by Jim Butcher
Mortia stood on the sidewalk outside my apartment building, wearing the same outfit as the day before, plus a long evening coat. She was staring thoughtfully at the building. The Rhino stood behind her in, I kid you not, a khaki trench coat you could have made a tent out of and a broadbrimmed fedora. He had a gym bag in one hand - it doubtless held the stupid hat.
My spider sense quivered, and I glanced down. Malos was on the sidewalk immediately below me, walking slowly down the length of the building like a pacing mountain lion, gazing thoughtfully up at lit windows. Down the block, Thanis was doing the same thing on the other side of the street from Mor-tia and the Rhino, neither of whom was headed into my building.
I sucked in a breath. So. They had a general idea where I was, but didn't know exactly where. That meant that they hadn't found out about Peter Parker, at least not yet, which in turn meant that they wouldn't know about Mary Jane - or Aunt May's place. Good. With that off my mind, I would be free to worry about myself - something which is really quite useful when one is in combat.
In fact, given that they were still searching, there was really nothing to be gained from a fight, except possibly getting tagged and tracked down. Not only that, but there were way too many people around who could get hurt. I decided to sidle out and run.
Which is when I got an object lesson in how important it is for prey to stay downwind of predators.
Hey, whaddya want from me? I lived my whole life in New York City. The only time I worried about the wind was during games at Yankee Stadium and in fights with real stinkers like Vermin and the Lizard.
Mortia suddenly tensed and then whirled, eyes intently scanning up and down the street - and then tracking up to me. I was hidden in deep shadow, invisible.
Invisible, for crying out loud. There aren't many people on the whole planet who can sneak around better than me, and I know invisible when I do it.
I guess nobody told Mortia that, though. She bared her teeth in a very slow, very white smile, and as she did, both Thanis and Malos froze in their tracks and looked up at me as well.
The Rhino continued to look around, evidently bored. It took him a second to notice Mortia, and then he squinted upward and around, expression puzzled.
I dove off my perch just as Malos ripped a steel wastebasket off of the sidewalk and chucked it at me. I hit a flagpole sticking out from the building three stories up, flung myself up, flicked a web-strand at Mortia's feet in midair with one hand while sending out a zipline down the street and hurling myself forward with the other. Thanis leapt at me as I did, and I had to contort and twist in midair to alter my trajectory and avoid him.
I hit the sidewalk rolling, then hopped up over a mailbox and landed on its other side, with Thanis coming hard behind me. I reached out and seized the parking meters on either side of me and ripped them from the concrete, one in each hand as Thanis approached.
I caught him on the end of one of the four-foot lengths of metal, the broken concrete jabbing into his belly, and planted the actual meter on the ground beneath me. This had the effect of slamming him in the breadbasket pretty hard, as well as keeping him physically away from me, sending him flying over my head, his flailing fingers missing me by an inch or more.
It was harder without my spider sense working at full power, but I assumed the worst - that Malos was already closing in - and bounded to one side, then up onto the wall, then into a double backflip that carried me all the way to the roof of an old Chevy sedan parked on the street.
My fears had been well founded. Malos missed catching me in a simple tackle by a fraction of a second, but the flip carried me straight over his head and behind him. He whirled around to face me, expression furious. I played "Shave and a Haircut" on his noggin with alternating blows of the parking meters. I put a lot of extra oomph into the "six bits" part, and the meters exploded in mounds of silver coins when I did.
Malos was driven back several steps by the impact, and his knees looked a little wobbly for a second.
But just for a second. Then he gave his head a shake, speared me with an annoyed glance, and started in again.
By that time, Mortia had torn her foot loose from where I'd webbed it to the sidewalk, and she was coming after me at a sprint. Wow, she was quick. And if she'd gotten out of my webbing that fast, she wasn't exactly as dainty as a schoolmarm in the muscle department, either.
