Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(81)

"Yeah," Hellboy said. "Cute." He glanced at Liz, and she rolled her eyes.

"There's a ghost standing behind her," Jim said. "Just standing there. No expression on its face. Arms down by its sides. It's looking at her, as though it can make itself felt if it really concentrates. Probably someone from her past, family or friend, but she'll never see it, never give it peace. She doesn't know how. Most people don't, and it's because they're scared of knowing too much. They'll happily buy a tabloid newspaper and think that's it, that's the news, that's what's happening. This celebrity's marrying that one, and all is good in the world tonight."

"I can't see a ghost," Hellboy said. He looked hard, glancing left and right to give his peripheral vision a chance. But she was just a young woman waiting for a bus.

"Maybe you're too optimistic," Jim said.

"I see it," Liz said. "The instant you told me it was there, I saw it."

Jim smiled sadly. "Then you're someone not scared of knowledge."

Hellboy threw down his cigarette and crushed it out. "Jim, we need your help. We have to get close to the Anderson Hotel, and we need to be able to move fast when the time comes."

"What do you think will happen now?"

"War," Liz said. "Fast and bloody. Blake is ready to start a war for what he believes in, and it's obvious from Miss Minister up there that she's ready to lose."

"We have to spend more time here," Jim said. "We have to try harder to make her understand."

"We go in there again, and they'll throw us in the deepest dungeons they can find," Hellboy said. "At least, they'll try. And whether they believe what we're telling them or not, the time will come very soon when their forces are forced to face what we're warning them about. Forewarned is forearmed, but at least we know they have some protection down there."

"We need to be ready to go after Blake," Liz said.

"Exactly." Hellboy rearranged his coat over his shoulders and delved into the pockets for another cigarette. Stumps. That's all he had. One day he'd have to buy some new ones. "And that's why you need to find us a helicopter, Jim."

Jim Sugg raised his eyebrows.

Hellboy smiled at him. And he kept smiling until Jim looked away, shaking his head.

"There are some favors I can call in," the ghost hunter said. "Damn, Hellboy, this is getting messy."

"Getting? Wait till this time tomorrow. I hate to say it, but by then this city will know what messy means."

Jim led them back to the embassy car, and within minutes they were fighting their way through the London traffic. It was almost two in the afternoon. The environmental conference had begun at midday. Somewhere a clock was ticking down, and Hellboy thought it might be only hours before the alarm started to sound.



* * *





North Sea — 1997



THE RUKH DRIFTED HALF a mile above the ocean, keeping watch. It was unnerved at being this far from its father and home, but it also knew that the time was close for it to launch out from the New Ark one last time, and then home would be a different place entirely. It experienced freedom every minute of every day. Now, its father had said, it would have the opportunity to experience life as it should be lived. Below, the New Ark had been slowing down for more than an hour. Its wake stretched behind it like a scar on the ocean, and occasionally the wake itself was disturbed by things breaking the surface. Its bow pointed toward land — the first land it had seen for some time — and every one of the heavy hold doors along its deck was swinging open. Several large boats were being lowered along both sides of the ship, and the rukh could see shapes scurrying, walking, or sliding across the deck, filling the boats and readying to depart.

Several flying things rose from the New Arks holds, spiralling skyward and heading off to the west. The rukh knew its kin, and it also recognized the other things that took wing: the dragons, the phoenix, the griffin. Shapes that it did not recognize rose from another hold; too small to identify from this distance, there were so many of them that they seemed to form a cloud, drifting across the surface of the ocean.

And below the ocean there were shadows. From this high up the rukh could make out several areas where they were concentrated, a couple on either side of the ship and more farther away, ahead, heading toward land. It had seen the things breaking the surface sometimes, sliding out and back into the water as if testing an alien environment for just a few moments. There were hooks and claws, teeth and suckers, horns and other appendages that could kill, and the rukh was astonished at the variety of deadly weapons the things of the sea possessed. It made it grateful that it was of the sky, not the ocean, and that its own defenses were the beak and the claw. It had only ever used them for the hunt.