by Jim Butcher
Chapter 25
I MANAGED TO KEEP MY FEET and throw a punch.
It wasn't a fast punch or a strong punch, but it was the best I could do.
It wasn't good enough. Mortia slapped it aside, seized me, slammed me into the same car her brother had not two minutes before, and then threw me through the air to land near the Rhino.
"Quite the interesting morsel you are," she murmured, regarding me with amused eyes.
I counted birdies and stars. At least she'd hit the other side of my head. That way, my brain could be equally bruised on both sides. The agony of the Ancient's devouring touch was fading as my heart kept on beating, and I felt some of my balance returning.
Mortia flicked a bit of debris from her sleeve. "But all things in their due course, trickster. First, the tart little aperitif."
With that, she turned and walked deliberately toward Felicia.
At which point I found myself suddenly angry enough to chew barbed wire and spit nails. I'll say this for the bad guys: Just when they pound me the worst, they have this ongoing tendency to provide me with oodles of motivation.
So I motivated Mortia right through a mound of scrap metal by way of saying thanks.
She came out on the other side furious, her jacket and pants in tatters.
The steel had torn the expensive clothing to rags, though it hadn't broken her pale flesh. "Do you have any idea," she snarled, "how difficult it will be to replace this outfit?"
"You're one to talk!" I shot back. "At least you can get someone else to make yours!"
She came at me hard and fast, leaping from the ground to propel herself off the fence around the yard and straight at me.
This time there was no dodging, no webs, no tricks. I stepped forward to meet her and swatted her out of the air with a punch that killed her momentum cold. She bounced back from it with a spinning kick imported straight from Hong Kong that nearly took my head off. I managed to get away from it with nothing worse than a chipped tooth, but was reminded that I couldn't fight stupid against Mortia. She was too fast.
I ducked a second whirling kick, knocked her ankle out from underneath her with one leg, and got in a good stomp on her stomach, but then she drove her knuckles against the side of one of my knees, forcing me to hop away before I got knocked to the ground. After that, she came in close and brought a lot of hard, vicious, swift punches with her, throwing everything from less than a foot away, and all of it aimed at my eyes and nose and neck - Wing Chun, I think it's called. She'd had formal training somewhere.
I'd done all my learning in the school of hard knocks, and even if I don't have a pretty martial arts sheepskin, I can get the job done. I did a lot of bobbing and weaving, more boxing technique than anything else, spoiling the occasional blow with a quick slap of one hand. We closed and struck and counterstruck and parted a couple of times, each exchange several seconds long.
Whether it was the formal technique or just her sheer weight of experience and untiring speed, I missed a beat and took a chop to the side of the neck, followed by a stiff blow from the heel of her hand to the tip of my jaw that snapped my head back in a sudden whiplash.
I barely blocked a haymaker of an uppercut, and in a single motion splashed a blob of webbing into Mortia's face and followed up with a hard, driving strike with the same hand. I caught her on the forehead and knocked her tail-over-teakettle into one of the toxic-looking pools of the junkyard's liquid refuse.
She rose from the pool, her pale eyes cold and angry.
"There's something on your face," I told her.
She only stared at me with that intense, alien stare, and replied,
"You're getting tired. You're slowing down." She prowled around the little pool to-ward me. The top of her head never changed height as she walked; you could have balanced marbles on it. Her eyes, similarly, never varied in height above the ground, just floating along, wide and intent.
It was extremely graceful in an insectlike way, and highly creepy.
Especially because she was right. This wasn't going to be like my fight with Morlun. With him, even after I'd gotten tired, I had still been a lot faster than he was. With Mortia, I'd barely had an advantage when I was fresh, if I'd had one at all. As fast as she moved, it would not take much fatigue to slow me down enough to be overwhelmed by her sheer speed.
"Tired, mortal," Mortia murmured. "It's almost over. You can't avoid me for very much longer."
"Maybe not," I said. "But at least my outfit's still clean."
