Cornered
October at sixty miles an hour was a cold hand across the face. Peter had been swinging for an hour, the web-lines pulling at his shoulders on each arc, mask damp from the river fog rolling up the Hudson. The city looked good from up here. It always did.
He was coming off a long arc over Tenth when the spider-sense pulled left.
Steady, directional. Chelsea. The docks. He changed his anchor and swung south toward the water.
The docks smelled like diesel and salt and the wood rot of pilings that had been soaking since before he was born. He landed on a crane arm and the metal was cold through his gloves.
Four men. Below him, between two shipping containers, in the gap where the dock light didn't reach. They had the squared-off posture of men who carried guns under their jackets. One had a crowbar. The other three kept their hands at their sides, close to their holsters.
The person they were cornering had white hair.
Felicia was backed against a container. She had the grappling hook in her right hand, swinging it in a tight arc to keep the closest man at arm's length. Her left arm was down at her side. Dark wet on the shoulder of the catsuit. Blood. Enough that her left arm was the arm she was keeping still.
He'd been looking for her for weeks. Empty rooftops, cold water towers, the Diamond District quiet. She'd erased herself from the city after the kiss she'd said didn't happen. He'd stopped at the water tower in Chelsea every patrol. Dust on the ledges, no boot prints, no grappling-hook scratches on the brick.
Here she was. Bleeding and outnumbered and fighting. Because of course she was fighting. Three against one with a bleeding shoulder and she hadn't dropped the grappling hook and she hadn't called for help. She'd have gone down swinging before she asked anyone for anything. That was the problem with Felicia Hardy.
He dropped.
Seventy feet straight down. The first one didn't see him. Peter landed feet-first on his chest and the impact drove him flat against the wet concrete. The man's breath left him in a sound like a punctured tire. The crowbar clattered into the dark gap between containers.
The second man turned. Peter webbed his ankles together and he went down sideways, hard, his hand halfway to his holster. The third man got the holster open and Peter was already there, grabbed the gun hand and bent it backward until the wrist gave up, and threw him into the shipping container. The metal rang like a bell and the man slid down the corrugated wall and sat on the concrete looking confused.
Ten seconds. Three men down.
The fourth man ran. He made it to the dock gate, heavy footsteps on wet concrete, and turned at the fence. His face was pale in the dock light.
"Fisk remembers. You hear me? Fisk remembers NAMES."
Then he was gone into the fog.
Peter looked at Felicia. Felicia looked at Peter. The three men were groaning on the wet concrete and the dock light was doing its yellow best and her shoulder was bleeding and her grappling hook was still in her hand and her jaw was set.
"I didn't ask for help."
"You're bleeding."
"It's a scratch."
The cut was visible through the torn catsuit. Diagonal across the top of her shoulder, deep, the edges pulling apart.
"It's a gash."
"It's my gash."
"Sit down."
"Move."
"No."
She sat. On a bollard at the edge of the dock, her grappling hook on her thigh, her good hand pressing the torn catsuit against the cut. The domino mask was on. Her white hair was tangled on the left side where one of them had grabbed it, a fist-sized knot she hadn't fixed because fixing it would mean letting go of the wound. Her breathing was controlled, even, deliberate breaths through her nose because the alternative was sounds she didn't want him to hear.
The dock was quiet except for the three men and the water hitting the pilings and the distant machinery of a city that didn't know or care what was happening between two shipping containers.
Peter pulled a web-shooter cartridge from his belt pouch and cracked it. A thin line of web-fluid on his fingers, hardening in the cold air, tacky and flexible. He'd discovered the improvised-adhesive trick three weeks ago when he'd cut his forearm on a fire escape bolt and didn't have bandages. Web-fluid closed a wound better than butterfly strips if you got it on before it solidified completely.
"This is going to sting."
"I've had worse."
He peeled the torn catsuit fabric back from the cut. The skin underneath was pale, goosebumped from the cold. The cut was clean, a blade edge, and deep enough that a hospital would have put stitches in. His fingers found the edge of the wound and pressed the web-fluid along it, sealing as he went, and the fluid was warm where his fingers heated it and cold where the air hit it and his fingertips brushed the skin where the catsuit had torn wider than the cut itself.
Her collarbone. The muscle running from her neck to her shoulder. Cold skin, and the fine hair that stood up when his fingers passed over it.
Felicia sucked in a breath. Through her teeth. Sharp.
"Your hands are cold."
They weren't cold. His hands ran warm. Spider metabolism. She knew it. He knew it. The dock smelled like diesel and the fog was getting thicker and the three men on the ground had gone from groaning to quiet and his fingers were on the warm side of her shoulder where the catsuit had pulled back.
