I blinked at her. “Why else would you be here?”

  She gestured around us. We were down in the basement of this one, and it was nearly deserted, and quiet. “Look around, Peter. Lots and lots of long rows of books, lots of dim little crannies—not a lot of people.” She tipped the rather frumpy horn-rimmed glasses down. “Imagine the possibilities.”

  “I’m imagining books getting damaged,” I told her, half-amused. “And after that, I seem to remember that libraries occasionally carry rare books, and sometimes important documents or pieces of art.”

  “Why, Peter. I’m shocked that you would suggest such a thing.” She sighed. “Besides, that isn’t a terribly good market. It’s difficult to move any of the take. It’s all too identifiable. You’ve got to go to a foreign market to get decent money and it adds in several more middlemen who . . .” She gave me a brilliant smile. “Should I go on?”

  “Please don’t,” I said.

  “What are you looking for down here, anyway?”

  “Stories,” I said. “Folklore, specifically Native American folklore. There were powerful totemic images all through their society and their religious beliefs. Especially with regards to their shamans.”

  “What’s a shaman?”

  “It’s like a wizard or a holy man,” I said. “They were often the healers and advisers of a tribe. They communicated with the spirit world, negotiated with spirits for the benefit of the tribe. There was a lot of lore about them taking on the shape of various animals.” I shrugged. “Maybe they really did. Or at least, maybe they could do some extraordinary things—like mutants.”

  Felicia nodded. “You think the Ancients did some feeding on them.”

  “I think it’s worth investigating. It’s possible that if anyone encountered them and survived it, it would make one heck of a good story. There’s a chance that it passed into their folklore.”

  Felicia frowned. “Like . . . like if there was a real-live Pecos Bill who was a mutant who could control tornados? And he was used as the source of the myth? Something like that?”

  Felicia isn’t exactly a moron herself.

  “Just like that,” I said. Then I jabbed my finger down on the page. “Aha!”

  “Do people really say that?” she asked. But she came around the table and sat down in the chair next to me. “What did you find?”

  “This is the third mention I’ve found of a tribal shaman being pursued by a wendigo. It’s a Native American manitou—a spirit creature. It’s a kind of punishment that happens to people who resort to cannibalism to survive. They’re possessed by the wendigo and transformed into a creature of endless hunger, doomed to haunt the earth forever, looking for victims to devour.”

  “Sounds like our Ancients all right,” Felicia said. “Except that from what you’ve said, they eat energy, not flesh. And they aren’t human. And they only eat once every several years. So it really sounds nothing like them.”

  I shook my head. “But the details of the story don’t necessarily have to be accurate. Think about it. One of the Ancients gets hungry. It comes into a tribe, looking like one of them, to pursue its victim. Then, it and the victim go hunting, or gathering herbs or what have you. The Ancient attacks and leaves a dried husk behind. Later, concerned relatives and friends find the ruined corpse, which is nothing but bones and skin, as if the meat had been sucked out of it. And the new tribesman, the Ancient, has vanished.” I shrugged. “Why not assume that the stranger had been a wendigo? Give me some time and I could probably make a case for the original Grendel of folklore being something similar.”

  “Ah,” Felicia said, though she didn’t look confident in my hypothesis. “So. Does it say how to kill a wendigo?”

  “It’s got a heart of ice,” I replied. “The traditional way to kill it is to melt the ice.”

  “We could get Mortia a nice card,” Felicia suggested. “Some roses, some chocolate, maybe a Yanni CD and a bottle of Chianti . . .”

  “Very funny,” I said. “Look, each of these stories is different. In the first two, the wendigo destroys the shaman it hunted. In the last one, though, the shaman had a twin brother, who was a great hunter. The two of them overcame the wendigo.”

  “I know one set of twin brothers,” Felicia admitted. “Though admittedly, I’m not sure if they could take on an Ancient, even though they were definitely in great shape.” She frowned. “Come to think of it, I’m not even sure I remember their names.”

