"Bug Boy?" I said, and felt myself grinning.
"Spidey!" called Felicia's voice from the other end of the junkyard. "I lost him! He's heading back to you!"
A vise-clamp settled on the back of my neck, and bounced my head off the nearest car. Which was twenty feet away. It hurt.
An undetermined amount of time later, I managed to sit up, only to find Malos standing over me. He leaned down and grabbed the front of my costume, hauling me to his level. "You forget that you touched me," he said in a quiet voice. "It struck me that while I seemed to be pursuing you, my sense of your presence told me that you were, in fact, behind me. A clever enough ruse, little spider. But your bag of tricks is now empty."
My spider sense's terror-reaction was nothing to that of my mind, as I scrambled to gather up my wits and try to defend myself.
I was too slow, the blow to my head too severe. Malos held me high off the ground with one hand, made a talon of the other, and his fingers suddenly dug into my abdomen.
Pain.
Pain.
White hot. Ice cold. Nauseating. Terrifying. My senses were overloaded, the pain something that somehow gained sound and taste, color and texture and scent. The pain was as fundamental, solid, and real as I was—in fact, more so. I tried to scream, but the pain had priority on reality, and no sound came out. This was worse than what Morlun had tried to do. He'd barely touched me for a second. This went on for an eternity, and mixed itself with a horrible sensation of something being ripped out of me, like someone had shoved a blender into my belly and turned it to puree.
Somewhere behind the pain I could dimly sense the real world, but it was disconnected and unimportant, a shadow play being performed far away. I saw it all through a hallucinogenic haze. Saw myself running atop a wall of crushed steel. Saw myself take off my mask and become Felicia. Saw her look up at the power lines passing by on the street, saw her raise her baton, saw a thin black line extrude from it as the hook arched up and up, sailed over the power lines, and then fell—onto Malos.
The Ancient's expression was quite calm—except for the maddened frenzy of hunger dancing in his eyes—and he paid the shadow-play world no mind. But his expression turned to shock and sudden agony as the Black Cat's line touched him and electricity from the power cables surged through to him.
I felt it, too. It hurt, but not necessarily in a bad way. The burning tingle was an honest pain, a real-world pain, not the nightmare agony of the feeding Ancient. I felt my body contort along with Malos's—and then the agony was gone and I was in my body again, burned and breathless and utterly exhausted.
I lifted my head enough to see Malos stirring, attempting to rise. I had to get on him right away, knock him out before he gathered his wits and focused his power into his defenses. I managed to wobble upright. Then I staggered over to him and kicked him in the chops. The blow was weak, and it knocked me down, but it got the job done. He fell to the ground in a pile of loose limbs beside me.
I fumbled out the second agate and flicked it at his nose. It missed and struck his cheek, but once more, without a flicker of showy lights, with barely more than a whisper of sound, the Ancient simply vanished.
I heard Felicia come running toward me. "Spidey?"
"Mmm, fine," I slurred. "Jusht ducky." I started to stand up and staggered again.
Felicia had to catch me. "Is that all of them?"
"Two," I managed to say. "We got two."
"What about Mortia?" Felicia hissed, looking around.
She turned her face directly into a blindingly swift blow. The Black Cat went straight down, body gone instantly and entirely limp—unconscious or dead.
Mortia, her dark clothes and hair soaked from her landing in the river, looked coldly down at Felicia for a moment. "Don't worry, darling," she purred. "I'm sure she'll turn up."
Chapter 25
I MANAGED TO KEEP MY FEET and throw a punch.
It wasn't a fast punch or a strong punch, but it was the best I could do.
It wasn't good enough. Mortia slapped it aside, seized me, slammed me into the same car her brother had not two minutes before, and then threw me through the air to land near the Rhino.
"Quite the interesting morsel you are," she murmured, regarding me with amused eyes.
I counted birdies and stars. At least she'd hit the other side of my head. That way, my brain could be equally bruised on both sides. The agony of the Ancient's devouring touch was fading as my heart kept on beating, and I felt some of my balance returning.
Mortia flicked a bit of debris from her sleeve. "But all things in their due course, trickster. First, the tart little aperitif."
With that, she turned and walked deliberately toward Felicia.
At which point I found myself suddenly angry enough to chew barbed wire and spit nails. I'll say this for the bad guys: Just when they pound me the worst, they have this ongoing tendency to provide me with oodles of motivation.
So I motivated Mortia right through a mound of scrap metal by way of saying thanks.
She came out on the other side furious, her jacket and pants in tatters. The steel had torn the expensive clothing to rags, though it hadn't broken her pale flesh. "Do you have any idea," she snarled, "how difficult it will be to replace this outfit?"
"You're one to talk!" I shot back. "At least you can get someone else to make yours!"
She came at me hard and fast, leaping from the ground to propel herself off the fence around the yard and straight at me.
This time there was no dodging, no webs, no tricks. I stepped forward to meet her and swatted her out of the air with a punch that killed her momentum cold. She bounced back from it with a spinning kick imported straight from Hong Kong that nearly took my head off. I managed to get away from it with nothing worse than a chipped tooth, but was reminded that I couldn't fight stupid against Mortia. She was too fast.
I ducked a second whirling kick, knocked her ankle out from underneath her with one leg, and got in a good stomp on her stomach, but then she drove her knuckles against the side of one of my knees, forcing me to hop away before I got knocked to the ground. After that, she came in close and brought a lot of hard, vicious, swift punches with her, throwing everything from less than a foot away, and all of it aimed at my eyes and nose and neck—Wing Chun, I think it's called. She'd had formal training somewhere.
I'd done all my learning in the school of hard knocks, and even if I don't have a pretty martial arts sheepskin, I can get the job done. I did a lot of bobbing and weaving, more boxing technique than anything else, spoiling the occasional blow with a quick slap of one hand. We closed and struck and counterstruck and parted a couple of times, each exchange several seconds long.
Whether it was the formal technique or just her sheer weight of experience and untiring speed, I missed a beat and took a chop to the side of the neck, followed by a stiff blow from the heel of her hand to the tip of my jaw that snapped my head back in a sudden whiplash.
I barely blocked a haymaker of an uppercut, and in a single motion splashed a blob of webbing into Mortia's face and followed up with a hard, driving strike with the same hand. I caught her on the forehead and knocked her tail-over-teakettle into one of the toxic-looking pools of the junkyard's liquid refuse.
She rose from the pool, her pale eyes cold and angry.
"There's something on your face," I told her.
She only stared at me with that intense, alien stare, and replied, "You're getting tired. You're slowing down." She prowled around the little pool to-ward me. The top of her head never changed height as she walked; you could have balanced marbles on it. Her eyes, similarly, never varied in height above the ground, just floating along, wide and intent. It was extremely graceful in an insectlike way, and highly creepy.