Hellboy: Unnatural Selection by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online Page B

beauty in everything.
    The phoenix was watching the fire twist and coil around her arm, transfixed. Liz could hear its breathing above the sound of the car cooling. If the fuel tank goes up ... she thought, but there was little she could do about that. Dimitris' best chance was for her to distract this thing, or even to calm it down. Anything else — more fire, more flames, more rage — and he would die.
    The bird's breath was like the whistle of a tuned flute. It sang to her, or to her fire.
    "No rage or anger here," she said. "Nothing to hurt you, nothing to hate. Just the fire we both know so well. Let's look at the fire for a while ... " Liz stared at her own hand, bewitched. Control was good, but at times like this, she knew that there was really no such thing. She could funnel her power but never truly manage it. It was untamed. Like a wild animal performing tricks in a circus, it was merely obeying her command. Deep down where it really came from, down in the depths of her mind that she had never been able to plumb, it was ferocious.
    And as her curiously becalmed mind acknowledged that, the phoenix began to laugh.
    Liz dropped her hand and let the fire gutter away to nothing.
    The bird was snorting through nostrils high on its beak. It shook, but with mirth this time instead of rage. The car vibrated below it, Dimitris crawled out, and the phoenix looked down at his blackened head, the clothing scorched from his body, his olive skin turned red, split, weeping ...
    "Liz," Dimitris croaked, raising his hand as if to hold on to her memory.
    The phoenix reared up, clapped its wings together, and conjured the greatest conflagration it would ever know.
----
    Liz retreated into herself. Even the heat of this mythological fire could not mirror the fury of her own memories. She was eleven years old again, living with her family, and something went wrong, and everything was heat and light and pain — physical pain for the people she loved, mental pain for her. Anguish that would last a lifetime, and beyond. Guilt that would swallow her up and spit her out many times over. There was screaming and melting and dying, and it was all because of her and through her.
    From outside, other fires came in. They merged with her experience and became memory, and there was a single new scream — brief but intense — that added itself to her gallery of screams, all those exhalations of terror that she had heard through the years, all those cries that came because of her, and what she was, and what she could do. She collected screams, and in her nightmares she viewed this collection.
    When Liz surfaced, the new phoenix was rising from the remains of the old. It shrugged itself from the scalding remains, testing its new wings, their colors fresh and vibrant even through the layers of ash. It looked at Liz, and she was sure it was staring down at her hand. She flexed her fingers, and fire danced there.
    The phoenix turned away and gathered its mummified father into its claws, ready to launch itself for its fledgling flight to Egypt. Then it took off without sparing Liz another glance.
    She stood shivering in the heat, gathering the remnants of her scorched clothing around her, crying. The tears washed a clean route through the soot on her face. They burned.
    "No!" she exclaimed. "Oh, no!" She almost went to him, but she knew there was no need.
    Dimitris was little more than a greasy stain on the road.
----

Somewhere over the North Sea — 1997
    T HE RUKH DRIFTED ON air currents high in the sky, its massive wings spread wide to catch the updrafts. Its great beak cut through the air, so streamlined that there was no noise as the atmosphere parted around it. Although it was more than strong enough to carry the weight of the two fully grown cows, each claw hung low beneath it, and wind raged around them. They were dragging it down, and every now and then it beat its wings once and soared a hundred feet higher. One of the cows still bayed