“Myers!” Liz called as she rushed into the room. Agents Sapien and Pierce were close on her heels as she dropped to one knee and picked up the Bureau-issue communication device that Myers had attempted to contact them from. “Myers!” She called out again as she rose from her crouched position, eyes roaming the ballroom furiously. Were she not brimming with fury and worry she might have been able to appreciate the beauty of the tapestries, the smart decor, the dusty forgotten place having once lived a life of lavish hosting. “Myers!” She tried again desperately. Closed windows. No perceivable exits.
“Where could he have gone?” Agent Pierce asked, giving voice to the question on everyone’s mind. With a grunt of frustration, Liz started about the ballroom, pulling back the many curtains and pushing aside statues. Feeling useless, the Agent huffed and started off to do the same, when he realized that he could see his breath before his face. As he held his weapon before him and began his own quest for hidden doors or hidden enemies, his teeth began to chatter. The room must have been even colder than it was outside. Yet the windows were all closed. There were no perceivable exits. “What in fresh Hell…?” Agent Pierce muttered to himself.
“Abe, tell me you’re getting something.” Agent Sapien stood in the middle of the room, his scanner held out before him, the strap held taut around his neck. “Anything?” Liz pressed desperately as she crossed her arms over her chest, holding herself tight against the impossibly chill of the bygone ballroom.
“If he’s somewhere in this room, his body heat must be failing fast.” Abe noted as he turned about himself, checking the various walls and corners before finally turning the scanner to the floor. “I’m not sure that he’s… Wait. He’s in the floor! Liz, Myers is in the floor!” The agent exclaimed, lips falling numb to the cold of the room, frost climbing up the walls and spreading across the statues.
“Myers!” Liz screamed, dropping to her knees.
Roger dropped beside her and ripped at the wooden floorboards, pounding against them with his strong fists, but to no avail. Leaning back on his feet he rested warped hands against the Bureau issue trousers that covered his muddy knees. “I can’t get through. It’s like really thick ice or somethin’...” Roger remarked, catching his breath.
“Ice, you say?” Liz asked in a low voice, having suddenly gone very quiet and very still.
“Liz?” Roger asked.
“You should be running boys.” She warned in a heavy tone as she lifted her hands into the air and blue flames appeared, enveloping her fingers and palms.
“You heard the lady! Let’s haul ass, gentlemen!” Agent Pierce called, the first to start towards the doors of the ballroom that had been consigned to oblivion. The B.P.R.D. agents all bolted for the doors as Liz brought her hands down flat against the floor, blue flame spreading across the decorously carpeted wood. The frost began to recede and the cold melted away as beared down upon it until at last she felt a floorboard splinter beneath her hands.
“Myers!” She screamed, pulling her hands back from the floor as the flames began burning orange and hot around her. Pliable and singed wood gave way beneath her capable hands, still burning hot like coals as she ripped her way through the floor. “John!” She screamed, reaching into the darkness beneath her.
~~~~~~~~~
Across the castle, a corpse lay against the side of his tomb, legs and arms ripped from his decaying body. He cursed at the Red Demon who stood before him, uttering dark words in the tongue of his Mother Land. Unfortunately, Hellboy understood Russian so he got it all. “Listen old man,” he said as he turned to Count Khilkov, or at least what remained of him. “I’m gettin’ real tired of this conversation, and I’m sure you’re gettin’ real tired of me putting bullets in you.” He divulged, thinking out loud as he dropped the empty shells from his gun and reloaded it. “So, why don’t we just cut this whole thing short, and you tell me how you know Rasputin.” The corpse only smiled at him this time.
“Uh, H.B.? We got a problem over here.” Agent Johnson announced as he rose from where he had been sitting alongside Agent Smith. While the seasoned field agent for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence held his palms against his ears and moved away from one of the many archways leading to other cavernous parts of the chamber, Agent Smith did not. In fact, he began stumbling slowly towards it, his eyes wide and his expression blank. Hellboy himself could hear it faintly, a sweet little melody, hummed upon a woman’s lips, floating across the air into the burial chamber.
“Damn.” Hellboy muttered, firing a few more shots into the withered corpse of Count Khilkov. He had hoped it would make him feel better. It didn’t.
“Red, what does
rusalka mean?” Agent Johnson asked, his brow furrowed as he began to put together the pieces of the puzzle that Hellboy had already completed for himself.
“Siren.” He answered.
