Pernilla was aware of those around her, of course, just as she was aware of the flutter of birds’ wings above. Abe stood behind her, one hand on her shoulder, a silent comfort, lending her his strength. She could not imagine what it was like to go through life in this world looking like he looked, knowing he was not human. Yet in so many ways he was far more human than most of the people she had known in her life.
Across the clearing, Hellboy stood and gazed off in the direction Thrym had fled. Pernilla had glanced up at him only once, but there was something about the way he held himself there in the starlight that seemed different, even in the few days since they had met. There were no words from him now, neither to soothe her grief nor to lighten her spirit. As far as she knew, he had never been boisterous. Now he was grim and silent.
Several yards from where she knelt with her father, the Nidavellim were down on one knee, heads bowed out of respect for her, as an acknowledgement of those among them who had died and of the death that was about to occur. She flinched as the thought crossed her mind, but it was inescapable. Her father was about to die.
He gazed up at her with damp eyes, but there was no focus there, no indication that he actually saw her. The warm breeze blew her lush raven hair across her face, but Pernilla shivered with the chill that came from within her. Her skin felt tight and her eyes burned with tears that she tried to force away. Her belly ached as though someone had punched her there repeatedly, and her throat closed up, her mouth dry.
She pinched her lips together and fought the urge to run away, to flee from what was happening right there before her eyes. She could not do that to him, could not leave him when he most needed her to be there for him. So she cradled his head in her lap and stroked his face, and she began to croon to him, high and sweet, voice cracking with emotion, unmindful of the others who gathered near her in the clearing.
Images flashed through her mind, the sorts of moments from her childhood that she supposed most people had. This bruise or that scrape, her father cooing to her and kissing it better. Reading to her in that deep, sonorous voice as she drifted off to sleep. Carrying her on his shoulders through the streets of Gamla Stan, into shops where everyone seemed to know him and want to give her a candy or ruffle her hair. But intermingled with those were other memories, of accompanying him to libraries and lectures and to exotic locales all over the world where one artifact or another might be unearthed. The thrill of discovery, the search for the truth in history.
Yet all along, he had held within him the avarice that had led to this day, the greed that had caused him to betray Hellboy those years ago. A seed of dark desire within him that had been represented for decades by the large hole through the center of his hand, the one burned there when he tried to claim the gold of King Void. But even that horrid reminder had not been enough to prevent him from falling victim to his greed again. Edmund Aickman had taken a draught from the Tankard of Thrym out of his lust for power and wealth, and by doing so he had invited evil into his body. It had drained him, leeched the life from his body, far too powerful for his frail human shell to contain. Now it was going to kill him.
And he had no one to blame but himself.
Pernilla could not stem the tide of bitter tears that streamed down her cheeks. She could taste them as they traced the edges of her lips. Her father, she had only recently learned, was not a good man. But despite his failings, he had been a good father, and to her, that mattered so much more.
She whispered to him again and he began to shiver and to murmur something, and just in case he was speaking to her, Pernilla lowered her ear to his lips. It was gibberish, though, nonsense words, or else a language she had never heard before.
His breath was warm against her ear.
Then he twitched, once, and his breath came no more.
“Oh, God, Daddy,” she sighed, chest hitching as though she would also cease to breathe. She spoke the words in Swedish, but Abe seemed to understand, for at that moment his hand slipped off her shoulder and he took a step back from her.
For long minutes there was only silence. She hung her head and wept fiercely. After a time, Pernilla stood and let her father’s body slump to the damp ground. When she looked around she saw that all of the snow—the impossible frost that had swept down upon them—was gone, as if it had never happened at all, as if this dead, towering evil had not thrust itself up out of the earth. But it had, and the grave it had left behind was there as testament, even if she had not seen it herself.
Abe stood just a few feet away. His wide eyes seemed damp as well, and she wondered if he had cried for her, cried for her father, despite what the man had done. The gills fluttered at his neck and she knew she ought to be repulsed by him. Instead she felt only grateful.
