The Dragon Pool: The Dragon Pool (15 page)

"Move," said a gunman behind her, prodding her with his weapon.

Anastasia planted her left foot, spun, pushed off with her right, and drove her head into the man's ugly face. His nose shattered. She felt his blood spray across her cheeks. One of the others shouted. With her hands cuffed behind her, there was no hope of her getting the fallen man's gun, so she simply ran.

Half a dozen steps, and she tripped, tumbling, then rolling down the side of the mountain. Stones cut and scraped her as she fell end over end. A thick bush tore at her right arm as she plunged past. Anastasia held her breath because trying to breathe through her nose with the gag over her mouth would only have panicked her. She whipped her legs around, trying to slow herself down, and her right ankle struck a rocky outcropping with a crack that sent spikes of alarm through her heart.

The slope leveled out for a few feet before dropping off again. Anastasia managed to stop. Bruised and bleeding, trying to breathe through her nose, trying to shake the gag out of her mouth; she put her legs under her and tried to stand.

The pain in her ankle put stars in her head.

At last, fresh tears came.

And then a voice.

"No need to cry, little one," said the sorcerer as he stepped out of a cloak of night, and her nostrils filled with the stink of burning plastic. The handsome magician in his stylish clothes--one of the two who had stolen her away from the balcony that night--gestured with one hand and the darkness enfolded her, picked her up.

He moved toward her. Anastasia tried to pull away, but the night held her fast. The sorcerer gathered her up in the darkness and reached out a hand. She spun toward him as though they were locked in some marionettes' tango, and then she felt it happen. Just as it had the night she'd been taken by the Obsidian Danse, the world rushed into darkness around her. Anastasia felt plucked from the ground, thrust into the air, then released.

When she came down on her shattered ankle, the pain drove a scream up out of her throat.

The darkness cleared, leaving her in the midst of Paul Campbell's excavation. Lights had been strung through the cavern on the face of Mount Ida. Perhaps twenty of the men and women who served the Obsidian Danse were spread about the place, guns at the ready, watching every corner for some surprise attack. Others covered the entrance.

There were eight sorcerers all told. Five men and three women. Anastasia found that she hated the women more. She knew her own sex could be just as vicious as men, perhaps even more savage at times, yet still she felt a strange betrayal at their presence.

They were elegant people, these sorcerers, sophisticated and well-dressed. Perhaps they hoped to persuade those around them that they had some gift of enlightenment, but their eyes were full of the same dull motivations she'd seen in far less powerful creatures--greed, zealotry, lust for power. Why was it that such characters were always so full of ignorant and destructive notions? She wished she knew.

Of course, it would do her little good. Their notions were about to spill her blood in sacrifice to some ancient deity.

Anastasia felt tired. She wondered if she would see Hellboy again, afterward, if there was some place their spirits might be able to encounter one another. She didn't expect eternity with him. What a naive hope that would be. All she wanted was an opportunity to tell him good-bye, and that she'd loved him.

"Bring her," one of the female sorcerers shouted in French. She had long, red hair that fell in curls around her shoulders, as though she'd just come from the salon. Likely she had.

The three thugs who'd escorted her before surrounded her.

"Where's your friend?" she asked. "Migraine?"

Anger flickered across the faces of the two men, but the woman was stoic. She merely gestured with her gun toward the rear of the cavern. The sorcerers were gathering there, and the shadows slithered along the floor. The bright lights set up by the archaeologists could not penetrate them.

Then, for the first time, Anastasia looked carefully at the strange columns that lined that wall. A wave of understanding crashed upon her, and she stared, shaking her head. For those four columns were not stone at all. They were something else--something no human could have identified, though it must have been some kind of flesh. They were the fingertips of something unimaginably large.

And the huge rectangle that jutted up like a table from the floor of the cavern--thirty feet across--that was not stone, either.

The hammer. The anvil. The forge.

Vague recollections of conversations she'd had with Paul Campbell came back to her, now. He'd talked to her of local folklore before he'd departed for Crete. Paul knew she fancied such tales. The Daktyloi. Demons or gods or simply monsters, beings who should not exist in this world; they were the Forge, and the Hammer, and the Anvil. She did not remember their names of legend, but what did that matter, when she could see the anvil on the floor, see the four fingers of some antediluvian deity jutting from the stone?

