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enough to know the difference.
    "What's funny?" Hellboy asked.
    Abe tilted his head. "It isn't the chair that has you distracted."
    "I'm not distracted."
    Abe nodded, as though allowing for the possibility that this was the truth. He started to put his headphones back on, then paused.
    "You never told me the story, you know."
    Hellboy glanced out the window, wondering where they were. Their destination was twelve hours ahead of Connecticut on the international time chart. The plane had taken off at a quarter past ten in the evening. That meant it was already morning in Tibet. It would take them thirty-three hours to reach the landing strip and several hours more to unload and travel to the site of the archaeological dig.
    A day and a half. And Anastasia was waiting.
    "What story?"
    "You know," Abe said. "All you've ever said was that you and Anastasia met while you were on a case. Why haven't you ever told me the story?"
    Hellboy glanced at him. "Liz hasn't told you?"
    "You told Liz, but not me?" Abe said, obviously a bit irked.
    "Yeah. And she told you she was taking a leave of absence, but not me. We're all such fickle friends."
    Abe stared at him, wide eyes almost hypnotic. "You're avoiding the subject."
    "You think, Dr. Freud?"
    "I'm not going to analyze you. I'm just curious. Never mind. I didn't mean to pry."
    And that was it, precisely. Hellboy did not mind talking about Stasia, and some of the digs they went on together during the year and a half that he had traipsed around the world with her playing Indiana Jones, and falling in love. Gloriously, stupidly in love. But the things that were intimate, that were shared only by the two of them, he'd always held close.
    But Stasia was just an ex, now, an old flame, and Abe was one of his closest friends.
    "I met her in a pub," he said.
    Abe perked up. "A pub? You're not serious."
    Hellboy gave him an impatient stare.
    "Okay, a pub," Abe relented. "But you said you'd met her on a case."
    "I did. The case just happens to end with the opening line of a bad joke. 'These two goblins walked into a bar....'"
    London, England, 10 June, 1979
    Hellboy didn't care much for punk, but there were times he could relate to the directionless anger and frustration that churned in all that sound and fury. For the pissed off youth of England, though, punk had been Camelot--a brief and shining moment. But it was late spring of '79, and Hellboy knew the moment was over. Punk was dead. How else to explain walking into a dark, smoky pub just down from Great Russell Street full of old-timers and museum curators and hearing The Sex Pistols on the little stereo behind the bar?
    The ripple of its effects was still expanding, but that was just echoes.
    Rain dripped from his trench coat as he entered the pub, carrying a small vacuum cleaner by its handle. The smell of damp metal filled his nostrils, along with smoke and stale beer. With the rain and fog and the lateness of the hour, it was black as pitch outside, but it was hardly any brighter in the pub. He ran his left hand--his ordinary hand--over the stubble on his head, wiping the beads of water away. Then he patted the pockets to make sure he had the little silver box.
    The smoke was nearly as thick as the fog had been outside. He started across the pub, the wooden beams of the floor creaking under his hooves. He kept his tail low, though he knew there weren't a lot of ways to make himself inconspicuous. Several of the old duffers at the bar tapped one another and gestured in his direction, and conversation began to diminish as he made his way through the pub. The tables on his left were jammed with university students and professorial types from the museum. One young redheaded woman cocked her head and raised an eyebrow as she watched him pass by, smoke ringlets drifting past her face like clouds across the moon. Her companion, a fiftyish man with a thick beard, knocked back a shot of whiskey. Several people--closest to the door--closed their