I took it off and stared at it for a minute. It was just a piece of cloth, but it had done more to protect me—and the people I cared about—than any number of locks or security systems over the years. I’d thrown it away several times. I’d always picked it up again. Looking at it now, it just seemed a little worn.

  I looked at the Rhino. I could count the number of times I’d seen him without looking through the mask on the fingers of one hand—and never from this close, this clearly. He finished the water and set the glass carefully to one side. I had half-assumed he would smash it in his fist when finished. Perhaps follow that by chewing up the pieces and swallowing. It was the sort of recreational activity I had expected from him: I am the Rhino. My favorite movie is Rocky IV and my turn-ons include exotic haberdashery and rubble.

  “I assume,” he said instead, “that we are in your secret headquarters.”

  “Secret headquarters,” I said.

  “Da,” he said. “The armory and lab where you design your weaponry. The bulletproof, stealth-technology super costumes. All the equipment you have used over the years. The cloaking technology that hides all of it.”

  I nearly burst out into a laugh, but kept it from happening. “Ah. That headquarters.”

  “Mysterio once said it was the only way you could counter his illusion technology so completely. With access to advanced equipment for the design of countermeasures, like that of Mister Fantastic.”

  “Mysterio thinks a whole lot of himself,” I said.

  The Rhino snorted. “Da.”

  Wait.

  I had just agreed with the Rhino on something.

  I wondered if my brain would explode out of my ears or just sort of flow out of my nostrils in steaming gobs.

  “I presume,” the Rhino said, “your security measures are monitoring me.”

  Why not?

  “Every single one,” I said. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t give me a reason to use them.”

  At that, he tensed a little, and his jaw clenched. “You think you can frighten me?”

  “No,” I replied. Normally I would have added something like: You’re obviously too stupid to be afraid of anything. It would have been funny, but maybe not entirely accurate. Whatever else his faults, the Rhino was tough-minded, and no coward.

  Besides. I didn’t need to be a telepath to realize that he was scared. Who wouldn’t be, in his position, blinded and captured by a bitter foe? But all I said was: “You’ve never had a problem with fear. There wouldn’t be any point to trying to scare you now.”

  He grunted. We were both guys, so to me, the grunt sounded like, Good, because I’m willing to fight you, blind and helpless and doomed, rather than let you think you frighten me.

  It was the kind of grunt I might have used myself, were things reversed.

  “I am ready to go,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Go,” he said, tensing again. “You said you intended to set me free. Do you mean to go back on your word?”

  “No,” I said, tiredly. “But that was before I knew about your eyes.”

  The Rhino shifted his weight warily. More dishes rattled. “You did this to me?”

  “No, bonehead,” I replied, mildly annoyed. “But I’m not going to send you out there blind. God only knows what you might blunder into and smash.” I shook my head, my voice trailing off. “Besides. When the Ancients came for you, you wouldn’t have a prayer.”

  “Then I am your prisoner?” he asked.

  “No. You’re free to go.” I paused for a second. If I just put my teeth together and kept them that way, the Rhino would be out of my hair. It would be simple, practical, and easy.

  Who am I kidding? I’ve never really been all that good at simple, practical, easy things. Things like baking frozen pizzas and abandoning enemies to their gruesome fate.

  “You don’t have to leave,” I said. “If you need some more time to get back on your feet, you can stay.” I paused. “So long as you give me your word that you and I have a cease-fire until Mortia and company are dealt with.”

  The Rhino tilted his head, sharply, blank eyes staring at nothing. “My word? You would trust this?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and realized, as I did, that I meant it.

  The Rhino was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded and said, “Until they are dealt with and for twenty-four hours after.”

  Because he didn’t want me pitching him into the pokey if we managed to survive. Understandable. “No rampaging while you’re here, and you leave town peacefully after. Deal?”

  He nodded. “Done.”

  I picked up his glass and got him some more water, and a glass of my own. Then I gave him his glass, clinked mine against it, and we drank in silence.

  Suddenly, rap music with a lot of bass and someone chanting “Unh, unh, unhunh yeeeeaaaaah” blared through the room.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  The Rhino tossed off the rest of the water, set the glass aside, and said, “Is me.” He fumbled a bit at the rhinoceros hat, then patted his legs and chest before saying, “Ah,” and ripping open a panel in the gray-armored suit I had never seen before. The sound of Velcro tearing scratched through the room, and the music got louder as the Rhino produced a little cell phone from the hidden pocket. It looked grotesquely tiny for his enormous, blunt hands. He put it to his ear and said, “Da.”

  His jaw clenched.

  He held the phone out in my general direction. “For you.”

  Well. That couldn’t be good.

  I took the phone and put it to my ear. “Da,” I said in my best growling Russian accent. “Ivan’s Pizza Shack. Ivan take your order.”

  There was a moment of puzzled silence, and then Mortia’s cool, quiet voice asked, “Is this the spider?”

  “If it isn’t,” I said, “he’s going to be upset when he finds me running around in his tighty-whities.”

  “Your kind,” she said, “are irritating in the extreme.”

