"You having a stroke, Lamont? Your face is twitching."
"I might be," he said darkly. "Helping out one of the maniacs in tights. I might puke. Maybe on you."
I looked down at him from my upside-down position. "That would be difficult, considering."
"I'd manage. I'm crafty."
"Don't know if there's much you can do," I said. "Except for making sure you aren't putting pressure on the Addams Family. If you start a fight, they'll take you up on it."
"Good plan," Lamont said. "I solve most of my problems by standing around hoping they'll go away."
"If I could give you a better one, I would," I said. "Let me handle this one my way; give me some room to breathe. I'll take the fight to somewhere safe." I glanced at the square. "Well. Safer than this, anyway."
Lamont grunted again. "I'll see what I can do. No promises. And if something like this happens again, all bets are off."
"You try to take these guys down, cops are going to die."
He was stone-still for a moment. Then he murmured, "I know. So you damn well better take them out before it comes to that."
Trust is something precious and fragile. Once it begins to fracture, it isn't ever going to be strong again. Lamont didn't like me, I knew. But I hadn't realized that he trusted me. It was an enormous gesture, especially for him.
"I'll handle it," I told him, voice serious.
He finished the coffee, crushed the cup in a frustrated fist, and then pitched it down into the rest of the wreckage. "Right. Move along, then, citizen. Nothing to see here."
He was right, thank God. There wasn't.
Yet.
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.