Marvel classic novels - Spider-Man: E-Book

Jim Butcher

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Collecting three classic fan-favorite Spider-Man novels together for the first time in a brand-new omnibus edition.THE DARKEST HOURS by Jim ButcherWhen Black Cat foils Spider-Man's attempts to stop the Rhino rampaging through Times Square, she informs him the Rhino is just a distraction. The real threat comes from a group of Ancients, members of the same race as the being called Morlun, seeking revenge for Spider-Man defeating them years before. Spidey must rely on Black Cat if there's any hope of stopping them again, before they can steal his life force.DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS by Keith R.A. DeCandidoA mysterious drug known as Triple X has been giving users super-powers as well as rendering them mentally and physically unstable. Only by teaming up with a police force that hates him can Spider-Man find the source behind this lethal drug and protect people from those using it. But one of Spider-Man's most fearsome enemies may be behind it all as part of a greater scheme to bring down the city.DROWNED IN THUNDER by Christopher L. Bennett.The ongoing conflict between Spider-Man and his longtime outspoken nemesis, crusading newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson, reaches a whole new level when JJJ exploits several mysterious attacks on Manhattan island in his propaganda war against the web-slinger.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Novels of The Marvel Universe By Titan Books

Title Page

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Copyright

Book One: The Darkest Hours

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty One

Twenty Two

Twenty Three

Twenty Four

Twenty Five

Twenty Six

Twenty Seven

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Book Two: Down These Mean Streets

Dedication

Historian’s Note

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Book Three: Drowned in Thunder

Dedication

Historian’s Note

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

NOVELS OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE BY TITAN BOOKS

Ant-Man: Natural Enemy by Jason Starr

Avengers: Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Dan Abnett

Avengers: Infinity by James A. Moore

Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther? by Jesse J. Holland

Captain America: Dark Design by Stefan Petrucha

Captain Marvel: Liberation Run by Tess Sharpe

Civil War by Stuart Moore

Deadpool: Paws by Stefan Petrucha

Spider-Man: Forever Young by Stefan Petrucha

Spider-Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt by Neil Kleid

Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus by Diane Duane

Thanos: Death Sentence by Stuart Moore

Venom: Lethal Protector by James R. Tuck

Wolverine: Weapon X Omnibus by Marc Cerasini, David Alan Mack, and Hugh Matthews

X-Men: Days of Future Past by Alex Irvine

X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga by Stuart Moore

X-Men: The Mutant Empire Omnibus by Christopher Golden

X-Men & The Avengers: The Gamma Quest Omnibus by Greg Cox

ALSO FROM TITAN AND TITAN BOOKS

Avengers: The Extinction Key by Greg Keyes

Marvel Contest of Champions: The Art of the Battlerealm by Paul Davies

Marvel’s Spider-Man: The Art of the Game by Paul Davies

Obsessed with Marvel by Peter Sanderson and Marc Sumerak

Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover by David Liss

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – The Art of the Movie by Ramin Zahed

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales – The Art of the Game by Matt Ralphs

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales – Wings of Fury by Brittney Morris

Ant-Man and the Wasp: The Official Movie Special

Avengers: Endgame – The Official Movie Special

Avengers: Infinity War – The Official Movie Special

Black Panther: The Official Movie Companion

Black Panther: The Official Movie Special

Captain Marvel: The Official Movie Special

Marvel Studios: The First Ten Years

Spider-Man: Far From Home – The Official Movie Special

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – The Official Movie Special

Thor: Ragnarok – The Official Movie Special

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Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours Omnibus

Print edition ISBN: 9781789096040

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789096057

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: May 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

© 2021 MARVEL

FOR MARVEL PUBLISHING

Jeff Youngquist, VP Production Special Projects

Caitlin O’Connell, Associate Editor, Special Projects

Sven Larsen, VP, Licensed Publishing

David Gabriel, SVP Sales & Marketing, Publishing

C.B. Cebulski, Editor in Chief

Cover art by Justin Ponsor.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Book One

THE DARKEST HOURS

by Jim Butcher

ONE

MY name is Peter Parker and I’m the sort of person who occasionally gets in a little over his head.

“The most important thing,” said the man in the dark hood, walking down the hall next to me, “is not to show them any fear. If you hesitate, or look like you don’t know what you’re doing, even for a second, they’ll sense the weakness. They’ll eat you alive.”

“No fear,” I said. “No getting eaten. Check.”

“I’m serious. You’re outnumbered. They’re faster, most of them are stronger, they can run you into the ground, and if you’re going to keep it under control, you’re going to have to win the battle here.” He touched a finger to his forehead. “You get me?”

“Mind war,” I said. “Wax on. Wax off.”

The man in the dark hood stopped, frowned at me, and said, “You aren’t taking this seriously.”

“People always think that about me,” I said. “I’m not sure why.”

