She jabbed a finger into my chest. "I am not afraid. I am also not going to commit suicide for some lowbrow thug too stupid to be careful who he works for."
I pulled the mask of£ and met her eyes. "I'm not asking you to do it with me," I said quietly.
Her eyes narrowed, searching mine. Then they became hooded and unreadable, her voice calm. "Good," she said. "Then I don't need to tell you no." She spun on a heel and walked quietly to the door. "I'll call you if I find out anything else. Good-bye."
She slammed the door on the way out.
I flinched a little at the sound of it.
My head pounded in a dull, steady rhythm. My brush with the Ancients had left my spider sense screaming, and the headache was, I began to understand, some kind of natural aftereffect of having the gain on my extra sense turned up to eleven, some sort of psychic hangover. My mouth felt fuzzy. More than anything, I wanted to crawl into a dark hole for a while and rest.
I've noticed that you rarely get a chance to do any dark-hole-crawling when you seem to need it most.
Mary Jane's fingers touched my chin and gently turned my face toward hers.
"Why did you provoke her?" she asked, her manner very serious.
"Provoke her?" I said. "I don't know what—"
She rolled her eyes. "Oh, please. Don't try to deny it. I know you too well."
I felt my mouth turn up into a tired smile. "Well. Maybe a little."
She gave me a small, strained smile and slid her arms around me. "You're pushing her away. Trying to protect her."
I held MJ for a moment, closing my eyes. "Maybe."
"You're a good man," she whispered, her arms tightening. "Which makes me think that she must be right about how dangerous it will be to protect him."
"Maybe," I said.
"What's the real plan, then?"
"The Jolly Gray Giant here should wake up sometime soon. I hope. When he does, I'll tell him about the danger and send him on his way."
Mary Jane was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "How is that different from putting him on a train?"
"Because I'm not going to use him as a lure. I don't think Mortia will chase him down until she's concluded her business with me. He deserves to know what he's up against, and needs time to recover and prepare for it, in case I don't…"
I didn't finish the sentence. Mary Jane's arms tightened around me. We stood that way for a minute.
Then I said, "All right. The webs will hold him, but not for long. So I need to be here with him when he wakes up, so I can start talking right away. If he panics, he'll rip out of the webs in a few seconds, and God only knows what will get wrecked. So if he freaks, I'll pitch him out the window."
She nodded, biting her lip thoughtfully. Then she turned the kitchen lights out.
I frowned at her quizzically.
"I don't have a mask," she explained. "I'd rather not be someone he recognizes, generally speaking."
I gave her a small smile and put my mask back on, leaving my nose and mouth uncovered. It hit me that I was starving, so I opened Aunt May's fridge to rustle up something.
"How long will it take them to find us?" Mary Jane asked.
"Technically, they could have been right behind me. But you don't live for thousands of years by taking unnecessary risks. They'll come in carefully, quietly, checking out the area. With any luck, Sleeping Beauty here will wake up in the next few minutes. We'll let him go on his way, which ought to confuse them, at least. Then you and I will slip out and make them start looking for me all over again."
Mary Jane nodded slowly. "But you still don't know how to beat them."
"No."
"Do you know how to find out?"
"No."
"Then what good is running going to do?" she asked. "Ultimately, it's just a delaying tactic."
"So's exercise and controlling your cholesterol," I said, and it came out more frustrated than I meant it to. "I don't know how to deal with freaking magical, Spider-Man-eating monster people." I lost control of my voice completely and found myself shouting. "I'm scared, all right? I can't think! I
don't know!"
"But you'd risk drawing them here, to both of us, for this man?"
I was quiet for a moment, staring at the inside of the fridge. Then I said, "I couldn't just leave him."
Mary Jane's voice turned warmer. "No. You couldn't."
"If it comes to a fight, I'm not going to stay around here. I don't want them to grab you."
She was silent. I assumed she nodded.
"I'll try to lead them off somewhere where it will minimize the damage. And…"
And what, Pete? Bounce around until you get tired, while they don't? Then miss a step. Then die.
"Here's a thought," Mary Jane said.
"Hmmm?"
"Maybe the doctor didn't mean those stones for the Ancients."
I frowned and blinked at her. "Huh?"
"Maybe he meant them for us." She shrugged. "I'm just saying. If it's some sort of timeless prison—maybe he meant us to use them to go there for shelter. Maybe he'd come and get us out."
"Maybe," I said quietly. "But… maybe he wouldn't. Or couldn't."
"Did he say that?"
I frowned. "He said that he believed I had what I needed to defeat this foe."
"Oh." She thought about it for a moment, and then said, "He's a difficult man to pin down."
I grunted. Aunt May's fridge was largely bare. Of course. She had been planning to leave for a week on Anna's prize cruise. She wouldn't have left anything in the fridge that would go bad. The freezer had TV dinners, but with any luck we'd be gone from here long before they could be done. So I made do with some microwave popcorn.
As the scent filled the room, the Rhino let out a groan.
I looked up sharply at Mary Jane and nodded toward the bedroom. She swallowed and went there in silence.
Popcorn rattled in the microwave. The Rhino muttered something I didn't understand, in what sounded like Russian. His head tossed left and right. Then he snorted and tried to lift his head.
"Take it easy there, big fella," I told him. The microwave beeped, and I took the popcorn out. "Yes, you're tied up. Yes, I'm Spider-Man. No, I'm not going to hurt you, or even turn you over to the cops. And to prove it, I'll split some popcorn with you if you give me two minutes to talk to you without you going berserkergang on me."
"Spider-Man," the Rhino spat. I could dimly see him bare his teeth in the shadowy kitchen. His basso voice rolled out the thick, half-swallowed consonants of his accent. "You think this is funny, I bet."
"No," I said. "Ow, hot popcorn. Augh, that steam, right when you open the bag? Anyway, I don't think it's funny. I think it's really scary. I think that both of us have bigger problems to worry about than one another."
The Rhino growled, a sound full of suspicion and not much in the way of intellect. "Then why am I bound?"
"What do you remember?" I asked.
"Mortia. She touched me and…" He shuddered. Eight hundred pounds of shuddering Rhino is a lot. The plates rattled in the cupboard.
"How are you feeling?" I asked.
"I… hurt." There was a note of almost childish surprise in his tone. The Rhino did not often get hurt. Heck, he wasn't even showing any bruises from the massive walloping I'd given him not twenty-four hours before. My knuckles, on the other hand, were still swollen. "Heat, on my face. Headache."
"Mortia and her brothers are extremely bad news," I said. "They feed on life energy like yours and mine."
"They eat super-powered people?" Rhino asked.
"Close enough," I said. "They had a brother who came to eat me several months ago. He got a case of the deads."
"So they came to even the score," said the Rhino. I had to give the big guy credit. Not much in the way of brains, but he understood the meaner things in life.
"Exactly. They hired you to draw me out. Then stood around doing nothing, by the way, when I beat the stuffing out of you."