Spider-Man - The Darkest Hours

by Jim Butcher

  "Maybe," she admitted.

  "I think maybe you're having a bad day," I said. "I think that she's mostly a convenient target."

  "Of course you'd say that," she snapped. Then she forced herself to stop, the harshness in her voice easing, barely. "Because you're insightful and sensitive. And because you're probably right."

  "Yeah," I said. "That's hardly fair to you."

  She lifted her hand in a gesture of appeasement. "Peter, I do my best to be rational and reasonable about everything I can. But I think maybe I'm running low on rationality where Felicia is concerned."

  "Why?" I asked.

  "Because she gets to help you when I can't," Mary Jane said. "Because you used to date her. Because she doesn't respect such banal conventions as marriage and probably wouldn't hesitate to rip off her clothes and make eyes at you, given half an excuse."

  "MJ. She wouldn't do that."

  "Oh? Then why is she dressed like some kind of corporate prostitute?"

  I sat down next to my wife, put my hands on her shoulders, and said, "She wouldn't do that. And it wouldn't matter if she did. I'm with you, Red."

  "I know," she said, frustrated. "I know. It's just..."

  "It's a tough time, and between the two of us there isn't enough sanity to cover everything."

  She sighed. "Exactly."

  "No sweat. I've got it covered," I said. "I'll take care of business, release the pressure, Felicia will probably go back to her glamorous life in private security, and everything will be like it usually is - which is good."

  She covered one of my hands with hers and said, "It is pretty good, isn't it."

  "I always thought so."

  She took a deep breath and nodded. "All right. I'll... somehow avoid clawing her eyes out. I can't promise you anything more than that."

  "I'll take it," I said. I kissed her again, and we went back into the living room.

  Felicia hadn't eaten anyone's omelet. She was, however, giving the fridge an enthusiastic rummaging, setting things haphazardly on the counter by the sink as she did.

  Mary Jane paused, and her cheek twitched a couple of times. Then she took a deep breath, clenched her hands into fists, and sat down at the table without launching even a verbal assault. She began eating her omelet in small, precise bites while Felicia continued foraging in the refrigerator.

  Felicia eventually decided on the leftover pizza and popped it in the microwave while I sat back down.

  "All right," I said to Felicia. "What did you find out about Gothy McGoth and her brothers?"

  "That we're in trouble."

  "Gosh. Really."

  She stuck out her tongue at me. "Mortia is connected, and in a major way.

  She controls at least half a dozen corporations, two of them Fortune companies. She's visited the White House twice in the last five years and has more money than

  Oprah - none of which can be found in documented record or proved in a court of law."

  I frowned. "How'd you find out, then?"

  "Let's just say that I know some very intelligent and socially awkward men with a certain facility for the electronic transfer of information."

  She checked the pizza with her fingers, licked a blob of tomato sauce from them, and sent it for another spin cycle in the microwave. "The point is that these people have money, employees, and enormous resources. And bad things can happen to people who start sniffing around.

  Several investigators looking into their business turned up dead in really smooth professional hits. They looked like accidents."

  "How do you know they were murders, then?"

  "Because the Foreigner said so."

  Mary Jane frowned at me. "The Foreigner?"

  "Professional assassin," I said quietly. "He killed Ned Leeds. Hired a mutant named Sabretooth to kill Felicia."

  Felicia smiled, and it made her eyes twinkle. "He can cook - oh my goodness! And his wine cellar is to die for."

  Mary Jane blinked. "You dated him? Before or after he tried to kill you?"

  "After, of course," Felicia said with a wicked little smile. "It made things... very interesting."

  Mary Jane's fork clicked a bit loudly on her plate for a moment as she cut the omelet into smaller pieces with its edge.

  "I'm out of the business," Felicia said, "but we keep in touch. I went skiing with him in South Africa last summer. Even the Foreigner's information on Mortia was very sketchy, but it gave me places to start looking." She took a bite of pizza. "And our best move is to blow town."

  "What?" I asked.