“See, that’s what I mean,” Coach Kyle said. He tucked his hands into the pockets of his workout jacket and shook his head. “You go joking around with them like that, and that’s it. You’ve lost control.”

“It’s a basketball practice,” I said. “Not a prison riot.”

Coach Kyle was about six feet tall, with a slender build. Dark skin, and dark hair which apparently hadn’t started to go gray, though he had to have been in his late forties. He wore thick glasses with black plastic Marine-issue, birth-control rims. He’d been a Hoosier, starting guard, back in the day. He hadn’t made the cut to the pros. “I see,” he said with a snort. “You’re upset because you were the one who got stuck with running the team.”

“Well,” I hedged, “I wasn’t much for sports when I was in school.”

“This was settled at last week’s faculty meeting,” he told me cheerfully. “If you hadn’t been the last one to arrive at this meeting, you’d be halfway home by now.”

“I know.” I sighed.

“Guess you had something more important come up?”

I’d been crawling around about two hundred and fifty berjillion freight-train-sized shipping containers at the piers, looking for the one the mob was using to ship out illegal immigrants for sale on the slave market. Officially speaking, they weren’t people, since they hadn’t filled out the right paperwork and learned the secret American handshake from the INS. Unofficially speaking, scum who target people who can’t defend themselves incite me to creative outrage. By the time I had the last of them webbed to the side of their slave container in the shape of the word “LOSERS” I’d been five minutes late to the faculty meeting already.

But that’s not the kind of thing you can use as an excuse.

“The dog ate my homework,” I said instead.

Coach Kyle shook his head, grinning, and we stopped outside the door to the gym. “Look. Your big worry is the tallest kid there. Samuel. Best strong center I ever had, and he could go all the way. Problem is he knows it, and he doesn’t play well with others.”

“The fiend,” I said. “This is a job for Superman.”

Coach Kyle sighed. “Peter. Samuel’s mom works three jobs to make enough to feed him and his three little brothers and sisters. Their block isn’t such a good one. He had an older brother who was a gangbanger— that is, until he got stabbed to death a few years back. That’s when Samuel took over as man of the house. Looking out for the little ones.”

I sighed, and dialed down my snark projector. “Go on.”

“Boy’s got a real chance of turning into a top-rate athlete, and if he can make it into a college, he can help out his whole family. Problem is that he’s a good kid, at the core.”

“That’s a problem?”

“Yes. Because if he doesn’t get himself under control and make it into a good school, he’ll graduate and try to support his family.”

I nodded my head, getting it. “And wind up in the same place as his brother.”

Coach Kyle nodded. “He’s big, tough, and can make good money in a gang. And it isn’t as if he’s going to have employers kicking down his door to get to him.”

“I see.” I glanced through the narrow window in the door to the gym. A lot of young people were running and screaming. Shoes squeaked on the floor. Many, many basketballs thudded onto the court in a rhythm that could only have been duplicated by a drunken, clog-dancing centipede. “What do you need me to do?”

“Right now, the kid is his own worst enemy. If he doesn’t learn to work with his team, to lead on the court, no university will even look at him.”

“But he hasn’t realized that yet,” I guessed.

Coach Kyle nodded. “I just want you to understand, Peter. Coaching the basketball team isn’t just a chore that needs doing. It isn’t only a game. The team might be this kid’s only chance. Same goes for the others, to a lesser degree. The team keeps them off the streets, out of some of the trouble.”

I watched the kids playing and nodded. “I hear you. I’ll take it seriously.” I met his eyes and said, “Promise.”

“Thank you,” Coach Kyle said, and offered me his hand. “To tell you the truth, I was hoping you’d be the one to keep an eye on them for me. I see you with some of the other kids. You do good work.”

I traded grips with him and grinned. “Well, I’m so childish myself.”

“Heh,” he said. “Maybe I should come in with you for a minute. Just to help you get started.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I can handle it myself. Have fun getting lasered in the eyes.”

He tapped his ugly glasses with one finger. “See you next week,” he said. Then he headed out.

I sighed and opened the door to the gymnasium. After all, it wasn’t like I’d never been outnumbered before. I’d gone up against the Sinister Six versions one through fifty or sixty, and the Sinister Syndicate, and those bozos in the Wrecking Crew, and . . . the X-Men? No, that couldn’t be right. I hadn’t ever taken on the X-Men and thrashed them, I was sure. But those others, yes. And if I could handle them, surely I could handle a bunch of kids playing basketball.

Which only goes to show that just because I happen to be a fairly sharp scientist, the Amazing Spider-Man, and a snappy dancer, I don’t know everything.

TWO

THERE’S something about gymnasiums. Maybe it’s the fluorescent lighting. Maybe it’s the acoustics, the way that squeaking shoes echo off the walls, the way thudding basketballs sound on the floor, or rattling against the rim, or the way “bricks” slam into the backboard and make the whole thing shudder. Maybe it’s the smell—one part sweat and friction-warmed rubber to many parts disinfectant and floor polish. I’m not sure.

