The Darkest Hours

Chapter 8

I found Felicia waiting on the same rooftop where I'd tackled her a little while before. Full night had come on, but in New York, that means little. Even up high where we were, there was enough ambient light to see by, easily. In spots, you could read by it. But when night's curtain is drawn over the azure face of the sky, the light takes on a sourceless, nebulous quality. It stretches shadows, gleams on metal and glass, and emphasizes the brooding shapes of gargoyles and statues and carvings on many of New York's architectural wonders. The sounds of the city come up, but lightly, as though they were little more than remembrances of their makers, no louder than the voice of the wind. It's a kind of fairyland, and it always makes me feel as if I am the only real, tangible object in the world. It's beautiful, in its own way, and peaceful.

I figured the next day or three might be real short on peace. So I sat down next to the Black Cat for a minute and soaked it up while I still could.

"Hey," she said after a moment of silence. 'You're trembling."

"Am I?"

'Yes."

I shook my head.

She stared at me for a second. Then she took off the visor again. Her eyes were worried. "Peter?"

"I'm all right. It's what happens when I'm scared."

Her silver blonde eyebrows went up. "What?"

"Scared. Frightened. Afraid. Having the wiggins."

"That doesn't sound like you," she said.

I shrugged.

"How bad are these people?" she asked quietly.

"They aren't people," I said. "They look like us, but they aren't. I studied Morlun's blood. Their genetics are… almost an amalgam of hundreds of different species. Maybe thousands."

"What's so bad about them?"

"They feed on life energy," I said quietly. "The way I hear it, they're from the mystical end of the universe. They devour the life energy of totemic vessels."

"Totemic what?"

"People," I explained, "who have chosen to use an animal as a personal totem. Who, in some sense or fashion, draw power from that association." I pointed at the spider on my chest. "Like Spider-Man." I chewed over an unpleasant thought. "Or like the Black Cat."

She blinked. "Just because of my name? What if

I

were… I don't know. The Black Diamond or something."

I shrugged. "Don't ask me."

She frowned. "So, this Morlun. He tried to eat you?"

"Nearly did," I said. "He was… the Hulk's opening shot was kind of soft, compared to Morlun's. He was strong. Really strong. And he just kept coming. I fought him for about two days, almost nonstop." I glanced at her. "I hit him with everything I had, Felicia. He just kept coming." I shuddered. "Like the Terminator, only relentless. He could follow me everywhere. And every time I tried to bail, he'd start hurting people until I came back."

She grimaced. "How'd you beat him?" she asked quietly.

"I injected myself with radioactive material from a nuclear reactor. When he tried to feed on me, he got that instead. It dazed him, weakened him. I beat Morlun down. He had this little Renfield clone named Dex with him. When Morlun went down, Dex snapped and Wormtongued him."

"He what?"

"Doesn't anyone read anymore?" I asked. "Dex killed Morlun."

"Injected yourself with…" She shook her head.

"That's insane."

"I was getting a little punchy when I came up with it," I said, agreeing.

"Still. They can't be all that tough. They turned tail and ran once enough people showed up." She frowned. "Right?"

I stared down at the city. "Morlun… he was just so old. He'd seen everything. He said he only fed once in a while. That I would have sated him for a century. But the hunt was something that was nearly a ritual with him, something that he had to get right. The only time I got him off me was when I blew up a building with him in it. He came out without a scratch, but his clothes had been incinerated. He called a time-out to go get dressed again, because he knew he had all the time in the world. He knew that I wasn't going to be able to stop him."

"And that's why Mortia stopped?"

"I think that she wants to be able to take her time, when she gets me. She wants to be able to do it right."

Felicia shuddered. "She's insane."

"No. Just inhuman. Though I suppose it amounts to the same thing." I glanced up at her. "Which reminds me. How in the world did you know about Morlun? And about these three?"

"I think that 'know' is probably too strong a word," she said. "Look, I told you I've been working in the private security sector, right?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I've been doing some private investigation on the side. A couple of years ago, I get hired by a man who wants me to find out the exact time of Spider-Man's first appearance in New York, and every time he has appeared in foreign cities."

I blinked. "What?"

She spread her hands. "Exactly. So I play this guy along, trying to find out more about him, why he's asking these questions like he did. I figure he was trying to figure out who Spider-Man really was. Who you were. Like, maybe he was looking for puzzle pieces, and he just wanted me to find one of them." She shook her head. "No clue why he'd do that. I tried to find out more about him, but the paper trails and money trails all ran into dead ends. Zip, nothing, like the guy didn't exist. All I got was his first name. Ezekiel."

I blew out a breath. "Wow. Ezekiel. He told me he had hired several investigators to find out pieces of my background. He kept them ignorant of each other so that none of them would realize who I was. He was protecting my identity."

Felicia looked even more surprised. "You know this character?"

"I did," I said quietly. "He's dead." My tone did not convey the sense that further questions along this line were welcome.

Felicia, being Felicia, feared my wrath about as much as she would a bubble bath and a glass of chardonnay. "What did he want?"

I kept my temper and answered as calmly as I could. "To protect me from Morlun," I said. "To hide me in some big expensive life-support unit he built, so that Morlun wouldn't find me and kill me."

"That was nice of him," she said.

"Heh," I said. "He was only doing it so he could feed me to something else, later. Something that had been coming for him."

I clenched my teeth on my bitter tone and forced myself to lower my volume. "In the end, he didn't do it. Maybe he really did want to help. Maybe he didn't really know what he wanted. I don't know. Never had the chance to talk to him about it."

Felicia shook her head. "A few months later, I get another job. This time, someone wants to know about the recent appearances in New "York of a missing family member named Morlun. Specifically, if he was ever seen in an altercation with the Amazing Spider-Man, and if so where. I dig, and find out that the description I've got matches this loser in a cravat who was seen trying to pound Spider-Man's face in."