Fighting all of them in the open was a losing proposition. Sooner or later Mortia and her brothers would be almost certain to inflict harm on the citizenry - and I had no illusions about outmaneuvering Mortia this time. If this went on too long or I got unlucky, she'd at least get to tag me. Once that happened, I could run, but not hide.
So, I needed somewhere to fight that would leave me with enough room to move around, while simultaneously being hostile to long lines of sight and relatively free of bystanders. New York being what it was - packed with people - unpopulated spaces tend to be the kinds of places no one wants to hang around in: places that are dangerous or unsettling to linger in, places where bad people do bad things.
So I headed for the nearest parking garage. I leapt onto an awning, bounced on it to gain speed, and whirled around a traffic light to get airborne. I took a long, long swing and flipped myself into a helplessly ballistic arch with Mortia only a few leaps behind me. I was making an easy target of myself, and she went for the opening, coming after me.
Excellent. I flipped in midair, gave her some webbing in the face with one hand, stuck a line to a passing garbage truck with the other, then joined the two, and watched the truck jerk her off-course and begin dragging her down the street. It looked painful. Also cool. I landed in a backward roll, flipped up into the air, and used a webline to whirl in a couple of big circles around a streetlight before throwing myself up onto the garage's roof. A little ostentatious, maybe, but this way Malos and Thanis would be certain to spot me. They looked like the types who might not exercise their brain cells very often. Malos showed up first, by climbing up the side of the parking garage. He wasn't sticking to the wall or anything amazing and stylish like that. Instead, he just made a claw shape with his fingers and sank their tips several inches into the concrete, like it was so much soft clay. He went up hand over hand very nearly as fast as I could have done it. He flipped himself up the last five or six feet and landed on his feet with credible grace. His silk shirt was torn in a couple of places where my follow-through with the meters had wreaked havoc, and both his shirt and his long black hair were covered with dust.
"You got dust all over that pretty shirt," I told him in a cheery tone.
"And your hair, too. And look, there are security cameras. Everyone is going to see you all mussed and disheveled."
"Oh dear," he said in a very low, velvety-soft voice, and walked toward me in no great hurry. "However will I survive?"
Then he turned to a dark green Volvo and picked it up.
They might be the safest cars in the world, but when they're thrown from an eight-story parking garage, I really doubt that their Swedish engineering does very much to soften the blow. So I simply hopped off the roof, popped the garage with a webline, and swung back in on the sixth level, out of Malos's sight, and hoped that he wouldn't waste the effort to throw the car.
A distinct lack of crashing crunches told me I'd been right, and I breathed a little sigh of relief - right up until Thanis stepped out of the shadows of a stairway in his expensive Italian suit and threw a haymaker at me.
I didn't sense him coming until the very last second. I got a little lucky. If he'd just reached out to touch me with his near hand, it probably would have been fast enough to land. He'd gone for the whole enchilada, though, and I had time to get my head out of his way. I danced to one side with Thanis breathing down my neck and dodged another pair of quick blows. He was good at throwing them, but I was better at getting out of their way. I could keep this guy from laying a glove on me, if I was careful, and if he didn't get any help - and if he didn't realize that I had
no intention of hitting him back.
But he figured that part out - and within a few seconds, to boot - and the shape of the fight altered. It's like that in hand-to-hand combat. If you can simply discard the notion of protecting yourself from counterattack, it's a whole heck of a lot easier to get through an opponent's defenses with a focused, concentrated offensive, and it was suddenly everything I could do to keep him off me - until I ducked under a sledgehammer blow aimed at my neck. Thanis's fist hit the wall behind me, and shook loose a fire extinguisher from its mount on the wall.
I caught it on the way down and hollered, "Batter up!"
I swung with both hands and hit him. I didn't hold anything back. I don't do that very often, but for Morlun and his kin, I cared enough to send the very best.
There was a sound halfway between the ringing of a gong and the thump of a watermelon hitting the sidewalk, and Thanis left the garage by way of having his head line-drived through a section of concrete wall.
