The Darkest Hours

Chapter 4

Ah, New York on an autumn evening. Summer's heat had passed by, and let me tell you, there's nothing quite as miserable as webbing around the old town when it's so hot that my suit is soaked with sweat. It clings to and abrades things which ought not be clung to or abraded. My enhanced physique runs a little hotter than your average human being's, too—the price of having muscles that can benchpress more than any two X-Men, and reflexes that make Speedy Gonzalez look like Aesop's Tortoise. Autumn, though, is different. Once the sun starts setting and the air cools off, it feels just about perfect. There's usually a brisk wind that somehow smells of wood smoke, a golden scent, somewhere on the far side of eau de New York, that heralds the end of summer. Sometimes, I can stand on one of the many lofty rooftops around town, watching the moon track across the sky, listening to the passage of geese heading down to Florida, and letting the traffic-sounds, the ship-sounds, the plane-sounds of New York provide the musical score. Nights like that have their own kind of delicate beauty, where the whole city feels like one enormous, quietly aware entity, and though the sun was still providing a lingering autumn twilight, tonight was going to be one of those times.

Assuming, of course, that whatever had caused a third column of smoke to start rolling up through the evening air didn't spoil it for me.

I was making pretty good time through Manhattan when that twitchy little sensation of intuition I'd dubbed my "spider sense" (because I was fifteen at the time) let me know that I wasn't alone.

I managed to catch a blur in the corner of my vision, moving along a window ledge on a building parallel to my course, above and behind me, staying in the shadows cast by the buildings in the fading light, and rapidly catching up with me. If I continued in my current line of motion, my pursuer would be in a perfect position to ambush me as I crossed the next street—one of those midair impacts, when I was at the top of a ballistic arch and least able to get out of the way. The Vulture loved those, and so had the various Goblins. If I had a chiropractor, he'd love them too, on account of every one of them would make him money.

Me, I'm not so fond of them.

So at the very last second, just as I would have flung myself into the air, I turned around instead, hit the building my chaser was on with a webline, and hung on. The line stretched and recoiled, flinging me back toward the would-be attacker, and I added all of my own oomph to it and shot at my pursuer like a cannonball.

Whoever it was reacted swiftly. He immediately changed direction, leaping off a ledge and soaring through the air by swinging on some kind of matte black, nonreflective cable to a lower rooftop. He hit the roof rolling, and I had to flick out a strand of webbing to reverse direction again. He might have been fast, but not that fast. I hit him around the waist with a flying tackle and pinned him against the roof.

At which point I realized that I had pinned her to the roof.

"Well," drawled a languidly amused woman's voice. "This evening is turning out even better than I thought it would."

"Felicia?"

I said.

She turned her head enough to let me see the smirk on her mouth and said, "This is hardly a dignified position for a married man. What if some nerdy freelance photographer for the

Bugle came along and took our picture? Can you imagine the headlines?

Two Swingers Caught in Flagrante Delicto on

Roof."

"I doubt that the Human Flattop would use that term," I replied. But she had a point. I read somewhere that full-body pins are not a proper greeting for an ex-girlfriend from a married man, so I got off of her in a hurry.

Felicia Hardy rolled over, leaned back on her el-bows, and regarded me for a moment from her lounging position. She'd given her Black Cat costume a minor makeover, losing the white puffs at her calves and wrists. Maybe they'd been harder to find since

Cats closed. She still wore the catsuit, and still filled it out in a way that could cause mass whiplash, but this new suit was made out of some supple, odd-looking black material I'd never seen before, and it managed to give me the impression that it was some kind of body armor. Her hair was shorter than the last time I'd seen her, and she wore a black visor that covered her eyes, until she tipped it down enough to give me a wicked-eyed smile over the visor's rim, and extended her arm up to me. "Give me a hand?"

Part of me was happy to see Felicia again. There aren't a lot of people I'm comfortable fighting beside, but Felicia is one of them. Admittedly, we'd gotten off to a bad start, since she had been a professional burglar at the time, but eventually the bad first impressions became spilt milk under the bridge. She'd reformed—more or less. And she'd helped me out a couple of times when I really needed it.

Plus, she had been hot. Really, really hot. I like to think of myself as a decent guy, most of the time, but what man wouldn't enjoy his work more partnered up with a looker like Felicia?

We became involved during that time, and the romance had been… eventful. Tempestuous. On occasion, it had resembled pay-per-view professional wrestling. It had ended amicably, more or less, but

I'd still been worried that she might go back to what she was doing before she met me. Apparently, however, her reform had been sincere, and she was, as far as I knew, on the straight and narrow these days. I pulled her to her feet. "What are you doing here?"

"I needed to talk to you," she said, rising. She put her hands on the small of her back, winced a little, and stretched again. "Mmmm. I always did like it when you played rough, Spider."

"I could have killed you," I said. "What do you think you're doing, stalking me like that?"

"I was going to knock on your door," she said, "but I saw you leaving. I had to get your attention somehow."