  "I picked up four plane tickets for London, and from there we can cover our tracks and get elsewhere. I can have new identities set up within the day."

  Mary Jane blinked at Felicia and then at me.

  I finished my omelet's last bite, swallowed, and set my fork down.

  "Four?"

  "You, me, Aunt May, and MJ," Felicia said. "We have to get all of you out together."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "This is a no-win, Peter," Felicia said, her tone growing serious.

  "Without more knowledge, you can't take those three on. And if we start nosing around to get that knowledge, one of their managers is going to notice it and correct the problem."

  "And hit men are supposed to be scarier to me than the Ancients?" I asked.

  She finished the first piece of pizza with a grimace. "I guess you cooked, eh?"

  "Stop trying to dodge the question," I said.

  She looked down for a moment, her expression uncertain. Then she glanced at Mary Jane. "The Ancients are rich. One person has already found out about Peter's alter ego by spending a lot of money and using his brain.

  If they're willing to expend the money and manpower, it's only a matter of time before the Ancients know, too." Then she glanced at me. "And then you won't be the only one in danger."

  My stomach felt cold and quivery, and my eyes went to Mary Jane.

  Her eyes were wide with fear, too. "Aunt May," she said quietly.

  Aunt May was out of town at the moment. Her friend Anna had won two tickets on an Alaskan cruise liner in a contest on the radio, and they were off doing cruise-liner things for the next few days. The brochure had said something about glaciers and whales.

  It occurred to me that there really wouldn't be anywhere for Aunt May to run or anyplace to hide, trapped out on a ship like that.

  "The people they send won't be obsessive, melodramatic maniacs like your usual crowd, Pete," Felicia continued, her voice calm and very serious.

  "They'll use strangers, cold men, with years of skill, patience, and no interest whatsoever in anything but concluding their business and taking their money to the bank. They'll find you, stalk you, and kill you, and it won't mean any more to them than balancing their checkbook."

  "All the more reason to take care of it right now," I said quietly.

  "No," Felicia replied. "All the more reason to run right now. For the moment, the Ancients don't know any more about you than you do about them. If Peter Parker and his family vanish now, you'll be able to hide -

  to bide your time until we can figure out more about the Ancients or else get some help in taking them down."

  "I'm not - ," I began.

  "Whereas if you wait," Felicia said, running right over me, "if you keep going the way you are, they'll find out who you are, probably within a few days. Then it's too late. Then they'll use their resources to keep track of you and everyone you care about, and you won't have the option of running anymore. You won't be able to get out of sight long enough to come up with a new identity."

  Silence fell.

  I've been afraid of bad guys before. That wasn't anything new. The people I care about have been put in danger before. That wasn't new, either. But this time was different. This time a choice I had to make would determine whether or not they'd be in danger. If I stood my ground, the Ancients would use them to get me out in the open, and the only way I could keep them absolutely safe was to hide
them - or else to get eaten, in which case my loved ones would no longer be of value or interest to the Ancients.

  But it would mean vanishing, maybe for a while. It would mean leaving behind a lifetime there, in our town, our home. New York can be dirty and ugly and rude and difficult and dangerous, but it is by thunder my home, and I would not allow anyone to just rip it away.

  Bold words. But I wondered if I'd ever be able to look at myself in a mirror again if MJ or Aunt May got hurt because of my stubbornness.

  I looked up at Mary Jane, searching for answers.

  My wife met my gaze and lifted her chin with her eyes slightly narrowed, a peculiarly pugnacious look on her lovely face.

  I felt my lips pull away from my teeth in a fierce grin.

  Felicia looked back and forth between us and drew a small packet consisting of airline tickets held in a rubber band from her jacket pocket. She tossed it negligently in the trash can. "Yeah," she sighed.

  "I was afraid you'd see it like that."

  Chapter 11

  Felicia accompanied me to the libraries, plural. The New York Public Library system is enormous, and it took most of the morning to get through the three different branches I wanted to visit. By the time I was finished hunting through the stacks of books, Felicia looked like she might simply explode from pure nerves.

