the Arctic Circle. He tried to work out the odds of that in his head, then realized they were better than he would have imagined. After all, he himself had come to Aickman for his expertise. It stood to reason he might not have been the only one.
Cursing loudly, he saw Aickman go down into the open entrance to the subway. Hellboy was nearly there himself now, and he picked up speed. His hooves struck the sidewalk hard enough to turn small divots of the stone to chalk dust and he had left a grues
ome Hansel-and-Gretel trail of injured weasel creatures behind him, the dead ones having disappeared in a puff of black mist.
He reached the opening to the subway station. Aickman had been slowed by the long, steep stairwell that descended far beneath the city—necessary, as the subway traveled under land and water alike. The folklorist was less than a third of the way down the stairs.
Hellboy started down.
Another wave of cold swept up at him from underground. Frost formed all along the walls, and ice covered the fluorescent lights for a few seconds. Then they began to explode in a chain reaction of tiny pops that plunged the deep stairwell into true darkness.
Something hit Hellboy’s legs from behind. Then the weasels were all over him, more than before. Dozens of the things, maybe more. They seemed endless, and they drove him down to the steps and piled on top of him, and now he could feel their talons raking his flesh, trying to tear him open. But their claws were not as sharp as their swords. For that he was grateful.
“Off!” he grunted. “I don’t have time for a weasel pig pile.”
They were smothering him.
All but his right hand. They stayed well away from Mjollnir. He swept the arm up, cracking bones with the war hammer. He bucked against the things, gathered up all his strength, his muscles almost crackling with power, and he shook the weasels off him with a bellowed war cry that had not been heard on earth in millennia.
Mjollnir whirled. Hellboy spun around, clutching it in both hands now, and he used it as a bludgeoning scythe that erased the creatures it struck from the face of the world, tearing into them, so that only a black mist remained around him to mark their passing. It quickly dissipated, but as it did he heard the click of feet upon the stairs as the survivors fled in all directions.
His eyes narrowed, he peered into the darkness, started down the stairs again. Nothing moved there, in the cold blackness. The walls were still frozen, but they had started to melt, water running down to the stairs. At the bottom, where the steps finally opened up into the subway station itself, the lights were still on.
But when he reached that place, there was no sign of Professor Aickman, or of the things that had attacked him.
His fury surprised him, rose up through him to shatter his usual calm, and Hellboy brought the hammer around and struck the wall of the subway station. Shards of broken tile flew and the hammer caved in a two-foot stretch of the concrete. From somewhere deep in the tunnel came a horrible banshee wail, the scream of ghosts or the shriek of a passing train. It could have been either one.
“Oh, that’s perfect,” he whispered to himself. “Have a tantrum. That’ll solve everything.”
Unnerved by his own behavior, and by all that had happened, he turned to start up the stairs again, only to find his path blocked. The two figures who stood at the bottom of the steps were not weasels, however. They were broad, thick-bodied things with brown skin, marks like huge freckles scattered across their faces. Stumps of men, they seemed, long wiry hair clumped together with iron rings. One wore a thick beard and carried a war hammer similar in shape but much smaller than Mjollnir. The other had only a patch of stubble on his chin and his hands lay across his belly, fingers gripping the handles of twin daggers he wore on either hip.
Hellboy rolled his eyes. “Dwarves. You’ve gotta be freakin’ kidding me. Where’s Snow White?”
The one with the daggers bowed his head. “The snow is white all across the Northlands,” he said in the same ancient tongue Hellboy had spoken in two days before. Yet in Hellboy’s mind, it was as though two voices spoke, one that rough, antique language, and one translating, the two voices intertwined. “We have come to aid the thunder-bearer in any way possible.”
“Good for you. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled. Any idea where Professor Aickman went?”
The two stout half-men frowned deeply.
“Didn’t think so. Tell the thunder-bearer I said hello, will ya?”
He started for them, Mjollnir slightly raised, expecting them to stand aside. But the dwarves only stared up at him gravely, their eyes heavy with expectation.
Again, the one with the daggers bowed just slightly. “But you are the thunder-bearer.”
Hellboy sighed and hung his head.
“Crap. How did I know you were gonna say that?”
Chapter Six
Hellboy had no particular love of cities, and yet if pressed he would have had to confess that he found Stockholm fascinating. It was comprised of islands and peninsulas, bridges and sub-Arctic rivers. The Swedes had built for their capital a city that was a conquest unto itself, a conquest of the land and the ocean and the elements.