The Obsidian Danse meant to use her blood to bring them to life.

Why?
she wondered, before realizing that
why
mattered not at all.

Tendrils of shadow pulled at her, wrapping around her arms and legs and sliding her through the air, placing her gently upon the anvil.

Close your eyes,
she told herself.

But Anastasia could not look away. They were going to kill her, but she wondered if she would live long enough--her blood seeping away--to see that hand come to life, and what might come up out of the mountain behind it.

The red-haired sorceress stood above her, a silver knife appearing in her palm as though it had been forged in darkness and produced through some sleight of hand. Only then did the weight of reality descend upon Anastasia. Death had come for her.

She trembled in dreadful anticipation and wondered how much pain there would be.

An explosion rocked the cavern, and part of the roof caved in.

Rock rained down only a few yards from her. She rolled herself off the anvil. The sorceress cursed in some ancient tongue and grabbed a fistful of her hair, silver dagger raised high.

And then the woman's gaze shifted toward the sounds coming from the pile of rubble from the collapse of the roof. The movements, there.

Hellboy stood, and the shattered rock fell down around him, so that for a moment he looked quite like a statue himself, save for the leather satchel that hung from one shoulder. He glanced once in obvious curiosity at the giant hand thrust out of the stone behind him, then ignored it. Anastasia's breath caught in her throat, and she quivered with relief to see that he was alive and had come for her. Even if neither of them got out of there alive...he had come for her.

"Fool," said that elegant, exotic sorcerer who had picked her up off of the mountainside.

"Yeah. Hey. How's it going?" Hellboy asked.

The idiot lackeys with their guns started to gather around, but the sorcerers waved them away. Those arrogant magicians circled him like lions on the veldt, all save the redhead who still twisted her hand painfully in Anastasia's hair.

"You've given us precisely what we wanted," the sorcerer continued. "I thought you had abandoned the woman. Instead, you deliver yourself to us. It's a gift, Hellboy. You will make a far more substantial sacrifice than Dr. Bransfield...and then you will plague us no longer. What is it they say? Two birds with one stone."

Hellboy narrowed his eyes, and the anger there was more powerful than any sorcery. "See, there you go again. I told you, dumb-ass, I never heard of you losers before. Just so we're clear that you brought this on yourselves."

The redhead was the first to laugh. Then the other two sorceresses joined in. The men shook their heads in amusement. One or two of them seemed actually nervous, but they were confident in their greater power. There were eight of them, after all, and twenty fools with guns.

"We shall try to remember that when the world is ravaged by fire and despair."

Hellboy sighed, reaching into the leather satchel he carried. "You guys ever heard of Aksobhya the Immovable? He was one of the Five Jinas, the guys with the Mandala, all that? Point is, he didn't like magic, wouldn't have it in his presence."

The sorcerers moved nearer as he spoke.

"What are you prattling about?" one of them snapped.

But the most vocal, the one Anastasia thought of as the leader, scowled. "Don't listen. The fool is going to try some enchantment. Just kill him."

Whorls of darkness filled the air, rushing toward Hellboy across the cavern. In the same moment, Hellboy pulled his hand from the satchel.

He held a yellowed, human skull.

The shadows dissipated, the lights flickering once, then the sorcerers stood there, gaping dumbly at Hellboy and at one another. Their hands danced in the air uselessly, and they twisted their bodies in spastic motion, but to no effect.

"Meet Aksobhya," Hellboy said. "Toldja he didn't like magic."

The grip in Anastasia's hair tightened. The sorceress holding her screamed in fury, and she felt her head jerked back. She saw the silver dagger flash down out of the corner of her eye, then it wavered. The knife slipped away, and Anastasia found herself free. Behind her, she heard the sorceress crumple to the ground, and she turned to see the woman lying there, her beauty gone, her flesh withered, now that the magic that had preserved her had been dispersed.

A blowgun dart jutted from her throat.

Anastasia spun to see Hellboy just tossing the small blowgun aside.

The thugs in the employ of the Obsidian Danse started shouting. Sorcerers called out orders. Some of their lackeys fled. One of them shot a sorceress through the head in what Anastasia could only imagine was revenge for some slight--or a thousand. The rest of them started to move toward Hellboy, weapons at the ready.

