A DATE WITH DR. MANNING
by Atana
"Excuse me, Miss Lucine," Dr. Johann Krauss intoned sternly as he observed the BPRD's latest acquisition – the decidedly diminished angel of death Agent Hellboy had met in Northern Ireland – putting on a jacket and heading toward the secret facility's exit. "You cannot leave the Bureau without clearance. You are too dangerous to be exposed to the outside world, at least for the moment."
Lucine Mal'akha froze in her tracks, her small and bony shoulders stiff. Although they no longer bore her all-seeing black wings, their owner was every bit as resolute and implacable as she had been in Bethmoora. One does not survive being slashed and immolated by an army of devils without a great deal of fortitude, after all. Such an attack would have reduced an ordinary human being to liquefied pulp.
If this place had been Ugarit or Jericho or Ur and it had been twelve hundred fifty BCE, Lucine the Messenger would have simply smitten the being who now stood yammering behind her. The ancients hadn't called her the Destroyer for nothing. However, the demon attack had sapped her of both her strength and many of her abilities, leaving her in dire need of the protection afforded by the underground facility in which she now found herself. Its chaos and noise and bright lights disturbed her greatly, but she had also met a most wonderful human who had asked her out for dinner instead of fleeing from her as if hell-hounds were snapping at his heels. She casually examined her glitter manicure, tipping her fingers so that the overhead lights made the sparkles dance. Slowly, she turned toward the Austrian.
"Excuse me yourself, spirit in a bowl," she hissed. "I am going to dinner with Dr. Manning."
"Not a good idea," Johann declared. "I doubt if the late great residents of Sodom would have invited you to dinner. Didn't you smite them with an asteroid? Or the late great members of that Assyrian army of one hundred and eighty-five thousand, all of whom you sent to their eternal rewards? I suspect that our local residents would not enjoy meeting a death angel under similar circumstances, ja?"
Her crooked golden eyes – plucked and rescued from her burnt and broken wings and pressed into her face by Queen Hela Lokisdottir's Jotun sorcery – were hard as flint. "Those deeds were at the command of the Heavenly host and not up to me," she hissed in response. "If you read the Talmud instead of those idiotic Teutonic fairy tales about Sigurd and Brunhilde you would know that."
At that moment, the facility's overhead lights began to flicker. Dr. Krauss instantly registered concern. Power surges were not supposed to happen at the Bureau.
He snapped to attention, addressing Lucine while being entirely aware of the group of agents congregated around him, watching him intently. "I will not grant any such clearance, Miss Lucine. I do not understand why Dr. Manning agreed to your being brought here in the first place, frankly. You are a mal'ach ha mavet and I cannot have you running loose until I am confident about the extent of your capabilities."
"Are you truly afraid that I will lay waste to Trenton, New Jersey? I do not need your permission to come and go," Lucine replied. "I answer to the dictates of Heaven and not to some disembodied soul who should have crossed over years ago."
She turned and began her slow and clumsy way down the corridor. Walking was quite difficult for her. She wished mightily that she could fly instead to escape this troublesome meddler.
"Entschuldigen Sie! Miss Lucine!"
The lights began flickering wildly.
As if on cue, still more BPRD agents prairie-dogged from the offices up and down the corridor all at once, gaping at the Bureau's odd little acquisition with curiosity and alarm.
"Lucine, you must stay here," Johann declared, crossing the arms of his containment suit. "That is an order!"
The light fixture above his head suddenly exploded, showering him with plastic and glass.
There was a universal gasp from the assembled agents; more than a few fingered their sidearms with apprehension. Lucine continued her clumsy saunter toward the main doors, the air around her sparking with some sort of internally-generated electricity. A Bureau agent reached up and patted her hair, astonished to find that it was standing on end. Another felt his metal fillings ache in an unfamiliar way; he immediately reached for his phone to remind himself to research whether angels could generate EM fields.
He needn't have bothered.
Every light fixture under which the angel passed now exploded noisily. The glass cases showcasing the Bureau's most famous metaphysical acquisitions shattered, one after another. Karl Ruprecht Kroenen's helmet fell from a broken shelf with a clatter and rolled across the floor like a discarded casserole dish. Someone shrieked.
"Mein Gott!" Krauss shrieked. "Stop that, Lucine!"
The death angel continued on; more and more and more display cases and fixtures exploded. Someone punched the emergency alarm. Security guards raced toward the disturbance from all parts of the installation. No one dared lay a hand on her, not even the security guards who tried to ring her; they were too busy dodging the constant rain of shattered glass and plastic from above.
XXXXXXX
Dr. Thomas Manning stood just outside the heavily-guarded BPRD front doors and smiled. "Ah, there she is," he thought. "Agent Andrews, open the doors," he said to the security officer who now watched Lucine's unsteady approach.
"Um, I can't, sir," the young man replied. "She's a Level Three. That means –"
Tom frowned, his voice sharpening. "I know what Level Three is. I run this place, you know. I am rescinding that classification."
"But, sir –," the security officer said hesitantly. "Dr. Krauss himself gave her that designation – I don't think that you – " His hesitant explanation was interrupted by the sudden explosion that blew out the facility's front doors.
