Blake raises his eyebrows and holds up one hand. "Ahh," he says. And then he nods.
Abby falls sideways to the deck, and the first drone passes over her, crashing into the railing. She kicks out and sends it shrieking into the sea. The second drone grabs her arm, but she twists away, snapping at its throat and ripping flesh and sinew. She spits. The blood is rank, like old oil, and the flesh tastes bland and insipid. There is nothing to these things. Two more drones attach themselves to her, Blake laughs ... and instead of fighting them off, Abby goes for the old man.
The next few seconds are a confusion in her memory. Blood and screams, the impact of flesh on flesh, her teeth crunching together, and a long, desperate howl that can only be her own as she falls from the ship and splashes into the water. She swims hard, kicking against the flow, pulling with her hands, knocking aside the drones that fell with her, and hearing their panicked squeals as they are sucked into the giant propellers. Seconds stretch into minutes, and at last she floats on her back, riding the swell and surprised that she can swim. She looks up at the shadow of her father, standing at the railing high above and staring down at Abby. Believing, perhaps, that she is dead. He says nothing. He does not move. Abby floats, staring up past her father at the waxing moon, and even as the tanker moves quickly away, she sees him standing there, looking back at her with mad eyes she hopes she will never see again.
* * *
Abby sat in the shade of a huge, anonymous building in Baltimore and cried. She remembered swimming ashore at last and finding her way to Paris. Freedom had never tasted the way she thought, and soon the Seine served to drown her sorrows. And then Abe was there, giving her a place in the world, whereas Blake had only given her a life ... and that was too painful to dwell upon as well. Because she was about to betray Abe — him and everyone at the BPRD — simply because she could not face admitting her lie.
Her tears were not for herself but for that girl she had been. Innocent, unknowing, ripped out of myth and given something that resembled life by Benedict Blake, all to further his own madness and feed his hate. She cried also for what was to come. Because if the werewolf she had killed really was from Blake, then the other things even now being sighted across the globe were probably his as well. And that could mean only one thing: whatever insanity he had been courting over the decades was soon to come to fruition.
And she knew exactly what the New Ark contained.
"Help us all," she sobbed. "Oh, God, whoever, help us all now that he's here!" Unable to calm herself, she gave in to the tears. Once she was cried out, she knew, she had to leave to find Blake. He was her creator — her father — and only she had an inkling of how he could be stopped.
Having escaped, and lied, Abby Paris felt responsibility crush down upon her.
* * *
Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense Headquarters, Fairfield, Connecticut — 1997
TOM MANNING, DIRECTOR of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, was having a very bad day.
"Where the hell is Hellboy?"
"I don't know, sir." The man running the Bureaus communications that day, Chris Moore, shrank down in his seat, offering Manning a smaller target.
Manning seemed to grow, pumped up with disbelief. "You don't know? How the hell can you not know? The guys seven feet tall and red. Someone in Rio must have seen him!"
"I've got a lecturer on the phone," Moore said. "She was with Hellboy when — "
"Is it Amelia Francis?"
"Yes, sir."