Without pausing, I cleared the pin from the firing mechanism of the extinguisher and sent a cloud of white chemicals billowing out behind me
- right into the face of Malos, who had emerged from the stairway in pursuit. He came through blind and aggressive. My second swing of the extinguisher lifted him from his feet and into the concrete roof above me, sending a web-work of cracks about twenty feet across it, and leaving the extinguisher bent into the shape of a boomerang.
"G'day, mate!" I shouted in a cheesy Australian accent, and whipped the extinguisher at him in a sidearm throw. The impact slammed his head back into the front grille of an old Impala, driving his skull into the body of the car up to his ears. "Spider-Man! That's Australian for 'Headache!'
"
The ground started to shake in rhythm, and the Rhino came pounding up the car ramp at a modest pace of thirty or forty miles an hour. He'd ditched the coat, the broad-brimmed hat, and his bag, and he had the silly rhino-head hat on. The fashion slave. He doesn't corner well, and he had to windmill his arms to keep his balance as he bent his course around the ramp. Then he saw me, bellowed, and came my way, picking up speed fast.
Figures. Someone I can actually punch finally shows up and it's already time to leave.
I charged him right back.
He wasn't expecting that, but after a fraction of a second of surprise, he simply lowered his horn and came at me faster, letting out a bellow as he did.
I waited until the last second, then bounded straight up and over him, and clung to the ceiling. As he passed, I tagged his broad gray butt with a webline, then sent another web at Malos, who was just then regaining his feet. And since it had already worked once, I merely joined the lines together.
The Ancient looked down as the webbing plastered itself to his silk and the belt area of his leather pants. Then he tracked the line of the web-strand back to the thundering Rhino.
He closed his eyes in irritation and sighed. "Oh, bother."
I gave him a cheerful, upside-down wave from where I crouched on the ceiling.
The Rhino tried to brake, but he had too much momentum going. He went out through the wall.
The line stretched a little, so that there was a Looney Tune instant of motionlessness, and then it snapped back like a bungee cord and dragged Malos out of the garage after the plummeting Rhino.
"Sometimes I amaze even myself," I said in a cheerful voice. Then I hurried to the far side of the garage and beat a hasty retreat. I'd delayed the Ancients long enough for Felicia to get MJ out of there, so there was no point in staying. It was time to fade out and fight another day.
Except that in the middle of fading, I saw Mortia running down the street back toward me, running on top of the power lines as if they were as wide as a city sidewalk. She spotted me, bounced like a diver on a board, flipped through the air, and landed at a bounding run. I saw that she was wearing one of those tiny headsets some cell phones have, and she was speaking into it as she pursued me.
Maybe thirty seconds later, the Rhino caught up to us and joined her.
He's a lot lighter on his feet than you'd think - he can top out at better than a hundred miles an hour, even if he can't change course much while he does so. Mortia looked like something out of Japanese anime, streaking along in a bounding run that would have run me down in about ten seconds flat on level ground.
I could use that speed against them, to keep them separated from Malos and Thanis.
So I poured it on, zipping down the street, using every trick I knew to move as fast as I possibly could. I didn't have an infinite amount of webbing, and I was burning through it fast, using its elasticity to maintain my momentum and add speed, while taking a lot of turns to prevent the Rhino from getting enough momentum to catch up.
Mortia came after me the way the Lizard always chased me - fast and nimble, bounding over cars and passersby, her feet hardly touching the ground. She leapt to sprint along window ledges occasionally, when traffic on the street was too high-volume.
The Rhino lumbered along the road in the mid-dle of the right-hand lane, passing cars and at one point shouldering aside a cabby who had tried to change lanes and was crowding him. The cab flew into the side of a building.
I made sure to keep the pace down just enough that they seemed to be catching up with me, always gaining a little ground, and as a result they never slowed. We left the other two Ancients to trail along blocks behind us - because while they were superstrong, they just didn't have the raw speed necessary to keep up with Mortia and the Rhino. I started changing the pace as we pulled away, hopping over a block this way, then doubling back and heading three blocks the other way, until I was sure Malos and Thanis were nowhere in the immediate area.