  I snorted. “It wasn’t that they were twins,” I said. “It’s that there were two of them fighting it.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Comparative data,” I said. “You notice how quick Mortia and her goons vanished after you showed up?”

  Felicia blinked. “I . . . suppose they did.”

  “Mmmm. And there were police nearby, choppers coming in close. I think that it posed some kind of threat to them.”

  Felicia laughed. “Are you kidding? I’ll be the first one to tell you how fantastic I am, but I’m not stupid, Pete. I couldn’t last a round with any of them, let alone all three. I don’t think I made them nervous. I don’t think the cops made them nervous.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But something did.”

  “They didn’t look nervous,” she said.

  “Maybe it was only a marginal threat,” I said. “Maybe that was enough to make them cautious.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “It’s the nature of predators,” I said. “No matter how hungry one of them gets, there are some things they won’t do. If the prey is too dangerous, a predator will look for an easier target if possible. They know that if they’re wounded in the course of bringing down the prey, it will render them unable to continue hunting effectively. They don’t take chances if they can help it.”

  Felicia frowned and nodded. “Throw the fact that they’re immortal into the mix, too. If you had eternity to lose as the price of a mistake, you wouldn’t take any chances, either.”

  “Right,” I said. “So we know they’ve got a weakness. They don’t want to face more than one target at a time.”

  “Good,” Felicia said. “Now. How does that help us? Specifically.”

  “Working on it,” I said. “Let me get back to you. What did you find out about the Rhino and his money? Any way we could nab it, get him to part company with the Ancients?”

  “Not a prayer,” she said. “The money trail looks like an Escher drawing. It could take months to sort it out.”

  “Mmmm,” I said. “Anything more?”

  “Quite a bit, actually. The Foreigner gave me a copy of his own file on the Rhino.”

  “And?”

  “Aleksei Mikhailovich Sytsevich,” she began.

  “Gesundheit.”

  “Immigrated to the States from the Soviet Union, back when they had one. He’d come over to get a job that would pay enough for him to bring the rest of his family—the usual American dream. But since he didn’t have much in the way of education, he couldn’t get a job that would offer him enough money.”

  I grunted.

  “He was big and tough, though. He wound up working as an enforcer for the mob. Someone—the Foreigner isn’t sure who—offered him a chance to participate in an experiment. The one where they grafted the armored hide to his skin.”

  “Did they give him that hat, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “The fiends.”

  “Stop interrupting,” Felicia said. “Later, he went through another experiment that enhanced his strength as well, enabling him to go toe-to-toe with the Incredible Hulk. He lost, but he made the Hulk work for it.”

  “Engh,” I said. “Well, it’s too bad we couldn’t subtract him, but he won’t affect the equation too badly.”

  Felicia gave me a pointed look. “Equation? Peter. He’s fought the Hulk.”

  “So what?” I said. “I’ve fought the Hulk. The Hulk’s personality being what it is, pretty much everybody has fought the Hulk.”

  Felicia leaned over and peered at my face.

  “What you doing?” I asked her.

  “Seeing if your eyes have turned green.” She smiled at me. “The Rhino’s had a lot of work with various villains, and has a reputation as an extremely tenacious mercenary. As long as no one sends him after the Hulk, apparently.”

  “Or me,” I said.

  She patted my hand. “Or you.”

  I scowled at her. “Why are you giving me a hard time about this?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe it’s my background. As mercenaries go, the Rhino isn’t all that bad a guy.”

  “Not all that bad? He wrecks things left and right! Factories, buildings, vehicles—”

  “And,” Felicia said, “in the midst of all that destruction, he’s never actually killed anyone. That says something about him, Pete.”

  “Even if he hasn’t killed anyone, he’s still breaking the law. He destroys property, steals money and valuables, and in general makes a profit off of his victims’ losses.”

  Felicia removed her glasses and stared hard at me for a second. Then she said, her voice very quiet, “The way I used to do.”

