Hellboy, Vol. 2: The All-Seeing Eye Read Online Free Page B

unmoved. In fact, her lips squirmed as she fought a losing battle to keep her humor contained. If his butt hadn’t been stinging so damn much, Hellboy would have relished her childlike glee. A part of him still did, despite the fact it was at the expense of his own comfort.
    It was a constant weight in his big old heart that Liz, one of the few people he cared about most in the world, smiled about as much as she slept — which was hardly ever. Amazing then that her face remained remarkably unlined for a woman in her thirties. What stopped her from looking truly young, though, were her haunted eyes, and the great dark crescents beneath them. Hellboy had seen men cast admiring glances towards Liz’s trim, athletic figure, only to flinch when she turned the bruised intensity of her gaze on them.
    Now, however, she was smiling, and it transformed her. Hellboy had to employ all his willpower to stop himself smiling back. Maintaining his frown with an effort, he growled, “I’ll live.”
    “Maybe there’s some kind of cream you can use? A scorched-butt ointment?” she suggested innocently.
    “You’re walking a thin line, Liz,” Hellboy said, though he couldn’t quite make it sound convincing.
    Liz laughed and reached up to pinch a great slab of his red cheek between her dainty thumb and forefinger. “Aw, you’re so cute when your pride is wounded,” she said.
    “And it’s getting thinner all the time,” he muttered.
    Liz was about the only person in the world whom he’d allow to treat him like that. Damn, she was the only person in the world who would dare to treat him like that.
    Sitting a few seats in front of them on the private jet, working his way conscientiously through the information dossier Kate Corrigan had presented them with after last night’s meeting at B.P.R.D. headquarters in Connecticut, Abe Sapien turned around. To anyone not used to him, Abe was a startling sight. He was a humanoid amphibian of unknown origin, his skin a shimmering blue-green, albeit etched with striking markings that resembled jagged black lightning bolts. Although his face was expressionless and his large, globular eyes unsettling, his cultured voice was full of warmth, humor, and intelligence.
    “How you two doing back there?” he asked.
    “Don’t you start,” grumbled Hellboy.
    If Abe had had eyebrows he would have raised them. “I was only — “
    “I know what you were only doing,” Hellboy said. “You were mocking the afflicted. Hey, you try getting stung by a Sumatran fire-worm, see how you like it.”
    Shielding her mouth with her hand, Liz confided loudly to Abe,”HB’s a little sensitive about his swollen butt.”
    “It didn’t sting me on my butt!” Hellboy protested. Less convincingly he added, “It was my ... lower back area.”
    “Burned a hole right through his shorts,” Liz said breezily.
    “Can we talk about something else?”
    “Gladly,” said Abe, and held up the dossier. “How about the particulars of our current mission?”
    Hellboy groaned. “Jeez, you sure know how to kick a guy when he’s down. We went through all this at the meeting!”
    “Did you actually listen?” Liz asked.
    “ ‘Course I did. Every word.” His golden eyes flickered away from her almost-black ones. “Well ... all the important ones,” he amended.
    Abe and Liz exchanged a knowing glance. The only time Hell-boy had come alive throughout the debriefing had been right at the end, when their boss, Tom Manning, had glibly informed the three field operatives that they were to fly to London right away. The big red guy had still been smarting from a particularly bruising encounter with a Sumatran fire-worm, which had been unwittingly invoked by a bunch of college boys in Milwaukee. Eight of the thirteen amateur cabalists had been barbecued by the worm by the time Hellboy arrived, and although it had been a pretty routine stomping on his part, it had been messy and he had been knocked around pretty bad. He had