by Tim Lebbon
“What was she trying to do?” Franca asked. “It felt . . . dangerous.”
He looked at her then, and for a while she thought he would not answer. The silence between them felt heavy. Finally Hellboy sighed, brushing down his coat and resealing the pouches on his belt.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “She was nuts.”
That was no answer to her question, but right then Franca wanted to know no more. What she craved more than anything was to leave the ruin of that dead city. Beyond that she could not see.
The unreality of what was happening seemed remote right now, and she was accepting much that she would have questioned just a day ago. There was something in the human mind that defended against such instances, she believed, allowing the person to function when in reality they should be a quivering, crying mess. It was the same with grief. When her father had died when she was fifteen, she’d been consumed with a fear that she would never be able to move on past his death. But something inside had stepped up to guide her through those terrible days and weeks. At first she’d put it down to instinct: thousands of years ago, humans would have had to deal with such grief while still being alert for dangers, hunting food, and ensuring that their families were safe. But she had come to believe that it was something even deeper than instinct, a spiritual function in the human soul that took death, no matter how close its victim, for what it was: the most natural consequence of life.
She felt the same protective filter around her now. She had just been talking with a ghost, and she could accept that, and deal with its resultant information.
“Hey, you okay?” Hellboy asked.
“Yeah.” Franca nodded, hugging herself and looking around the ruin. She saw the mosaic of the fire wolf and looked quickly away, hoping that would be the last time she would ever have to set eyes upon it.
“We really need to get back to Amalfi,” he said. His voice sounded uncertain, as though weighed by something heavy he could not express.
“Amalfi,” she said. “You know we won’t be welcome.”
“Were we ever?” Still that hesitancy.
“You think Adamo knows something about the fire wolf.”
“Yeah,” he sighed, and relief lightened his voice. “I think he knows a lot about it, and the disappearances.”
“If what that woman said is true, and Vesuvius erupted because it was angry . . . why hasn’t it done so again?”
“Because its anger is being sated.”
Realization hit quickly. “Human sacrifice,” Franca gasped, barely believing such words could pass her lips. Like an old Hollywood movie. But here in Pompeii, with the dust of ages stirred in the air around her, such a phrase did not sound so ridiculous.
“That book from the basement is like a . . .” Hellboy shrugged.
“An order book.”
“Yeah. Or a score sheet.”
“Can we go?” Franca said. True darkness was falling now, and shadows were stretching out from where they hid beneath walls and under the parts of the old city yet to be excavated. The thought of what might be down there, feeding these shadows . . .
“It’s okay here now,” Hellboy said, gesturing her to him. And hand in hand with someone she had twice heard called demon, she guided them both out of Pompeii and back towards her car.
She carried with her an increasing fear of Hellboy and his world, and a burgeoning fascination. And, perhaps . . . perhaps the old ghost had been right.
CHAPTER 8
—
Pompeii
—
Leaving Pompeii, their path was illuminated by lightning. Hellboy turned back in the passenger seat and looked through the rear window at Vesuvius. Just before arriving at the car, they’d felt the ground vibrating beneath their feet, dust and grit had danced, and then a booming explosion had rolled down the mountain slopes towards them. Now, the mountain had a snaking head of lightning and staggered splits in the sky above the smoking crater, ripping through the clear evening air and the billowing mass of steam and smoke alike. It lit the expanding and rising cloud from the inside, giving it shape and texture and the appearance of great, ponderous movement. It looked like a monstrous tentacle slowly birthing from beneath the ground, and Hellboy could not help but feel chilled by the notion. He hated tentacles.
“That’s one pissed-off volcano,” he said.
Franca drove. Her hands were tight on the wheel, knuckles a pearly white. She stared grim faced through the windscreen, concentrating on where they were going, not where they’d been. She was terrified.
“Hey, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just bluff and bluster right now. All bark, no bite.”
“First time I came to Pompeii, over a year ago, I was scared,” she said, still not taking her eyes off the road. She was driving faster than she should, but she seemed a more than competent driver. “It was like walking into a place where I’d been before but having no memory of it. Does that make sense? Things seemed . . . familiar, but it was my first time there. Really disturbing.”
“Fate has a way of messing with us,” Hellboy said.
“This time, it was worse. I can’t wait to leave. And the volcano . . .” She looked in the rear view mirror and shivered. “That just scares the crap out of me.”
“Where’d you learn English?”
“School. And TV. I like American cop shows.”
Hellboy sat back in his seat and watched her drive. Being so intent on the road, she did not seem to notice him sizing her up. He knew she was strong, and intelligent, but now he noticed for the first time just how attractive she was. He’d seen it before, but not really acknowledged it.
Can’t do this, he thought. Can’t get mixed up with her, especially as she’s one of Adamo’s. An Esposito. He felt uncomfortable at that. He’d only known Franca for a couple of days, and already he felt a level of trust and respect growing between them. But he had to be sensible.
He had to be cautious.
“I remember the voice of my father when he was angry,” she said. “And Vesuvius sounds worse.”
“Let’s just keep driving, then. We’ll be away from it soon.”
