by Tim Lebbon
Franca nodded. “And if Hellboy isn’t back by then, I’ll be coming with you.”
He did not want her with him, that was clear. But Franca went to the children, smiling and touching heads and hands, and when they asked what was wrong, she said nothing. The other adults only stared at her.
As they all walked back through the gates and down the winding path into Amalfi, Franca realized just how much she and her family had grown apart.
CHAPTER 12
—
Amalfi
—
This did not look good. They might be a bunch of old folk hiding out belowground from the fate that had befallen their family and home . . . but their eyes said not. Their eyes spoke of complicity, and Hellboy had seen too much to be seduced by their frailty.
“So you know all about the old boy,” he said. He kept the gun swinging by his side, his right hand fisted, and he did not take his eyes from the illuminated hole in the corner of the cavern. Fighting to come, he thought, but something was not quite right.
An old woman laughed and put her hands up to her cheeks. She was not looking directly at him, and he wondered whether she was blind.
“You know what that bastard’s done upstairs?” he said, gritting his teeth. But it was a stupid question. Of course they knew. Why else would they be down here, and why else . . . ? Sheltering the fire wolf? he wondered. Protecting it? But from what?
An old man stood—the only one who’d yet spoken—and reached for a bottle on the table. He poured a generous amount of red wine into a goblet and took a drink, sighing in satisfaction, staring at the goblet as if it were the holy grail itself.
The other Elders were all watching him, eyes open as if coveting what he had.
The fire wolf emerged from its hole in the corner of the room. Its flames seemed lessened somewhat, their fury dampened by the presence of the Elders. But still the thing looked at Hellboy with its whitest of eyes.
He lifted his gun and pointed it between those eyes.
The old woman laughed again, a cackle that turned into a gentle, scorching roar. And when Hellboy looked at her, her eyes were alight, and her hair was shrivelling back to her taut scalp.
“Oh, this is not good,” he muttered, swinging the gun around and blasting the old woman in the face. She flipped back in her chair, old lady’s hands clawing at the air, and her laugh rose into a wail of rage. He fired again through the upturned chair, and at the sound of the second gunshot, the room erupted into chaos.
Fire seemed to leap from person to person, but it was not really leaping; it was igniting. The Elders were changing, their clothes burning away, skin blackening, eyes melting, hair shrivelling. The air in the room jumped ten degrees, then another ten, and Hellboy backed to the door, blasting away with his gun wherever he saw any hint of humanity left. The fire wolves twisted and writhed as they changed, and he knew that bullets were no good against their flames. His only hope was that he could kill them in their human form, like the old lady whose head he’d—
The old woman rose from behind her tipped seat, and the chair’s upholstery caught on fire. She stretched and screeched, revelling in her natural form.
A whole damn family of fire wolves! Hellboy thought. This is something that old ghost neglected to mention.
But maybe she didn’t even know. The time would come to ask her, but now—
He holstered his gun—the bullets had done no good, even against flesh and blood—and backed through the doorway.
The Adamo fire wolf was the center of the room, and the others waited around it, watching for some signal which Hellboy knew would inevitably come soon. He had fought this thing three times now, and the idea of taking on . . .
He counted quickly. Twelve!
“Hiding away like scared dogs?” he said, but he was not at all certain they could hear. The furnishing was all aflame now, carpet smoldering, and a wine bottle on the table burst, spewing warm wine across the room. A splash of it touched one of the fire wolves and it howled, flinching away and passing one fiery limb across the affected area. Flames flickered there again, but for a beat beforehand, Hellboy saw the unmistakeable glow of sweating flesh.
“So . . .” He drew his gun again, aimed at the Adamo fire wolf. The burning things hissed, and he supposed it could have been laughter. Then Hellboy turned quickly and shot at a rack of wine bottles on the table. Three of them smashed, and wine splashed. A fire wolf screeched as the fluid damped its flames, and Hellboy backed through the door and swung it closed behind him.
