The Fire Wolves Read online

  And Alex didn’t like smoking.

  She dragged deep, feeling the smoke caressing her throat, looking around at the bustling street through the shade of her sunglasses. They looked expensive but were cheap. One thing she’d had to leave behind at La Casa Fredda was her entitlement to any family money.

  Naples was packed with tourists at this time of year, skinny and fat, pale and sunburnt and dark, but all of them distinguishable from the locals by the way they walked, talked and seemed to exist in another world. Franca spent much of her life looking back in time, digging down through layers of silt, mud and rock to unearth the truth about what had once existed in a certain place, and who had breathed its purer air hundreds or thousands of years ago. She was comfortable with the past, at home with the dead, and Alex had only recently jested that it was because they could not answer her back. She thought perhaps it was a defense mechanism against the tightness of the family she’d grown up in, but she was a strong-minded individual whenever an argument or discussion raised its head.

  Yet she was also fascinated with the living. Though not especially garrulous—she did not suffer fools gladly, and perhaps it was another defense mechanism that made her consider most people fools—she loved to watch and ruminate, constructing hidden histories for people from the way they dressed and spoke, the look in their eyes, the cast of their shadows. It was something else she had little time to indulge in nowadays, so she was relishing this hour sitting at the café and watching the world go by.

  Another such rare occasion was how she had met Alex. A lover and humility, both gained in one day. She laughed softly at the memory and took another draw on her cigarette.

  “Another drink?” the waiter asked.

  “Double espresso,” she said. “Some warm milk on the side?”

  “Sure.” He gathered up her empty cup and replaced her ashtray, and she breathed in his scent. He lives on a lemon farm, she thought. Works here in the day just to get away. Someone else tied to their family. She glanced up and the waiter offered her a cautious smile. Not sure of himself, but he should be. Nice face. Strong shoulders and arms. He’s probably breaking someone’s heart and doesn’t even know it. The waiter went to fetch her drink, and she returned her attention to the pedestrians passing by her table.

  She’d spotted Alex working on his laptop in a café on the other side of town. His white shirt had been open almost to his waist, sweat dribbled down his temple, and he’d been nervously biting his lip as he typed. She’d smiled, because something about his total involvement with what he’d been doing had been alluring. And so she’d begun her game. Student, British, maybe Irish. Given the opportunity to study here by parents who can ill afford it, but he’s messing things up, and soon . . . He’d looked up and smiled, and Franca had been frowning even as she glanced away, her heart jumping and a flush warming her cheeks. What the hell . . . ? It was never like her to react like that.

  The waiter brought her drink and disturbed her from her reverie. He breezed off between the tables, approaching a group of four fat men and women in stark white shorts and colorful tops. She guessed at their nationality, their relationships to each other, and when the fattest one started talking to the waiter in slow, ponderous English, as if to make him understand better, Franca laughed out loud. One of the women looked over, and Franca held her gaze until she looked away again.

  She took a sip of her espresso and thought back to that first meeting with Alex. She’d been so, so wrong. He was American, for a start, and he was an engineer, not a student. He had been poring over his laptop, composing an email to break up with his girlfriend from several thousand miles away. Most of the nerves had been because of his fear at her family’s reaction to the split; he worked for her father. All this she had learnt over several more coffees, and perhaps it was his inscrutability that led her to seek much, much more of him later, in his hotel room. After a passion-filled twenty-four hours—and after missing two important lectures and one assignment deadline—Alex began to talk about staying.

  The next email had been to his ex-girlfriend’s father, severing his employment.

  Franca sighed. They were already talking about love. After breaking away from her family, she was so cautious about intimacy that when it presented itself to her like this, she knew it must be real.

  A bus came along the road, edging around parked cars and scattering scooters before it like fish before a shark. Franca stubbed out her cigarette and glanced at her watch. Almost two p.m. This was probably the one, though whether Carlotta had even made it on, she was not sure. She’d tried her cousin’s phone several times but it had been turned off. She really must be worried about something.