“Really?” Franca asked, and she looked at him for the first time since leaving Pompeii. Doubting or desperate, her question went unanswered.
When they hit the main road, traffic was much heavier than was normal this time of evening. With the sky darkening, the roads were alight with rows of traffic, flowing like the rivers of lava they were keen to escape. Franca turned on the car radio and listened to the news, translating for Hellboy. While a major eruption was still not expected—the gas and steam were the results of minor ventings, so the experts said—a limited evacuation of those areas susceptible to pyroclastic flow had been put into action. The greater evacuation, if it was ordered, would take up to seven days, with almost a million people being transported to other parts of the country. There was a sense of excitement in the announcer’s voice. This was still an adventure, not a disaster.
While Franca drove, Hellboy thought. The fire wolf obviously had Adamo Esposito in its thrall. He’d dealt with parasitic scumbags like Adamo before, keen to serve because they thought doing so would gain them some unseen, unknowable benefits—immortal life, endless power, other stuff. Occasionally they were coerced, or even threatened into working for some stronger master such as the fire wolf, but Adamo did not seem to be the frightened type. The more he thought about it now, the more Hellboy recognized a smug complicity in the memory of Adamo’s eyes, and a confident swagger to his pronouncements. Here was an old man, apparently preparing a member of his own close family for sacrifice to something horrible, and he could still wear a smile.
That pissed off Hellboy. He closed his eyes, and imagined smacking that smile right off the old bastard’s wrinkled face.
Take a deep breath, a voice said, and Professor Bruttenholm spoke to him from the past. Leaping to conclusions is easy, but holding back when you get angry is more difficult. He had tried teach
ing Hellboy to be more analytical, encouraging study and research in place of action. But it was moving, searching, fighting that made Hellboy feel alive. There were plenty of others back at B.P.R.D. headquarters who were paid to pore through books and come up with their theories. He was out in the field. And sometimes the field got hot.
That worked best for him. He never liked taking too much time to sit and ponder things.
When he had a chance, he’d unbind the spirit and confer, but right now he was sure he knew what had to be done. The fire wolf had been out for two millennia, and every now and then it made a sacrifice to Vesuvius to keep it happy. Hellboy had no idea how that worked, and he glanced again in the wing mirror, going cold at the sight of that billowing, almost living cloud. Lightning still thrashed above the volcano. It did not look like a nice place to be.
But that was where he had to go. Confront Adamo, find out where the fire wolf laid low, then take it to the volcano and throw it back in.
Piece of cake.
—
“Hellboy?” Franca’s voice stirred him from a doze, and it took Hellboy a few moments to come around, dregs of fiery dreams melting away as he opened his eyes. When he’d nodded off they’d been nose-to-tail in a traffic jam, the oppressive heat aggravated by exhaust fumes, but now they drifted quickly along an unlit road. There were a couple of lights in the distance—lit windows on a hillside, he thought—but there seemed to be no other cars around.
And then he saw the solid bridge ahead, and the soft glow emanating from beneath.
He snapped awake quickly, sitting up in his seat and reaching for his gun.
“You know this road?”
“Yes.”
“And that?”
Franca stopped the car a hundred yards short of the bridge. “Never seen it before.”
“No new buildings down in the ravine? No mad modern artist’s come along and lit the bridge up?”
Franca shrugged, and he just caught it in the darkness.
“Well, maybe—”
The glow beneath the bridge moved. It expanded and brightened, and then it started to flicker as it turned from an even light to a textured, billowing fire. It was like seeing the wound in the land forded by the bridge filling with lava. And then it flowed over the parapet and onto the bridge, and the fire wolf sped along the road towards them.
How it knew which route they had taken, where they were, who they were . . . these were all questions that sprung up in Hellboy’s mind and cast themselves aside for later. The priority right now was to survive.
Though silenced, he felt a wave of fear emanating from the demon-hunter’s spirit.
“Jesus Christ!” Franca whined.
“What’s below the bridge?”
“A river.”
He clasped her arm, hard, because he knew she needed nudging from her shock. They had maybe three seconds. They needed action. “Franca, drive!”
In the darkness, the fire wolf seemed much larger than before. It loped along the road, its long legs stretching in fluid motion, and it carried with it a wide field of illumination. Bushes and trees on the scrubby hillside beside the road danced with their own shadows. As the thing closed on their vehicle and opened its mouth, its maw was darker than the night.
Franca was moving again by the time the thing hit them.
The fire wolf flowed right over the car. Metal sang and pinged as it expanded rapidly, and the windscreen glass cracked under immense heat. Hellboy squinted against the bright firelight, then fired his gun once through the roof when he thought the thing was on top. It had no discernable effect.
The vehicle bounced once from the roadside barrier, then it was on the bridge.
“Stop here!” Hellboy said, turning in his seat. The fiery demon was squatting in the road behind them. As it spun around, black slicks of melted tarmac flicked from its fingers.
“Shouldn’t we drive?” Franca asked.
Hellboy strained against the window and looked over the bridge parapet. The narrow valley was not deep, and he could see the shimmer of a river flowing along its base.
“We’re near water here,” he said.
