Assuming, of course, that whatever had caused a third column of smoke to start rolling up through the evening air didn’t spoil it for me.

  I was making pretty good time through Manhattan when that twitchy little sensation of intuition I’d dubbed my “spider sense” (because I was fifteen at the time) let me know that I wasn’t alone.

  I managed to catch a blur in the corner of my vision, moving along a window ledge on a building parallel to my course, above and behind me, staying in the shadows cast by the buildings in the fading light, and rapidly catching up with me. If I continued in my current line of motion, my pursuer would be in a perfect position to ambush me as I crossed the next street—one of those midair impacts, when I was at the top of a ballistic arch and least able to get out of the way. The Vulture loved those, and so had the various Goblins. If I had a chiropractor, he’d love them too, on account of every one of them would make him money.

  Me, I’m not so fond of them.

  So at the very last second, just as I would have flung myself into the air, I turned around instead, hit the building my chaser was on with a webline, and hung on. The line stretched and recoiled, flinging me back toward the would-be attacker, and I added all of my own oomph to it and shot at my pursuer like a cannonball.

  Whoever it was reacted swiftly. He immediately changed direction, leaping off a ledge and soaring through the air by swinging on some kind of matte black, nonreflective cable to a lower rooftop. He hit the roof rolling, and I had to flick out a strand of webbing to reverse direction again. He might have been fast, but not that fast. I hit him around the waist with a flying tackle and pinned him against the roof.

  At which point I realized that I had pinned her to the roof.

  “Well,” drawled a languidly amused woman’s voice. “This evening is turning out even better than I thought it would.”

  “Felicia?” I said.

  She turned her head enough to let me see the smirk on her mouth and said, “This is hardly a dignified position for a married man. What if some nerdy freelance photographer for the Bugle came along and took our picture? Can you imagine the headlines? Two Swingers Caught in Flagrante Delicto on Roof.”

  “I doubt that the Human Flattop would use that term,” I replied. But she had a point. I read somewhere that full-body pins are not a proper greeting for an ex-girlfriend from a married man, so I got off of her in a hurry.

  Felicia Hardy rolled over, leaned back on her elbows, and regarded me for a moment from her lounging position. She’d given her Black Cat costume a minor makeover, losing the white puffs at her calves and wrists. Maybe they’d been harder to find since Cats closed. She still wore the catsuit, but this new suit was made out of some supple, odd-looking black material I’d never seen before, and it managed to give me the impression that it was some kind of body armor. Her hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen her, and she wore a black visor that covered her eyes, until she tipped it down enough to give me a wicked-eyed smile over the visor’s rim, and extended her arm up to me. “Give me a hand?”

  Part of me was happy to see Felicia again. There aren’t a lot of people I’m comfortable fighting beside, but Felicia is one of them. Admittedly, we’d gotten off to a bad start, since she had been a professional burglar at the time, but eventually the bad first impressions became spilt milk under the bridge. She’d reformed—more or less. And she’d helped me out a couple of times when I really needed it.

  We became involved during that time, and the romance had been . . . eventful. Tempestuous. On occasion, it had resembled pay-per-view professional wrestling. It had ended amicably, more or less, but I’d still been worried that she might go back to what she was doing before she met me. Apparently, however, her reform had been sincere, and she was, as far as I knew, on the straight and narrow these days.

  I pulled her to her feet. “What are you doing here?”

  “I needed to talk to you,” she said, rising. She put her hands on the small of her back, winced a little, and stretched again. “Mmmm. I always did like it when you played rough, Spider.”

  “I could have killed you,” I said. “What do you think you’re doing, stalking me like that?”

  “I was going to knock on your door,” she said, “but I saw you leaving. I had to get your attention somehow.”

  “You know what gets my attention?” I said. “When someone shouts my name and says that they want to talk to me. One time, they even used this magical device called a telephone.”

  “You don’t get it—” she began.