Shouts came from the entrance. Many of the thugs turned to watch as dozens of soldiers and BPRD agents swept into the cavern.

Hellboy didn't even pay any attention as the Obsidian Danse began to surrender. His eyes were on Anastasia. He carried the skull under one arm like a football and ran to her, leaping up on top of the anvil.

"Hey," he said, reaching down for her with his free hand.

"Hey." Careful with her broken ankle, she let him help her up onto the stone platform. Shouts and activity were all around them, but neither of them were paying any attention. "Took you bloody long enough. Got it in my head you might be dead."

He cocked his head, a mischievous light in his eyes, and held up the skull of Aksobhya. "Nah. Just knew it wasn't going to be a matter of busting in and beating these guys into submission. For morons, they had some serious mojo. I needed to do a little research first."

Warmth spread across her chest, and she reached up to trace the contours of his face. "You hate research. You did your homework for me?"

Sheepish, he shrugged. "Yeah. Of course."

"God, that's romantic."

A
be Sapien emerged from the water of Lake Tashi and stood on the shore, surveying the tent village that the archaeologists had created with their camp, and the BPRD tents erected nearby. Ever since they'd arrived, Abe had felt the terrible weight of some imminent terror. At first, when they had discovered the true nature of Nakchu village and its inhabitants, and when it seemed the missing girl, Kora, might be murdered as a sacrifice, Abe had presumed those things had caused his unease.

Now the dragon-human half-breeds had returned to their village, and the little girl was safe. Though three men were dead, the crisis appeared to be at an end.

Yet Abe felt more unsettled than ever. He'd never been a precognitive--this was more primal than some kind of clairvoyance. The fish in the lake had been darting back and forth erratically. He could not ignore his own nature. Abe Sapien might not know his origins, but he existed as both a humanoid and an aquatic being. And something primeval in his makeup was reacting to a disturbance in the natural order of things.

Hellboy would tease him mercilessly if he brought it up. Just as Abe would have done the same had it been his friend who broached the subject. But they would both take the ominous feelings seriously, regardless of how odd things might seem.

Abe had other reasons to seek Hellboy out. In fact, he thought it was time to have a conversation with Professor Bruttenholm as well. The behavior of the fish in Lake Tashi wasn't the only unusual thing he'd encountered in the water. The weather had not changed substantially since they had arrived here. The sun was warm, the wind off the mountains quite cool, and at night it grew cold.

But in the depths of the lake, the water had gotten warmer. Down near the shifting, formless bottom, the temperature had risen enough that he would almost say it was hot.

Under the circumstances, this seemed like spectacularly bad news.

Long arms swinging at his sides, Abe walked toward the cluster of tents at the edge of the camp. His gaze scanned the ridgeline above. Though evening had arrived, lights burned around the main excavations, and a number of people were still at work up there. The dark shape of Hellboy was unmistakable. He stood on an outcropping of rock with a silhouette that had to be Anastasia. This time of day, when the darkness had not fully gathered, his eyesight was not what it became in the fullness of night.

Abe did not attempt to get Hellboy's attention, reluctant to interrupt. Instead, he continued toward the tents that had been set up for the BPRD operatives at the edge of the archaeologists' camp. Voices carried, some of them hushed with worry and grief, but others filled with the enthusiasm an endeavor such as this always created.

He passed between two tents and emerged at the center of the camp, where the entrances to most of the tents opened. In front of the nearest of the BPRD tents, Neil Pinborough smoked a filterless cigarette, gaze roving as always, gun slung across his shoulder. His dark skin seemed almost blue in the early evening gloom.

"Hello, Abe," the man said, amiably enough. They'd worked together only once before, and didn't know each other well, but it seemed as though everyone felt comfortable calling Abe by his first name.

He'd never been sure how he felt about such intimacy from acquaintances.

"Agent Pinborough," Abe replied. "Evening. Has Professor Bruttenholm heard anything further from Dr. Manning, do you know?"

