Chapter 8

Loreto woke up suddenly. Immediately her center pulsed in alert. Her retinas acclimated to the indirect light in the surroundings. She was laying. She raised her head and saw herself in a bed. Was she in the hospital? The intravenous catheters connected to the back of her right hand and to the left arm told her it seemed so. The index of her left hand had a gray plastic tweezers. It measured her pulse. Each pulse of her finger matched with a beep, which at that moment became apparent to her ears. She studied her surroundings. Before the feet of the bed was a wardrobe of minimalist design. At her left, a leather armchair and a design standing lamp. The floor was covered with a thick white rug inviting to stand on it with bare feet. Both the walls as also the roof were painted plain white, and the floor had dark gray tiles of opaque look. A big horizontal mirror covered a prominent part of the wall at her right along with a closed door. Even though the room did not look like a hospital one, the bed did for it had rails at the side and a remote control to adjust different positions. Suddenly she was conscious of the coldness in her limbs. She trembled and all the pores in her skin stood in goosebumps. She fought against the shuddering of her teeth and tried to stand up from the bed. Her back, shoulders and neck complained releasing powerful pulls and stabs forcing her to lay back on the mattress. She took the control remote of the bed, resting at the reach of her right hand against her thigh on the comforter. She tried to operate it and had to ignore the uncomfortable sensation of the needle crushing against the vein under her skin. With effort she pressed the bottom to lift the head. At the corner of her eyes to the right she saw somebody entering the room. It was a man who wore a white coat. He asked how she was feeling, whether he could do something for her. Only then she noticed how thirsty and hungry she was.

"Where am I? Who brought me here?," she asked, still dizzy.

"You find yourself in the facilities of the B.P.R.D., Miss Clair," the man said as he wrote in a binder the values of the screens at both her sides. "The agents Hellboy, Sherman and Sapien brought you here from the theater. You lost consciousness."

It took her awhile to find the last memory before passing out. She had lost balance and fallen to the floor. Then somebody had taken her in their arms and everything vanished behind a black blanket. The terrorist. Nuada? The pit of her stomach dropped in fear.

"Did they catch the terrorist?"

The man nodded, revealing no further detail.

"Then I can go home already," she said and attempted to get up from the bed.

There was no movement she attempted that wouldn't release a chain of cramps. How long had she been in bed?

"I'm afraid we can't sign your release just yet," the man said and finished writing on his binder. He closed it and faced her, "Miss Clair, we found an adenocarcinoma in the wall of your stomach."

For a good two or three seconds all Loreto could hear was a loud beep in her ears. Her head pulsed, about to boil. She searched inside the man's eyes for the meaning of what he had just said, or rather, the confirmation he wasn't referring to what she feared. The man coughed in his fist and put away the binder somewhere at the feet of the bed. He returned by her side.

"It's a malignant tumor."

Her gaze watered, bulging in tears. She blinked several times, unable to believe. Cancer? She? How?

"For your peace of mind I inform you we have successfully removed it. What's left now to do is to control the possibility of a metastasis to the neighboring organs."

Loreto placed her hands on her abdomen and palpated her skin under the chemise she had on. There they were, five small bandages spread along her core. She stood up and let herself fall on the bed. She barely felt the pull of each of them. These scars weren't recent.

"When was I operated? What day is it?," she barely uttered with a thin thread of voice.

"Exactly two weeks ago. We induced a coma to facilitate and quicken the regeneration process."

She didn't know what dazzled her the most. Whether the fact of having cancer, of having been operated without her consent or having been in a coma absent from the world for two weeks. She had never been in a hospital for more than two days in a row and due to nothing more serious than a common flu as she was a child. This was no hospital. It was that secret agency of paranormal investigation. How had they even discovered the tumor in her stomach? Don't you actually need a bunch of exams to determine the nature and degree of a cancer? A second door at her left opened and a blue figure entered. She didn't believe what her eyes saw. If her senses weren't betraying her, that which now neared towards her looked like a mutant halfway between a human and a fish. What kind of place was this?! The man with a white coat, a medical doctor she assumed, greeted it, commented on the stable values of her vital signals and that he had just informed Loreto about the surgery and its repercussions.

"I'm glad to see you awake and on the mend, Miss Clair," the man-fish said in impeccable English.

Loreto opened her eyes at their maximum capacity. She observed him, fascinated and horrified in equal measure. He was singularly skinny and tall. He had big gills at both sides of his tall neck, huge deep blue almond-shaped eyes, a nose lost under the curve of his profile and marbled skin in different shades of blue. He only wore a black pair of Bermuda shorts and sneakers of the same color. He possessed the torso of a human man with marked pectorals and abs. He asked her permission to remove the blanket and approached his web-footed hands to her stomach. For a few seconds his hands levitated millimeters away from her chemise as he lost his gaze in the nothingness. The vertical membranes which were his eyelids opened and closed a few times. Then he came back to himself and covered her with the blanket.

"I don't perceive cancer cells," he said with satisfaction and faced the doctor.

"It was Agent Sapien who felt the tumor inside your abdomen," the doctor clarified and spoke to her.

"What are you?," Loreto mumbled and neared a hand to the fish-man.

The doctor smirked and left.

"I'm an amphibian humanoid," he said with total normality. "I understand that, for people unaware of my existence as also that of my brother Red, we may scare with our appearances. My apologies," he said and lowered his head.

"You're talking about agent Hellboy, right?"

The humanoid nodded.

"Is he your brother?," Loreto barely uttered.

"Not by blood, clearly," he joked. "We both were discovered by this agency and raised by the same scientist, Professor Broom."

"What happened to the terrorist?"

"We captured him. He's under surveillance in this facility. He was about to get his hands on a weapon capable of exterminating the human race. We had to stop him. But about that you mustn't worry. Your task is to rest and to fully recover."

The terrorist was under the same roof as she meters away. She had helped to capture him. If he found her in this place... Agent Sapien seemed to feel her fear.

"Do not fear, Miss Clair. We won't allow him to approach you. Prince Nuada is totally restricted from movement and too weak to escape," the agent said, and with a brief gesture he said goodbye and left the room.

A prince? A terrorist prince? There was a piece of information she was missing to even make sense of all of this. Restricted of movement and too weak? That could only mean one thing: they were torturing him.