  “Oh gosh,” I said. “Now I’m going to blush, you sweet talker. We can go on like this, but I should warn you that your credit card will be billed at two ninety-nine per minute.”

  Mortia’s voice got colder. “Spider. I grow weary of you. Listen well, for I will not repeat myself, nor make this offer again.”

  I let my tone get harder. “Speak.”

  “The Metro Used Auto Center in Flushing. Twenty minutes before dawn.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is more convenient to meet you there than to expend resources upon my optional initiative.”

  My stomach fluttered and felt cold. “Which is?”

  “Look out the window to your left.”

  I froze for a second. Then I turned my head, just enough to see out the window.

  Mortia crouched on a four-inch-wide window-pane across the street, on a level with Aunt May’s place, balanced easily on her heels. She had a phone to her ear, and the wind blew her hair and coat around her in a fashion every bit as chilling and unsettling as Venom on a good day. She stared at me, at my partial profile, with the emotionless patience of a shark waiting for a bleeding seal to weaken.

  It was scary.

  I turned sharply away before she could see any more of my face.

  “Meet me there,” she said. “If you do not, I will kill you where you stand.”

  “You think you’d get away with—”

  “Whether you escape or die,” she continued, “my staff will detonate the explosive charges currently planted on the building in order to cover our tracks. There are, at present, nearly fourteen hundred people in your building. Including one hundred and twenty-six children.”

  At which point, the fear vanished, replaced by raw anger.

  “And if I meet you?” I asked.

  “Then I will withdraw my staff and the threat to the innocent.”

  “How do I know you won’t blow up the building anyway?” I said.

  “I have no interest in the residents. Only in you. You have five seconds to decide.”

  “I don’t need one,” I snarled. “I was planning on pounding you to scrap in any case. See you there.” Then I hung up on her, turning enough to watch her indirectly.

  Her eyes glittered, a weird and somehow insectoid sight, and then she leapt from the ledge in a flicker of black cloth and white teeth, and was gone.

  I leaned down and put the phone back into the Rhino’s hand. “What does she want?” he asked.

  “A beating,” I said.

  Tough words.

  But the bottom line was that in all probability, I’d be dead by the time the sun rose once more.

  EIGHTEEN

  I went into the bedroom and shut the door behind me. Mary Jane took one look at my face and went pale.

  “Peter?” she whispered.

  I sat down slowly on the bed while she hovered over me.

  “The thing is,” I heard myself say, “you’ve got to feel the traffic around you. You’ve got to have your eyes watching other people, making sure some idiot isn’t about to turn in front of you. The laws, the lights, changing lanes, all of that really isn’t hard at all. Most people can drive while they’re half asleep and stand a reasonable chance of arriving safely anyway. You just have to keep an eye out for the idiots. It’s the idiots that mess up an otherwise decent system of transportation. As long as you know you’ve got your eye on any potential morons, it’s a lot easier to feel confident about the rest of it.”

  She shook her head, lips pressed tightly together.

  “It’s like listening to music. You know it when something starts going wrong. You know how it’s supposed to sound, and when you hear that first difference, that’s when you know you’ve got to look sharp. Or like science. You know what’s supposed to be in a given environment, and when something changes, you can see it, see what caused it. It’s the same on the road. You listen for the change in music. You watch for the active variable. That’s really all there is to driving, MJ.”

  She sat down with me. “Peter. You’re scaring me.”

  “I just . . . I just don’t want you thinking that this driving test is something big or complicated. It’s simple. Sometimes the simple things aren’t easy. But it isn’t anything that’s going to stop you for long. You’ll beat it.”

  She took my face in both hands and made me look at her. “What happened?”

  I told her about the Rhino’s blindness and Mortia’s phone call.

  “So. I guess we’ll have this finished by dawn,” I said.

  We sat together in silence for a minute.

  “I have to go,” I said. “If I don’t . . .”

  Mary Jane gave me a quiet smile. Then murmured, “Yet do I fear thy nature; it is too full o’ the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.”

  “What’s that mean in English?” I asked her.

  She kissed me. “That I love you.”

  We held hands for a while. Then she said, “Can you win?”

  “Not that it matters,” I said. “But I think so. If I could figure out how.”

  “You always do,” she said. “Yeah,” I said, without really meaning it. “Maybe something will come to me.”

  “Well,” she said quietly, “you’ll need some dinner. And to get some sleep, if you can.”

  Sleep. Right.

  “Come on,” she said. “You’d better introduce me to our guest.”

  “MJ . . . ,” I said.

  “He’s our guest, Peter. Didn’t you invite him to stay? Offer your protection to him? Didn’t he agree to a truce?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But . . .”

  “Then he’s probably hungry, too. I’ll see what I can put together.” She stood up to leave.

  I touched her wrist and said, “Just, uh. Be careful of him. All right? Don’t go within reach of him. I’ll move him to the couch.”

  “Where is he now?” she asked.

  “Um. The kitchen floor.”

  “Oh, Peter, for goodness’ sake.”

  “I’ll move him,” I said. “As long as you promise to be careful.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “One more thing . . .”

