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the air was turning hazy.
    Artaud included, there were six men in black down here--four in cassocks and two in suits. None of them appeared to have enjoyed a restful night, with bleary eyes and stubbled faces all around. A rotund fellow sat repeatedly nodding off in his chair; his heavy jowls would squash outward with every sharp droop of his head, then he'd bob upright again and blink. A thin man with a balding skull and the prize for the room's darkest shadow of whiskers was pouring himself coffee, black as oil, from a silver thermos. Artaud introduced him as Vittorio Ranzi, his superior in the Archives.
    "I'm not much for ceremony, so it doesn't bother me," Hellboy said, "but if this is the best conference room you can come up with, it leads me to believe that whatever comes out of here won't have an official stamp of approval."
    "Official can mean many things," Ranzi told him. "Whatever comes of this will have the support of many hundreds more than you see here. For now, it is best if that support is quiet. Away from eyes and ears that would be better off blind and deaf to it."
    "Spoken like a true conspirator," Hellboy said. "Let me tell you something, just so we're clear on it: I hate doing other peoples' dirty work. And I hate it when people twist the truth to try and get me to do their dirty work."
    Kate put her hand on his arm. "Hey. You're getting a little ahead of yourself. Hear them out."
    The plump man in the chair, introduced as Archbishop Bellini, had jolted awake for good and struggled upright. "This place, this Church--if you know anything about her, then you know that no matter how tranquil she seems on the outside, underneath she always has some unrest. Always some struggle going on beneath her surface." He shook his head. "Dirty work? No, no, no. Where the Church is concerned, we here speak of evolution."
    "I don't believe I've ever heard that word spoken in positive terms by the clergy," Abe said.
    "And the reasons for that, the attitudes..." Bellini said. "Would you be the one to see them continue on, unchallenged? You especially, of all beings."
    No secrets here. They knew what Abe Sapien was, all right, or near enough. He may have taken care, on a trip like this, to conceal himself in a high-collared topcoat, under a hat, and behind glasses, but there was only so much normality he could project. Come to a place like this, where so many spent so much time dwelling on higher things--on the Creator of the world and their place in it, convinced they knew the answers to everything that mattered--and you had to wonder what they really thought of their visitors. Of someone as unique as Abe. Or, Hellboy thought, someone like me.
    He figured the reactions split along a pair of likely polarities.
    One: God indeed works in mysterious ways, and must surely love infinite variety.
    The other: A pity it's not four hundred years earlier, when we might have killed these things with impunity and the thanks of a grateful city.
    Bellini spoke of evolution? One look at an unconcealed Abe Sapien left you with the thought that Darwin had definitely been onto something. Abe had been found in the mid-'70s in Washington, D. C., deep in the basements beneath St. Trinian's Hospital. A plumbing crew had broken through a sealed door and happened upon a large room that not only predated anyone's living memory, but had also evaded replication on any known blueprints. Floating inside a tall, circular glass tank tipped back and resting at an angle, its base sunk into stagnant ooze, there he was: a long-slumbering fellow, humanoid in appearance, hairless and sleekly muscled, but with finned forearms and a neck that bristled with gills. The only clue to his origins--and scant evidence at that--was a note, penned by what appeared to have been an ornate Victorian hand and curled like parchment, affixed to a piece of the corroded and broken-down machinery near the tank.
    Icthyo Sapien, it read. April 14 1865.
    The same day President Lincoln