"I'm sorry," he said. He touched her arm with his right hand, and she withdrew. "Hey ... sorry."
"The thing with mythology is, it's safe," she said. She drank some more, finishing her glass and letting out a dainty burp. "It's secure. It's a land of stories and legends that affect humanity down through the ages, but for me it's always been just that: stories and legends. I can tell as many students as I like about vampires and werewolves and dragons, and how terrible they can be, and how awful they are. But when I go home at night, I'm not afraid, because the world I've been talking about doesn't really exist. It's theoretical. Some people believe, many more don't, but it's always very safe. Mythology isn't as dangerous as murder, or as immediate as pollution, or as vicious as the drug gangs that control part of this city. The ideas within it are, for sure, but when I close my books at the end of the day, that's where the ideas stay. And I avoid the places where the drug gangs rule, and I wear my smog mask, and everything is right with the world."
Hellboy drank and watched and said nothing, because he knew the real truth. And he was watching Amelia discover it now, for herself. There was no reason for him to go in heavy-handed and smash it home for her.
"Now I can't close my books anymore. The myths have escaped. I've seen the dragon, I've seen it kill people, and life will never be the same again." She looked up at Hellboy, and he could see the weight of realization in her eyes. "Do you see what this is?" she said. "Do you understand why today is the first day of the future?"
"Isn't every day?"
"Not like today." Amelia shook her head and drank more beer. "No way, not like today. Stuff like this has always been hinted at, that's all; fuzzy photos in tabloid newspapers, secondhand accounts of the supernatural. But today ... there were cameras up there. That was prime time! News companies the world over were feeding those images into people's living rooms. Kids at school in America were watching those pictures over their amazed teachers' shoulders. Adults in Europe were settling down to be numbed by another evening of soap opera, but they saw the world changing instead."
"You think? What about the people here, in Rio? You said yourself, they could hardly believe what they saw, even when it was standing up there on Christ the Redeemer and shitting down his soapstone robes. People have a way of compartmentalizing stuff like this. It'll cause a fuss, but it'll die down. People need to eat, pay their mortgages, have affairs. Personal stuff will always take over."
"That's so cynical," Amelia said.
"Cynical?" Hellboy was surprised, because he'd never seen himself as a cynic. Perhaps Amelia was right. "Maybe. But didn't you know what the Bureau did when you agreed to advise?"
"Yes, but I always thought it was a lie."
"Why?"
Amelia shrugged. "I thought that's what the government did. But dammit, Hellboy, dragons aren't real!"
"You'd say magic isn't, either, but — "