  Another enormous crunching, crashing sound from Times Square, only a few hundred yards off, interrupted her.

  “No, you don’t get it,” I said, and turned to go. “I don’t have time for this right now, Cat. I’m on the clock.”

  “Wait,” she said. “You can’t!”

  I ground my teeth under the mask and paused, webline in hand. “Five words or less, why not?”

  Felicia put her hands on her hips, eyes narrowed, and said, holding up a finger with each word, “It is a trap.” She considered and stuck out her thumb, too. “Dummy.”

  “A trap?” I said. “Whose?”

  “That’s just it,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

  “You just know it’s a trap.”

  “If you’ll give me a second to explain—”

  Down the street, a police car tumbled across the road, end over end, bouncing along like a child’s toy, lights flashing. It knocked over a fire hydrant, sending a cascade of water into the air, then crashed through the front window of an adult bookstore.

  “You’ve got to admit,” she said. “It isn’t hard for someone to get a rise out of you if they want to draw you out. That’s what Morlun did.”

  I had been about to swing off, but her words stopped me cold.

  Morlun.

  Ugh.

  Morlun had been . . . bad. A creature, some kind of entity that fed upon the life energy of vessels of totemistic power. That’s mystic gobbledygook for superheroes who draw their powers from—or at least compare them to— some kind of animal. Say, for example, your friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man. He was an ultra-ancient being who only looked human, who devoured the life energy of his victims to sustain his own apparent immortality.

  Morlun had asked me to dinner, and not as a guest. The invitation had come in the form of a rampage in the fine tradition begun by the Hulk. I sent him a two-fisted RSVP. As brawls go, it had been a long one. Days long. I can’t remember anyone who’s made me feel more physical pain, offhand. Morlun was strong. Really, really strong. And he took everything I could throw at him without blinking. Or talking. Which cheesed me off. How am I supposed to uphold snappy superhero banter when the other guy won’t carry his end of the conversational load?

  He almost killed me. God help me, I almost let him. I almost gave up. I’d just been that hurt, that tired—that alone. Morlun showed up in my nightmares for a good long while afterward, temporarily supplanting my subconscious’s favorite bogeyman, Norman Osborne.

  I came out on top in the end, but only by injecting myself with material from the core of a nuclear reactor, so that when he tried to eat me, Morlun got a big old mouthful of gamma-ray energy instead. After that, Morlun’s day went down-hill pretty fast.

  Here’s the kicker, though.

  I hadn’t told anyone about Morlun.

  Not Aunt May.

  Not Mary Jane.

  Nobody.

  As far as I knew, the only one, other than me, who had known what was going on was a guy named Ezekiel. A man who had, somehow, acquired powers remarkably similar to my own, and who had tried to warn me about Morlun—and who had eventually helped me defeat him, nearly at the cost of his own life.

  So how had Felicia found out about Morlun?

  “Hey,” I said. “How did you find out about Morlun?”

  “I’ve turned over a new leaf, remember?” she said. “I’m a security consultant and investigator now. I investigate things, and some of what I turned up indicates that there’s someone here to call you out.” She slipped off the visor and met my eyes, her expression worried. “The details will take me a while to give you, but the short version is that you’re in danger, Peter.”

  An ambulance siren added its wail to that of the police cars and fire trucks. I could see people running from the area, underneath one of the big flashing signs for the New Amsterdam Theater, where they were performing The Lion King.

  “No,” I said. “They’re the ones who are in danger.”

  “But I already told you—”

  “It’s a trap, I know. But the longer I stay away from it, the more noise whoever is over there is going to make. I’m going.”

  “Don’t,” she said, touching my arm. “Don’t be stupid. It’s not as if there aren’t a couple of other folks around New York who will show up to a disturbance this public.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t let other people do my chores for me. If I wait for the FF to show up, or the Avengers, he’ll scamper and do it all again another day.” I felt myself getting a little angry, talking about it.