Pinborough nodded, drawing another lungful of smoke. When he spoke, it ghosted from his mouth like hot breath on a winter morning. "He did, yeah. It's all sorted. Manning's sending a cadre of our people and the U.N. have struck a deal with Beijing. Joint mission between U.N. and Chinese military. Couple of hundred, if I heard it right. They'll deal with Nakchu. Part of the reason Redfield's flown Lao down to Lhasa."

Abe sighed. "I almost feel bad for them."

"Yeah?" Pinborough said, glancing around again, his eyes always in motion, watching for more incursions from the dragon-men. He plucked his cigarette from his mouth, wet his thumb and forefinger on his lips, then snuffed the burning tip with a pinch before slipping it into the breast pocket of his military jacket.

That was the kind of operative Neil Pinborough was--he wouldn't leave a trace of his presence behind if he could help it. When dealing with such men and women, Abe often wondered why the Bureau put up with its more unique agents. He and Hellboy and Liz had been trained, of course. But none of them had ever been very skilled at the espionage sort of tactics that were standard fare for other BPRD field agents.

Then again, Pinborough and the others couldn't light fires with their mind, breathe under water, or pummel a Hydra into submission with their bare hands, so maybe there had to be a give-and-take.

"Did Professor Bruttenholm say how long before they would arrive?" Abe asked.

Pinborough spoke as though to himself, all of his attention focused on the nighttime landscape around them. "Two or three days. After that, the rest of us go home and leave the grunt work to the grunts."

"A lot of things can happen in three days," Abe replied.

A troubled expression crossed Pinborough's face. He turned to Abe as though he were about to ask a question. The moment was interrupted by Professor Bruttenholm, who appeared from within the largest of their tents.

"Ah, good evening, Abe," the old man said.

Abe nodded. "Professor. I have troubling news."

Bruttenholm smiled. "Of course. Nothing is simple here. Do come in." He stood back and held the flap of the tent aside.

As Abe started toward him, he heard a low sound like distant thunder and felt the ground tremble, just slightly, beneath his feet.

His stomach lurched. He stared down at the ground, then quickly looked up at the professor. "Did you feel that?"

Bruttenholm frowned. "Feel what?"

It happened again, the slightest tremor.

Abe glanced back and forth between Agent Pinborough and Professor Bruttenholm. "We don't have three days."

Inches. Maybe a foot. Hellboy had never been so aware of distance as he was of the small space separating him from Stasia as they started down the hillside toward the shore of Lake Tashi. That gap between them seemed somehow charged to him, like the air heavy with moisture and electricity right before a storm. Anastasia had seemed awkward when he'd run into her, just a few minutes before, and she'd been acting skittish ever since. Her gaze shifted away from him, and she seemed constantly on the verge of putting into words whatever troubled her.

But Hellboy didn't push. He wasn't the type. And truth to tell, he had a feeling it might be dangerous for Anastasia to say out loud what troubled her.

"You're sure the museum's not going to pull you off the project?" he asked.

Anastasia had her hands thrust deeply into the pockets of a lamb's wool jacket. Her New York Yankees cap was nowhere to be seen. Her strawberry blond hair seemed golden orange in the moonlight. Hellboy took short strides as they went down the slope together, his long jacket flapping in the light wind. He kept his hands at his sides.

When Anastasia shrugged, she kept her hands in her pockets. He wondered if she sensed the charge of the space between them the way that he did, and guessed that she did.

"Once they've read the BPRD report and the statements of my staff, they won't pull me. They'll send an additional team including someone to replace Mark Conrad--probably Tott Peck, who's a decent bloke--and the newcomers'll have orders to keep an eye on me. Once all the excavation is done and it comes down to nothing but cataloging and photographing, they'll call me home. Which is fine, really. You know the initial discovery and interpretation is my real love. Then I like to move on."

Hellboy glanced at her in time to see her frown at her words and her eyes narrow with wrinkles of worry. She shot him a sidelong look, almost guilty, and he realized she was reconsidering her words, wondering if he would read any deeper implication into them.

"Tott Peck?"

She blinked, careful as she picked her way down a tumble of stones. "Hmm?"

"That's someone's name? Seriously? Tott Peck?"

Anastasia laughed a bit too much. "His name's Tottenham. Apparently where his parents conceived him. Some apartment on Tottenham Court Road. The sort of precious thing Americans do all the time, giving their children such names. Tott's parents are from Boston, but moved to London before he was born. If they've got to send someone to watchdog me, I hope it's him."