Hellboy had come up behind Abe while she was not looking, and he stood there now, stoic and apparently unmoved. That was not fair, she knew. His features were severe, and she had not known him long enough to read the limited range of expressions he seemed to have. Pernilla walked toward them, barely sparing a glance for the Nidavellim nearby. They were impossible creatures, but it had been a day for the impossible, several days in fact. She felt a rush of contempt for them, and though they had helped, in her mind she lumped them together with the Svartalves and with Thrym, these darkling beasts out of myth.
They didn’t belong in this world, and they had cost her father his life.
No, she thought. He brought it on himself. She had to keep reminding herself of that. But it did not assuage her burning hatred for Thrym. Not at all.
“Where did he go?” she asked, glancing from Hellboy to Abe, and then back again.
Hellboy shrugged. “No idea. North. Other than that, he moved too fast for me to follow. I’m sorry.”
Pernilla nodded, jaw set. She wiped her hands across her stinging eyes. There were no tears left to weep, not tonight. But she was certain there would be more.
“Thrym shouldn’t be hard to track,” Abe told her. “It’s early yet. People are going to notice him.”
“Only until he gets far enough north,” she replied. “And if he can swim, he could get out of the city unnoticed. Where do you think he’s going?”
Abe glanced at Hellboy with what might have been a frown. His features were hard to read as well. Hellboy glanced down at the war hammer fused to his hand and shrugged.
“I don’t know. I… I’m not getting any intuition on it.” Hellboy shifted uncomfortably on the churned earth and turned to gaze at the two Nidavellim who were in front, the same two who had guarded the door the night before. “Any ideas?”
Brokk and Eitri, those were their names, master forgers of their race. They bowed their heads. The one who seemed younger, Eitri, put his hands upon the hilts of the twin daggers in his belt.
“Let us begin to search,” Eitri said. “We may be able to follow the trail. If not, there are darklings who dwell within this city and around it, some of our race, and some of the alves, as well as others whose race is unknown to us. Word may pass amongst them.”
“Go,” Hellboy told him.
To Pernilla it sounded like a command, and the way the Nidavellim responded, she imagined they took it as one. Eitri stared for a long moment at the serpentine pendant around Hellboy’s neck, and then he and the others ran toward the edges of the forest where Thrym had disappeared perhaps ten or fifteen minutes before. They would never be able to catch him, that was something they all knew. But they might be able to track him.
“You’ll be going after him, then?” she asked, eyes on Abe now.
“As soon as we have a lead.”
“I want to bury my father,” Pernilla told him, the words hurting her, voice breaking with each one. “Then I’m coming with you.”
Neither of the BPRD operatives argued with her. She waited another moment to make sure they would not, and then she walked up to Hellboy. She laid a hand on his chest and gazed up into his eyes. They were inhuman, those eyes, but there was still a warmth and gen
tleness in them.
“Will you bring him back for me?” she asked.
Hellboy nodded and went to her father’s corpse. Even with Mjollnir in his hand, it was simple for him to lift the dead man.
Then they began to walk back through the forest, Hellboy carrying her father in his massive arms like a sleeping child. But Edmund Aickman was not asleep. And as far as Pernilla was concerned, he would not be truly at rest until Thrym was destroyed at last.
In the basement of Riddarholm Hospital, Fredrik Klar pinched an unlit cigarette between his lips and thought about God. He was the Prime Minister’s man, and proud of that fact. Klar had earned a reputation over the years for his ability to handle sensitive operations, particularly in conjunction with foreign governments, with diplomacy and alacrity. Three successive Prime Ministers had retained his services, and that was a feat. When Parliament named a new PM, most of the last fellow’s most trusted operatives were reassigned. But not Klar. They needed his expertise and particularly his calm.