All I know is that every time I walk into a gymnasium, I get hit with a rush of memories from my own days of high school. Some people call that phenomenon “nostalgia.” I call it “nausea.”

Unless, of course, nostalgia is supposed to make you feel abruptly shunned, unpopular, and inadequate—in which case, I suppose that gymnasiums are nostalgic as all get-out for me.

The gym was full of young men in shorts, athletic socks and shoes, T-shirts and tank tops. The color schemes and fabrics employed were slightly different, but other than that they looked pretty much exactly like the b-ball players had when I’d gone to school here. That made me feel pretty nostalgic, too.

I hadn’t had a very easy time of it in high school, particularly with the sports-oriented crowd who hung around in the gym. A radioactive spider bite had more than taken care of any physical inadequacies—but my memories of that time in my life weren’t about fact. They were about old feelings that still had power.

Fine, so I had one or two lingering issues from high school. Who doesn’t?

I also had Coach Kyle’s whistle, his clipboard, and his practice schedule, complete with warm-ups, drills, and all the other activities which constituted a training session. Plus, I was an adult now. A teacher. I had the wisdom and experience of age—well, compared to a teenager, anyway. I was the one with the authority, the one who would command respect. I was not a big-brained high school nerd anymore. No one was going to give me a wedgie or a swirlie or stuff me into a locker.

Even if most of them did seem to be awfully tall.

I shook my head and grinned at my reaction to all those memories. These days, I’d have to work hard to be sure not to hurt any of them if they tried it, but the emotional reflexes were still there. You can take the nerd out of the school . . .

I stepped out onto the court and blew a short, loud blast on the whistle and rotated my hand in the air above my head. “Bring it in, guys, right here.”

A couple of the kids immediately turned and shuffled over to me. Most of them never even slowed down, being involved in a game of seven-on-one against Samuel.

They probably just hadn’t heard the whistle. Yeah, right. No fear, Peter. No fear.

I blew the whistle again, louder, and for as long as I could keep blowing, maybe twenty or thirty seconds of pure, warbling authority. Most of the stragglers came over after ten seconds or so.

Samuel, who was big enough and strong enough to dunk, slammed the ball in one more time after everyone else had come over, recovered it, and took a three-point shot for nothing but net. He finally turned to walk over about half a second before I ran out of wind.

“Afternoon, guys,” I said. “I’m Mister Parker, and I’m a science teacher, in case you didn’t know. I’m going to be standing in for Coach Kyle for a few days, until he’s back on the job. The coach has left me a schedule of what he wants you to be doing so—”

“Shoot,” said Samuel, with a disgusted exhale. He didn’t say “shoot,” exactly, but I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“You have a question, Mister . . .” I checked Kyle’s clipboard. “Larkin?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Where you played ball?” His expression was sullen and skeptical. The kid was ridiculously tall, and not just for his age. He would have been ridiculously tall at any age.

“I haven’t lately,” I told him.

“College?” he asked.

“No.”

“High school?”

“No,” I said.

“Shoot,” he didn’t say. “You don’t know nothing about ball.”

I didn’t let it rattle me. “Those who can’t do, teach,” I told him. Then I held up the clipboard. “But I figure Coach Kyle knows what he’s doing, so we’re just going to stick to his plan, starting with a ten-minute warm-up run and stretching.” I tucked the clipboard under my arm and tried to pretend I was a drill sergeant. I blew the whistle once, clapped my hands, and said, “Let’s go!”

And they went. Slowly, reluctantly, and Samuel was still standing there glowering at me when the first of his teammates had finished the first lap, but then he shambled off to join them. Good-looking kid, very strong features, skin almost as dark as his eyes, and his voice held authority well. His teammates would look up to him, literally and figuratively.

Once the run was finished, I told Samuel to lead the team through stretching, which he did without batting an eye. He’d done it for Coach Kyle before, I supposed. I could see what the coach meant when he said the kid was a natural leader.

When the stretching was done, Kyle’s plan called for passing drills, and that was when I saw what the coach meant about Samuel’s bad attitude.

The team groaned when I said “Drill,” and Samuel shook his head. “Screw that. That isn’t what the team needs right now.” He looked around. “Okay, we’ll go half court twice. Starters against me on this end; Darnell, you take the rest to that end and split into four-on-four.”

The kids went into motion at once.

Good thing I had that whistle. I blew another blast on it and called, “The coach wants you running passing drills. You are darn well going to run passing drills.”

“Hey,” Samuel said, “shredded wheat.” He shot me a hard, swift pass that should have bounced the ball off the back of my head—but my spider sense, that inexplicable yet extremely cool sixth sense that warns me of danger, alerted me to the incoming basketball. I turned and caught it flat against my right hand, then gripped onto it with the old wall-crawling cling, so that it looked like I had caught it and perfectly palmed it to boot.