  Franca left the café and stood at the curb, watching the bus disgorge it passengers on the opposite side. Just as she thought Carlotta must have missed the bus, she saw her cousin peering cautiously around the vehicle’s rear.

  “Carlotta! Over here!” Franca waved, and she saw Carlotta wince and look around. Damn, she really was wound up tight.

  Carlotta walked quickly across the road, head down, eyes raised to look at Franca. A smile spread across her face. When she finally reached her, Carlotta laughed out loud and grabbed Franca into a hug.

  “It’s so wonderful to see you!” she said. “Oh Franca, you have no idea how happy I am.”

  “To be away?” Franca asked.

  Carlotta shrugged, still hugging her cousin, but she said nothing.

  “So,” Franca asked, “how’s the family?” She pulled back and stared into the younger girl’s eyes, instantly shocked at how startled she looked. She glanced left and right, searching for searchers, and Franco knew instantly what the girl was going to ask.

  “Is there somewhere we can go? Somewhere quiet and . . .”

  “Safe?”

  Carlotta nodded, then shrugged, but not with apology. She blinked slowly, then let out a sigh that sounded filled with far too many terrible burdens. “Franca, I’m in danger.”

  “What? How? What sort?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. But you’re the only one I can trust. I’ve found out some things, and . . .” She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a file bulging with notes, clippings and pictures.

  Franca glanced at the file, and when she looked up again, the girl was pale and terrified.

  “I need help,” Carlotta Esposito said. “In six days, on my eighteenth birthday, I think something will come to kill me.”

  —

  Franca took her cousin back to her apartment. This had not been the sort of reunion she had expected. Carlotta had hinted that she was worried about something, yes, but Franca had expected some vague family matters, or perhaps the girl had gone and got herself pregnant. Nothing like this.

  Nothing about death.

  Carlotta seemed to relax once they were inside, and she looked around the apartment while Franca prepared them some food. Cooking pasta, stirring the simple tomato and basil sauce, she watched her cousin, waiting for the girl to start talking rather than prompting her.

  Carlotta ran her hands across the shelves and shelves of books on archaeology, history and ancient Mediterranean civilizations, and she barely paused when she passed a full set of Calvin and Hobbes paperbacks. She strolled slowly around the cramped room, looking at framed pictures of Franca and her friends at various digs, gently touching some old pottery stacked unceremoniously in an open storage cabinet, and she seemed not to notice the empty wine bottle and two red-stained glasses on the coffee table in front of the huge sofa. She was looking, but not seeing; touching, but not feeling.

  “Hey,” Franca said. Carlotta glanced around. “Sit down. Chill. Do you need a drink?”

  “Maybe just orange juice, if you have some?”

  “Wine?”

  “I’ve got to go back.”

  “Today?”

  Carlotta nodded.

  Franca went to say more, then turned and delved into the refrigerator for some juice. When she looked through the ser
ving hatch into the living room again, her cousin had slumped onto the sofa, head resting back with her eyes closed. She’s comfortable with me, Franca thought. That’s good. But still she was unsettled by her cousin’s surprise pronouncement. I think something will come to kill me.

  She dished up their food, broke some crusty bread and dropped it into a big bowl, then carried everything through on a tray. Sitting beside the girl, she half expected to finds her asleep. But Carlotta was only staring at the ceiling.

  “Here,” Franca said. “Call it a birthday meal from me.”

  “Mmm.”

  The two cousins sat and ate in silence for a while, but Franca soon noticed that Carlotta did not seem very hungry. Still, she finished her own meal, sipping at the glass of wine she’d brought in for herself. Then she sat back and waited for the girl to begin.

  “Company?” Carlotta asked, nodding at the empties.

  “Alex,” Franca said. “An American. Extremely sexy, intelligent and easy to wind around my little finger.” She cringed at the lie, but the other girl laughed without apparent humor.