He finished the seal. Stepped back. She rolled the shoulder, testing. Her breath caught at the top of the rotation but she completed the motion. The web-fluid was white against the black catsuit, a clean line along the wound. She looked at it.
"Nice work."
"Thanks."
"Didn't say it was a compliment." Her left hand flexed, testing the grip strength. The shoulder held.
"They found me because of the safe house job," she said. "Twenty-Sixth Street. Your Maggia friends."
"They're not my friends."
"They're yours because you helped me clear that warehouse. Someone talked. Connected the safe house to the Cat, the Cat to Rosetti's crew, Rosetti to Fisk." She looked at the dock gate where the fourth man had run. "So this is your fault."
He could have given her the fight she wanted. Could have pointed out that she'd cased Rosetti's warehouse, kissed him on a water tower, and then vanished for three weeks while the people she'd robbed organized. All true. Exactly what she was looking for.
"Okay," he said.
Her mouth opened. Closed.
"Okay?"
"You're right. I helped you and they tracked you through me."
"You're supposed to argue."
"I know."
"Why aren't you arguing?"
"Because it's easier when you argue. You've had weeks of practice."
Her chin dropped. She looked at her gloved hands in her lap. The white fur trim on the left glove was dark with blood from the shoulder.
"I don't need a partner."
"I know."
"I don't need someone who shows up and punches people and patches my shoulder and then stands there being reasonable. That's worse than arguing. You know that, right?"
"Yeah."
"Stop saying yeah and okay and I know." Her voice was tight. The performance had dropped. Under the Black Cat purr was a girl sitting on a bollard with blood on her glove and nobody else to call. "Say what you mean."
"I think your grappling hook technique is better than last time. You modified the tension spring."
She stared at him. The left corner of her mouth pulled up and she killed it before it could finish.
The tugboat horn sounded on the river. Low, long. The fog was thick enough now that the dock light had a halo and the shipping containers were losing their edges. A chain was swinging against a hull somewhere, metallic and rhythmic.
"How's your father?"
Felicia stood. The motion was fast, sharp, the bollard rocking on its bolts. Her good hand grabbed the grappling hook and she fired it at the crane arm above them and the cable went taut and she was in the air before he finished the word, rising, legs pulling up, white hair streaming behind her in the fog.
She didn't look back.
Peter stood on the dock. The three men were stirring, the first one pushing himself up on the concrete, groaning, holding his chest where Peter had landed on it. He webbed all three to the ground for the cops. Quick, clean, the webbing going on in straight lines because he'd had practice.
The web-fluid patch on her shoulder would hold for about twelve hours. He'd tested degradation time on his own cuts. She'd need a real bandage before then. Wherever she was going.
He climbed the crane arm and stood where she'd grappled to and looked north. Chelsea rooftops, water towers, fire escapes. She was already gone. Fast for someone with a sealed gash and one arm.
Fisk remembers names. Wilson Fisk. Peter knew the name from the MCU. Big guy. Crime boss. Daredevil's problem, mostly. But Felicia had said it with a weight the movies hadn't given him, and the fourth man had shouted it across the dock like a promise with teeth.
The fog was thick. The tugboat horn sounded again, farther away. The chain had stopped swinging. The city was grey and orange below the fog line and the three men webbed to the dock were arguing about whose fault this was, which Peter appreciated because at least somebody's arguments were going normally tonight.
His hands smelled like web-fluid. Under that, barely, the skin of her shoulder where the catsuit had torn. Cold skin, warm hands, and the sharp breath through her teeth that she'd said was about the temperature.
She'd run the instant he said "father." She always ran when he got close. The kiss on the water tower, the three weeks of empty rooftops, now the grappling hook the second the word left his mouth. Different exits, same direction. Away.
Walter Hardy. Prison. Dying, if Peter's foreknowledge was right, and his foreknowledge was wrong about most things but he'd been right about the Vulture's wings and he might be right about a thief's father rotting in a cell.
A cat on a fire escape watched him swing past. Orange tabby, sitting on the railing with its tail hanging off the edge. It watched him go and went back to watching the alley below. Peter was briefly jealous of a cat's ability to sit on a railing and not worry about Wilson Fisk or white-haired girls who ran when you asked the right question.
He got home at midnight. Climbed through his window. Pulled off the mask. His room was dark and the compass was at one, Cindy distant, and his hands smelled like web-fluid and cold skin and the sharpness of a breath she'd pretended was about temperature.
His hands were still warm.