"Made you suspicious, eh?"

"I'm always suspicious. You know that."

"True. What did you do?"

She ran her fingers back through her hair and let a cool wind play with the strands, her eyes distant in thought. "I fed them a little good information, a lot of false information, and played them along while I tried to find out everything I could about them." She shook her head. "I thought they belonged to some kind of secret society—like the Hellfire Club or something."

"Ah," I said fondly. "The Hellfire Club. What did you find out?"

"They're loaded," she said. "Seriously rich, managed through all kinds of law firms and accountants and hidden under enough red tape to choke a sena-tor. They referred to themselves as 'The Ancients.' Like I said, it sounded like a club or something."

"The Ancients." I sighed. "You'd think they'd pick something a little less done to death."

"Maybe they had it first," she said. "I did some more digging and I managed to find several references to the Ancients—and eventually a picture of Mortia." She dipped a hand into the suit and drew out a slender PDA. It lit up, made a couple of beeps, and then she held up the visor. "Here. See for yourself."

I put the visor on, and was treated to an infrared display of New York. "Whoa," I said. "Predator-cam."

She touched a button on the side of the visor, and it cleared away to a light-enhanced image of the Big Apple, mostly black and white, the colors all oddly muted. I could see the bad toupee on a passing pedestrian thirty-five stories below. Then, an image appeared in front of me, as if on a projection screen—a newspaper clipping.

"It's from a microfiche archive I found at the University of Oklahoma," she said. "An article from the Dust Bowl era."

I read the article. It detailed the disappearance of a number of individuals from a traveling circus that had been passing through Tulsa, including a snake charmer, a lion tamer who was purported to actually wrestle the beasts, and the self-proclaimed world's greatest equestrian. They had last been seen in the company of a woman who generally matched Mortia's description. The article included an artist's ren-dering of the suspect as described by witnesses. It wasn't a perfect sketch, but it bore Mortia enough likeness to get the job done. "How did that connect you to the Ancients?"

"The owner of the circus attempted to bring a suit against the company that owned the hotel his people had been in when they disappeared. It was one of the properties owned by the Ancients." She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I also found this. A friend of mine got it out of the archives of the Texas Rangers, early fifties." Her PDA beeped again, and I saw another image—this time simply a photograph.

I took it for a photograph of a dry creek bed for a second. Then I made out the shapes in the picture. They were dried, desiccated human remains. Nothing was left except for the skin, stretched drum-tight over bones. Dead faces were locked in silent screams. Hair still clung to scalps, but other than their desiccated condition, there was not a mark on the bodies, as if even the animals and insects had refused to touch them.

"Two men, one woman," Felicia said quietly. "One of the men wore a gold wedding ring with an inscription that matched that of a ring owned by the lion tamer who disappeared from Tulsa."

I swallowed, staring hard at the wasted remains of what had once been human beings. This was what was waiting for me, if the Ancients had their way. This is what they had been doing to people for thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years.

I took the visor off, and the image of the wasted remains was replaced with Felicia's worried face. "Is this what they want to do to…"—she swallowed— "to us?"

"Looks that way," I said.

She shook her head. "I got this two days ago, and wanted to get a better look, so I tracked down the contact the Ancients had been using to speak with me, so that I could see him when I called him back with the information. It was an office building in Chicago. Mortia was there with him." She took a deep breath. "That's when the client starts asking me some of the same questions Ezekiel did." I sat up straight. "What?"

She nodded. "I fed them some false information, and came to warn you, Pete. I told you, these folks were rich. And if Ezekiel can spend enough money to find out who Spider-Man is…"

"The Ancients can too," I breathed. "Mary Jane. If they find out about me, they find out about her."

"I'm sorry, Peter," Felicia said. "I didn't realize how serious it was or I'd have contacted you sooner."

"You did good," I said quietly. "Thank you." She tried a smile. "You want to get home, I suppose? Make sure they aren't there?"

"They aren't," I said. I focused on my spider sense and peered around. "They're… on the other side of town somewhere."

She frowned. "How do you know that?"

"Mortia didn't manage to touch me," I said. "But I flicked one of my spider tracers into her pocket."

Felicia blinked at me. Then she said, "Gosh, and here I was going to feel all smug that I'd marked her with an isotope paste I put on the end of my grapple. I can track it from maybe three or four hundred yards out."

"Great minds," I said.

"We always did make a pretty good team."

I grinned at her, beneath the mask. Felicia couldn't see it, but she'd hear it in my voice. "Yeah. We work well together."

"What's the plan?" she asked.

I thought about it for a minute. Then I said, "I'm going to head back to the apartment. I'll know if the tracer gets within half a mile or so. I'll get on the net, see what I can find out about these things."

She nodded. "Let me get in touch with Oliver."

"Who's Oliver?"

"He works with me at the company," she said. "Mostly skip tracing, but he's a demon for research, too. He's good. If anyone can find out more about the Ancients, he can."

I mused. "See what he can get on the Rhino."

She gave me a skeptical look. "The Rhino?"

"He's a mercenary," I said. "Maybe we can find a way to make them default on their payment or something. I've got enough on my plate without fighting him, too."

"Are you kidding?" she teased. 'You clean his clock every other week."

"Not that often," I said. "I've got his number, one-on-one, but that doesn't mean he isn't dangerous. If the Ancients had come after me before he went down, instead of after, I'd look like those poor circus folks right now."

Felicia slipped the visor back on, adjusted its controls, and said, "I'll see what I can do." She got out her baton and said, "We can handle this, Pete. Right?"

"Sure," I said cheerfully. "We're the good guys."

I'm fairly sure the Black Cat didn't believe me.

I'm fairly sure I didn't, either.