  “Trust my cousin.” She sat back as well, less than half her food eaten. “A boyfriend. I so wish for that, one day.”

  “There’s no one?”

  Carlotta shrugged. “Some admirers. A few kisses. And one boy, earlier this year . . .” She stared into space, then shook her head. “Adamo scared him away.”

  “Not grand enough for the Esposito family, eh?”

  “Who is?”

  “Huh.” Franca drained her glass and wished she’d brought the bottle in with her. “So . . .” she began, looking at her cousin. She wished that Carlotta would hurry and elaborate on her fears, but at the same time she suddenly didn’t want to know. She felt an instant of fear and panic so intense that her heart fluttered, and her eyes went wide. She gasped and coughed. What was that? she thought.

  Carlotta seemed not to have noticed. “The family’s cursed, Franca,” she said. “And it has been for centuries.”

  Franca laughed. It was reaction to Carlotta, but more so, it was her way of combating the sudden trepidation. She couldn’t help herself, even though she saw how it annoyed Carlotta. She had to hold her hand over her mouth to press in any further nervous giggles. “Cursed? You sound like the Elders, Carlotta. Damn, you need to get away from them like I did.”

  “You don’t believe in curses?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’ve never seen anything, never dug anything up, that makes you believe?”

  Franca shook her head, feeling a tension leaving her shoulders that she was not even aware had been there. So this is all, she thought. Something had happened to Carlotta, she had seen something that made her believe in the unbelievable. All it would take—

  “You remember Maria?”

  Franca’s smile faded a little, stolen away by the memory of their aunt. “Of course I remember. I’m older than you.”

  “You were seven, I was four,” Carlotta said. “La Casa Fredda was preparing for Maria’s eighteenth, but three days before her birthday she vanished.”

  “Ran away,” Franca said. “Fled that family just as I have, and—”

  “And just as dozens of others have down the centuries? All on or around their eighteenth birthdays?”

  Franca stared at her cousin, blinking slowly. She believes every word she’s saying, she thought. She drained the final drops of her wine, staring up at the ceiling through the bottom of the glass, and she heard Carlotta emptying the folder across the sofa.

  “They were killed, and I have proof,” the younger girl said. “Some from old family records, and some I stole from the Elders’ library. Some, from Adamo’s room itself.” She spread the papers around, then paused, staring down at her own hand, tapping the pictures beneath them as though playing a piano. “I still move. I still live. But now it’s my turn to disappear.”

  “Wait,” Franca said, and she returned to her kitchen for the rest of the bottle of wine. She had a feeling she was going to need it.

  CHAPTER 2

  —

  Naples

  —

  Another café, another wait, but this time she was not allowed to smoke.

  Franca watched the world go by, playing her usual game and wondering where people were going to or coming from. The tourists were obvious and did not interest her, but there were some people who had the look of escape or pursuit in their eyes. She was surprised that she had never noticed them before. It was a look that Carlotta had only recently made her familiar with, and she was haunted by just how many there were.

  Is the world really so bad that this many people have to be running from something? she mused. She waved to the waiter and ordered another coffee. She had always loved airports, enjoying the feel that this was a place where old existences were ended and new lives embarked upon. Now, with Carlotta’s story at the forefront of her mind, she knew that some things were not so easy to flee.

  Sometimes, we carry the bad stuff with us.

  She still had grave doubts about what she had done. When she’d told Alex about Carlotta’s amazing, disturbing story, he had immediately tried to persuade her to place the call. I only ever saw him from a distance, he’d said. The first company I worked for called him in when they found an old lab, deep in the Brazilian rainforest. Turns out it was an old Nazi place, set up after the war but long since gone to ruin, and he has a thing about Nazis. But this . . . this is just the sort of thing the B.P.R.D. is set up for!

  She’d doubted him, and she still doubted Carlotta’s strange, disquieting story. But she’d made that one call just to keep Alex happy, and from that . . .

