Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell Read Online Free Page A

and starts unloading, and it no longer matters who he does and doesn't have grudges against. If it catches his eye, it's a target.
    You could follow the paths of some of the flames, trenches dug and melted into the patterned tiles of the floor, as though concentrated bursts had generated on the spot, then coursed after their targets. Most of the paths were straight, like third-degree burns that slashed across rooms, down hallways, along ceilings. But a couple of them had altered course...one curving in a broad arc, the other hooking a sharp left after twenty or so feet and reducing a display case to a pile of slag.
    No concern for who got caught in the crossfire, Abe had said. Hellboy didn't doubt he was bothered greatly by the human loss--seven casualties was the estimate so far, and the number would've been a lot higher had this attack occurred during the day instead of late at night--but Abe would be mourning more than life. This place had been called a decanting of history, and Abe Sapien would be mourning that, too. He wasn't strictly human, Abe wasn't--or not entirely--but he read more than just about any five other living souls that Hellboy knew. If Abe had been in some other kind of skin, this might have been the sort of place he would've ended up, and happily so, tending to the past so that it would continue to live and speak.
    They were just things, that's all, someone might have said. Just books, just papers, just manuscripts and ornaments and trinkets. Nothing when compared to the value of a human life. They'd never drawn breath, all these inanimate things. They didn't scream as they burned. But things often survived the people who owned them, then outlived everyone who'd remembered their owners, until the day came when things were all that were left to speak for lives long gone.
    The two of them were stepping around the crusted remnants of a large, square, frescoed column when Hellboy felt Abe's touch on his arm. He followed Abe's other hand, pointing off to their left, a spot on the nearest wall they might have overlooked because it blended so well with the rest of the destruction.
    Optical illusion--when you first looked at it, you didn't see it for what it really was. No, that took a few moments. At first, all you saw was a wide circular area more than halfway up the fifteen-foot wall that had been turned into a blackened cinder. Stone, plaster, wood--whatever was there had been blowtorched into some crumbling alloy that faded into the pigments of the mural painted there centuries ago.
    Look deeper, though, and then you would see it: the desiccated suggestion of a man blown off his feet and hurled high against the wall--fused into the wall, a charcoal man outstretched in his final agonies and joined to the architecture in bas-relief. Stand in the right place and you could picture how it probably happened: The guy's running when he catches his assailant's attention; no chance of dodging the fireball, but it's partially deflected and absorbed by the square pillar standing between them...the only reason there's as much left of the guy as there is, why he wasn't rendered even further down to ash.
    Something like that, stuck to the wall, you don't do it just because you have to.
    You don't do it out of a sense of duty.
    You do it because a part of you likes it, the sport of it.
    "Hellboy...?" said Abe. "What can do this?"
    "There's Liz, for starters. But she's on the other side of the ocean right now, and it's not her style anyway, so we can rule her out," he said. "Other than that, plus what my nose tells me? My guess is seraphim."
    Abe had one of those faces that could be hard to read a lot of the time. Not his fault. He didn't have the full set of features that helped with all the nonverbal cues. Like eyebrows. Or a brow ridge, for that matter. Still, he sometimes had this way of looking at you, and you just knew how much he hated what he was hearing.
    "Seraphim," Abe said flatly. "And here I thought that, of all