I guess she expected more whimpering and pleading, because my reply clearly enraged her. She came at me like she intended to tear my head off and it was suddenly all I could do to stay alive.
The fight got blurry after that. I had no frame of reference for time.
Every move she made came at me too quickly to see, and at the same time it seemed to take forever, if not longer. I remember landing a couple of good ones, and shrugging off a lot of lighter blows - a whole lot of them. She wasn't trying to KO me. All she wanted was to continue to inflict pain through smaller, repeated blows, to grind down my endurance.
It must have worked. I saw bloody knuckles rush at my face - her knuckles, my blood - and then a flash of white light.
After that, I stared up at the slowly brightening sky, which looked like it was getting ready to turn into a pretty day, and wondered why I wasn't back home in bed with MJ.
"My brothers are gone," she said. Her voice echoed and rang oddly, as if coming to me down a long tunnel. "Which I admit is mildly disturbing, but probably inevitable." She picked me up and threw me into a heavy beam supporting the structure of the car crusher. I struck sideways across the small of my back, and heard things crackle when I hit.
"They were always incautious, you see. Impatient. Once they saw the prey, they could only pursue it, devour it." She paused over the weakly stirring Rhino and crushed her heel down upon his head in several vicious kicks as she spoke in a conversational tone. "Ultimately, of course, I would have had to kill them. The world will not bear the strain of feeding even the few of our kind who remain, in the next several thousand years. As the source drains from this world, fewer and fewer of your kind appear, spider. And subsisting on lesser beings" - here, she paused to step over the unmoving Felicia - "is simply no way to live."
I got up and hit the car crusher with a webline near the top, using my left hand, intending to jump and swing and get some distance from Mortia.
I was moving too slowly, though, too weakly.
"All in all," she said, "I suppose I should be thanking you, in some ways." She seized my left arm, and with a squeeze and a twist she snapped the webline - and broke my wrist. I felt and heard my bones cracking under her viselike fingers.
Fiery pain took away whatever strength was left to me, and I fell to my knees.
"Yet," she continued in the same conversational tone, "they were family.
Companions over the empty years. They would have amused me, somewhat, until I had to kill them." She threw me with both hands - she wasn't as strong as Malos had been, but was at least as strong as I. I slammed into the mechanics' garage and left a deep dent in the rusty corrugated sheet metal that passed for its walls.
It hurt. A lot.
"Your struggle has been useless, of course," she said. She kicked my ribs several times, and all I could do about it was to try to exhale when her foot impacted me. It hurt even more. I'd have been screaming about it if I'd been able to get a breath. I'd have been running away if I could have managed to stand. "That's the way of the world, spider. Predators and prey. Your fall was inevitable. But the tricksters are always the most interesting hunts. Certainly more so than the brutes."
I tried crawling away, around the office building and garage. I dimly remembered that the chain-link gates had been there.
She picked me up with one arm and slammed me into the office building. I could see the gates, see the street outside through the chain links. It wasn't thirty feet away - but I'd neve
r reach it.
"Truth be told," Mortia purred, her voice growing deeper, huskier, "the brute will make a more than acceptable meal. But you will taste simply divine. A spirit such as yours will be most rich; most delightful." She idly ripped off the front of my costume, and pressed a kiss against my chest. Flickering sparkles appeared in my vision, and the nauseating pain of the Ancient's hunger brushed against me for a minute.
Mortia looked up, licked her lips, and shivered. "But your passing need not be agony. I can take you gently. Peacefully. It will be like falling asleep in my arms." Her eyes brightened. "All you need do is ask me to be merciful." She pinned me to the wall with one hand, looking up at me with the same horrible hunger I'd seen in the eyes of Morlun and Malos, just before they fed. "Beg, spider."
So this was it.
Huh. I hadn't really figured today would be the day.
But then, who does? Am I right? You never really wake up and think that it's your last day on this rock.
She leaned closer, almost close enough to kiss me. "Beg, spider."