For a place so remote, it held a presence on the world stage far in excess of what might be expected. And yet up close there were sections of the city with an old European beauty that seemed to defy its global reach. The financial and commercial organs of Stockholm might be located elsewhere, but the old town section of the city, Gamla Stan, was still its heart. The echo of ancient times still resounded along its cobblestoned streets, from palace and cathedral to the homes and shops of those Swedes who chose to make this place their home. There was a purity here in Gamla Stan that most of the city lacked. It was a place where the old gods were still remembered, where myth had been built into every wall. By day, the winding, narrow streets of Gamla Stan were alive with light and laughter, as both locals and tourists enjoyed the many shops that were lined along the cobblestones. Even at night there was purpose and energy as people filled the neighborhood’s nightclubs and cabarets.
But in the long hours before dawn when very late became very early and the night seemed at its darkest, Gamla Stan seemed haunted by the whispers of its old gods. Boutiques, art galleries, jewelry stores… each shop window was filled with shadows. Gamla Stan seemed bled of all life, a place where the plague had come through and touched the foreheads of the people with its scarlet fingers. It was a hollow place, then, a place out of time, where the world had ended and these buildings stood as a grave marker for humanity.
Hellboy chuckled nervously as he glanced around at the shop windows, the clack of his hooves echoing off stone and mortar and glass. He knew the city was only sleeping, that it would awaken. But he had always felt that sleeping cities seemed to have an awareness of their own. And perhaps they did.
“Twilight Zone“ he muttered.
The two dwarves—the Nidavellim, or whatever they were called—walked behind him at a respectful distance of about six feet. The bearded one with the small war hammer was called Brokk. The other, with the chin patch and the daggers, was Eitri. They had made introductions down in the subway station, and then Hellboy had bade them a good night and left. He had to walk and think. It was not really like him to be so contemplative, but then he had been doing a great many things that were unlike him in recent days.
Mjollnir felt heavier than ever in his grasp.
So he had walked and felt a sort of restless stirring both in his massive right fist and in his heart. He worried that the influence of the hammer was taking root, and he wondered what that would mean.
Yet despite his wishes to the contrary, he was not alone. Though he had said good night, Brokk and Eitri followed him. Hellboy was tempted to shoo them away; though they had guts to just tag along like that. Still, he knew that he would want to speak to them eventually, even soon, and they knew it too. So they followed, and they waited patiently, and the first words out of his mouth were “Twilight Zone.” He figured the Nidavellim were expecting something more profound, but then he felt the urge to hit something with Mjollnir and realized that the last guy to bear the thunder, or whatever, probably hadn’t been exactly a sage himself.
“You confuse us, thunder-bearer—,” Brokk said.
Hellboy shot him a withering glance.
Brokk bowed slightly. “Apologies. Hellboy. What do you mean by these words?”
“Just that it’s kind of eerie out here, this time of night.” I keep expecting Rod Serli
ng to walk out of an alley, he wanted to say, but that would only have confused them more. And the truth of it was, anyone looking out their window just then—maybe an old lady with lots of cats and terrible insomnia—would have seen him walking down the street with two ugly, dark-skinned little men draped in primitive clothes and bearing archaic weapons, and thought just about the same thing. Or they would have if Twilight Zone had ever been popular, or even broadcast, in Sweden. He wasn’t sure about that.
Brokk and Eitri continued to follow patiently until at last Hellboy stopped in front of an empty store front between a leather goods shop and one that sold musical instruments. He tried to fold his arms and was reminded with a heavy thump of the hammer in his hand. Self-conscious, he lay Mjollnir on his shoulder to rest his arm and gazed at the two Nidavellim expectantly.
“All right. Let’s pretend I’m the thunder-bearer. Who were the weasels?”
Eitri frowned deeply. “Weasels?”
Brokk cleared his throat and put his hand on the head of his own hammer, which he had slipped through a loop on his belt. “They are Svartalves.”
Understanding dawned upon Eitri’s face and he nodded. “Yes. Svartalves.” He said it as though it was supposed to mean something.
Hellboy sighed. “And?”
The dwarves looked perturbed. Brokk stroked his thick beard. Eitri became agitated, blowing out a long breath as though he were growing annoyed with Hellboy’s ignorance.
Not that Hellboy cared. In fact, if Eitri didn’t get the grumpy look off his puss, Hellboy might be tempted to give him a closer look at Mjollnir.
“Look,” he said sharply. “Morning’s not that far away and I haven’t had nearly enough sleep. I need my beauty rest. You two dog me around talking about being helpful. But you’re not all that informative, are you? So I’ll ask questions. You give answers.
“What the hell are Svartalves? Other than annoying little weasels with greasy hair and sharp tools.”
The Bones of Giants Page 7
