Free The Ice Wolves by Mark Chadbourn Page A

broken into the house, his only concern was for Lisa. Brad heard the familiar sound of her shoes clacking on the bare boards outside, and then her cursing as she attempted to navigate the winding stairs without light. Afraid she would break her neck, he ran after her, calling her name.
    It wasn’t like her to panic. In Fallujah, she had always kept a cooler head than he had: saving his life when the masked Shia terror squad came hunting near the border with Iran, and helping the children during the marketplace suicide bomb when everyone else had been running in fear. She’d been the rock when he felt like his own life was falling apart, and it unsettled him immensely to see the foundations of her life shifting since Hellboy had brought them to Boston. Now it was his turn to help her.
    Gripping the rail, he cautiously negotiated the stairs. They were old, and hadn’t been repaired in a long time. Some of the boards were lifting, others had protruding nails, and he remembered acutely what Hellboy had said about malignant ghosts guiding people to fall out of windows. Or down stairs .
    From the attic room, he heard the thunder of gunfire and more shattering glass. Hellboy was dispatching the werewolf, but Brad already knew the beast wasn’t a real threat. Not yet. He’d seen how quick and savage it had been on the journey up Beacon Hill. If it had really been able to cross the house’s protective boundary, it would have been in the room before they had known about it. The attack had been designed to create fear, and it had worked.
    And somehow, for all the beast’s ferocity and sheer supernatural terror, it paled against the real terrors lurking inside him; no external danger could ever match that sucking darkness in his heart that threatened to pull him in, every waking hour, the thing he’d only managed to control by locking it down, not addressing it. But now it was all shifting.
    â€œLisa!” he called.
    He didn’t like the way his voice echoed. The way the word came back at him didn’t sound natural; it was as if someone had simply repeated her name in his voice, but with a faint inflection of contempt.
    The second time he called, the echo came back with a note of threat. He didn’t try again.
    Dampening down his anxiety over why Lisa had not responded, he eased his grip on the railing as he came to the landing of the floor below. He recalled the shutters on all the windows at this level had been fastened. A sea of darkness swam all around, making it impossible to pick out even the faintest detail; there was something almost hallucinogenic about the intensity of the gloom. He had the odd sensation that he was floating in space, and had to clutch at the wall to stop himself from pitching forward.
    He listened intently. All was silent. Was Lisa hiding? His heart beat faster. What if something in that place had already gotten to her? What if she was injured? What if she was dead? A pang of anxiety made him feel queasy, and although he tried to resist, for the first time he considered what life would be like without her. He found the idea devastating. She’d been such a part of his daily existence for so long, he’d started to take her for granted: her jokes, her minor irritations, her warmth, and support.
    Since the marketplace bomb, most days had been a fog that he had wandered through blindly, numb, ragged emotions lost beneath gray waves. Sometimes he had thought he might not even make it through till dusk, and then, when the sun had set, he was afraid he would never see dawn. But Lisa had always been there to hold his hand—or kick his ass—to say the right words at the right time, and to give him hope without ever letting him know that that was what she was doing.
    â€œLisa,” he called tentatively. This time there was no echo at all.
    Feeling along the wall, he found the next flight of stairs, listening all the time, hearing nothing but the wind. On the