Hellboy smiled at him. And he kept smiling until Jim looked away, shaking his head.
"There are some favors I can call in," the ghost hunter said. "Damn, Hellboy, this is getting messy."
"Getting? Wait till this time tomorrow. I hate to say it, but by then this city will know what messy means."
Jim led them back to the embassy car, and within minutes they were fighting their way through the London traffic. It was almost two in the afternoon. The environmental conference had begun at midday. Somewhere a clock was ticking down, and Hellboy thought it might be only hours before the alarm started to sound.
* * *
North Sea — 1997
THE RUKH DRIFTED HALF a mile above the ocean, keeping watch. It was unnerved at being this far from its father and home, but it also knew that the time was close for it to launch out from the New Ark one last time, and then home would be a different place entirely. It experienced freedom every minute of every day. Now, its father had said, it would have the opportunity to experience life as it should be lived. Below, the New Ark had been slowing down for more than an hour. Its wake stretched behind it like a scar on the ocean, and occasionally the wake itself was disturbed by things breaking the surface. Its bow pointed toward land — the first land it had seen for some time — and every one of the heavy hold doors along its deck was swinging open. Several large boats were being lowered along both sides of the ship, and the rukh could see shapes scurrying, walking, or sliding across the deck, filling the boats and readying to depart.
Several flying things rose from the New Arks holds, spiralling skyward and heading off to the west. The rukh knew its kin, and it also recognized the other things that took wing: the dragons, the phoenix, the griffin. Shapes that it did not recognize rose from another hold; too small to identify from this distance, there were so many of them that they seemed to form a cloud, drifting across the surface of the ocean.
And below the ocean there were shadows. From this high up the rukh could make out several areas where they were concentrated, a couple on either side of the ship and more farther away, ahead, heading toward land. It had seen the things breaking the surface sometimes, sliding out and back into the water as if testing an alien environment for just a few moments. There were hooks and claws, teeth and suckers, horns and other appendages that could kill, and the rukh was astonished at the variety of deadly weapons the things of the sea possessed. It made it grateful that it was of the sky, not the ocean, and that its own defenses were the beak and the claw. It had only ever used them for the hunt.
But now Father said there would be fighting and war. And it was ready.
The rukh performed a long, wide circle around the New Ark, and when it faced west again, it saw a spot on the horizon that did not belong there. The spot grew quickly, manifesting itself into a machine that had no right to be in the sky. The rukh could smell it from miles away, stinking up the air and slashing at it with spinning slices of metal. The giant bird rose into the clouds, drifted for a while, and then came back down, falling onto the noisy machine and smashing it from the heavens. It came apart as it fell, disgorging several waving shapes that screamed as they tumbled into the sea. The rukh watched them fall down, saw the splashes as they hit the surface, then the larger eruptions as things rose to feed.
The boats had left the sides of the New Ark and were powering toward land. There were six in total, containing all manner of its father's creations, all ready to serve and fulfill the purpose they had been given. "Find life," Father had told them all as he rescued them from Memory. "Find life, but first there will be death to mete out."