  Like I said: I have issues with people who pick on those who can’t protect themselves.

  “I’m taking this guy down,” I said. “Thank you for the warning. But I’m going.”

  Felicia didn’t look happy with me as she jammed the visor back onto her face. “You stiff-necked . . .” She shook her head. “Go on. Go. Be careful.”

  I nodded once, dove off on my line, and flung myself from building to building down the street. I swung around the last corner, rapidly gathering momentum, and found a scene of pure chaos. Emergency units were trying to cordon off the square. Fires burned. Smoke rolled. Several police cars had been flattened—literally flattened—by blows of superhuman strength. Many of the lights were either out or flickering wildly, giving the place that crazed, techno dance club look. Broken glass lay everywhere. Car alarms and fire alarms beeped and wooped and ah-oohgahed. The air stank of burning plastic and motor oil. People shouted, screamed, and ran.

  “It’s like the mayor’s office in an election year,” I muttered.

  At the center of it all, in the thick plume of black smoke, stood a single, hulking figure. I altered my course, spat a new line from my web shooters, and swung down to give whoever it was a big old double-heeled mule-kick greeting on behalf of the citizens of New York.

  Did I mention that I have a tendency to get in over my head?

  FIVE

  I hollered, “Boot to the head!” as I swung through the black smoke and slammed into Newtonian physics.

  Newton. Isaac Newton. You remember him. White wig, apple tree. Played poker with Einstein, Hawking, and Data in an episode of Star Trek. You can’t really say he discovered the laws of physics, since they’d pretty much been there already, but he was one of the first to actually stop and look at them and get them written down. And while the next several centuries of scientific advancement proved that in certain circumstances he had dropped the ball—bah-dump-bump-ching!—he did a good enough job that it took the computer revolution to knock him off his pedestal a bit. Even then, pretty much anywhere on the planet (for example, Times Square), for pretty much everything you might bump into (for example, rampaging bad guys), Newton’s material is a darned good rule of thumb.

  One of them applied here: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

  I came swooping down and delivered my double-heeled kick all right. Right into the Rhino’s breadbasket.

  Granted, I’m smarter than most, and I always have something pithy to say, and I can just be a gosh-darned wonderful person when I put my mind to it. But all of that fits into a pretty small package. I’m not big. I’m not heavily built. I weigh about one sixty-five, soaking wet.

  The Rhino, now, he’s built like a brick gulag. He’s huge. Huge tall, huge across, huge through. Not only that, but whatever process was used to ramp up his strength, it mucked about with his cellular makeup somehow, because he weighs on the heavy side of eight hundred pounds. I’m sure some of that can be accounted for by the stupid Rhino hat he wears, but bottom line, he’s an enormous gray block of muscle and bone, and even with my oh-so-stylish spider strength, I wasn’t really set for this kick. Super strength is all well and good, but if you don’t have yourself braced—like if you’re swinging on a webline—you’re at Sir Isaac’s mercy.

  But my Aunt May always taught me to make the best of things, so I let him have it.

  The kick took the Rhino off guard, even with me shouting and all. Granted, he isn’t exactly the shiniest nail in the box, and there were all kinds of bright colors and sounds around to distract him, but still. I think I might have caught him on the inhale, because the kick made his face turn green and threw him fifteen or twenty feet back and smashed him into a storefront.

  Of course, the same amount of force came back at me. And since the Rhino weighs four or five or six times as much as me, I got flung a lot farther than fifteen or twenty feet. Then again, I’m the Amazing Spider-Man. Flying around in the air is what I do. So I hit a streetlamp with a webline as I flew by, hung on to be whipped around in a circle twice, arched up into a tumble, and came down in a crouch on top of an abandoned taxi about sixty feet away—where I could see the Rhino, enjoyed a clear field of view around me, and had plenty of room to move.

  Felicia is no dummy. If she said that this was a trap, she probably had a good reason to think so.

