Leah came in the next morning to find Kroenen lying down on the operating table, calm as if the previous evening's theatrics had never taken place. There was something more animated about him, a humming energy rather than the corpse-like stillness he had evinced before, something almost cheerful. Leah shuddered a little. As his strength grew, her importance decreased.

She was surprised to find no one guarding the room, but prisoner negotiations were not her department. If no one stopped her from working, she would work. Still, his energetic movements, helping her make his final improvements, unnerved her. He had found the key she left for him. She left it as a token, if not of esteem, perhaps as a nod, one colleague to another--a message to tell him she saw him as more than a prisoner.

Leah wished to herself for the thousandth time, as she sewed up a wound on the back of his leg, that occult pathology were an accepted form of science. The journals that would allow any articles on the fascinating creature before her were the worst kind of periodical. They filled their pages with dating advice for werewolves, and advertisements for suppliers of black market blood. They would only accept her articles considerably dumbed down from her usual scientific standards.

If only she had stayed with the NYPD's pathology department. When a ghoul showed up on her operating table, she made her report accordingly, only to find herself forced to endure daily appointments with the police psychiatrist. No, she told herself, at least here she did not have to lie to anyone about what she saw. Better to go through life with her eyes open . . . and that thought brought her back to her patient, whose eyes would never be closed. She wondered if that bit of surgery had been a metaphorical statement carved into his flesh.

As she cut the last piece of thread, Kroenen quickly rolled over and grabbed her wrist, his fingers pinching like a vise, and grinding her flesh against the bones. A body on a table, its arm laid open to the bone, her own hands grasping a cauterizing torch and a scalpel . . .fingers twitching . . . the sounds of screams echoed in her ears but she ignored them and bent to her task. Leah twisted her arm out of his grasp and backed toward the door. He made no attempt to follow.

"You could learn so much," he said in a harsh and garbled whisper, and she realized he was offering her Faust's bargain.

"You're finished," she said, not answering his unspoken question. "You're fixed." Leah had her hand on the doorknob, and she pulled it open and went through it so fast it caught her lab coat as she closed it. She bent to free herself, and on the floor saw Abe's Rubik Cube. No telling why it was there. She cradled it in her hands for a few moments and looked in on her patient. He stood in he bare feet, with bare eyeballs turned toward her. He made such a pathetic looking figure that Leah felt a moment of pity. She opened the door again, just a crack, and threw the toy to him. His arm shot out fast as a snake's tongue and he caught it.
Abe would have liked to huddle in a corner with his arms wrapped around his knees as he had seen Liz, and even Hellboy, do when they were sad or overwhelmed, but such a motion did not work well in a tank of water, and bobbing around like a cork did not help him get a handle on his mood.

Earlier in the day Manning had come to his tank, tapping on it again with that obnoxious ring. "Well? Did he tell you anything?"

"Yes," Abe said shortly.

"And . . . ? Will I see a report? Some time this year?"

"Later," said Abe, and he swam to the back of his tank, and answered no more of Manning's impatient questions.

Kroenen's memories must be confronted; there was simply no other way. All Abe could do was sort through them, write them down, and make them into an easily digestible report. Much like his own bad memories, these would be better when he faced them. Having been on the wrong side of far too much experimentation and testing at the hands of BPRD scientists, Abe was frightened to face the nightmare version of the person on the other side of those memories, the torturer-doctor he always feared all scientists could be. Even himself. Yes, there lay the meat of his fears, that if he understood Kroenen too thoroughly, he would become him.

There was no help for it. Abe swam to the top of his tank and put on his dry weather gear. He liked typing at least; Manning would have let him dictate to a stenographer, but Abe's hyper-flexible fingers made typing a pleasure. Abe sat down to his computer in the corner of Professor Bruttenholm's old office, where it stood out incongruously shiny and new among the old papers and books. His keyboard had a plastic shield on it so he could keep his hands wet and comfortable as he wrote.

Karl Ruprect Kroenen was born in 1897. By the age of 10 he performed his first blood sacrifice . . .
In her office, Leah attempted to type up a report of her own, but her mind kept wandering. Of course she would never accept Kroenen's offer. It was wrong, impossible, unacceptable and, of course, far too tempting. Leah did not share his apocalyptic fervor, but the idea of limitless experimentation, unbounded by ethical considerations did exert a pull on her imagination. And she could publish again. She had heard rumors of rogue labs in places like Zaire, Western China, and remote areas of Pakistan where even respectable drug companies outsourced their testing, places where human life was cheap.

I won't go, she thought, but I'd like to know I have the option. Which she wouldn't if Kroenen remained in BPRD custody. His melding of flesh and metal held such promise for the prosthetics industry, and his magic--well, Leah was enough of an expert in her field of occult pathology to know that his source of unlife was unique and needed more study. Imprisoning him, or worse yet, executing him, would rid the world of all that promise.

Some part of her mind wondered if these thoughts and feelings were truly hers, but she brushed that away. Still, any plan would have to be put into motion quickly, before Abe overheard an errant thought and stopped the whole thing. First he would need his swords, mask and mechanical hand. Leah stood up and went down to Evidence.

The BPRD had a sizable machine shop--mostly used for constructing weapons or containment units--and when Leah walked in she saw one of the technicians holding one of the swords into the furnace with a pair of tongs. Leah yelled above the din of fire and machinery, "What do you think you're doing?"