"You know what gets my attention?" I said. "When someone shouts my name and says that they want to talk to me. One time, they even used this magical device called a telephone."

"You don't get it—," she began.

Another enormous crunching, crashing sound from Times Square, only a few hundred yards off, interrupted her.

"No, you don't get it," I said, and turned to go. "I don't have time for this right now, Cat. I'm on the clock."

"Wait," she said. "You can't!"

I ground my teeth under the mask and paused, webline in hand. "Five words or less, why not?"

Felicia put her hands on her hips, eyes narrowed, and said, holding up a finger with each word, "It is a trap." She considered and stuck out her thumb, too. "Dummy."

"A trap?" I said. "Whose?"

"That's just it," she said. "I'm not sure."

"You just know it's a trap."

"If you'll give me a second to explain—"

Down the street, a police car tumbled across the * road, end over end, bouncing along like a child's toy, lights flashing. It knocked over a fire hydrant, sending a cascade of water into the air, then crashed through the front window of an adult bookstore.

"You've got to admit," she said. "It isn't hard for someone to get a rise out of you if they want to draw you out. That's what Morlun did."

I had been about to swing off, but her words stopped me cold.

Morlun.

Ugh.

Morlun had been… bad. A creature, some kind of entity that fed upon the life energy of vessels of totemistic power. That's mystic gobbledygook for superheroes who draw their powers from—or at least compare them to—some kind of animal. Say, for example, your friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man. He was an ultra-ancient being who only looked human, who devoured the life energy of his victims to sustain his own apparent immortality.

Morlun had asked me to dinner, and not as a guest. The invitation had come in the form of a rampage in the fine tradition begun by the Hulk. I sent him a two-fisted RSVP. As brawls go, it had been a long one. Days long. I can't remember anyone who's made me feel more physical pain, offhand. Morlun was strong. Really, really strong. And he took everything I could throw at him without blinking. Or talking. Which cheesed me off. How am I supposed to uphold snappy superhero banter when the other guy won't carry his end of the conversational load?

He almost killed me. God help me, I almost let him. I almost gave up. I'd just been that hurt, that tired—that alone. Morlun showed up in my nightmares for a good long while afterward, temporarily supplanting my subconscious's favorite bogeyman, Norman Osborne.

I came out on top in the end, but only by injecting myself with material from the core of a nuclear reactor, so that when he tried to eat me, Morlun got a big old mouthful of gamma-ray energy instead. After that, Morlun's day went downhill pretty fast.

Here's the kicker, though. I hadn't told anyone about Morlun. Not Aunt May. Not Mary Jane. Nobody.

As far as I knew, the only one, other than me, who had known what was going on was a guy named Ezekiel. A man who had, somehow, acquired powers remarkably similar to my own, and who had tried to warn me about Morlun—and who had eventually helped me defeat him, nearly at the cost of his own life.

So how had Felicia found out about Morlun?',

"Hey," I said. "How did you find out about Morlun?"

"I've turned over a new leaf, remember?" she said. "I'm a security consultant and investigator now. I investigate things, and some of what I turned up indicates that there's someone here to call you out." She slipped off the visor and met my eyes, her expression worried. "The details will take me a while to give you, but the short version is that you're in danger, Peter."

An ambulance siren added its wail to that of the police cars and fire trucks. I could see people running from the area, underneath one of the big flashing signs for the New Amsterdam Theater, where they were performing

The Lion King.

"No," I said. "They're the ones who are in danger."

"But I already told you—"

"It's a trap, I know. But the longer I stay away from it, the more noise whoever is over there is going to make. I'm going."

"Don't," she said, touching my arm. "Don't be stupid. It's not as if there aren't a couple of other folks around New York who will show up to a disturbance this public."

"No," I said. "I can't let other people do my chores for me. If I wait for the FF to show up, or the Avengers, he'll scamper and do it all again another day." I felt myself getting a little angry, talking about it.

Like I said: I have issues with people who pick on those who can't protect themselves.

"I'm taking this guy down," I said. "Thank you for the warning. But I'm going."

Felicia didn't look happy with me as she jammed the visor back onto her face. "You stiff-necked…" She shook her head. "Go on. Go. Be careful."

I nodded once, dove off on my line, and flung myself from building to building down the street. I swung around the last corner, rapidly gathering momentum, and found a scene of pure chaos. Emergency units were trying to cordon off the square. Fires burned. Smoke rolled. Several police cars had been flattened—literally flattened—by blows of superhuman strength. Many of the lights were either out or flickering wildly, giving the place that crazed, techno dance club look. Broken glass lay everywhere. Car alarms and fire alarms beeped and wooped and ah-oohgahed. The air stank of burning plastic and motor oil. People shouted, screamed, and ran. "It's like the mayor's office in an election year," I muttered.

At the center of it all, in the thick plume of black smoke, stood a single, hulking figure. I altered my course, spat a new line from my web shooters, and swung down to give whoever it was a big old doubleheeled mule-kick greeting on behalf of the citizens of New York.

Did I mention that I have a tendency to get in over my head?