"Hey now, no need to be like that!" He leaned forward, glancing left and right as if about to impart a secret. "How about we get lost together?"
Abby dropped the pencil, leaned across the table, and hissed. She felt the power coming to the fore, the lack of control that gave her such dreadful freedom, and she tasted the tang of blood in her mouth. Whatever the boy saw or smelled scared the hell out of him. He stood, knocked his coffee across the table, and ran. He didn't make a sound.
Abby sat back and snatched up her writing pad before the coffee could stain it. Her heart had not skipped a beat. But inside, where nobody ever saw, she could feel the change coming over her. Why the hell did I run two days before a full moon? she thought. But it had been an impulse, and there was no way she could have controlled what happened. Perhaps she had no control. The birthing at the hands of Blake, escape from the New Ark, being rescued by Abe, the BPRD, killing that werewolf in Baltimore ... her whole life had the feel of being preordained, and the more she fought against it, the more she felt steered by something way beyond her ken.
"Shit." She opened her eyes, glanced down at the pad, and saw yet another signature of fate.
Growling at the boy had split her gums, and blood had sprayed across the table and pattered down onto her writing pad. It was smudged now, already drying, and it had smeared into a pattern she recognized.
A place she recognized.
How can something from the Memory make that happen? she thought. That wasn't me, not my hand, not my subconscious. That was ...
But it would not do to think about this too much.
She tore off the sheet of paper and screwed it up. She had seen enough maps of Great Britain to recognize this impromptu bloody sketch. And the one place where her dripped blood had remained in a raised bubble instead of being smeared into coastlines was London.
Abby went to buy a ticket, hoping that she would not see the boy on her flight. She had caught a whiff of his blood, and it smelled good.
* * *
Private airfield, Bridgeport, Connecticut — 1997
LIZ SAT IN THE DRIVER's seat of the Humvee and watched Hellboy inspect the Lear jet. He'd told her to sit and wait while he gave it the once-over. Don't want any little green men ripping the engine apart when we're at twenty thousand feet. Said he'd be using a particularly probing talisman, and her presence could mess up the balance. Got this from a demon in Marrakech, and it's not a girl-friendly spell. Liz had smiled at him and nodded, and she sat watching him stride around the aircraft. Maybe he just wanted to impress her. She didn't know. Lots of stuff about Hellboy impressed her, and lots of stuff was still a mystery as well. For someone so open and unencumbered by ego, sometimes he wasn't only a closed book, he was a book yet to be written.
Maybe his real time's still to come, Liz thought. It was an idea she'd had a few times before: that Hellboy was here for some specific purpose, and all this BPRD demon-chasing, ghost-hunting, paranormal-investigating stuff was just practice for the real job to come. And that troubled her more than anything. Because she knew that Hellboy was far from normal, and his eventual fate would be far from normal as well. She dreaded that. He was the best friend she'd ever had, and she never wanted to lose him.
* * *
Hellboy was nervous. The Lear sat proud and magnificent on the concrete, waiting for the crew to board and wind her up, waiting to jet him and Liz off to London, and it was all so damn normal and easy and convenient that he couldn't help but feel jumpy about the whole thing. Usually he preferred the simple explanation — and a lot of times he'd found it to be the correct one — but this time the simple explanation left a lot unsaid.