As he started running back along the corridor, he chuckled at the idea of closing a door on fire. Still, maybe it would give him a second or two, and for what he had planned he didn’t want too much of a head-start.
This was all going to be about timing.
For a beat he fished around for the flashlight, but then the door behind him exploded open and shattered against the tunnel wall, and the glow of pursuing fire wolves threw his shadow before him and lit the way. They had him at a disadvantage; he assumed that they knew these tunnels, and the way that room had been furnished hinted that they maintained it as a hideaway should events call for it. And now, events had. Their latest sacrifice to Vesuvius, Carlotta, had taken her own life before they could do whatever they needed with her. The volcano was erupting, and they could fool it no longer.
But what exactly did they fear? Or did they even fear anything at all?
He ran, putting the thinking aside for later. Surviving was his prime concern right now, and he needed to come out of this with the upper hand. If all he did was escape, leaving these damned things to do as they wished, then he would have gained absolutely nothing, other than the knowledge that there was more than one.
Damn, I should have seen this coming!
A few questions had been answered, but a hundred more had been posed. Usually in a case like this he’d beat the truth out of the bad guy, but when the bad guy was mainly comprised of fire, that wasn’t the easiest course of action. He’d been wounded enough over the past couple of days; he’d heal, but there was only so much he could take. No, standing and fighting was not the way to gain the advantage in this one.
Not yet.
Making them think he was running . . . feigning fear, leaving a hint of panic in the air behind him . . . that was the first step towards control. Besides, he’d sent Franca back into the house. The last place he wanted these things to go was back up there.
Emerging into the main cavern, Hellboy did not hesitate in plunging back into the tunnel down which the bats had fled. He breathed in deeply, picked up the scent of seawater, and heard the fire wolves coming after him.
—
The doubts began to crowed in within a minute of fleeing the room. There was no way he could tell how many fire wolves were pursuing; glancing back, he only saw a mass of flame coming his way. Sometimes the curves and angles of the tunnel hid the things from view, and he was left with their reflected glow. Other times, they filled the tunnel behind him completely. They burned air and more was sucked in from outside, drawing the briny smell of the sea up to him.
Run, Franca! he thought. They wanted her. Now that Carlotta was dead, they needed another young Esposito to fling into Vesuvius, a sacrifice to the erupting volcano. How the fire wolves were actually related to the Espositos he had yet to discover, but he suspected they were an old family that the creatures had adopted for their own. But now they’re burning their family . . .
He stumbled, reaching out to the tunnel wall for balance. His hooves scraped across the stony floor and he winced at the sound. Fire raged louder than ever behind him, as if the fire wolves had seen his slip and were celebrating the fall of their quarry. He cursed and forged on, rebounding from the wall and using the momentum to carry him faster down the gently sloping tunnel.
At one point he sensed another tunnel opening on his left, and looking up he saw the vaguest hint of daylight filtering in through bends and clefts. This must have been the bats’ way in an
d out, but it was not escape into open air he was seeking. He turned away from the light and headed downward.
The floor suddenly sloped down even more steeply, and the ceiling of the tunnel dropped so that he had to crawl. It was an unnatural stance for him, but the fire wolves took to it easily, gaining on him with every breath. He let his weight move him down, struggling to maintain balance so that his descent did not turn into a roll or fall. A spur of rock jarred him in the back and he grunted, left hand slipping from beneath him and sending him rolling.
Flame roared, unnatural mouths hissed in triumph.
The descent lasted for some time, and then the tunnel opened out again. But there was no floor.
Hellboy had a second to consider his options, and he realized quickly that there were none. He could feel the heat of the fire wolves behind him, and his own hesitant shadow was thrown against the opposite wall of the pit. He took in a deep breath, somehow hoping that would tell him how deep the pit might be. And he had time to smile at this foolishness before he rolled forward and tipped over the edge.
He started counting. One . . . two . . . three . . . As four began, he hit bottom.
