"I've got a bad feeling about this," Hellboy said. He had a thing for bad feelings. His tail twitched and scratched at the timber floor.
Tom rapped his knuckles on the table and sighed. "Guys, the shit has really hit the fan. The missions you've just returned from are the tip of the iceberg. Liz had what sounded like a nasty encounter with a phoenix in Greece, and other agents have been investigating other sightings across the globe. They've all been highly visible occurrences. Hellboy, the dragon you met was a case in point. It's been splashed across the media all over the world. Abe, the alligator you tackled is already on Italian TV. The list is long, but so far we've had unicorns running through the streets of Manila, a troll pulling trucks off the Sugg Gate Bridge, mandrake plants sprouting in banana plantations in South America, sirens luring ships onto rocks in Newfoundland ... and the list goes on. Very visible, very filmable, and all pretty nasty. Death tolls from each separate occurrence hadn't been high and were mostly a result of press or curious publics getting too close."
"You said hadn't been high," Abe said. "Has that changed?"
Tom bit his lip and looked down at the table. Kate shuffled papers nervously.
"What?" Hellboy said. "Hey, Tom, we're big boys. Abe and I have been through enough crap — "
"Not like this," Tom said. "Hellboy, this is all new. This is different. We're used to fighting things that are between the lines or below the radar of normal perception, powers that work behind or beyond reality to achieve their own ends. What we have now ... " Tom shook his head and rubbed his eyes. "Kate?"
Kate Corrigan forced a smile and stood. "The shit that Tom talks about hitting the fan shouldn't be real, but it is," she said. "In the past twelve hours, four airliners have been brought down over Europe, one of them crashing into Zagreb. Almost two thousand people have been killed. Flight recorders and radio transmissions received from the first downed aircraft talked of little men running across the fuselage and smashing their way out of panels in the cockpit."
"Little men?" Abe said.
Hellboy frowned. "Gremlins."
Kate nodded and continued. "Six hours ago in Paraguay, hikers entered a village to find its entire population dead, totally drained of blood. Many of them had been killed in their homes, but there were a few in the streets and a concentration of corpses in the village church. Several dead creatures also lay in the streets, brought down by gunfire. Bats. Huge, bodies as big as a fully grown adult, with unnaturally long canine teeth, and their stomachs were distended with the amount of blood they'd drunk."
"Not good," Abe muttered.
"Yeah." Hellboy stood and paced over to the window, looking out at the HQ's gardens. "Is there more?"
"Believe it," Kate said. "More than a hundred men have vanished in the Azores in the last day. Some of their bodies have been washed up on beaches, minus their sexual organs — "
"Ouch," Hellboy said.
"Quite. Their throats are ripped out as well. The ones who hadn't already been got at by normal marine life displayed signs of human teeth marks on their wounds."
"Human?" Abe said. "Mermaids?"
Kate shrugged. "Who knows? But men are still disappearing, and women are patrolling the beaches with shotguns."
"Daryl Hannah was never that nasty," Hellboy said.
Tom stood. "We saved the worst until last," he said. "This one's ... "
"Beyond belief?" Hellboy asked.