Samuel hadn’t expected that—but it didn’t faze him, either. “You’re pretty fast for an old man.”

“Thanks,” I said, and flicked the ball back at him, making sure I didn’t break his ribs with it out of annoyance. “Now line them up and run the drills.”

“Screw you, Mister Science,” Samuel said. “The team needs real practice.”

I frowned at him. “The coach—”

“Ain’t here,” Samuel said, his tone harsh. “He’s off on vacation, ain’t he.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re running drills. We’ve got twenty minutes of full-court five-on-five at the end of the day.”

The team groaned, and Samuel grinned at me. “Full-court five-on-five? Might as well send everyone else home and let me practice shots. ’Cause that’s all that is gonna happen. My way, everybody gets to play.”

“You aren’t the coach,” I said.

He shrugged. “Neither are you.”

“I am today.”

“Tell you what, Mister Science,” Samuel said. “You come out here on the floor with me. We can go half-court one-on-one to five. You get even one past me before I hit five, or if I foul you even once, we’ll do it your way. Otherwise you let someone who knows what he’s doing run the practice.”

I was tempted, but only for a second. Hammering my point through the kid’s thick skull wasn’t going to do him any good. “We’re going to practice,” I told him. “If you don’t want to practice, that’s cool. You can leave whenever you like.”

Samuel just stared at me. Then he burst out into a rolling belly laugh, and most of the other kids followed along.

Clearly, the whistle’s power was finite. The clipboard’s additional failure was sadly disappointing. I was on the verge of trying my luck with pure alpha-male bellowing, when someone behind me cleared her throat, a prim little sound.

I turned to find my professional nemesis standing behind me.

Julie from Administration.

She was fortyish, fake blonde, slender as a reed, and wore a lavender business suit. She had a diamond the size of a baby elephant on her wedding ring, a thick pink clipboard in her hands, and was entirely innocent of original thought.

“Excuse me, Coach Kyle,” Julie said without looking up. “I needed you to sign this report.”

“I’m not Coach Kyle,” I said. “Coach Kyle is a little taller than me. And he’s black.”

She looked up from the papers on her board and frowned severely. “Coach Kyle coaches the basketball team.”

“Hence ‘Coach.’ Yes.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“He’s on a medical leave.”

Julie frowned. “I did not see the paperwork for it.”

I sighed. “No paperwork? Clearly, Western civilization is on the brink of collapse.”

She frowned at me. “What?”

Insulting Julie from Administration is like throwing rocks into the ocean. There’s a little ripple, and the ocean never even notices it happened. “I’m standing in for him,” I said. “Maybe I can help you.”

Behind me, the kids had broken up into two half-court games as soon as my back was turned, just as I told them not to do. Gee, thanks, Julie.

“It’s about Mister Larkin,” she said. “His immunization record still hasn’t been completed, and if he doesn’t get his shots we’ll have to suspend him until he does. I need you to sign here to show that you’ve been notified.”

“That happens,” I allowed, as she offered me the pink clipboard. I signed by the X. “How long does he have to get the shots?”

“Until Monday,” she said. “If he doesn’t have them Monday morning, he’ll have to go into suspension.”

I blinked at her. “It’s Friday,” I said.

“And I’m working late,” Julie replied. “Because unlike some people who work at this school, I find it important to put in extra effort, instead of calling in sick every six-point-two-nine days. Like some people I could mention.”

“Oh,” I said, in a tone of sudden revelation. “You’re talking about me.”

Grrr.

“Yes,” she said. “I only hope your attitude doesn’t affect Coach Kyle’s job performance.”

Grrr.

“You missed my point, though,” I said as politely as I could. “There’s no way to get him into a city clinic before Monday morning. They aren’t open before then.”

“Well,” she said, exasperated, “his parents will just have to convince their family doctor to help.”

“Parent,” I said. “Single parent, working three jobs to support the family. I promise you, they use the clinic, not a private practitioner.”

She sniffed. “Then they should have gotten him to the clinic sooner.”

I gritted my teeth. “Have you notified him or his mother?”

“No,” she said, as if I was a moron. “I required the signature of one of his teachers before I could run through all the forms, and you’re the only one left in the building. You didn’t sign for it until just now. Which makes it all your fault, really.”

The ironic thing is that Julie is an enormous Spider-Man fangirl.

Deep breaths, Parker. Nice, deep breaths.

“But he didn’t know he needed the shots.” I blinked. “Still doesn’t know, in fact.”

“Letters were sent to all students’ parents last July,” she said firmly. “He should have had them before school even started.”

“But you’re only telling him today? When it’s already too late?”

“It was a low organizational priority,” she said. “More pressing matters have kept administration”—which was always Julie plus someone who was going to quit within two weeks—“far too busy to waste time doing Mister Larkin’s parents’ job.”