  I frowned at that, and fell silent.

  “I know you’ve got a lot of contempt for him,” she said in that same quiet voice. “But I’ve been where he’s standing—and I got into it purely for the profit, not to take care of my family, the way he did. He started off with better intentions than I ever had, and he’s ended up in a much worse position. It’s a bad place to be, Peter. I feel sorry for him.”

  “I don’t,” I said quietly.

  “And what’s the difference, Pete?” she asked. There was no malice in the question. “What’s the difference between him and me? What’s the difference between him and you, for that matter? I mean, I don’t know if anyone ever explained this, but vigilantism isn’t exactly smiled upon by the law in this town, and you do it every day.”

  Which was true, and really inconvenient to this debate. “So what? You think I should drop the mask, go to the police academy, and get a badge? Right. Like they’d ever let me do that.”

  She shook her head. “I just think you should think of him as a human being, not some kind of dangerous wild animal. Speaking of which,” she said, “didn’t it ever strike you as odd that the Ancients hired the bloody Rhino? A goon chock-full of totemic life energy?”

  I blinked.

  It hadn’t.

  “I’m not saying you should pull your punches,” she continued. “I’m not saying we should give him a hug and sign him up for group therapy. I’m just saying that he’s a human being with strengths and flaws, just like anyone else—and that he’s in way over his head. He’s in as much danger as you are and he probably doesn’t even realize it.”

  I shut the book a little harder than was strictly necessary. “He hurts people for money.”

  “You hurt people for free!” she said tartly. “That just means he has better business sense than you.”

  “I fight criminals,” I said. “Not bank guards and security personnel.”

  “One man’s security guard is another man’s hired thug,” she said. “And when you get right down to it, men like the Rhino spend far more time pounding on other criminals than they do on law enforcement.”

  I stacked the books up to return to the shelves. Most people probably don’t make enormous booming noises when stacking books. But I think they would if they had the proportionate strength of a spider and the proportionate patience of the crowd control guys on Jerry Springer. “So what are you saying? There’s no difference between the good guy and the bad guy?”

  Felicia arched an eyebrow at me. “They’re both guys. Aren’t they?”

  “Yeah. One of them a violent criminal, and the other someone who protects people from violent criminals.”

  “My point, Peter,” she said, “is that when you get down to it, there’s very little difference between a wolf in the fold and the sheepdog who protects them.”

  “Like hell there isn’t,” I said. “The sheepdog doesn’t eat sheep. Which is a really sorry metaphor to use for New Yorkers in the first place. Your average New Yorker is about as sheeplike as a Cape buffalo.”

  “Not everyone has a heart like yours, Parker,” she snarled, her voice ringing out among the stacks. “Not everyone is as good as you. As noble. Not everyone sees the difference between right and wrong—and once upon a time you didn’t, either, or you wouldn’t be who you are.” She folded her arms and brought her voice under control with some difficulty. “And I’d still be doing jobs on jewelers and vaults and . . .”—she gestured around us, wearily—“libraries.”

  True enough. Once upon a time, I hadn’t seen the difference between right and wrong, and Uncle Ben died for it.

  I sighed. “Look, there’s nothing else to be gained here. You want to go?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Another library?”

  “No,” I said. “I have another stop to make.”

  TWELVE

  COACH Kyle had been right. It wasn’t a great neighborhood.

  The Larkins’ apartment building was well coated with graffiti and neglect. There wasn’t a visible streetlight that hadn’t been broken. The windows on the lower floors were all barred and covered in boards. There weren’t a lot of cars around, and the ones that were looked far too expensive for anyone living there—except for one old Oldsmobile, which had been put on blocks and stripped to a skeleton of its former self.

  Most tellingly, on a Saturday afternoon, there was almost no one in sight. I saw one gray-haired woman walking down the street with a hard expression and a purposeful stride. Several young men in gang colors sat on or around one of the expensive cars while a big radio boomed. Other than that, nothing. No pedestrians headed for a corner grocery store. No one taking out the trash or walking to the mailbox. No children out playing in the pleasant weather.

