Maybe it’s the hat.

  I evaded the Rhino’s charge, and he kept coming at me. I let him, leading him into the street and as far away from the buildings and storefronts as I could—some of them would still be occupied, and I didn’t want the fracas to set them on fire or knock them down. Once the Rhino goes . . . well, rhino, it’s possible to turn his own strength against him, but it takes an awful lot of judo to put the man down.

  He batted aside a car between us, just as I Frisbeed a manhole cover into his neck. He flung a motorcycle at me with one hand. I ducked, zapped a blob of sticky webbing into his eyes, and hit him twenty or thirty times while he ripped it off of his face. He clipped me with a wild haymaker, and I briefly experienced combat astronomy.

  He chased me around like that while the police got everyone out of the immediate vicinity. Give it up for the NYPD. They might not always like it that they need guys like me to handle guys like the Rhino, but they have their priorities straight.

  I led the Rhino in a circle until one of his thick legs plunged into the open manhole and he staggered.

  Then I let him have it. Hard. Fast. Maybe I’m not in the Rhino’s weight class, but I’ve torn apart buildings with my bare hands a time or two, and I didn’t get the scars on my knuckles in a tragic cheese grating accident. I went to town on him, never stopping, never easing up, and the sound of my fists hitting him resembled something you’d hear played on a snare drum.

  Once he was dazed, I picked up the manhole cover and finished him off with half a dozen more whacks to the top of his pointed head, and the Rhino fell over backward, the impact sending a fresh network of fractures running through the road’s surface.

  I bent the manhole cover more or less back into shape over one knee, nudged the unconscious Rhino’s leg out of the manhole, and replaced the cover. My Aunt May taught me to clean up my messes. I checked the Rhino again, and then gave the nearest group of cops a thumbs-up.

  That was when the trap sprang.

  My spider sense is an early warning system hard-wired into my brain. It can somehow distinguish between all sorts of different dangers, warning me of them in time for me to get clear. A few times, my spider sense has become a liability, though. I was so used to its warnings that when I went up against something that didn’t trigger it, for whatever reason, it made me feel crippled, almost blind.

  When Morlun had come after me, my spider sense did something new—it went into overdrive. Terror, terror so pure and unadulterated that it completely wiped out my ability to reason, had come screaming into my thoughts. It almost felt like my spider sense was screaming “HIDE!” at me, burned in ten-foot letters upon my brain. It had been one of the more terrifying and weird things that had ever happened to me.

  It happened again now.

  Only worse.

  The terror came, my instincts howling in utter dread, and the sudden shock of sensation made me clutch at my head and drop to one knee.

  Hide.

  Hide!

  HIDEHIDEHIDEHIDEHIDE!

  “Move, Spidey,” I growled to myself. “It’s fear. That’s all it is. Get up.”

  I managed to lift my head. I heard myself making small, pained, frightened sounds. Danger. It couldn’t be Morlun. It couldn’t be. I saw him die. I saw him turn to dust.

  They came out of the New Amsterdam, where The Lion King was rolling onstage. Maybe they’d been watching the fight from the lobby. They came walking toward me, their postures, expressions, motions all totally calm amidst the chaos. Two men. One in a gray Armani suit, the other in Italian leather pants and a silk poet’s shirt. Both men were tall and pale. Both had straight, fine black hair and wore expressions of perpetual ennui and disdain.

  And both of them bore a strong resemblance to Morlun.

  The third was a woman. She wore a designer suit of black silk and had on black riding boots set off by a bloodred cravat. She too was pale, her black-cobweb hair worn up in a Chinese-style bun.

  She, too, looked a bit like Morlun—especially through the eyes. She had pale eyes, soulless eyes, eyes that neither knew nor cared what it was to be human.

  She came over and stopped about five feet from me, her hands on her hips. She tilted her head and stared at me the way one might examine a messy roadkill in an effort to determine what it had been before it was squashed.

