Contents

  Cover

  Novels of The Marvel Universe By Titan Books

  Title Page

  Leave us a review

  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.”