The Darkest Hours

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."

I frowned at that, and fell silent.

"I know you've got a lot of contempt for him," she said in that same quiet voice. "But I've been where he's standing—and I got into it purely for the profit, not to take care of my family, the way he did. He started off with better intentions than I ever had, and he's ended up in a much worse position. It's a bad place to be, Peter. I feel sorry for him."

"I don't," I said quietly.

"And what's the difference, Pete?" she asked. There was no malice in the question. "What's the difference between him and me? What's the difference between him and you, for that matter? I mean, I don't know if anyone ever explained this, but vigilantism isn't exactly smiled upon by the law in this town, and you do it every day."

Which was true, and really inconvenient to this debate. "So what? You think I should drop the mask, go to the police academy, and get a badge? Right. Like they'd ever let me do that."

She shook her head. "I just think you should think of him as a human being, not some kind of dangerous wild animal. Speaking of which," she said, "didn't it ever strike you as odd that the Ancients hired the bloody

Rhino?

A goon chock-full of totemic life energy?"

I blinked.

It hadn't.

"I'm not saying you should pull your punches," she continued. "I'm not saying we should give him a hug and sign him up for group therapy. I'm just saying that he's a human being with strengths and flaws, just like anyone else—and that he's in way over his head. He's in as much danger as you are and he probably doesn't even realize it."

I shut the book a little harder than was strictly necessary. "He hurts people for money."

"You hurt people for free!"

she said tartly. "That just means he has better business sense than you."

"I fight criminals," I said. "Not bank guards and security personnel."

"One man's security guard is another man's hired thug," she said. "And when you get right down to it, men like the Rhino spend far more time pounding on other criminals than they do on law enforcement."

I stacked the books up to return to the shelves. Most people probably don't make enormous booming noises when stacking books. But I think they would if they had the proportionate strength of a spider and the proportionate patience of the crowd control guys on Jerry Springer. "So what are you saying? There's no difference between the good guy and the bad guy?"

Felicia arched an eyebrow at me. "They're both guys. Aren't they?"

"Yeah. One of them a violent criminal, and the other someone who protects people from violent criminals."

"My point, Peter," she said, "is that when you get down to it, there's very little difference between a wolf in the fold and the sheepdog who protects them."

"Like hell there isn't," I said. "The sheepdog doesn't eat sheep.

Which is a really sorry metaphor to use for New Yorkers in the first place. Your average New Yorker is about as sheeplike as a Cape buffalo."

"Not everyone has a heart like yours, Parker," she snarled, her voice ringing out among the stacks. "Not everyone is as good as you. As noble. Not everyone sees the difference between right and wrong—and once upon a time you didn't, either, or you wouldn't be who you are." She folded her arms and brought her voice under control with some difficulty. 'And I'd still be doing jobs on jewelers and vaults and…"—she gestured around us, wearily— "libraries."

True enough. Once upon a time, I hadn't seen the difference between right and wrong, and Uncle Ben died for it.

I sighed. "Look, there's nothing else to be gained here. You want to go?"

She nodded. "Yeah. Another library?"

"No," I said. "I have another stop to make."