  “You are he,” she said in a low, emotionless voice. “The spider.”

  “Uh,” I said.

  I found myself at a loss for words.

  She narrowed her eyes, and they flickered with cold, cold anger— and inhuman hate, something that could roll on through a thousand years without ever abating. “You are the one who killed our brother.” Her eyes widened then, and a terrible hunger came into them as the two men stepped up to stand on either side of her.

  She pointed a finger at me and said, “Kill him.”

  SIX

  IT dimly occurred to me that at this point, if I was Han Solo, faced with a genuine threat to my life, I would officially have moral license to shoot first.

  The thought flashed through my mind as swiftly and lightly as a wood chip passing over the surface of a rushing river, but it gave me something to grasp toward, and I was able to get my head above the surface of my instinctive terror long enough to grab on to another thought:

  If one of them touched me, just touched me, I was as good as dead.

  Right then. Don’t let them touch me.

  Tweedle-Loom and Tweedle-Doom stalked forward with a predator’s economic grace, but I didn’t want to give them time to shift gears when I scampered. I waited until the last second to pop them both in the face with bursts of webbing and jump back out of reach. A quick hop landed me twenty feet above the road on an enormous billboard, and I crawled up it, turning to study them. If they were anything like Morlun, they’d be walking tanks with nearly limitless endurance—but not a lot swifter, on foot, than anyone else.

  As it turned out, the boys were apparently a lot like Morlun. They tore off the webbing with about as much distress as I would feel wiping off shaving cream, gave me dirty looks, and continued stalking toward me.

  The woman had evidently stood in a different line when they were handing out superpowers. She hit the spot where I’d been standing with one foot and leapt—with grace and élan—up to the top of the sign I was scaling. She crouched there, her head still tilted at that odd angle. “You must know this is pointless,” she said dispassionately. “You cannot stop us. You cannot save yourself.”

  My spider sense was still gibbering at me, but enough of my voice had come back for me to say, “Now let me think. Where have I heard someone like you say something like that before? Hmm.”

  A cold little smile touched her mouth. “Little Morlun was one. We are three.”

  Little Morlun? That wasn’t encouraging. “I don’t suppose it matters to you that I didn’t kill him,” I told her.

  Her lips twitched a little. “He hunted you?”

  “Yes.”

  “He died.”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw it. You allowed it.”

  “I . . .” I swallowed. When it came down to the wire, I’d had him at my mercy. I knew full well that if I’d let him live, he’d only come back another day. I hesitated. And before I could go through with it, Dex, Morlun’s demented little attaché, had emptied a Glock into him from ten feet away and blew him to dust.

  I’d like to think that if I’d been aware of Dex and his gun I would have stopped him. Part of me is sure I would have. But more honest parts of me aren’t so sure.

  “I did,” I told her quietly.

  “Then for his sake, you die.”

  “What if I’d tried to stop it?”

  She smiled a cold little smile, showing me very white teeth. “Then you would die for mine. I am hungry, spider. I will devour you.”

  “Gosh, that’s kinda intimate,” I said. “We haven’t even been introduced.”

  She lifted her chin a bit, and then inclined her head to me. “Mortia.” She moved a hand in a simple gesture to indicate the other two. “Thanis in the suit. Malos in the silk.”

  “Spider-Man,” I said. “I’m the one standing in the shoes which are going to kick all three of you back to wherever it is weirdos like you come from.”

  Mortia threw back her head and actually laughed a cold little laugh. “Such defiance.” Her eyes widened, showing the whites all the way around. “And it makes you smell sweet.”

  “Well,” I said, “they tell me my deodorant is strong enough for a man—”

  She flung herself at me in mid-quip. She was fast, as fast as anyone I’ve ever seen. As fast as me—and my spider sense, already howling at maximum intensity about how much danger I already knew I was in, gave me no warning at all.