He’d been expecting the impact of solid rock, and he’d wrapped his arms around his head and tucked in his knees in preparation. So when the cold bit in, and the water closed around him, it robbed his lungs of air and sent a shock deep into his bones. He gasped and sucked in a mouthful of water, gagging, fighting against the automatic reflex to spit it out and swallowing as much as he could instead. He let the weight of his clothes pull him down and turned onto his back, looking towards where he believed “up” to be.
Flames played across the water’s surface. The fire wolves were down in the pit, crawling across the rocky walls like giant spiders. Part of one of them dipped into the water—accidentally or intentionally, Hellboy could not tell—and the flame immediately extinguished, replaced with a spur of gray flesh that might have been a fisted hand.
His lungs were burning. He felt the ebb and flow of the sea, as if in mockery of the breathing he could not perform. And the fire wolves were above him, steaming the water’s surface, ready to burn him as soon as he surfaced.
Hellboy closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. He played the flashlight beam around him, using his heavy right hand to steer himself in a rapid circle . . . and then he saw the small tunnel. There was no way of knowing how long it was, or whether there were any air pockets in there at all . . . but he was sure it went the right way, out towards the sea. And the alternative was even worse. If he surfaced, he’d be treading water. Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, and the fire wolves would be on him in a beat, grabbing his head and arms and pulling him out, then taking turns to hold him against the side of the pit while the others came in and burnt away another part of him.
So he swam, clamping the torch in his teeth and using both hands to pull himself along the submerged tunnel. His lungs were burning, vision blurring. It was terrifying. Climbing down that narrow tunnel from La Casa Fredda to the caves beneath had been bad enough, but he knew that if he faced a dead end here, the chance of turning around and making it back to the pit was remote. He’d drown down here, and that would leave Franca back on the surface just waiting for these things to re-emerge, track her down, drag her to Vesuvius . . .
Anger bit in and gave him strength. He pulled with his hands, pushed with his feet, and then the sense of space grew around him. He surfaced and gasped in lungfuls of air, catching the flashlight as it dropped from his mouth and wading to the edge of the pool. This new cavern was large and contained a hundred shadowy areas, any one of which could have been the start of a new tunnel.
To his right, one of these shadows suddenly grew bright.
“Oh, gimme a break,” he muttered, but he was already pulling himself from the water. His soaked clothes weighed him down, but adrenalin drove him on. By the time the first of the fire wolves entered the new cavern, Hellboy was entering another tunnel.
But he was never so far ahead that the fire wolves did not know which way he had gone.
—
The sea smell suddenly grew much stronger—the stench of brine, the rot of old seaweed and dead fish—and he knew that he was where he needed to be.
Allowing the fire wolves to remain close on his tail had not been difficult. In fact, he’d had little choice in the matter. They were fast, and for the last couple of minutes, Hellboy had felt their hot breaths on the back of his neck. Several times he’d suspected that they would bring him down before he reached his destination, but then another swelling and retreating pool was before him, and he knew that the open sea was close.
This was when timing meant everything.
As he stopped at the edge of the shifting pool of water, standing in a mass of rotten and rotting seaweed, he turned to face the approaching fire wolves. They swarmed into the wide, low cavern, spreading around him and closing off any possible escape route. He did a quick count and was pleased to see all twelve of those bastards down here with him. Good. At least that meant Franca might have a reasonable chance at escape.
But soon, he knew, the clock would be ticking for her once again.
“You run like crippled dogs,” he panted, but he had no idea whether the things understood, or even heard what he was saying.
The Adamo wolf was easy to recognize. Not only was it the largest of them, it also stood at their center, the sun around which all the others orbited. Its star-bright eyes glared at Hellboy, and he hoped they were full of rage.
Hellboy casually pulled his gun and fired at the Adamo wolf three times. Little happened—ripples of flame sprang out from where the bullets passed right through—but the thing lifted its head and roared flame at the ceiling.
