Intertwining Destinies

Chapter 7

Emerald slowly opened her to the blinding white light and had to immediately squeeze it shut. She kept her eyes shut. Slowly, she started feeling the rest of her body and felt a lump growing from the left side of her head. It was throbbing mercilessly.

"She has been id'd as Dr. Emerald Bruttenholm. She works at the Blackwoods..." , a voice sounded from a corner of the room like it was reading it out of a paper.

"Did someone say Bruttenholm?", a gruff voice cut in.

"Yeah Hellboy. According to this, she is Dr. Alasdair Bruttenholm's daughter", the first voice said.

"Whoa! Really?!!! I gotta meet her", said the gruff voice.

"Wait! Hellboy, she is still out! And I think we would all like to talk to her about what happened. How is she the only one alive from the Blackwoods gallery massacre?"

Memories suddenly came exploding to Emerald's mind. The screaming...golden-yellow eyes staring out of dark depths...a tusked troll...the crown piece! With that, she suddenly sat up and moaned loudly as her head gave a wild throbbing in protest.

She saw that she had been lying in a white sterile looking room with strange steel equipments. She was still in her black dress suit and covered in some gritty dust-like power. She swiped them away but the particles stubbornly clung to the material of the dress. She pulled some away and looked at the grits. They gave out a strange sort of smell.

"I don't care Manning. I wanna see what she looks like", the gruff voice and a pair of heavy footsteps followed by others followed in his wake.

Emerald's first impression was that of a very tall and wildly muscular violently red-hued man. As she continued to stare at him, she realised thick stubs that grew out of his forehead. He sort of had tiny yellow eyes too. She saw a swish of a forked red tail behind him. If she were to completely lose her head this moment, she would scream out "Devil!" thought Emerald. She saw a bald man in a black suit appear behind him.

Manning saw that she was staring at Hellboy without blinking. He decided that he had to step in (yet again) to control the situation. Putting on a falsely cheerful face, he came forward and said, "Ahh Dr. Bruttenholm, I see you are awake. Please excuse Agent Hellboy here. He can be a bit loud at times...you need not worry about him. You are quite safe here".

Emerald willed herself to tear her eyes away from Hellboy and look at the bald man called Manning.

"Is this a FBI building?", she blurted out.

Manning hesitated.

"You are at the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence. And yes, we are part of the FBI. Did your father tell you about us? Technically he wasn't supposed to. We are an undercover government agency and it is against our policy...."

"Oh shut it Manning!", Hellboy cut in.

"He didn't tell me anything. It's just that my uncle used to work here, I think...and he would sometimes talk about his son..." Emerald looked up at Hellboy here. "I always wondered why he would name someone Hellboy...but I guess my curiosity is finally satisfied", Emerald finished with a smile.

Things seemed utterly bizarre since she had got out of her house that morning. Starting with the green-skinned girl in the hospital, she had met a Bethmooran royal...her mind finally concluding that the ash-white man must be an elf. An elf! Then she had seen a troll. Not just a club-wielding moronic giant but a warrior troll in an armour with a big metallic mechanical hand! And now, she was looking at her sort-of cousin Hellboy who absolutely looked like the devil himself, if she had believed in that sort of thing. She vaguely wondered if her throbbing head had turned her into a lunatic and she was imagining these things. "But I was hit in the head after seeing the elf and the troll", she thought dryly.