  I moved, barely ahead of her—and if I hadn’t been watching her, ready for it, I would have been too slow. I never thought I’d actually have a reason to be glad that that symbiotic maniac Venom had obsessed over me and done his best to make my life a living hell between bursts of attempted arachnocide. My spider sense never registered him, either, and it had forced me to learn how to bob and weave the old-fashioned way, using only five senses.

  Her hand flashed out toward me as she passed by, and missed me by less than an inch. I hit the ground moving. Tweedle-Loom threw a television set at me, while Tweedle-Doom went with a classic and flung a rock with such power that the projectile actually went supersonic in a sudden clap of thunder, like a gunshot. I did not oblige either of them by behaving like a good target.

  Besides, they were just distractions, and they knew it. For the time being, the woman was the real threat, and she was hot on my trail. She got better air than me, but she didn’t have handy-dandy weblines to play with, and I was able to stay ahead of her—barely. I went bouncing around Times Square like a racquetball, playing a lunatic version of tag with the mystery lady while I struggled to come up with a plan. It was harder than usual. Normally, between my reflexes and my spider sense, things just sort of flow by, and it feels like I have all the time in the world to think. That’s how I’m able to be all funny and insulting while duking it out with the bad guys. It feels like I’ve had hours to come up with the material.

  This time, my spider sense had ceased to be an asset, and my speed was only just sufficient to stay ahead of the three of them. It took all of my attention to avoid her, plus dodging the occasional portion of landscape her homeys pitched after me—complicated by the fact that if I led them out of Times Square, which the Rhino’s efforts had already cleared of most civilians, bystanders would get hurt. Morlun hadn’t blinked an eye at the notion of murder, and I didn’t think these three would be any more safety-conscious than he was.

  It’s hard to gauge passing time in circumstances like that, but I gradually got the impression that maybe the reason I couldn’t think of a plan of action was that there wasn’t one. I’d taken Morlun out with the aid of material from the core of a nuclear reactor, and I didn’t see one of those around Times Square. The only Plan B I could come up with was for me to keep doing what I was doing until some of the other New York hero types turned on the TV, found out what was going on, and showed up to lend a hand.

  Although “hope someone rescues me” was a pathetically flawed Plan B. I mean, I’m supposed to be a superhero. I’m the one doing the rescuing.

  Thanis took the decision out of my hands. He threw something heavy that hit the car I’d landed on and knocked it cleanly out from under me. I dropped to the ground unsteadily and looked up to find that Mortia had anticipated her brother’s action. She was already two-thirds of the way through the pounce that would pin me to the ground and kill me. Thanis’s distraction hadn’t cost me much, maybe half a second.

  It was enough.

  As fast as I was, I still wasn’t going to be fast enough to get out of her way.

  SEVEN

  ONCE in a while, plan B actually works out.

  As Mortia came down at me, there was a phoont sound of expanding compressed air, and a small, metallic grappling hook flew over my head and hit her right on the end of her upturned nose, trailing a line of fine, black cable. The instant it touched her, there was a flickering of blue-white light, and Mortia’s body convulsed, hit by what I assumed was a hefty amount of electricity. She went into an uncontrolled tumble, and I got out of the way in a hurry.

  “That’s new,” I said, hopping to my feet—which I happened to plant ten feet up a handy streetlight, so that I could be sure to keep an eye on Clan Goth.

  “I went legitimate,” Felicia replied tartly. She landed in a crouch on the streetlight’s arm, above me, pushed a button on a small baton, and the cord and grapple reeled swiftly back in. “I never said anything about not finding new toys to play with.”

  Mortia came to her feet slowly, looking down at the concrete dust clinging to her suit with undisguised annoyance. She traded a look with Thanis and Malos, and then all three of them turned to stare at me.

  Absolutely no one moved. The only motion in all of Times Square came from rising smoke and the whirling bulbs on the police cars. The only sound came from a few stubborn car alarms that had survived the fracas (evidently Thanis and Malos found them as annoying as I did), and the harsh clicks and buzzes of transmissions on distant police radios. Nothing happened for a long minute.