  "What's wrong?" I asked her. "Bibliophobic?"

  "Never met a bibble I didn't like," she replied. "It's just that I haven't ever actually come to a library for the books before."

  I blinked at her. "Why else would you be here?" She gestured around us.

  We were down in the basement of this one, and it was nearly deserted, and quiet. "Look around, Peter. Lots and lots of long rows of books, lots of dim little crannies - not a lot of people." She tipped the rather frumpy hornrimmed glasses down. "Imagine the possibilities."

  "I'm imagining books getting damaged," I told her, half-amused. "And after that, I seem to remember that libraries occasionally carry rare books, and sometimes important documents or pieces of art."

  "Why, Peter. I'm shocked that you would suggest such a thing." She sighed. "Besides, that isn't a terribly good market. It's difficult to move any of the take. It's all too identifiable. You've got to go to a foreign market to get decent money and it adds in several more middlemen who..." She gave me a brilliant smile. "Should I go on?"

  "Please don't," I said.

  "What are you looking for down here, anyway?"

  "Stories," I said. "Folklore, specifically Native American folklore.

  There were powerful totemic images all through their society and their religious beliefs. Especially with regards to their shamans."

  "What's a shaman?"

  "It's like a wizard or a holy man," I said. "They were often the healers and advisers of a tribe. They communicated with the spirit world, negotiated with spirits for the benefit of the tribe. There was a lot of lore about them taking on the shape of various animals." I shrugged.

  "Maybe they really did. Or at least, maybe they could do some extraordinary things - like mutants."

  Felicia nodded. "You think the Ancients did some feeding on them."

  "I think it's worth investigating. It's possible that if anyone encountered them and survived it, it would make one heck of a good story.

  There's a chance that it passed into their folklore."

  Felicia frowned. "Like... like if there was a real-live Pecos Bill who was a mutant who could control tornados? And he was used as the source of the myth? Something like that?"

  Felicia isn't exactly a moron herself.

  "Just like that," I said. Then I jabbed my finger down on the page.

  "Aha!"

  "Do people really say that?" she asked. But she came around the table and sat down in the chair next to me. "What did you find?"

  "This is the third mention I've found of a tribal shaman being pursued by a wendigo. It's a Native American manitou - a spirit creature. It's a kind of punishment that happens to people who resort to cannibalism to survive. They're possessed by the wendigo and transformed into a creature of endless hunger, doomed to haunt the earth forever, looking for victims to devour."

  "Sounds like our Ancients all right," Felicia said. "Except that from what you've said, they eat energy, not flesh. And they aren't human. And they only eat once every several years. So it really sounds nothing like them."

  I shook my head. "But the details of the story don't necessarily have to be accurate. Think about it. One of the Ancients gets hungry. It comes into a tribe, looking like one of them, to pursue its victim. Then, it and the victim go hunting, or gathering herbs or what have you. The Ancient attacks and leaves a dried husk behind. Later, concerned relatives and friends find the ruined corpse, which is nothing but bones and skin, as if the meat had been sucked out of it. And the new tribesman, the Ancient, has vanished." I shrugged. "Why not assume that the stranger had been a wendigo? Give me some time and I could probably make a case for the original Grendel of folklore being something similar."

  "Ah," Felicia said, though she didn't look confident in my hypothesis.

  "So. Does it say how to kill a wendigo?"

  "It's got a heart of ice," I replied. "The traditional way to kill it is to melt the ice."

  "We could get Mortia a nice card," Felicia suggested. "Some roses, some chocolate, maybe a Yanni CD and a bottle of Chianti..."

  "Very funny," I said. "Look, each of these stories is different. In the first two, the wendigo destroys the shaman it hunted. In the last one, though, the shaman had a twin brother, who was a great hunter. The two of them overcame the wendigo."

  "I know one set of twin brothers," Felicia admitted. "Though admittedly, I'm not sure if they could take on an Ancient, even though they were definitely in great shape." She frowned. "Come to think of it, I'm not even sure I remember their names."