I went by Shea Stadium on long, slingshot-style weblines, zoomed over a line of docks filled with small commercial fishing vessels and largish pleasure boats, and came down in the hangars on the eastern end of La Guardia. Ongoing renovations had several of the enormous buildings gutted and under repair, separated from the rest of the place by those orange construction fences, so there wouldn't be many people around. It was nice and dark there, plenty of three-dimensional space to play in, and not many people.
I swung over the fence and landed on a little open space between acres of yawning buildings, bounced up onto the side of one of the hangars, and made myself scarce and sneaky in the abundant shadows.
Mortia came down practically in the same spot my feet had landed in and froze, her stance a marvel of liquid tension, her eyes open wide. The Rhino wasn't far behind her. He had to jump over the fence to get to her, maybe a seventy-five-foot hop, and nothing his enhanced muscles couldn't handle. He landed on the concrete beside her. The impact sent several cracks running through it, and it took the Rhino a few steps to arrest his momentum.
Mortia gave him another contemptuous look. Then she turned in a slow, slow circle, looking for me. But I'd kept downwind this time.
"You're quite clever," Mortia called out, turning in a slow circle. "But then, the spiders always are. Separating me from my brothers this way is an excellent tactic."
I wanted to make a comment about family therapy, but I kept my mouth shut.
"I should also like to thank you for your gifts," she said. She reached into a pocket and held up my spider tracer between two fingers. "My people tell me that this is some sort of tracking device. They say it was built quite cleverly, but out of unremarkable parts. Which told us that you were not a being of substantial material wealth. But then, spiders rarely are."
She held up the cravat next. "This potion upon my clothes, on the other hand, is quite expensive and quite rare. Even governmental military bodies do not use it; its availability and use is restricted to private security firms. And there can only be so many lovely young white-haired women with access to it."
True enough. Gulp.
"We will find you, spider. You will fall. It can be no other way. Once we learn your name, there will be no place for you to hide. There will be no way to prote
ct those you love. But if you come forth and face me now, that need not happen. I do not know who your loved ones are, nor do I care. My business is with you. I have no interest in them, except in how I might use them to attain you. Come forth and we will depart, our business done. Deny me, and I will destroy them along with you."
For a minute I was tempted to deal with her. Anything I could do to keep the conflict between just myself and the bad guys was something that appealed to me. My fights had spilled over onto innocents far too many times. But I wasn't sure I could trust Mortia. If she really was here on a vengeance kick, she might well choose to take someone close from me, just as I had taken family from her.
Either way, the smart thing to do was to pull a swift fade, break contact, and let them flounder around looking for me. Definitely, that was the smart thing to do.
But no one threatens my family.
It took me maybe a second and a half to hit a scaffold on the opposite hangar, a heavy rig loaded with heavy steel structural support beams. I gave the scaffold a hard pull, and brought the entire stack of metal struts down onto Mortia and the Rhino, burying them in at least a ton of metal.
They weren't under it for long. The mess wasn't done settling before the Rhino started slapping struts away like they were so many drinking straws. Though Mortia did not seem to be the same kind of powerhouse as her brothers, she wasn't a wimp, either, and was able, with visible effort, to begin freeing herself from the tangled steel.
While she was doing that, I swung down at the Rhino and shouted, "Boot to the head!" as I kicked him there.
The Rhino flew into another stack of building materials - heavy-duty rebar and lumber. He came surging out of them with a bellow of anger and charged me, swinging. I let him do it like he always did it, barely dodging him - only this time I danced over toward Mortia, and just as she came to her feet, one of the Rhino's furious swings struck her squarely and slammed her back into the mound of twisted metal.
"Great hook! Thanks for the assist, big guy," I said in a cheery tone.