  What the heck. Every tableau’s got to be broken by something.

  “What we need,” I drawled to the Black Cat, “is a couple of tumbleweeds. Maybe a rattlesnake Foley effect.”

  “Grow up,” she sneered, watching Mortia and her brothers as carefully as I did. “What we need is the Avengers.”

  “Only because we didn’t bring them,” I said. “If we had, we wouldn’t need them.”

  “Well, better to have them and not need them than—”

  “Do I criticize your equipment list?” I asked. “And, oh. Don’t let one of them touch you.”

  “We aren’t dating anymore,” she said archly.

  I grinned, underneath my mask. “Very funny. Just don’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because once they do, they can track you down. Follow you anywhere. Find you anywhere.”

  She pursed her lips, the expression made tough to read by the visor, and said, “Got it. We should leave now, then.”

  I hesitated.

  It wasn’t a macho thing. I had no idea what Mortia and company might try if I left the fight. In a bid to keep me close enough to kill, Morlun had promptly started brutalizing whoever was handy when I tried to break contact with him for more than a minute or two. That was why I was hesitant to leave.

  It wasn’t because I didn’t want to tuck my webs between my legs and run in front of half of New York and my ex-girlfriend. It wasn’t that. At all. Not even a little.

  Of course, dying in front of half of New York and my ex-girlfriend didn’t sound like much fun, either.

  A news chopper came whipping down the street, lower than the level of the buildings; someone was going to get a royal chewing-out from the FAA and whoever else screams and rants about such things. It kicked up a lot of dust and debris in the Square.

  Mortia saw it and made a disgusted little noise. “Mortals. So gauche.” She glanced at her brothers, then turned to me and said, “We are introduced, Spider. And after all, a multicourse dinner calls for a more . . .”—she gave me an acknowledging nod of the head and another wintry smile—“. . . intimate setting. Fear not. We shall be reunited.”

  “Won’t that be ducky,” I said.

  She flicked her wrist, dismissive. “You and the aperitif may flee, Spider.”

  “What?” Felicia said, indignant. “What did she call me?”

  “Come on, bonbon,” I told her. “Let’s git while the gittin’ is good.”

  Mortia turned to walk away, then paused to consider the fallen Rhino. “Bring the brute,” she told her brothers. “He may yet be of use to us.”

  The two men each took one of the unconscious Rhino’s arms, lifted all of him without so much as a grunt of effort, and dragged him along like a giant, armored rag doll in a goofy hat toward the nearest subway entrance.

  There was a stir at one of the police control points, and I spat out a breath as I saw the SWAT van roll up. “Come on. Something we have to do.”

  “What?” Felicia called after me as I swung over to the control point.

  I landed on the street next to the police lines. A couple of beat cops stared at me. One of them laid his hand on the baton at his belt. That was actually a pretty good reaction, for me. Usually, the hands go right to the guns.

  “Hey, guys,” I said. “Who is in charge of this scene?”

  “None of your business,” one of the cops said. “You ain’t the sheriff of this town. You ain’t the one that makes the calls.”

  A spotter had his field glasses focused on the retreating shapes of Mortia and company and was speaking cool instructions into his headset’s mike as the SWAT team locked and loaded.

  “Guys, you’ve got to trust me on this one,” I told them. “Leave those three alone.”

  “Look, buddy,” the cop said, his face turning red. “You’re lucky they aren’t getting ready to come after you, you freakin’ nutball.”

  “Gosh, officer. Don’t be afraid to tell me what you really think.”

  “Jesus, Frank,” the second cop said with a sigh, rolling his eyes. “There’s no harm hearing him out.”

  Frank folded his arms. “He’s probably in this with those four, somehow.”

  The older cop stared at him for a second, blinked his eyes, and, through what looked like a nearly miraculous effort of self-control, did not whack him upside the head. Then he looked at me and said, “Why?”