Off to the right, Hellboy saw Abe walking between two of the tents the BPRD had set up beside the archaeologists' camp. But here, in the shadow of the ridge where the city of the Dragon King was being excavated, no one was around. Everyone was either up at the dig or in camp. Hellboy and Anastasia walked together down to the shore of the lake, undisturbed.

At the water, they paused to stare out toward the far shore. Until now, they'd been talking about the horrid events of the morning and the deaths of Sima, Rafe, and Dr. Conrad. Professor Kyichu would be leaving the expedition, apparently. He wanted to take Kora home. Hellboy couldn't blame him. Anastasia was sad to see him go, but she understood.

Now, though, all discussion of work came to an end.

The space between them fairly crackled. The lake's surface rippled in the night breeze.

"How long before the BPRD sends someone to deal with Nakchu village?" she asked.

Hellboy glanced away from her, the moonlight on the lake suddenly fascinating beyond its beauty. "I don't know. Haven't spoken to the professor about it. A few days, I'd guess. Probably BPRD and United Nations."

"And then you'll be going?"

Her voice sounded small and faraway.

"Yeah. Our job's done."

Hellboy felt strangely warm. He glanced at Anastasia and saw that she seemed not to notice all the beauty around her, focusing on her feet.

"Your father would be pretty upset with me, but...are you sure you have to go?"

The moment seemed eternal, and eventually Hellboy became aware he had remained silent for far too long. His lack of answer would have stung her. He knew that, and couldn't do anything about it.

"I shouldn't have said anything--" Anastasia began.

"Why would he be upset?" he asked.

Anastasia laughed softly, hollowly. "Professor Bruttenholm basically warned me off an hour or so ago."

"He what?" He was often frustrated with his father, but he'd never felt anger like this at the old man before. The feeling didn't sit well with him. It seemed to sizzle inside him, like he'd been electrocuted.

"Stop. Wait," Stasia said, shaking her head. "He was fine. Respectful. He's just your father, and he worries for you."

"I'm not a child," Hellboy growled.

"We should all be so fortunate as to have someone who loves us as much as he loves you," she told him. It felt like an admonishment.

"What'd he say, exactly?"

Anastasia turned toward him. She didn't reach for his hands or slide into his arms or any of the things that would have felt so natural for them, so comfortable.

"It's absurd, you know. This is only the second time we've seen one another in ten years. I go all this time thinking I'm set. I miss you, right enough, but I don't remember why I miss you. Then here you are, and it all comes back, and ten years seems like ten days. So here I am, saying all these things I know I shouldn't say, because I'm a selfish bitch, I suppose. I'm not asking you to be in love with me, or to travel around the world with me, or to make things as they were, once upon a time. I would never presume. I know it can never be that way again.

"But I feel better with you here. Better about myself. Better about the world. And I'm just...I'm having trouble with the idea of you going home in a few days. It's too quick. So, I just wondered if you might be able to stay on for a little while...."

A horrified expression crossed her face. "And now I've bollixed it up entirely, haven't I? Made a damn fool of myself."

Hellboy reached out his right hand, that huge destructive bit of him, and she lay her head against it, so gently. Anastasia was the only person in the world who'd never shied away from that hand.

"I'll always be here when you need me," he said. "I couldn't not come when you call. But you only think you want me to stay. Bad things happen when we're together."

A flicker of pain went through her eyes. "That's not...you're right, of course. You're right. I'm sorry. I know it isn't easy for you. I told you I was being a selfish bitch, and--"

"Yeah, no. Not what I meant," Hellboy interrupted. "I'm talking about the monsters, and the black magic, and the zombies and giant spiders and talking severed heads. Dragon-men are kind of a vacation compared to all that crap. But you know what my life is. You're sick with the horror of what happened this morning. You don't want that to be your daily routine."

Anastasia's gaze hardened. "That was never why it ended for us."

She didn't have to say any more. They both knew why it had really ended. Stasia had been courageous in the presence of darkness and evil, willing to stand with him no matter what kind of horror reared its head. It wasn't the monsters that had been the end of them, it had been the people--the looks and the whispers.