  I’d filled Felicia in on Samuel, and she had listened to the whole thing without comment until we got where we were going. “You take me to the nicest places,” she said. “Which building?”

  “The one with those friendly-looking young men with the radio.”

  “I thought you’d say that,” Felicia said.

  We approached the building and got flat-eyed stares from the young men. They sat with the grips of handguns poking up out of their waistbands or outlined against their loose shirts. None of them were older than nineteen. One couldn’t have been fifteen.

  “Hey,” said one of the larger young men, his tone belligerent. “White bread. Where you think you’re going?”

  I gestured with a hand without slowing down, as if it had been a polite inquiry instead of a challenge. “Visiting a friend.”

  The kid came to his feet with an aggressive little bounce and planted himself directly in my way. “I don’t know you. Maybe you better just turn around.” He looked past me to Felicia. “You’re pretty stupid, coming down here with a piece like that. Where do you think you are, man?”

  I stopped and looked around, then scratched my head. “Isn’t this Sesame Street? I’m sure Mister Snuffalupagus is around here somewhere.”

  The kid in front of me got mad and got right in my face, eye to eye. The young men with him let out an ugly, growling sound as a whole. “You trying to start something, man? You gonna get a cap, you keep this up.”

  It was annoying. If I’d been wearing the mask, I could have taken these kids’ guns away and scared them off. Peter Parker, part-time science teacher, however, couldn’t beat up gangs single-handed. And if anything started, Felicia was sure to pitch in. She could handle herself as well as anyone I knew, but this wasn’t the time or the place to look for a fight.

  I lifted my hands and said, “Sorry, man, just joking with you. I’m here to see Samuel Larkin.”

  “What do you care?”

  “I’m his basketball coach,” I said.

  That drew a round of quiet laughs. “Sure you are.” He shook his head. “Time you’re leaving.”

  “No,” I said quietly. “I need to see Samuel Larkin.”

  The young man pulled up his shirt and put his hand on the grip of a semiautomatic stuck in his waistband. “I ain’t gonna tell you again.”

  I met his gaze in silence, and didn’t move. He expected me to, I could tell, and as the seconds ticked by he started to get nervous. He had his hand on a gun, all of his friends had guns, and I would have had to be insane not to be afraid. He had expected me to back off, or produce a gun of my own, or attack him—anything, really, but stand there calmly. The basic tactics of bullies hadn’t changed since I was in school—cause fear and control people with it. Granted, they hadn’t carried around the handguns quite so obviously. And if one of them had backed down back then, it probably would have meant a little bit of embarrassment. Depending on how hard-core this gang was, backing off could cost this kid his leadership—which could well mean his life, or at least everything he thought was of value in it.

  I lowered my voice so that only he could hear it. “Don’t,” I said quietly. “Please.”

  He swallowed. Then his shoulder tensed to draw the gun.

  “George,” bellowed a deep voice from above us. “What you think you doing to my coach?”

  I looked up and found Samuel’s scowling face looking down from a window on the fourth floor.

  George, presumably, looked away from me and put his hands on his hips to scowl up at Samuel. “I don’t know no George.”

  Samuel rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah. G. You just G now, huh. George got too many letters.”

  “You got a big mouth,” George said, scowling.

  Samuel barked out a laugh. “G, you always been a funny guy.” Then he looked at me and said, “Hey, Coach Parker.”

  “Mr. Larkin,” I replied, nodding. “Got a minute to talk?”

  “Buzz you in,” he said. “Don’t be too hard on my man G. Nobody ever gave him a hug or a puppy or anything like that, so he grew up with a bad attitude.”

  I nodded to him and walked to the door.

  Behind me, George stepped in front of Felicia and said, “Now you, girl. You’re fine. Maybe you should stay here and hang with me. Me and my crew will keep you safe from the bad element.”