I swallowed and faced her, no longer attempting to struggle or escape. I was through. No one was left to attack her when she fed. I was alone. I was going to die alone. But I'd taken down three out of four, and I hadn't abandoned anyone doing it. Not bad. Not bad.
"I have seen gods and demons at war," I told her, my voice hoarse. "I have seen worlds created and destroyed. I have fought battles on planets so far from Earth that the light from their stars has never reached us. I have seen good men die. I have seen evil men prosper, and I have seen scales balanced against all odds. I have seen the strong oppress the weak, the law protect criminals instead of citizens. I have fought with others and alone against every kind of enemy you can imagine, against every kind of injustice you can imagine." I met her eyes and said, quietly and unafraid, "And because of what you are, Mortia, you will never understand why."
She tilted my head, staring at me as though puzzled, the way someone might regard a talking lobster being held above the pot.
"In all that time," I said, my voice growing weaker, "I have never surrendered." And all the defiance I had left in me rose - too weak to stir my limbs, but giving my voice a hard, hot, edge of anger. "I will never beg you for anything. So you'd better stop flapping your stupid mouth and kill me. Or so help me God, I will destroy you just like I did your brothers."
Those cold, alien eyes grew colder. "Very well," she said, her voice low, throbbing with excitement. "Then you will feel every second. May you live long enough for the pain to drive you mad."
Her hand slammed flat to my bared chest.
My world drowned in pain. This time, as she began ripping at me, I wasn't even strong enough to writhe.
The shadow play of the world went on in the background.
I saw a bright white light, from far away, begin to rush closer. And closer. And closer.
A roaring sound began, and I thought to myself that heaven needed to get itself a new muffler.
The shadow play rolled on, and what I saw there sent hope pouring through me again, one last surge of defiance that I had never imagined could have survived what the Ancients had done to me. It gave me one last tired wave of awareness, one last weak and weary burst of motion. I managed to twist my body enough to get my feet onto the wall of the junkyard office, then walked them sideways and up, until they were level with my head.
Mortia let out a flushed, ecstatic laugh at this last, tiny defiance, as she ripped into me.
And then Mary Jane's rusty, lime-green Gremlin blew through the junkyard's chain-link gates at seventy or eighty miles an hour and smashed into Mortia and the office building, ripping her hands away from me as the car's hood went entirely through the wall beneath me, taking Mortia with it.
The Gremlin's engine surged. Smoke and steam were coming from under the hood, but it backed out of the hole it had pounded in the office wall, and then crunched to a stop. Mary Jane got out, wearing her jeans, a sweater, and leather driving gloves. She opened the trunk, her expression focused and smooth, though her hands were visibly trembling, and emerged with a tire iron.
Mortia staggered out of the wreckage, bloodied, one of her arms smashed beyond recognition, one of her legs obviously broken. Dust clung to her damp clothing and hair, and her expression was dazed, almost childishly confused.
Mary Jane walked to face the battered Ancient, eyes narrowed, and tapped the tire iron against her palm.
Mortia stared at her, dumbfounded. "Who... who are you?"
"That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold," Mary Jane quoted.
And delivered a twohanded blow with the tire iron. Mortia staggered. My wife's voice, full of fury, rang out in the predawn air as she swung again. "What hath quench'd them hath given me fire."
She struck the Ancient on the head, and Mortia fell senseless to the ground.
Mary Jane snarled at the fallen Ancient and spat, "What's done is done."
"MJ," I croaked. I fumbled at my left hand with my right, where I'd stuck the last agate to my glove with a bit of webbing, and passed it to her.
She took it with a nod, knelt down, and after a second of consideration, shoved the stone hard into Mortia's ear.
The last Ancient vanished, and Mary Jane stood up. She stared at her tire iron for a moment, then at the car, and then she came to me. I more or less dropped off the wall, and she crouched down to wrap her arms around me. Compared to the last hellish minutes, her touch was pure heaven.
"Thanks," I told her, and meant it.
She shivered and cried a little. Then she pressed a fierce kiss against my head and whispered, "I love you."
