Free Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell by Brian Hodge Page A

steel gray hair and ice blue eyes and chiseled skull, bringing comfort to people. Personal prejudice, probably, that priests should be these doughy guys with marshmallow hands and eyes that twinkled. He could imagine Burke boxing in his younger days, and even now running marathons, and above all, shrewdly holding his own at the conference table in a boardroom. But hearing confession, sending the person off motivated to go and sin no more? Restoring peace to an anxious deathbed? No. He couldn't picture it.
    Still, Hellboy supposed he could forgive Burke all that. Like it or not, the Church needed men like this too. Mystics, on the whole, made lousy administrators.
    "I heard you were up there on top of the world," Burke said. "And I'm glad you spotted me. Saves me the trouble of tracking you down. Although...I would've thought you'd be looking after the scroll now."
    "It's in good hands."
    "In transit?"
    "Something like this, it's not like you can just take it to FedEx, now, is it?" Hellboy said. "I've done what I can for now. It'll be a few more hours before all the pieces are in place."
    "Dare I ask how?" Burke and his tight smile again. "Speaking informally, of course."
    Earlier, his colleagues had made it clear that they hadn't wanted to know much about how the scroll would be making the trek from the Vatican to Connecticut. Ignorance could be more than bliss. Sometimes there was security in it, too, and this was one of those occasions.
    "By sea," Hellboy said, and left it at that. "But if you really thought about it, you probably could've figured that out for yourself."
    "I suspected as much. What better protection against fire than all that water?" Burke took a long, smoldering pull on his cigarette. "You seemed in a hurry to reach me. Maybe you have something on your mind too?"
    "Some unfinished business from this morning. I just didn't think I'd get very far pressing the matter down in the hidey-hole."
    "That matter being...?"
    "Whoever it is you guys suspect of calling down the attack dogs," Hellboy said. "Father Laurenti, wasn't he the one looked like he'd dug his suit out of the charity bin? He seemed set on keeping the information close to the vest, and everybody else seemed content enough to follow his lead."
    "And you have a problem with that?"
    "It felt like it was getting treated as a need-to-know item, except we had two different opinions on who might need to know. If I have people putting their lives on the line because of this conflict you've got brewing under the surface here, then I'd say I've got a need to know."
    "So why come to me, if we presented a unified front earlier?"
    "Because you seem like more of a pragmatist than the other five put together."
    Burke's grin was looser now. "I believe if you wanted to, you wouldn't have to strain yourself at all to make that sound like an insult."
    "I just have that kind of face."
    "And you may have just come to the right pragmatist, too. As fate would have it, you and I are on the same wavelength. Do you have an hour or two to spare before you take off?"
    Hellboy thought of Abe in the tower, babysitting the scroll and bluffing out the possibility of Armageddon, and Bertrand up there, babysitting them both. He hoped Abe was in a forgiving mood.
    "Because if you do," Burke said, "there's something you need to see."

Chapter 6
    T hey took a taxi--easily the most harrowing experience of this trip so far, careening along streets tight as clogged arteries, mere inches from brown brick walls, and engaging in swerving showdowns with candy-colored motorscooters whose riders, if not suicidal, gave a heart-stopping impression of it.
    The ride ended in east Rome, in a neighborhood where the buildings started to thin out, a place of abandonment and obsolescence. As the light of day began to seep from the sky to leave behind a firmament of rose-stained clouds, Burke pointed out to their driver where he should stop. It was a rounded, ramshackle turret of a place, three floors