I rubbed at my forehead. “Look, Julie. If this kid gets suspended, he’ll be off the team—and it would make it more difficult for him to be accepted into a university.”

Julie gave me a bewildered stare, as though I’d begun speaking in tongues. “University?”

I wondered if I’d get strange looks if I threw myself down and started chewing at the floorboards. “The point is that if he gets suspended over something like this, it’s going to be all kinds of bad for him.”

She waved a hand. “Well. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Larkin will be more careful about following immunization procedures next time,” she said, and jerked her clipboard back. She tore off a pink copy of the form I’d signed and said, “This is for Mr. and Mrs. Larkin.”

“Julie,” I said. “Have a heart here. The kid needs some help.”

She sniffed in contempt at the very idea. “I am only following the policy, rules, and law of the New York educational system.”

“Right. Just following orders,” I said.

“Precisely.” She turned on a heel and goose-stepped out of the gymnasium.

My God, the woman was pure evil.

I glanced back at Samuel, who was currently playing four-on-one and winning handily. He wasn’t talking smack to them, though. He was focused, intent, moving in his natural element. The kid was a stiff-necked loudmouth, insulting, arrogant, and he reminded me way too much of people who beat me up for lunch money when I’d been in school.

But no one deserved Julie from Administration.

And since Coach Kyle wasn’t around to do it, this looked like a job for Spider-Man.

THREE

“TALK about disasters,” I said, as Mary Jane came through the front door of our apartment. “It’s like they could smell the high school nerd on my clothes. Mister Science. They called me Mister Science. And shredded wheat. Just did whatever they wanted. And the worst one, this Samuel kid, he challenged me to a round of one-on-one. Told me if I won, they would run the practice my way.”

I might have sounded just a bit sulky. My wife got the look she gets when she’s trying really hard to keep from laughing at me. “The basketball practice?” she asked.

“Yes.” I scowled down at the stack of papers I was grading. “It was like herding manic-obsessive cats. I can’t remember the last time I felt so stupid.”

“Why didn’t you play the kid?” MJ asked. “I mean, you could have beaten him, right?”

“Oh, sure. If I didn’t mind the kids finding out that Mister Science has a two-hundred-and-eighty-inch vertical leap.” I put my pen down and set the papers aside. “Besides. That isn’t what the kid needs. I’m supposed to teach him to be a team player. If the first thing I do is go mano-a-mano with him to prove who’s best, it might undermine that.”

“Just a bit,” Mary Jane conceded. “I thought you were going to go to the faculty meeting early so you wouldn’t get saddled with coaching the team.”

“I was,” I glowered. “Something came up.”

“Who could have foreseen that,” she said tartly, and walked into our little kitchen and set down the brown grocery bag she was holding. If you’d asked my opinion when I was Samuel’s age, I’d have said she looked like a million bucks. Since then, though, there’s been inflation, and now I figure she looks like at least a billion.

But as we grew closer, I saw other things when I looked at her. I saw the woman who was willing to stand beside me through thick and thin, despite a mountain of reasons not to, despite the fact that just being a part of my life sometimes put her in danger. I saw the woman who was willing to spend many nights—far too many nights—alone while I ran around town doing everything a spider can, and leaving her to wonder when I’d be back.

Or even if I’d be back.

I might have been able to juggle compact cars, but I wasn’t strong enough to do what she did, to be who she was. She was the one who had faith in me, the one who believed in me, the one who I knew, absolutely knew, would always listen, always help, always care. The longer I looked at her, the more beautiful she got, and the more thoroughly I understood how insanely lucky I was to have her beside me.

It was enough to disintegrate my frustration, at least for the moment. Honestly, if a man gets to come home to a woman like that at the end of the day, how bad can things be?

“Sorry, MJ.” I sighed. “I ambushed you the second you walked in the door.”

She arched a brow and teased, “I’ll let it go. This time.”

I started helping her with the bag. Not because she needed the help, but because it gave me a great excuse to stand behind her and reach both arms around her to handle the groceries. I liked the way her hair smelled.

She leaned back against me for a second, then gave me a playful nudge with one hip. “You really want to make it up to me? Cook.”

I lifted both eyebrows. I cook almost as well as Ben Grimm embroiders, and MJ knew it. “Living dangerously tonight, are we?”

“Statistically speaking, you’re bound to make something that tastes good eventually,” she said. She took a frozen pizza out of the bag and passed it over her shoulder to me. “Back in a minute, master chef.”

“Bork, bork, bork,” I confirmed. She slipped off to the bedroom. I flipped the pizza box and went over the instructions. Looked simple enough. I followed the directions carefully while Mary Jane ran the shower.

She came back out in time to see me crouched on the ceiling, trying to get the stupid smoke alarm to shut up. She got that I’m-not-laughing face again and went to the oven to see what she could salvage.

I finally pulled the battery out of the smoke alarm and opened a window. “Hey,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Of course,” she said. “Why would you ask that?”