I smiled at her. "You," I croaked, "are going to make one heck of a Lady Macbeth."
Chapter 26
I don't know how we would have gotten Aleksei home if Wong hadn't driven up in a heavy-duty pickup.
He just pulled up without a word, lowered the tailgate, and wheeled out a hand truck. I wasn't in terribly good shape, but I was able to web up the Rhino - again - and attach him to the hand truck. Getting him into the back of the pickup was another issue with one arm out of commission, but with Wong's help I managed it. Wong isn't big, but he's wiry. Not wiry like me, but stronger than he looks. I was still kind of unsteady on my feet, though, and Wong and MJ moved Felicia themselves.
Wong drove us to Strange's place, and MJ followed in her now-wheezing car. No one seemed to take any notice of us. Granted, it was sunrise on a Sunday, but even so no one seemed to actually make eye contact with the vehicles or any of their occupants. Maybe Strange had done some of that voodoo that he do so well. Or maybe it was just because we were in New York. It would take something a lot weirder than a cocooned bruiser in a Rhino hat, a shirtless Spidey, and a bald Tibetan martial arts expert in a pickup being tailed by a stunning redhead in a crumpled, wheezing limegreen Gremlin to attract attention.
Wong had a pallet ready on the floor of the reception hall, and he put Aleksei on it. He glanced at me, and I pulled the webbing off of him.
Felicia rated a cot, and Wong and MJ put her there. Wong examined the large swelling on the side of her head for a few moments, then drew out an old leather valise and opened it, filling the room with the pungent, pleasant fragrance of herbal medicine. He applied a fragrant salve of some kind to her head, another to her neck, and bound a bracelet of some kind of braided plant around her left wrist.
Within minutes, Felicia blinked her eyes open, peered around groggily, and said, "We win?"
"We won," I said.
"Go, us," Felicia mumbled. "You owe me big time, Spider." She then stripped out of my spare costume, staying only more or less covered by the blankets as she did. She sighed in contentment, dumped the clothing on the floor, rolled over, snuggled naked under the blankets, and promptly went to sleep.
Wong looked somewhat startled and uncomfortable at the sight.
I savored the moment.
I was next to get the herbal treatments. I don't know what Won
g has growing in his garden, but his stuff makes Tiger Balm look positively anemic. I had so many bruises that he had to open a second jar, and MJ
helped him slather it on me. Then he got to Aleksei, applying medicines to his much-abused face and head.
The pain began to fade, and it was a delicious sensation. I sat there hurting less and breathing deeply despite the twinge in my back and my broken wrist, and loved every minute of it.
Wong got to my wrist, frowned, and left.
He returned with the doc, who settled down next to the chair I was slumped in to examine my wrist.
"A clean break," he said. "I can set this for you, if you like."
"Can't you just fix it, O Sorcerer Supreme?" I said in a whimsical voice.
"For you, this is just a bippity-boppity-boo-boo, isn't it?"
Strange arched an eyebrow. "Healing magic is quite complex, and its employ must take into account several and various factors which - "
I winced, though he really couldn't see it through the mask, and interrupted him. "Doc. My head."
His eyes wrinkled at the corners. "No," he said.
"Now was that so hard?" I asked him.
"You've no idea," he said.
"Wong," he said to his servant, "I was looking for my Alhambran agates, and I couldn't find them anywhere. Do you have any idea where they are?"
Wong bowed at the waist. "Abject apologies, my master. I seem to have misplaced them."
"Ah," Strange said. He glanced at me. "It's always the little things you wonder about." He bowed his head to me and said, "Congratulations on your victory. It was well done and well won."
"Thank you for your help," I said.
Strange put a hand over his sternum. " 'Help'? I can't imagine what you mean. One ought not confuse my natural concern for your current state of health as partisanship in your recent struggle with the Ancients, which would be against my obligation to maintain a strict balance of mystic forces."
"Oh, right," I said. "Sorry. Thank you for the not-help."
