Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(16)

The giant bird opened its wings and stood upright on the car, calling into the blazing sky and shaking its head. Liz cringed down, expecting it to throw its wings together again. They only conjure fire to destroy themselves. At least, that was what she seemed to remember. And it was this fact that had been bugging her all day. If this really was the phoenix of myth and legend, how come it was conjuring fire at will?

What had pissed it off?

"We need to talk," she said. The bird looked down at her again and opened and closed its beak. Then it screeched, the sound so loud and forced that its body shook with the effort, claws squealing against metal where they had pierced the car's roof.

Liz looked down quickly, pleased to see that Dimitris was moving. He didn't look too good ... but at least he was not dead. Yet.

And then she had an idea. She'd always hated the saying 'Fight fire with fire', but if this thing was screeching like this to show off — as a display of power — then she, too, could play that game. So long as it didn't get the wrong idea and turn this into a mating ritual.

"Here!" she said. "Fiery ass!" She closed her eyes, picturing Dimitris' skin melting as he had squeezed her arm, and when she looked again, her hand was clothed in flame.

The bird stilled its strident calling and seemed shocked for a few seconds, standing there with giant wings unfurled and head tilted as it stared down at this other firestarter.

"I have this," Liz said. She turned her hand over, and the fire consumed her arm, moving up to her neck and curling around her throat like a pet snake. "It's a true power, isn't it? And it's beautiful. Feels like a cool kiss on my skin." She played with the fire. The familiar thrill came to her, unbidden and mostly unbearable. She hated what this curse had done, yet she loved this gift. Hellboy had once told her that something could be both, and he should know. You only had to open your mind to see the ugliness and beauty in everything.

The phoenix was watching the fire twist and coil around her arm, transfixed. Liz could hear its breathing above the sound of the car cooling. If the fuel tank goes up ... she thought, but there was little she could do about that. Dimitris' best chance was for her to distract this thing, or even to calm it down. Anything else — more fire, more flames, more rage — and he would die.

The bird's breath was like the whistle of a tuned flute. It sang to her, or to her fire.

"No rage or anger here," she said. "Nothing to hurt you, nothing to hate. Just the fire we both know so well. Let's look at the fire for a while ... " Liz stared at her own hand, bewitched. Control was good, but at times like this, she knew that there was really no such thing. She could funnel her power but never truly manage it. It was untamed. Like a wild animal performing tricks in a circus, it was merely obeying her command. Deep down where it really came from, down in the depths of her mind that she had never been able to plumb, it was ferocious.

And as her curiously becalmed mind acknowledged that, the phoenix began to laugh.

Liz dropped her hand and let the fire gutter away to nothing.

The bird was snorting through nostrils high on its beak. It shook, but with mirth this time instead of rage. The car vibrated below it, Dimitris crawled out, and the phoenix looked down at his blackened head, the clothing scorched from his body, his olive skin turned red, split, weeping ...

"Liz," Dimitris croaked, raising his hand as if to hold on to her memory.

The phoenix reared up, clapped its wings together, and conjured the greatest conflagration it would ever know.



* * *



Liz retreated into herself. Even the heat of this mythological fire could not mirror the fury of her own memories. She was eleven years old again, living with her family, and something went wrong, and everything was heat and light and pain — physical pain for the people she loved, mental pain for her. Anguish that would last a lifetime, and beyond. Guilt that would swallow her up and spit her out many times over. There was screaming and melting and dying, and it was all because of her and through her.

From outside, other fires came in. They merged with her experience and became memory, and there was a single new scream — brief but intense — that added itself to her gallery of screams, all those exhalations of terror that she had heard through the years, all those cries that came because of her, and what she was, and what she could do. She collected screams, and in her nightmares she viewed this collection.

When Liz surfaced, the new phoenix was rising from the remains of the old. It shrugged itself from the scalding remains, testing its new wings, their colors fresh and vibrant even through the layers of ash. It looked at Liz, and she was sure it was staring down at her hand. She flexed her fingers, and fire danced there.