“My husband sense is tingling.” I frowned at her, then hit the side of my head with the heel of my hand. “The audition. It was this morning, right?”

She hesitated for a second, and then nodded.

Oh, right, I got it. She’d been bothered by something about it, but I’d been quicker on the draw in the gunfight at the co-dependent corral, and she didn’t want to lay it on me when I’d been stressed myself.

Like I said. I’m a lucky guy.

“How’d it go?” I asked her. We got dinner (such as it was), a couple of drinks, and sat down on the couch together.

“That’s the problem,” she said quietly. “I got the part.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “What? That’s fantastic! Who’d they cast you as?”

“Lady Macbeth.”

“Well of course they did!” I burbled at her. “You’ve got red hair. Redheads are naturally evil. Did I mention that this was fantastic?”

“It isn’t, Pete.”

“It isn’t?”

“It isn’t.”

“But I thought you said it was a serious company. That working with them would give you some major street cred for acting.”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” I said. I blew on my slice of pizza. “Why?”

“Because it’s showing in Atlantic City.”

“Ugh. Jersey.”

She rolled her eyes. “The point being that I’m going to have to get over there several times every week.”

“No problem,” I said. “We can swing the train fare, I’m sure.”

“That’s just it,” Mary Jane said. “I can’t trust the train, Peter. Too many things could happen. If it’s delayed, if I’m late, if it takes off a couple of minutes early, and I don’t show up, that’s it: I can kiss my career goodbye. I’ve got to have a car.”

I scratched my head, frowning. “Does it have to be a nice car?”

“It just has to work,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “It’s more expensive, but we might be able to—”

“I bought a car, too.”

I looked down at the suddenly too-expensive pizza on my plate. MJ’s career as a model had been high-profile, but not necessarily high-paying. I was a part-time science teacher, and the paycheck isn’t nearly as glamorous and enormous as everyone thinks. We weren’t exactly dirt poor, but it costs a lot of money to own and operate a car in New York City. “Oh.”

“It didn’t cost very much. It’s old, but it goes when you push the pedal.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Um. Maybe you should have talked to me first?”

“There wasn’t time,” she said apologetically. “I had to get it today because rehearsal starts Monday afternoon, and I still had to take my test and get my license and . . .” She broke off, swallowing, and I swear, she almost started crying. “And I failed the stupid test,” she said. “I mean, I thought it would be simple, but I failed it. I’ve got a chance to finally show people that I can really act, that I’m not some stupid magazine bimbo who can’t do anything but look good in a bikini in movies about Lobsterman, and I failed the stupid driver’s test.”

“Hey,” I said quietly, setting dinner aside so that I could put my arms around her. “Come here.”

She leaned against me and let out a miserable little sigh. “It was humiliating.”

I tightened my arms around her. “But you can take the test again tomorrow, right?”

She nodded. “But Pete, I . . . I got nothing on the test. I mean, nothing. Zero. If there’d been a score lower than zero I would have gotten that, but they stop at zero. It isn’t fair. I’ve lived my whole life in New York. I’m not supposed to know how to drive.”

I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t. “It isn’t a big deal,” I told her. “Look, I can help you out, you’ll take the test tomorrow, get your license, and then we can plan your outfit for the Academy Awards.”

“Really?” she said, looking up at me, those devastating green eyes wide and uncertain. “You can help?”

“Trust me,” I told her. “I spent years as a full-time underclassman while spending my nights creeping around rooftops and alleys looking for trouble. If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to pass a test you haven’t had much time to study for.”

She laughed a little and laid her head against my chest. “Thank you.” She shook her head. “I didn’t mean to go all neurotic on you.”

“See there? You’re becoming more like the great actresses by the minute.” I kissed her hair. “Anytime.”

I heard a low, faint rumbling sound, and glanced out the window. I didn’t see anything, but it took only sixty seconds for the sirens to start howling—police as well as fire department, a dozen of them at least.

“Trouble?” Mary Jane asked quietly.

I grabbed the remote and clicked on the TV. Not a minute later, my regular programming was interrupted by a news broadcast. The news crew camera was still jiggling as the cameraman stumbled out of a van, but I got enough to see what was going on: a panic, hundreds of people running, the bright light and hollow boom of an explosion and clouds of black smoke rising up in the background—Times Square.

“Trouble,” Mary Jane said.

“Looks that way,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She looked up and laid a swift kiss against my lips. “All right, tiger. Get a move on.” She rose and gave me a wicked little smile. “I’ll keep something warm for you.”

FOUR

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 bench-press more than any two X-Men, and reflexes that make Speedy González 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 elbows, 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, 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.

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 down-hill 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 double-heeled 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?

FIVE

I hollered, “Boot to the head!” as I swung through the black smoke and slammed into Newtonian physics.