Keeping that calm had never been more difficult than it was at this moment. It had been difficult enough, having to cooperate with Hellboy and that malformed creature, Sapien. But Klar had been forced to choose obedience to his employer over his own ego many, many times. And so, though he felt free to keep a firm rein on Hellboy, particularly as long as he held that hammer, Klar cooperated as best he could.
In his time as the Prime Minister’s man, Klar had seen a number of strange things, freakish oddities and monstrosities. Things that should not exist, but did. None of them—even Hellboy—had made him doubt for a moment his faith in God.
Now he stood behind a glass partition and gazed dully into a glistening steel and tile autopsy room, and wondered just exactly what the hell the doctors were cutting up in there. Klar was in a small foyer that contained two desks, each with computer stations, heaped with files on various autopsies that had been done recently in the hospital. Behind him was a door out into the main corridor that ran through the basement of the Riddarholm. His associates waited there for him, impatiently, he imagined, likely talking amongst themselves, sneaking out to have a smoke or grab a sandwich. It would have been far better if he could have waited there with them.
Instead he was here, locked into a death room with a cadaverous myth. A glass door was set into the partition, and he could see nearly everything the pathologist and his assistant were doing. The room had two large steel autopsy tables, air vents that cycled the odors of rot and formaldehyde upward and out, metal tables upon which surgical instruments were displayed, and drawers filled with various slides, trays, tubes, and jars, so that samples taken could be properly preserved and labeled.
The corpse was so huge that a hospital gurney had been brought in and set against the bottom of the autopsy table to support its legs. Klar imagined that the weight of its torso might have collapsed the gurney. When it had been placed in the room, even the solid steel struts beneath the autopsy table had groaned.
What the hell are you:’Klar thought, staring at the skeletal remains, the strips of leathery flesh that still clung to the bones, peeling at the edges. He took the cigarette out of his mouth for a moment and stared down at it. The urge to light it, to let its poisonous smoke curl down into his lungs with that comfortable familiarity, that deadly, burning weight, was almost too much to resist. But there was no smoking here. Not ever.
Klar snapped the cigarette in two and tobacco spilled onto the floor. He left the broken butt on top of the nearest desk and approached the glass partition more closely. The skull was easily twice the size of a normal human head, the hands like those of a gorilla, the femur as thick around as a lamp post.
Against the black screen of his mind’s eye he could still see the lightning striking out of the sky, scarring the clouds as it touched a tendril down to that ancient war hammer again and again.
The hammer.
Klar gritted his teeth as he thought of it and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his suit jacket. That hammer was the bane of his existence. The PM wanted it back. As far as Klar was concerned, he hoped that it could never be removed from Hellboy’s grip. For it was the hammer that bothered him most of all. Without it, the cadaver was merely a collection of enormous bones, a freak of nature dead and buried a hundred years or so.
But the hammer… that made it possible for many to begin to believe that the skeleton belonged to something more than human, to a being who could not possibly have existed. For if it were real, if myths walked the earth, and magically forged weapons were used to slay giants and serpents of unimaginable size… if the gods were more than legends… then what of his faith?
Klar took off his glasses and wiped them on his jacket before settling them back upon the bridge of his nose. This was taking too long. The two doctors had been scraping and cutting at the remains for hours. Though there were no windows here, he suspected that if he could step outside to where the hospital overlooked the breadth of the Riddarfjarden, darkness would have fallen by now, turning the waves black.
Klar wanted to go home. It was getting late and Margarethe would be putting their Victoria to bed soon. A tentative smile flickered at the corners of his mouth as he thought of her, his little girl, named for the Crown Princess and just as pretty.
With a sigh, his impatience having gotten the better of him, Klar reached out and rapped his knuckles on the partition. Dr. Tegner glanced up and frowned at him from behind his safety glasses. In his hand, the bone saw whined loudly, its blade a spinning blur.
Klar raised his eyebrows and held up both hands to indicate his frustration. Tegner clicked off the bone saw and called out to him. Even through the closed door, Klar could hear him.