  I snorted. "It wasn't that they were twins," I said. "It's that there were two of them fighting it."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "Comparative data," I said.

  'You notice how quick Mortia and her goons vanished after you showed up?"

  Felicia blinked. "I... suppose they did."

  "Mmmm. And there were police nearby, choppers coming in close. I think that it posed some kind of threat to them."

  Felicia laughed. "Are you kidding? I'll be the first one to tell you how fantastic I am, but I'm not stupid, Pete. I couldn't last a round with any of them, let alone all three. I don't think I made them nervous. I don't think the cops made them nervous."

  "Maybe," I said. "But something did."

  "They didn't look nervous," she said.

  "Maybe it was only a marginal threat," I said. "Maybe that was enough to make them cautious."

  "Why would they do that?"

  "It's the nature of predators," I said. "No matter how hungry one of them gets, there are some things they won't do. If the prey is too dangerous, a predator will look for an easier target if possible. They know that if they're wounded in the course of bringing down the prey, it will render them unable to continue hunting effectively. They don't take chances if they can help it."

  Felicia frowned and nodded. "Throw the fact that they're immortal into the mix, too. If you had eternity to lose as the price of a mistake, you wouldn't take any chances, either."

  "Right," I said. "So we know they've got a weakness. They don't want to face more than one target at a time."

  "Good," Felicia said. "Now. How does that help us? Specifically."

  "Working on it," I said. "Let me get back to you.

  What did you find out about the Rhino and his money? Any way we could nab it, get him to part company with the Ancients?"

  "Not a prayer," she said. "The money trail looks like an Escher drawing.

  It could take months to sort it out."

  "Mmmm," I said. "Anything more?"

  "Quite a bit, actually. The Foreigner gave me a copy of his own file on the Rhino."

  "And?
"

  "Aleksei Mikhailovich Sytsevich," she began.

  "Gesundheit."

  "Immigrated to the States from the Soviet Union, back when they had one.

  He'd come over to get a job that would pay enough for him to bring the rest of his family - the usual American dream. But since he didn't have much in the way of education, he couldn't get a job that would offer him enough money."

  I grunted.

  "He was big and tough, though. He wound up working as an enforcer for the mob. Someone - the Foreigner isn't sure who - offered him a chance to participate in an experiment. The one where they grafted the armored hide to his skin."

  "Did they give him that hat, too?"

  "Yes."

  "The fiends."

  "Stop interrupting," Felicia said. "Later, he went through another experiment that enhanced his strength as well, enabling him to go toe-to-toe with the Incredible Hulk. He lost, but he made the Hulk work for it."

  "Engh," I said. "Well, it's too bad we couldn't subtract him, but he won't affect the equation too badly."

  Felicia gave me a pointed look. "Equation? Peter. He's fought the Hulk."

  "So what?" I said. "I've fought the Hulk. The Hulk's personality being what it is, pretty much everybody has fought the Hulk."

  Felicia leaned over and peered at my face.

  "What you doing?" I asked her.

  "Seeing if your eyes have turned green." She smiled at me. "The Rhino's had a lot of work with various villains, and has a reputation as an extremely tenacious mercenary. As long as no one sends him after the Hulk, apparently."

  "Or me," I said.

  She patted my hand. "Or you."

  I scowled at her. "Why are you giving me a hard time about this?"

  She shrugged. "Maybe it's my background. As mercenaries go, the Rhino isn't all that bad a guy."

  "Not all that bad? He wrecks things left and right! Factories, buildings, vehicles - "

  "And," Felicia said, "in the midst of all that destruction, he's never actually killed anyone. That says something about him, Pete."

  "Even if he hasn't killed anyone, he's still breaking the law. He destroys property, steals money and valuables, and in general makes a profit off of his victims' losses."

  Felicia removed her glasses and stared hard at me for a second. Then she said, her voice very quiet, "The way I used to do."