Newton. Isaac Newton. You remember him. White wig, apple tree. Played poker with Einstein, Hawking, and Data in an episode of Star Trek. You can’t really say he discovered the laws of physics, since they’d pretty much been there already, but he was one of the first to actually stop and look at them and get them written down. And while the next several centuries of scientific advancement proved that in certain circumstances he had dropped the ball—bah-dump-bump-ching!—he did a good enough job that it took the computer revolution to knock him off his pedestal a bit. Even then, pretty much anywhere on the planet (for example, Times Square), for pretty much everything you might bump into (for example, rampaging bad guys), Newton’s material is a darned good rule of thumb.

One of them applied here: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I came swooping down and delivered my double-heeled kick all right. Right into the Rhino’s breadbasket.

Granted, I’m smarter than most, and I always have something pithy to say, and I can just be a gosh-darned wonderful person when I put my mind to it. But all of that fits into a pretty small package. I’m not big. I’m not heavily built. I weigh about one sixty-five, soaking wet.

The Rhino, now, he’s built like a brick gulag. He’s huge. Huge tall, huge across, huge through. Not only that, but whatever process was used to ramp up his strength, it mucked about with his cellular makeup somehow, because he weighs on the heavy side of eight hundred pounds. I’m sure some of that can be accounted for by the stupid Rhino hat he wears, but bottom line, he’s an enormous gray block of muscle and bone, and even with my oh-so-stylish spider strength, I wasn’t really set for this kick. Super strength is all well and good, but if you don’t have yourself braced—like if you’re swinging on a webline—you’re at Sir Isaac’s mercy.

But my Aunt May always taught me to make the best of things, so I let him have it.

The kick took the Rhino off guard, even with me shouting and all. Granted, he isn’t exactly the shiniest nail in the box, and there were all kinds of bright colors and sounds around to distract him, but still. I think I might have caught him on the inhale, because the kick made his face turn green and threw him fifteen or twenty feet back and smashed him into a storefront.

Of course, the same amount of force came back at me. And since the Rhino weighs four or five or six times as much as me, I got flung a lot farther than fifteen or twenty feet. Then again, I’m the Amazing Spider-Man. Flying around in the air is what I do. So I hit a streetlamp with a webline as I flew by, hung on to be whipped around in a circle twice, arched up into a tumble, and came down in a crouch on top of an abandoned taxi about sixty feet away—where I could see the Rhino, enjoyed a clear field of view around me, and had plenty of room to move.

Felicia is no dummy. If she said that this was a trap, she probably had a good reason to think so.

“Well, well, well,” I said. “The Rhino. Again. I thought maybe poachers might have shot you and ground you up to sell as medicine on the Chinese black market by now. They’re doing that for all the other rhinos.”

The Rhino lumbered back to his feet. Lots and lots of broken glass slid off of his suit and tinkled to the concrete. Rhino wore his usual—the thick gray bodysuit made out of some kind of advanced ballistic materials that I’d heard could blow off armor piercing rounds from antitank guns. I can understand the insecurity. I mean, when your own skin can only handle heavy explosive rounds, you want a little insurance in case some enterprising mugger comes along packing discarding sabot shells.

He had on the hat, too. It was made of the same heavy material, encasing his head in armor and leaving only a comparatively small, square area of his small, square face vulnerable. The horn on it was heavy, tough, and sharp enough that when he put his weight and muscle behind it, he could blow through brick walls like they were linen curtains. All of which is imposing.

But at the end of the day, the hat still looks like a Rhino’s head. Good Lord, I keep hoping the NFL will approve a start-up team called “The Rhinos,” because then he’ll actually look like a comedic team mascot. I wondered if the Chicken could take him.

“Spider-Man,” growled the Rhino, presumably after taking a few moments to collect his thought. His consonants were clipped, the vowels guttural, Slavic, though if he really was a Russian, he spoke English pretty well. “We meet again.”

“Rhino.” I sighed. “You have got to get some better writers for these high-profile events. How are people ever going to take you seriously if you go around spouting that kind of hackneyed dialogue? What you do reflects on me, too, you know. I’ve got an image to think about.”

His face flushed and started turning purple. It’s almost too easy to handle this guy. “It will be pleasure to squash you, little bug man,” he growled. He seized a mailbox, ripped it up out of the concrete, and threw it at my head.

I moved my head, webbed the mailbox as it went by, and slung it around in a circle, using the elastic strength of the webline to send it back at him twice as hard. The impact made him stagger back a step. “Whoa there, big fella,” I told him. “Throwing down with me is one thing. But you do not want to tick off the Post Office. They don’t goof around.”

“I will shut your mouth!” he bellowed. He rolled forward at me, and to give the guy some credit, he moves better than you’d expect from someone who weighs eight hundred pounds. He swung fists the size of plastic milk jugs at me, a quick boxer’s combination, jab, jab, cross, but I was fighting my kind of fight and he never touched me. Instead, he pressed harder, throwing heavier blows as he did. I popped him in the kisser a few times, just to keep him honest, and he grew angrier by the second.

