Especially because she was right. This wasn't going to be like my fight with Morlun. With him, even after I'd gotten tired, I had still been a lot faster than he was. With Mortia, I'd barely had an advantage when I was fresh, if I'd had one at all. As fast as she moved, it would not take much fatigue to slow me down enough to be overwhelmed by her sheer speed.
"Tired, mortal," Mortia murmured. "It's almost over. You can't avoid me for very much longer."
"Maybe not," I said. "But at least my outfit's still clean."
I guess she expected more whimpering and pleading, because my reply clearly enraged her. She came at me like she intended to tear my head off and it was suddenly all I could do to stay alive.
The fight got blurry after that. I had no frame of reference for time. Every move she made came at me too quickly to see, and at the same time it seemed to take forever, if not longer. I remember landing a couple of good ones, and shrugging off a lot of lighter blows—a whole lot of them. She wasn't trying to KO me. All she wanted was to continue to inflict pain through smaller, repeated blows, to grind down my endurance.
It must have worked. I saw bloody knuckles rush at my face—her knuckles, my blood—and then a flash of white light.
After that, I stared up at the slowly brightening sky, which looked like it was getting ready to turn into a pretty day, and wondered why I wasn't back home in bed with MJ.
"My brothers are gone," she said. Her voice echoed and rang oddly, as if coming to me down a long tunnel. "Which I admit is mildly disturbing, but probably inevitable." She picked me up and threw me into a heavy beam supporting the structure of the car crusher. I struck sideways across the small of my back, and heard things crackle when I hit.
"They were always incautious, you see. Impatient. Once they saw the prey, they could only pursue it, devour it." She paused over the weakly stirring Rhino and crushed her heel down upon his head in several vicious kicks as she spoke in a conversational tone. "Ultimately, of course, I would have had to kill them. The world will not bear the strain of feeding even the few of our kind who remain, in the next several thousand years. As the source drains from this world, fewer and fewer of your kind appear, spider. And subsisting on lesser beings"—here, she paused to step over the unmoving Felicia—"is simply no way to live."
I got up and hit the car crusher with a webline near the top, using my left hand, intending to jump and swing and get some distance from Mortia. I was moving too slowly, though, too weakly.
"All in all," she said, "I suppose I should be thanking you, in some ways." She seized my left arm, and with a squeeze and a twist she snapped the webline—and broke my wrist. I felt and heard my bones cracking under her viselike fingers.
Fiery pain took away whatever strength was left to me, and I fell to my knees.
"Yet," she continued in the same conversational tone, "they were family. Companions over the empty years. They would have amused me, somewhat, until I had to kill them." She threw me with both hands—she wasn't as strong as Malos had been, but was at least as strong as I. I slammed into the mechanics' garage and left a deep dent in the rusty corrugated sheet metal that passed for its walls.
It hurt. A lot.
"Your struggle has been useless, of course," she said. She kicked my ribs several times, and all I could do about it was to try to exhale when her foot impacted me. It hurt even more. I'd have been screaming about it if I'd been able to get a breath. I'd have been running away if I could have managed to stand. "That's the way of the world, spider. Predators and prey. Your fall was inevitable. But the tricksters are always the most interesting hunts. Certainly more so than the brutes."
I tried crawling away, around the office building and garage. I dimly remembered that the chain-link gates had been there.
She picked me up with one arm and slammed me into the office building. I could see the gates, see the street outside through the chain links. It wasn't thirty feet away—but I'd never reach it.
"Truth be told," Mortia purred, her voice growing deeper, huskier, "the brute will make a more than acceptable meal. But you will taste simply divine. A spirit such as yours will be most rich; most delightful." She idly ripped off the front of my costume, and pressed a kiss against my chest. Flickering sparkles appeared in my vision, and the nauseating pain of the Ancient's hunger brushed against me for a minute.
Mortia looked up, licked her lips, and shivered. "But your passing need not be agony. I can take you gently. Peacefully. It will be like falling asleep in my arms." Her eyes brightened. "All you need do is ask me to be merciful." She pinned me to the wall with one hand, looking up at me with the same horrible hunger I'd seen in the eyes of Morlun and Malos, just before they fed. "Beg, spider."
So this was it.
Huh. I hadn't really figured today would be the day.
But then, who does? Am I right? You never really wake up and think that it's your last day on this rock.
She leaned closer, almost close enough to kiss me. "Beg, spider."
I swallowed and faced her, no longer attempting to struggle or escape. I was through. No one was left to attack her when she fed. I was alone. I was going to die alone. But I'd taken down three out of four, and I hadn't abandoned anyone doing it. Not bad. Not bad.
"I have seen gods and demons at war," I told her, my voice hoarse. "I have seen worlds created and destroyed. I have fought battles on planets so far from Earth that the light from their stars has never reached us. I have seen good men die. I have seen evil men prosper, and I have seen scales balanced against all odds. I have seen the strong oppress the weak, the law protect criminals instead of citizens. I have fought with others and alone against every kind of enemy you can imagine, against every kind of injustice you can imagine." I met her eyes and said, quietly and unafraid, "And because of what you are, Mortia, you will never understand why."
She tilted my head, staring at me as though puzzled, the way someone might regard a talking lobster being held above the pot.
"In all that time," I said, my voice growing weaker, "I have never surrendered." And all the defiance I had left in me rose—too weak to stir my limbs, but giving my voice a hard, hot, edge of anger. "I will never beg you for anything. So you'd better stop flapping your stupid mouth and kill me. Or so help me God, I will destroy you just like I did your brothers."
Those cold, alien eyes grew colder. "Very well," she said, her voice low, throbbing with excitement. "Then you will feel every second. May you live long enough for the pain to drive you mad."
Her hand slammed flat to my bared chest.
My world drowned in pain. This time, as she began ripping at me, I wasn't even strong enough to writhe.
The shadow play of the world went on in the background.
I saw a bright white light, from far away, begin to rush closer. And closer. And closer.
A roaring sound began, and I thought to myself that heaven needed to get itself a new muffler.
The shadow play rolled on, and what I saw there sent hope pouring through me again, one last surge of defiance that I had never imagined could have survived what the Ancients had done to me. It gave me one last tired wave of awareness, one last weak and weary burst of motion. I managed to twist my body enough to get my feet onto the wall of the junkyard office, then walked them sideways and up, until they were level with my head.
Mortia let out a flushed, ecstatic laugh at this last, tiny defiance, as she ripped into me.
And then Mary Jane's rusty, lime-green Gremlin blew through the junkyard's chain-link gates at seventy or eighty miles an hour and smashed into Mortia and the office building, ripping her hands away from me as the car's hood went entirely through the wall beneath me, taking Mortia with it.