“Oh God, you don’t mean we have to—”
“I get burnt, I’ll get over it,” he said, glancing quickly down at Franca’s clothing, up at her hair.
“Here it comes!” she shouted.
The fire wolf struck the rear of the car. This time it was a heavier impact, driving them squealing along the road for several yards. It drove forward, gnashing at the broken glass and shaking its head, a thousand diamond-shaped glass shards ricocheting around the car’s interior.
“Damn it!” Hellboy roared. He looked the thing in the face . . . and realized what it was trying to do. “Franca, out!”
“But—”
“Out!” He reached past her and pulled the catch on her door, snapping it off in his hand as the door fell open. Then he shoved her hard, falling across her on the road in case the gas tank went up before they could get away.
The fire wolf made a terrible, sickening noise; a laugh, with the amplified rumble of flames echoing from the bridge parapet and vibrating in Hellboy’s chest.
He reached for Franca as she went to stand and swung her forward. She scraped across the road, crying out as the grit burned into her hands and knees. Then she fell into a roll, and as she saw Hellboy coming after her, she kept rolling.
The car exploded. Hellboy was certain that beneath the roar of erupting gasoline and the screech of pained metal, he heard an ecstatic sigh, pleasure in heat. He fell forward and shielded Franca with his body. Something hard glanced from his back, slashing across his shoulder and spinning over the edge of the bridge. Heat blossomed behind him and threw his shadow forward, across Franca and past her, merging with the darkness beyond.
“Stay close to me,” he shouted in her ear. “You can’t let it get you on your own!”
Franca looked up at him, her eyes wide and filled with reflected fire. She nodded, then her eyes went wider as she saw past his shoulder.
Hellboy pistoned himself up from the ground and turned, bringing his big right hand around in a circle and using its weight to give the punch force. The fire wolf was already upon him, and his fist passed through its head, the flames slicking out around his hand and almost seeming to stick to it, pulling tendrils out and streaming them through the air. Hellboy felt resistance again as his fist moved through the monster’s furious head. It roared, flame and sound emerging from the hollow dark pit of its mouth, and Hellboy squeezed his eyes closed as its rage parted around his own head. When he looked again, the fire wolf had fallen to the side. It stood on the ground beside him, legs staggered, head lowered, the road beneath it melting and flowing from the intense heat.
“Well, you ain’t so—” he started, but then the fire wolf struck out with one of its thick, shimmering back legs. It struck him across the throat, a heavy, hot blow that sent him staggering back. He tripped over Franca and landed across her, frantically reaching for her even as he struck, desperate not to leave her exposed to the thing’s attention.
It’s after her, he thought. It wants her, not me, I’m just in the way.
His hand found Franca’s and he pulled, using the force to help him stand and drag her away from the fire wolf at the same time.
It stood to its full height again now, but it shook its head as though dazed. There is something harder than fire in there, Hellboy thought. I felt it when I punched.
He stepped forward and struck out with his left hand, and it was like punching air. The fire wolf snapped at his forearm with its flaming teeth, and he actually felt them penetrating, slipping hotly through skin and flesh and closing around his tough bones.
Which was just what he wanted. Hellboy punched again with his right hand, his fingers splayed out and ready to grab as soon as they felt something more solid. A risky experiment, but it seemed to work; while the fire wolf concentrated on trying to rip his left arm off at the elbow, Hellboy’s right
hand closed around something deep inside.
It felt like thick porridge, sludge, tapioca, and he was careful not to grip too hard. Then he pulled.
The fire wolf screeched in surprise, and what could have been pain. A sheet of fire sliced skyward from its mouth, forming a rainbow of flames as it twisted its head left to right in an attempt to shake his hold. In doing so, it lifted Hellboy from his feet. His right closed through whatever he was holding, and the momentum sent him flying.
“Crap!” he shouted, then hit the road and slid hard into the bridge parapet. The impact knocked the breath from him, but still he stood, staggering forward again, blood flowing down his left arm even though some of the wounds had been cauterized, and he had only one thing on his mind: Franca.
The fire wolf was crouching, ready to jump.
Franca scrabbled backward on her behind, pushing with her feet, desperately trying to back away from the demon.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Hellboy said, and he jumped at the same time as the fire wolf.
They met in mid-air, directly above the screaming Franca. Vicious and deadly though the fire demon was, Hellboy was heavier. They struck the ground beyond Franca and rolled into the opposite parapet.
They were tangled together, Hellboy’s legs wrapped around the thing’s waist, right hand grabbing inside the flames of the thing’s body, his fingers tangling again in whatever semi-solid stuff went to make up its insides.
Wish I could talk to that old ghost right now, he thought. But he’d taken his attention from its head for a split second, and that was a mistake. He just managed to twist his own head to one side as the thing bit down.
He shouted as fire-teeth sank into his neck and shoulder.
And then Franca was there, pulling at his arm, shouting in incomprehensible rage as she tried to tug Hellboy away from the fire wolf’s grasp. He punched the thing ineffectually with his left hand, pulled with his right, and for an instant when it let go with its teeth he felt relieved. But then he saw where it was looking. Its white-hot eyes were fixed on Franca, and liquid fire dripped from its bottomless mouth.