  “Well, well, well,” I said. “The Rhino. Again. I thought maybe poachers might have shot you and ground you up to sell as medicine on the Chinese black market by now. They’re doing that for all the other rhinos.”

  The Rhino lumbered back to his feet. Lots and lots of broken glass slid off of his suit and tinkled to the concrete. Rhino wore his usual—the thick gray bodysuit made out of some kind of advanced ballistic materials that I’d heard could blow off armor piercing rounds from antitank guns. I can understand the insecurity. I mean, when your own skin can only handle heavy explosive rounds, you want a little insurance in case some enterprising mugger comes along packing discarding sabot shells.

  He had on the hat, too. It was made of the same heavy material, encasing his head in armor and leaving only a comparatively small, square area of his small, square face vulnerable. The horn on it was heavy, tough, and sharp enough that when he put his weight and muscle behind it, he could blow through brick walls like they were linen curtains. All of which is imposing.

  But at the end of the day, the hat still looks like a Rhino’s head. Good Lord, I keep hoping the NFL will approve a start-up team called “The Rhinos,” because then he’ll actually look like a comedic team mascot. I wondered if the Chicken could take him.

  “Spider-Man,” growled the Rhino, presumably after taking a few moments to collect his thought. His consonants were clipped, the vowels guttural, Slavic, though if he really was a Russian, he spoke English pretty well. “We meet again.”

  “Rhino.” I sighed. “You have got to get some better writers for these high-profile events. How are people ever going to take you seriously if you go around spouting that kind of hackneyed dialogue? What you do reflects on me, too, you know. I’ve got an image to think about.”

  His face flushed and started turning purple. It’s almost too easy to handle this guy. “It will be pleasure to squash you, little bug man,” he growled. He seized a mailbox, ripped it up out of the concrete, and threw it at my head.

  I moved my head, webbed the mailbox as it went by, and slung it around in a circle, using the elastic strength of the webline to send it back at him twice as hard. The impact made him stagger back a step. “Whoa there, big fella,” I told him. “Throwing down with me is one thing. But you do not want to tick off the Post Office. They don’t goof around.”

  “I will shut your mouth!” he bellowed. He rolled forward at me, and to give the guy some credit, he moves better than you’d expect from someone who weighs eight hundred pounds. He swung fists the size of plastic milk jugs at me, a quick boxer’s combination, jab, jab, cross, but I was fighting my kind of fight and he never touched me. Instead, he pressed harder, throwing heavier blows as he did. I popped him in the kisser a few times, just to keep him honest, and he grew angrier by the second.

  Finally, I wound up with my back against an abandoned SUV, and let the Rhino’s next punch zoom past my noggin and right through the SUV’s door. I hopped around to his rear, and he swung his other hand at me, sinking it into the engine block of another car, and briefly binding his hands.

  I popped up in front of him, held up the first two fingers of my right hand in a V shape, poked him in the eyes, and said, “Doink. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”

  That last bit was too much for him. Something in him snapped and he let out a roar that shook the street beneath me, his anger driving him wild. He flung the cars hard enough to free his hands, sending each of them flying with one arm, inflicting more collateral damage, and charged me with murder in his eyes.

  Like I said: He almost makes it too easy.

  When you get right down to it, that’s how I beat the Rhino every single time. His anger gets the better of him, makes him charge ahead, makes him clumsy, makes him blind to anything but the need to engage in violence. He’s stronger than me, grossly so, in fact, and he isn’t a bad fighter. If he were to keep his head and play to his own strengths—overwhelming power and endurance—he could take me out pretty quick. That kind of thinking is hard to manage, though, once the rubble starts flying, and he’s never learned to control his temper. If he could do it, if he could work out how to force me into close quarters where my agility would be less effective, he’d leave me in bits and pieces. He just can’t keep his cool, though, and it’s always just a matter of time before he blows his top.