  * * *

  “I am curious,” said the Rhino as he sat on most of Aunt May’s couch, with a cup of hot tea. The Rhino hat occupied the leftover space beside him. He held the cup between two fingers and stirred very carefully as Mary Jane sat the sugar bowl back on the coffee table. “What kind of salary does a high-profile superhero’s majordomo require?”

  “Never as much as I’d like,” Mary Jane responded. “But the hours aren’t bad and there are decent benefits.” She walked back toward the kitchen and rolled her eyes at me. I gave her a thumbs-up, while she plundered the freezer. Aunt May had a bunch of frozen hamburgers left over from the big end-of-summer cookout we’d had, and some pasta, and some tomato paste, and Mary Jane set about making something out of it.

  “Benefits,” the Rhino said. “Never have gotten anything like that. That is a problem, working as an independent contractor.”

  I had a cup of tea, too, but I wasn’t sipping. Still too weird seeing the freaking Rhino on Aunt May’s couch. Sipping tea. “I like that phone,” I said. “Great speaker.”

  “Da, is also MP3 player,” the Rhino said, pleased. “When I first get into this business, tried to carry radio with me, but I had no pockets in the suit. I lose or break half a dozen radios, then cell phones, and one day think to myself, Rhino, what kind of idiot designs suit with no pockets?”

  Mary Jane turned her head away and bit down on a wooden spoon to keep from laughing.

  “Yeah,” I said, glowering at her. “Idiot.”

  I was going to design pockets into my costume. Eventually. It wasn’t like I didn’t have better things to be doing with my time.

  “Got to be practical in this business,” I said.

  “Exactly,” the Rhino said. “Is business. Lot of people cannot accept this.”

  I was quiet for a minute. Then I asked, “Why’d you get into it?” The Cat had told me why he’d gotten his start already. I wanted to hear what he had to say.

  The Rhino sipped his tea for a moment. Then he said, “The money. I had other ideas, back then. I was younger. Very naïve. Stupid.” There was more than a little bitterness in his voice.

  “When you’re young it isn’t necessarily stupidity,” I said. “It only means that there’s a lot you haven’t learned.”

  He shook off what looked like bad memories and resumed speaking in a neutral, conversational voice. “No, this I admit: I was stupid. Made stupid, young-man mistakes. After getting the strength enhancement and that first job against the Hulk, I had to find work. If you believe this, I had planned to enter professional wrestling. To become a wrestling star and make money.” He let out a rumbling chortle. “Of course, I am stupid, but not this stupid. I realize in time what a disaster it could be and ask myself, Rhino, what kind of moron gets superpowers and sets out to enter professional wrestling?”

  “Hah hah,” I chortled with him. “Hah hah, yeah. Heh.”

  Mary Jane’s face turned bright red, and she had one hand firmly covering her mouth as she stood over the stove.

  “Of course,” the Rhino continued, “you know what happened next. The armored suit began to bond to my skin, and I could not take the costume off.” He shook his head. “There I was, young man, big, strong, plenty of money, stuck in a gray suit I could not remove. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to pick up girls when you have been stuck in armored suit for six months?”

  I thought about it and shuddered. In that suit? “Ugh.”

  “Da,” he said with heartfelt agreement. “The smell alone . . . I had to go through car wash to get even a little clean. So I start taking more jobs, to get enough money to remove the suit.” He shook his head. “Is like low-budget horror movie. I thought that suit was an incredible asset, but it turns into horrible curse. You have no idea.” He shook his head, finished the tea, and carefully put the cup back on the table. “As I say, stupid. What kind of moron gets himself stuck into costume he cannot even remove?”

  My face turned red and I glanced at Mary Jane.

  Her whole upper body started jerking in little hiccuplike motions from the effort of holding in her laughter, and she had to leave the room.

  “I’ve got to ask you something,” I said. “Just something I’ve wondered.”

  He nodded. “Da.”

  I did my best to keep my voice neutral and calm. “Why do you keep that look? The big gray rhino suit. And . . . the hat.”

  “Bozhe moi.” He sighed. “The suit and hat. I hate the suit. I hate the hat.”

  I tilted my head and leaned forward. “Then why do you keep them?”

  He waved both hands a little, a gesture of helpless frustration. “I have no choice,” he said. “They have become business asset. Trademark.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “When I finally get the first suit off, I swear to myself never again. Hired a public image consultant. Bought myself business suit. Armani. Dark glasses. Big trench coat. Was good look, very hip, very professional.” He sighed. “First contract was in Colombia and it falls apart.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I reach employer for meeting, and he does not believe I am the real Rhino. He says I am fake. That real Rhino has hat with horn on it and big gray body armor suit. He says everyone knows that. So I must be fake, and I must prove I am real Rhino.”

  This conversation was like listening to a train wreck: fascinating, novel, and more than a little confusing. “What happened?”

  “I get angry and prove it,” he sighed.

  “How?”

  “I throw his yacht into his billiard room.” He shook his head. “After that, no more questions, but contract falls through. Unprofessional. Is better for business to wear stupid costume. And stupid hat.”

  I shook my head. Good grief. Felicia was even more right than I thought. I had also been young and ignorant when I got my powers. There but for the grace of God, Spidey.

  “You ever see yourself retiring?” I asked him.