“Wimp,” Hellboy said. He was acting casual, but each moment was judged, every second measured. He glanced around at the others. Yes, they were following the Adamo-wolf’s lead. That was good.
“So you chase me all the way down here and can’t even decide—”
The Adamo wolf came for him. He heard or sensed no instruction, but the other eleven all remained in place around the cavern as the fire wolf leaped through the air, fiery limbs extended, ready to burn him down.
Here we go! Hellboy thought, and he fell back, hands held up to warn off the attacking demon. Everything around him was fire. He squeezed his eyes shut and reached forward with his big right hand, spreading his fingers wide until he felt the white-hot heat give way to something slightly more solid.
Teeth of fire bit into his shoulder and left arm, and as he screamed his own breath caught fire.
He stumbled backwards, feeling the welcoming coolness of water closing around his legs as he entered the pool. Then he closed his right hand, took a deep breath and shoved backwards with every remaining ounce of strength he possessed.
As the flame teeth closed again, scorching into the flesh of his chest and neck, Hellboy felt the blessed relief of water swilling across every inch of his body. The fire stuttered out, replaced by pain. The fire wolf screeched, and clouds of steam rose around him, demonic shapes twisting within and through them as the other fire wolves scurried around the edges of the subterranean sea.
Then they were beneath the water together.
Hellboy kept his eyes open so that he could look into Adamo’s face as it appeared once again.
The fire wolf struggled in his grasp, flames receding as flesh replaced them. Hellboy’s fisted right hand was forced apart, but his fingers were still buried in the man’s flesh, and the pain he saw in Adamo’s eyes gave Hellboy reason to smile. Remaining beneath the water, held down by Hellboy, the old man’s fires went out totally, and he was as gray as ash.
His eyes were now deep, dark pits, nothing human within them, and no flames. Hellboy wondered whether the man Adamo could every truly return after this.
He stood, dragging his new prisoner upright with him. Hellboy could feel the strong surge and fade of the sea around his thighs, and the open water
beyond the caves called to him. But he needed one more deep breath before he undertook the last, long swim, and he also needed to know what was happening to the others.
Still aflame. He cursed. He’d been hoping that they were somehow connected to Adamo’s state, but life was never so convenient.
Adamo steamed and spat in Hellboy’s hand, and even in the few seconds they stood half out of the water, his skin began to glow, and flames licked across his throat and beneath his arms.
“Oh no you don’t!” Hellboy said. He pushed Adamo back towards the water’s surface, but with one final burst of strength, the old man—the fire wolf clothed in human flesh—let out an ear-splitting screech, clicks and whistles snapping at the air of the cavern.
Every one of the other eleven fire wolves froze in place, as if listening.
As Hellboy gathered in a huge breath and ducked down into the water once more, his last image of the other creatures was as they turned and started fleeing from the cavern.
This chase was not over, he knew. It had only just begun.
CHAPTER 13
—
Amalfi
—
Amalfi was abuzz with news of Vesuvius. People were excited more than scared, and Franca had never felt so removed from the place she had once called home. Now it was not only her differences with her family that repulsed her, but also the attitudes of the Amalfians themselves. With such terrible things happening in their midst, still they laughed and shouted to each other in the streets, and revelled in the sense of companionship that the vague danger of the volcano engendered in them.
They don’t know what’s been going on, she thought, but she could not make excuses for them. Amalfi had been sullied by Adamo, and for her, it could never be the same again.
She followed Mario and the others down the winding, steep paths from the hillside and into the bustle of the town’s center. All the way down he talked with some of the others, letting the kids follow them, and Franca came on behind. She wished Mario had wanted to talk with her—ask her what had happened, find out exactly what she had seen back up at La Casa Fredda—but there was something about him that she recognized from looking at herself in the mirror that morning: he was scared. She had told him that people were dead and that the other Espositos were in danger, and now fear ruled his emotions. Every time he glanced back she tried to catch his eye, but he looked only at the children.