Tom only felt a slight puff of air; Lucine had mentally engineered her energy pulse so that it would flow around him like water around a rock in the middle of a stream. After all, it had been Tom Manning who had taught her how to descend a flight of stairs without breaking her neck and who held her tight when nightmares of the demon attack jolted her from her uneasy slumber in the medical wing with screaming fits. She wouldn't hurt Dr. Manning; not for the world.
More alarms began to sound.
"Mein Gott!" Krauss shrieked.
Lucine the Messenger stepped gingerly over the shattered glass. Dr. Manning held out his arm and she took it. Both heard Johann off in the distance cursing loudly in German.
"Um, looks like you have a bit of a problem here, uh, sir," Tom said in his well-modulated voice after Krauss bulled his way through the crowd of curious agents flocking around them. "I think we owe Lucine a debt of gratitude for showing up the flaws in our security system. I think we have enough in the budget for a rebuild; don't you genuinely think so?"
"Just look at this mess!" Dr. Krauss shrieked. "Lieber Gott, hilf mir!" Beside himself, he spun around and signaled the immediate shutdown of the emergency sirens before the entire city was up in arms.
Lucine sniffed. "How do you expect God to help you? You do not even know how to help yourself."
Krauss stared at her, mystified.
"Lucine knows all languages spoken by the human race, both ancient and modern," Tom mused. "Hittite, Pashto, Canaanite, Cantonese, Tagalog, ancient Hebrew, Assyrian; you name it. Just another reason I decided that she was a good fit for the Bureau, of course."
Lucine waved her hand at the ruin that was once the BPRD's front entrance. "This place is not even warded against demonic intrusion, Dr. Krauss. You could have half of your staff possessed by devils and you would be too stupid to know it." She smiled at Dr. Manning. "Of course, I would know it."
Tom Manning smiled back at his bizarre little divinity. "And you would send them packing back to Hell before they knew what hit them, wouldn't you, my angel?"
The lights in the shattered facility stopped sparking for a few moments. Krauss spent the next three seconds contemplating the improbable sight of a Biblical destroying angel and his bureau chief making goo-goo eyes at one another. He forced himself back to his senses and sputtered a response. "We couldn't have warded it against demons without warding it against Agent Hellboy, Miss Smartypants!"
"Oh, please. I could have done it for you properly if you had asked me nicely instead of treating me like a prisoner," the angel replied. "You are an idiot. You are all idiots. Except for Dr. Manning. You have no idea what lurks in the air above your heads and underneath your feet. If you did, you would never stop screaming."
There was silence. "What do you mean?" Krauss whispered. "I can see – "
Lucine did her best approximation of an eye-roll; it was difficult as her transplanted eyes did not work quite in tandem. "You can see what people see, which is nothing. You were profligate with that astral projection foolishness and where did it get you? Didn't you know that any number of nasty things can snatch your soul when it is out of your body? That is what my kind does, you moron. The 'creatures' you call angels of death. Our job is to keep the demons off you long enough for you to be delivered to your final judgment. Unless you are stupid enough to leave your body on your own accord, of course. And look at you now. You live in a bag of rubber and plastic with a mixing bowl for a head and fancy yourself an expert on the invisible world. I – "
Tom gave a covering chuckle. "I'm sure that Lucine would be glad to protect the BPRD against devils for you, Dr. Krauss, right after you figure out how to protect it against the general public." Manning feigned a long-distance glance at the building. "I think I see a family group from Seacaucus walking right in and making themselves at home as we speak. I do believe they brought a picnic lunch."
"What – things – under – our feet?" Johann continued to sputter, ignoring Manning's comments. The other agents stared at Lucine, both fascinated and horrified. What exactly had she meant? Some of them looked about furtively.
"Excuse us, then," Tom declared. "Our reservation is at eight." The pair turned and began to walk away.
"That creature belongs in a containment chamber!" Krauss shrieked after them.
"Over my dead body," Manning replied.
"She's a danger to humankind!"
Tom stopped short. "She's not a danger to me. She's certainly not a danger to former Agent Hellboy. And I strongly doubt if she'll be a danger to Luigi's restaurant. Now, she may well indeed be a danger to a couple of glasses of Chianti and a plate of linguine with clam sauce; I will grant you that."
Lucine snickered. Humor was new to her and she found it highly enjoyable.
Krauss's voice was clipped and the arms of his containment suit were tightly crossed over his chest. "Very imprudent, Dr. Manning! You are highly imprudent! If someone angers her tonight and she goes off like a nuke and destroys half of northern New Jersey, it will be on your head and not mine! Do I make myself perfectly clear?"
Lucine's eyes narrowed. With a barely audible "plink", the dome on Krauss's containment suit cracked.
"I'm sure she'll be an absolute angel," Manning replied, walking her toward his car.
"She is going to pay for this!" Krauss cried, feeling the ectoplasmic tendrils that made up his earthly being migrating into the cold night air.
Lucine hissed and bared her teeth at him.
"Just deduct it from her consultant salary, Johann," Tom responded, now nearly out of sight.
"What salary?"
"My point exactly."
XXXXXXX
Tom Manning sat up suddenly in his bed. The room was possessed of the utter silence of two o'clock in the morning.
"I just had the strangest dream," he declared. "I dreamed that you trashed BPRD headquarters in order to go out on a date with me."
Lucine the Messenger opened her eyes and sighed. "What enormous egos you human males have," she replied. "Go back to sleep."
The End