  To this.

  She sighed, and thanked the waiter when he brought her a fresh coffee. Lifting the cup to her lips, she saw a commotion across the concourse.

  “Hellboy,” a voice said from somewhere far away, and another took up the name. They were muted, quiet voices, not shouts or shrieks of excitement. And then Franca saw him, and the cup paused halfway.

  Damn, he was one big son-of-a-bitch.

  He strode through the curious crowd, coat flapping about him even in this heat, kit bag slung over his shoulder, and an empty holster hanging from his belt. A big empty holster. In his left hand he carried a lockable metal gun box, and in his right hand—

  But no, she realized. That was his right hand. And on his head . . .

  She’d heard about these things on his head. Some said they were horns. A chill went through her, and she drained her coffee before standing.

  Hellboy paused by the café and looked around. His eyes locked on hers almost immediately, and he smiled. Franca smiled back, and a rush of relief swept through her. He might be big, red, and have the stumps of horns growing from his high forehead, but his face looked so damn human.

  “Hellboy,” she said, walking through the tables and approaching him with her right hand automatically extended. He gripped her hand—his own right hand was cold, and heavy, and it felt like he could crush hers to jelly with a squeeze—and shook.

  “So they say,” he said. “And you’re . . . ?”

  “Franca Esposito.”

  “Right.” He smiled again and nodded, looking her up and down with frank curiosity.

  “Er . . . do you want a coffee?” she asked. “Something stronger?”

  “Yeah, but not here. I hate airports. Full of people running away from things.”

  Franca laughed. “I was thinking just the same thing.”

  “You were?” Hellboy asked. He seemed both surprised and interested, and Franca could not detect an ounce of sarcasm in his voice.

  “We should go,” she said, unsure whether to be unnerved or charmed. “My car’s outside, and if it’s all right with you, we’ll go straight to Amalfi.”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said. “You can fill me in on the way.”

  “The B.P.R.D. didn’t give you all the information?”

  “Only the basics,” Hellboy said. “But
I’ve come straight from Iceland. They called me there just after I’d finished another job. Told me about this one, and damn, I’ve been cold for long enough. Italy sounded good. Amalfi is a place I’ve never visited.”

  “And you’re concerned about the possible family curse, of course,” Franca said, unnerved by his apparent casual approach.

  “Of course I am,” he said quietly. “The surroundings are just a bonus.”

  “I’m sorry,” Franca said. “It’s . . . thrown me, that’s all. To be confronted with the amount of evidence Carlotta presented is . . . well, I’ve never really believed in such foolish things.” She glanced sidelong at Hellboy, biting her tongue.

  “Don’t worry,” he said without looking at her. “I’m flesh and blood.” He paused inside the main exit from the arrivals lounge, shifted the kit back from his right shoulder to his left, and his face suddenly turned grim. “So who’s this joker?”

  Franca followed his gaze and gasped. Entering through the sliding doors, flanked on both sides by young, fit, hard-looking men dressed all in black, came the oldest man she had ever seen.

  And she had not seen him for years.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Adamo Esposito.”

  “Family Patriarch,” Hellboy said. “That much I do remember. Well, I guess this is as good a place as any to start.”

  Franca could say no more. Adamo looked up from his feet and directly into her eyes. He gasped as he came to a stop, but none of the men offered a helping hand. He’d brush them off, she knew. Adamo was proud.

  He grinned at her. And in the space of a few seconds, Franca remembered every terrible thing that Carlotta had claimed about this little old man.

  —

  Crap, Hellboy thought. I could have done with a shower, at least. He sized up the welcome committee, and they weren’t very big. Even after settling the agitated spirits of a glacial graveyard in Iceland, flying several thousand miles sat next to a seven-year-old kid obsessed with sharing every move he made on his Nintendo DS with the big red guy next to him, and having not slept for about forty hours, he figured he could take these goons without raising his heartbeat.