The technician pulled the sword out of the furnace and turned around. "It won't melt," he said. "It barely even gets hot. The mass spectrometer says it's a fairly ordinary steel alloy, but that would melt at this temperature."

"Did you even think about physical evidence?" Leah spat, hoping to jolt the man out of his techie haze. "Well?"

"Dr. Andrews. The pathology techs already checked all his effects over. I got permission."

"Not from me you didn't. I'm point on this project, or didn't anyone tell you." Leave it to Manning to undermine her authority. The tech looked sheepish.

"I haven't put the other one in the furnace yet," he said.

"Thank God for small favors," Leah snapped. "Have someone box up all of Kroenen's effects and bring them to my office."

"Yes ma'am," said the tech, fully chastened now.

Leah went back to wait in her office, and only ten minutes passed before the tech brought up a neatly packed crate containing boots, jumpsuit, vest, mask and sitting on top the mechanical hand. Leah thanked him curtly, and shooed him out. She picked up the hand from the top of the box, admiring the elegant filigree work in the metal. Another frustrated artist? she thought, then shied away from such imagining.

She glanced at her wall clock. Night was falling outside; the time approached to execute her plan, if it happened at all. She carried the box into her operating theater, where Kroenen waited expectantly.

She started to tell him that she had a plan, but the words were choked off somehow. He gestured for the box of his things and Leah handed it to him. She felt as if she were not fully under her own control, but she turned her back to give him privacy as he put back on his gear, and the pictures of his plan formed inside her mind. Leah found herself nodding in agreement.

Leah turned at a clattering noise behind her. Kroenen had opened up a collapsible gurney and lain himself down on it. He beckoned to her and Leah covered him with a sheet so she could wheel him out the door, but then she stopped for a moment.

"How do you know Abe won't find out? He'll read my mind later! This was a dreadful idea," she said suddenly. She stepped back, expecting to find herself held captive by Kroenen's terrible grip, but instead he spoke.

"He will not read you. I swear it," he rasped.

"But--" Leah protested.

"I swear it." His tone would allow no argument. Leah fixed her hair under a surgeon's cap, and put on a mask as well, so she would look like any other orderly at a quick glance. She wheeled him out the door and to the morgue. This evening the funeral home would come to pick up the body of Kyle MacDonald, Kroenen's victim, but instead they would get his murderer.

Leah flashed her badge and the attendant waved her through, back into the refrigerated room of locks and drawers. She found an empty drawer and affixed Kyle's tag to it. These drawers could be removed as a sealed coffin-like box, so, with luck, they would never even check that it was Kyle's body within. Leah started to raise the gurney up to the height of the drawer when Kroenen sat up.

"Thank you," he said. He tilted his head to one side, and Leah thought he might say something more. She drew closer to hear what he might say, but instead of speaking he grabbed her throat and drove one of his small knives into the back of her neck.

Kroenen leapt down from the gurney, and picked up Leah's fallen body. He had promised, and now Abe would not read her mind. Still, it seemed a waste of such an amoral intelligent person. She could have been very useful. He lowered the gurney and placed her on it. Blood had spilled over the front of her scrubs, but none had touched him or the floor. He eased the knife out of her neck and let the blood soak slowly into the padding on the stretcher.

Kroenen had taken one item with him from the operating theater that was not his own, the odd cubic toy given him by Leah. Leave it to a woman to be so purposelessly sentimental, he thought. He tucked it under her hands. In death, the unpleasant line between her eyes had smoothed out, and the mean, pinched look from her features relaxed. Kroenen looked at her again before pulling the sheet up over her face.

Kroenen turned to maneuver himself into the morgue drawer, but something drew him back. Leaning over the woman's body, he whispered a spell. Three days hence, if it were her desire, she would come to find him. The spell would only animate her for a short amount of time, and if she wished to remain dead, so she would stay, but it would give her enough power to open a grave and seek him out.
Abe typed without ceasing for nearly eighteen hours. Finally, almost too stiff and sore to stand, he made his way back to his tank and slept a dreamless sleep.

In the morning he went to see Dr. Andrews. Of anyone in the BPRD, she would have the best idea of what they should do with Kroenen after fixing him. He needed to talk it out with someone, but she was not in her office, and even worse, neither her nor Kroenen was in the operating theater. Abe turned to sound the alarm, when it started going off of its own accord.

"All senior personnel needed in the morgue immediately!" came a panicked male voice over the loudspeakers. Abe raced through the halls, nearly running into Hellboy on his way. He pushed past Hellboy, and heard him say an aggrieved "Hey", but he did not stop.

The morgue seemed full of people in lab coats, but they all stepped back and away from the body in their midst. There lay Leah with a Rubik Cube clasped like some bizarre bouquet in her hands. Abe took it from her, easing it out of her stiff fingers. It had dried blood on it, but Abe could see that every side had only one color. It had been solved.

A cursory investigation cleared Abe of any negligence and placed the blame on Dr. Andrews. Abe received a commendation for the thoroughness of his report.

The next day the story on the front page of all the Newark papers was of a stabbing in a funeral home. Two days later the elderly owner of the same funeral home died of a heart attack when a female corpse, stabbed through the neck, got up and walked away from his slab.