“Nobody said you had to stay!” the doctor called in Swedish.
Petulant, knowing he was too tired to still be hanging around there, Klar rolled his eyes and leaned on the desk. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his cigarettes, shook one out. A quick glance revealed no smoke detector in the glass-enclosed foyer. He fished out his lighter and lit up.
The smoke curled in the air above him and the cigarette’s tip burned orange and black. Klar took a long drag and blew it out, then looked into the autopsy room again. Tegner had the bone saw shrieking again, but was staring at him through the glass.
Klar smiled at him and gave a short bow, magnanimously sweeping his right hand out to indicate that, by all means, the man should continue. Childish behavior, he knew, but it felt good.
Dr. Tegner shook his head and turned to the remains again.
The skeleton sat up.
Tegner cried out in alarm, and the bone saw dropped to the floor, whirring blade chipping the tile. His assistant, Dr. Milles, tried to catch the instrument tray that had been resting on top of the massive corpse. Scalpels and shears clattered to the floor, and Milles screamed like a little girl.
The withered husk slid off the table. A flap of desiccated flesh on its cheek hung from the bone as it glanced about the autopsy room with dark, hollow orbits where eyes ought to have been. Fine, wiry hair floated down from its head, more of it falling away with each new movement. One of its skeletal hands clasped suddenly to its chest with a rattle of bones, and the other clutched at the air, stared down at its empty hand as though it could not believe the hammer was not there.
Klar muttered a silent prayer, and all the fear churning in his gut turned to ice, freezing him there in that spot.
Dr. Tegner turned to him and screamed his name. Klar took a step back, afraid that the shout might draw the things attention to him. That motion broke his paralysis and training kicked in. He had faced the impossible, the unnatural, before. Whatever this was, it could not be what the late Professor Aronsson had imagined it to be. Simply could not.
If he could convince himself of that, he would be all right.
The towering corpse opened its jaws as if to shout, but no sound came out. Teeth clacked together. Its mouth should not have worked at all. There wasn’t enough muscle l
eft tethering the bones together for it to have moved at all without falling apart. But it was moving nevertheless. Dark, horrible magic.
Milles ran for the door, hands flailing as he fled. The skeleton lashed out with incredible speed, and its bony fingers tangled in his hair and hauled him back. Again the doctor screamed.
He thinks we’re the enemy, Klar realized. That we took the hammer. That we did this to him, somehow. But then the dead thing reached out for Dr. Tegner and ripped his face off. The man went down in a heap on the ground, bleeding and screaming but hideously alive. The skeleton glared down at Milles, grabbed him on either side of his head and swiftly snapped his neck.
It dropped the corpse.
The incessant pounding on the door behind him seemed so distant to Klar. His men were trying to get in, responding to the screams. They had dropped their sandwiches and forgotten conversations about their girlfriends.
Something rumbled in the air in the autopsy room and the glass partition shook. It might have been thunder. Condensation beaded up on the inside of that window and the tiny wisps of hair on the shambling thing’s head stood up as though electrified.
It glanced up at Klar, empty eye sockets dead but still somehow filled with contempt. And it started toward him.
“Oh, please, no,” he whispered as he backed toward the door, thinking of his daughter.
He reached out, grabbed it and pulled, only to find it locked. Whimpering, he threw the lock and hauled the door open, then stood aside as his men flooded in. The first few men through the door staggered to a standstill, horror widening their eyes and catching their breath in their throats. Others followed.
The skeleton shattered the glass partition with a single blow of its massive bony fist. Huge shards of glass rained down like glittering guillotines in that glaring, pale fluorescent light.
“Destroy it, you idiots!” Klar screamed.
He was filled with anger at these fools who just stood there, although he himself had been frozen there gape-mouthed only moments before. Now he reached beneath his jacket to draw his weapon from its holster under his arm. It was a Heckler and Koch VP70, nine millimeter semi-automatic, eighteen rounds in the magazine.
The Bones of Giants Page 13
