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.She spun toward him as though they were locked in some marionettes' tango, and then she felt it happen.Just as it had the night she'd been taken by the Obsidian Danse, the world rushed into darkness around her.Anastasia felt plucked from the ground, thrust into the air, then released.When she came down on her shattered ankle, the pain drove a scream up out of her throat.The darkness cleared, leaving her in the midst of Paul Campbell's excavation.Lights had been strung through the cavern on the face of Mount Ida.Perhaps twenty of the men and women who served the Obsidian Danse were spread about the place, guns at the ready, watching every corner for some surprise attack.Others covered the entrance.There were eight sorcerers all told.Five men and three women.Anastasia found that she hated the women more.She knew her own sex could be just as vicious as men, perhaps even more savage at times, yet still she felt a strange betrayal at their presence.They were elegant people, these sorcerers, sophisticated and well-dressed.Perhaps they hoped to persuade those around them that they had some gift of enlightenment, but their eyes were full of the same dull motivations she'd seen in far less powerful creatures--greed, zealotry, lust for power.Why was it that such characters were always so full of ignorant and destructive notions? She wished she knew.Of course, it would do her little good.Their notions were about to spill her blood in sacrifice to some ancient deity.Anastasia felt tired.She wondered if she would see Hellboy again, afterward, if there was some place their spirits might be able to encounter one another.She didn't expect eternity with him.What a naive hope that would be.All she wanted was an opportunity to tell him good-bye, and that she'd loved him."Bring her," one of the female sorcerers shouted in French.She had long, red hair that fell in curls around her shoulders, as though she'd just come from the salon.Likely she had.The three thugs who'd escorted her before surrounded her."Where's your friend?" she asked."Migraine?"Anger flickered across the faces of the two men, but the woman was stoic.She merely gestured with her gun toward the rear of the cavern.The sorcerers were gathering there, and the shadows slithered along the floor.The bright lights set up by the archaeologists could not penetrate them.Then, for the first time, Anastasia looked carefully at the strange columns that lined that wall.A wave of understanding crashed upon her, and she stared, shaking her head.For those four columns were not stone at all.They were something else--something no human could have identified, though it must have been some kind of flesh.They were the fingertips of something unimaginably large.And the huge rectangle that jutted up like a table from the floor of the cavern--thirty feet across--that was not stone, either.The hammer.The anvil.The forge.Vague recollections of conversations she'd had with Paul Campbell came back to her, now.He'd talked to her of local folklore before he'd departed for Crete.Paul knew she fancied such tales.The Daktyloi.Demons or gods or simply monsters, beings who should not exist in this world; they were the Forge, and the Hammer, and the Anvil.She did not remember their names of legend, but what did that matter, when she could see the anvil on the floor, see the four fingers of some antediluvian deity jutting from the stone?The Obsidian Danse meant to use her blood to bring them to life.Why? she wondered, before realizing that why mattered not at all.Tendrils of shadow pulled at her, wrapping around her arms and legs and sliding her through the air, placing her gently upon the anvil.Close your eyes, she told herself.But Anastasia could not look away.They were going to kill her, but she wondered if she would live long enough--her blood seeping away--to see that hand come to life, and what might come up out of the mountain behind it.The red-haired sorceress stood above her, a silver knife appearing in her palm as though it had been forged in darkness and produced through some sleight of hand.Only then did the weight of reality descend upon Anastasia.Death had come for her.She trembled in dreadful anticipation and wondered how much pain there would be.An explosion rocked the cavern, and part of the roof caved in.Rock rained down only a few yards from her.She rolled herself off the anvil.The sorceress cursed in some ancient tongue and grabbed a fistful of her hair, silver dagger raised high [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]