Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(79)

Abby drove fast. Abe glanced at his dashboard clock. It was almost two in the afternoon. London was maybe three hours from here, and this evening there would be a full moon.

Full moon ...

The idea of what Abby would become sent a shiver down Abe's spine. The potential for what she could do come moonrise was another reason he should be picking her up right now. He was taking a huge risk She was a sweet girl, Abby. But she was also a monster.

He had seen her changing many times. There was a room at BPRD Headquarters that they had used several times before to contain ... things. When they first suspected what Abby might be — that first full moon, when her shape began to change and her mind turned to violence and blood — he and Hellboy had locked her in that room and observed what happened. The change was very fast and very thorough. One minute she was Abby, a young girl still scarred by whatever had happened to her, still shadowing Abe as though he had saved her from a fate worse than death, not just death itself. The next minute she was a wolf. A big wolf, fur patchy and exposed skin pale, but a wolf for sure. Scraps of her clothing had hung on the beasts shoulders and thighs. Blood had pooled on the floor beneath it, leaking from every orifice. And in its face, as it turned to the reinforced window they watched through, Abe had seen Abby's tortured eyes.

It had thrashed around the room, breaking bones and scraping long gouges in the walls, until Hellboy opened the door and shot it with a heavy tranquilizer.

She had been in there for three days.

Their mistake during her first change was not to feed her. As the full moon waned she had transformed back, the reversion much slower than the initial change. She was much thinner and weaker than she had been before the change and had lost far more weight than should have been possible in three days. It was as if her werewolf incarnation consumed much faster, swallowing her own body when there was no fresh meat to be had, and that had almost killed her.

Next time the change approached, she went in voluntarily. They watched the transformation and immediately introduced several small deer into the room.

For a few minutes the werewolf had glared at the terrified creatures as if transfixed. They were huddled in one corner, hardly moving, staring anywhere but at the creature Abby had become. Abe had started to think that it would refuse the food. But then it had lunged, and blood splashed the window from the inside, and when it finished an hour later, there were only scraps of fur and bones spread across the blood-slicked room.

They got through a herd of twenty deer in those three long nights.

Coming out again, Abby was strong and powerful, her naked skin gleaming with health, unabashed at her nudity. Dried blood was crusted beneath her fingernails, and her chin was black with it. Her eyes glimmered with satisfaction, and when she looked at Abe and Hellboy, she smiled.

That had been the pattern for the next several years. Abby had cost BPRD a fortune in cattle, but Abe insisted that they were saving her. She grew stronger, and the Abby he knew between full moons developed more of a personality, a confidence, and even a history. She was making her own life hour by hour, day by day, and he and the others at BPRD were doing their very best to help her.

And yet ...

And yet there was a hunger in her that had never been sated. He could sense that every time he talked to her, and on occasion he walked into a room and found her staring out the window, musing on something he could not know. She never admitted it in so many words, but he knew that she was unfulfilled. Abe started to grow nervous before each full moon, and Abby grew more and more fidgety. He had always suspected that she would flee one of these days, free herself to find the true food she had always craved, and the potential of that had terrified him. He had always thought that there was a fine line between those who worked at BPRD and the things they hunted. He did not want Abby to be the first one to cross that line.

He had never asked her what she had eaten before he found her in Paris, and she never volunteered the information.

Now she had gone, and the full moon was bearing down. Whatever had instigated her flight, however tied up it all was with Blake's sudden resurfacing, Abe's one great fear was that Abby would, at last, find that which had eluded her for so long.

So he kept on her tail and watched the sky. And he promised himself that should the situation arise, he would kill her before she stained her soul by killing someone else.



* * *





Ministry of Defense, London — 1997



"WE HAVE ... THE situation ... under control," the minister said. She was a tall, charming brunette, but her eyes were hard.