Finally, I wound up with my back against an abandoned SUV, and let the Rhino’s next punch zoom past my noggin and right through the SUV’s door. I hopped around to his rear, and he swung his other hand at me, sinking it into the engine block of another car, and briefly binding his hands.

I popped up in front of him, held up the first two fingers of my right hand in a V shape, poked him in the eyes, and said, “Doink. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”

That last bit was too much for him. Something in him snapped and he let out a roar that shook the street beneath me, his anger driving him wild. He flung the cars hard enough to free his hands, sending each of them flying with one arm, inflicting more collateral damage, and charged me with murder in his eyes.

Like I said: He almost makes it too easy.

When you get right down to it, that’s how I beat the Rhino every single time. His anger gets the better of him, makes him charge ahead, makes him clumsy, makes him blind to anything but the need to engage in violence. He’s stronger than me, grossly so, in fact, and he isn’t a bad fighter. If he were to keep his head and play to his own strengths—overwhelming power and endurance—he could take me out pretty quick. That kind of thinking is hard to manage, though, once the rubble starts flying, and he’s never learned to control his temper. If he could do it, if he could work out how to force me into close quarters where my agility would be less effective, he’d leave me in bits and pieces. He just can’t keep his cool, though, and it’s always just a matter of time before he blows his top.

Maybe it’s the hat.

I evaded the Rhino’s charge, and he kept coming at me. I let him, leading him into the street and as far away from the buildings and storefronts as I could—some of them would still be occupied, and I didn’t want the fracas to set them on fire or knock them down. Once the Rhino goes . . . well, rhino, it’s possible to turn his own strength against him, but it takes an awful lot of judo to put the man down.

He batted aside a car between us, just as I Frisbeed a manhole cover into his neck. He flung a motorcycle at me with one hand. I ducked, zapped a blob of sticky webbing into his eyes, and hit him twenty or thirty times while he ripped it off of his face. He clipped me with a wild haymaker, and I briefly experienced combat astronomy.

He chased me around like that while the police got everyone out of the immediate vicinity. Give it up for the NYPD. They might not always like it that they need guys like me to handle guys like the Rhino, but they have their priorities straight.

I led the Rhino in a circle until one of his thick legs plunged into the open manhole and he staggered.

Then I let him have it. Hard. Fast. Maybe I’m not in the Rhino’s weight class, but I’ve torn apart buildings with my bare hands a time or two, and I didn’t get the scars on my knuckles in a tragic cheese grating accident. I went to town on him, never stopping, never easing up, and the sound of my fists hitting him resembled something you’d hear played on a snare drum.

Once he was dazed, I picked up the manhole cover and finished him off with half a dozen more whacks to the top of his pointed head, and the Rhino fell over backward, the impact sending a fresh network of fractures running through the road’s surface.

I bent the manhole cover more or less back into shape over one knee, nudged the unconscious Rhino’s leg out of the manhole, and replaced the cover. My Aunt May taught me to clean up my messes. I checked the Rhino again, and then gave the nearest group of cops a thumbs-up.

That was when the trap sprang.

My spider sense is an early warning system hard-wired into my brain. It can somehow distinguish between all sorts of different dangers, warning me of them in time for me to get clear. A few times, my spider sense has become a liability, though. I was so used to its warnings that when I went up against something that didn’t trigger it, for whatever reason, it made me feel crippled, almost blind.

When Morlun had come after me, my spider sense did something new—it went into overdrive. Terror, terror so pure and unadulterated that it completely wiped out my ability to reason, had come screaming into my thoughts. It almost felt like my spider sense was screaming “HIDE!” at me, burned in ten-foot letters upon my brain. It had been one of the more terrifying and weird things that had ever happened to me.

It happened again now.

Only worse.

The terror came, my instincts howling in utter dread, and the sudden shock of sensation made me clutch at my head and drop to one knee.

Hide.

Hide!

HIDEHIDEHIDEHIDEHIDE!

“Move, Spidey,” I growled to myself. “It’s fear. That’s all it is. Get up.”

I managed to lift my head. I heard myself making small, pained, frightened sounds. Danger. It couldn’t be Morlun. It couldn’t be. I saw him die. I saw him turn to dust.

They came out of the New Amsterdam, where The Lion King was rolling onstage. Maybe they’d been watching the fight from the lobby. They came walking toward me, their postures, expressions, motions all totally calm amidst the chaos. Two men. One in a gray Armani suit, the other in Italian leather pants and a silk poet’s shirt. Both men were tall and pale. Both had straight, fine black hair and wore expressions of perpetual ennui and disdain.

And both of them bore a strong resemblance to Morlun.

The third was a woman. She wore a designer suit of black silk and had on black riding boots set off by a bloodred cravat. She too was pale, her black-cobweb hair worn up in a Chinese-style bun.