Daughters
The suit smelled like Felicia's lavender when he pulled the mask down.
He'd gone home, showered, checked the bite mark on his neck in the bathroom mirror and decided a high collar wasn't going to cover it. The scratch marks on his back stung under the hot water and the scratches on his shoulders were from Cindy and the bite was Felicia's and if someone stripped Peter Parker to his underwear right now they could reconstruct his love life from the evidence on his skin like a crime scene report. He put the suit on. The smell was in the fabric from being shoved in a bag in the bolt-hole. Lavender and leather and her.
Midtown was quiet for a Wednesday. He'd been swinging for a while, looping from Midtown south, when he hit Chinatown and the air changed. Denser. The neon from the restaurants on Mott Street threw colored light across wet pavement. A fish market on the corner had closed hours ago but the smell hung on, salt and ice and the gutter running dark. He swung over Canal and dropped low between buildings, following the grid south toward Worth.
The spider-sense fired two blocks ahead.
Low buzz. Sustained. It wasn't the sharp jolt of a gun or the electric scream of a bomb. A steady warning, the kind he'd learned to associate with intent. Someone down there wanted to hurt someone.
He landed on a fire escape above an alley between Baxter and Bayard. Narrow. A dumpster on one end, a chain-link fence on the other. Two streetlights, one broken.
Five figures in the alley. Four of them wore black. Head to toe, face wraps, bare feet on the pavement. They moved like they'd trained together for years. Practiced spacing, coordinated angles, no wasted motion.
The fifth was a woman.
She had a katana. The blade caught the remaining streetlight and the edge was clean and she held it in a low guard with both hands and her feet were planted in a stance that looked like it predated the city around her. Dark hair tied back. Practical clothes, dark, close-fitting, built for movement. She was fighting four on one and she looked annoyed about it.
Peter watched. He'd learned that about himself over the last year. The old Peter would have dropped in immediately. This Peter watched for two seconds first because two seconds told you things. Whether someone was losing or winning. Whether they wanted help or whether helping would insult them.
She was winning.
The first attacker came at her from her left. She parried, redirected, and the man's own momentum carried him into the dumpster. The second came from behind while she was resetting and she pivoted without looking, the katana tracing a horizontal arc that missed his throat by a controlled inch and made him stumble backward. She could have killed him. She chose not to.
The third and fourth came together. She dropped low, let one blade pass over her head, kicked the other in the knee, came up inside the first one's guard and drove the hilt of the katana into his sternum. He folded.
Peter dropped.
He hit the alley floor between the two recovering fighters and webbed the one by the dumpster to the brick wall before the guy could get his bearings. The second one, the one she'd made stumble, turned toward Peter and got a web to the chest that pinned him to the chain-link fence.
Two down. The woman had the other two.
She didn't seem to need the help with those either. The one she'd kicked was crawling toward a fire escape. She stepped on his ankle, and he went flat. The fourth had pulled a second blade from somewhere and was circling her. She waited. He lunged. She sidestepped, caught his wrist, twisted the blade free, and put the katana's point against his throat.
He said something in Japanese. Quiet. The woman answered in the same language. Her voice was level.
Then all four of them did the same thing.
They dissolved. The one pinned to the wall by Peter's webbing, the one on the fence, the one under her foot, the one at knifepoint. Their bodies went to smoke. Black smoke, thick, acrid, smelling like incense and rot. The webs hit the wall and the fence with nothing inside them. The webbing on the brick looked stupid and empty and the chain-link had a man-shaped smear of black residue and nothing else.
"What the hell," Peter said.
The woman turned to him. Katana up. Pointed at his chest.
She was taller than he expected. Five-seven, five-eight. Japanese-American. Her face was angular, jaw squared, dark eyes that moved across him once and dismissed what they found. Sweat on her hairline. A cut on her forearm she hadn't noticed, shallow, oozing red.
"I didn't ask for assistance," she said.
"The two behind you were flanking."
"I knew they were behind me."
Long stare. The katana didn't move. Peter's spider-sense was quiet. The blade was pointed at him and the buzzing was gone, which meant she wasn't going to use it. She was making a point.
She lowered it.
"Colleen Wing." The introduction was clipped. A formality she observed because formalities mattered to her. "You're the spider they write about in the Bugle."
"Spider-MAN. The Bugle gets it wrong."
"The Bugle gets everything wrong."
She cleaned the blade on a cloth she produced from her belt and sheathed the katana in a smooth motion. The sheath was on her back, angled for a draw. The whole cleaning-and-sheathing took three seconds. She'd done it ten thousand times.
"Those guys dissolved," Peter said.
"The Hand."
"The hand of what?"
She looked at him. Her eyebrows lifted a fraction, which on that face was the equivalent of a full expression.
"The Hand. A ninja organization. They've been operating in my neighborhood for six months. Before that it was the Maggia. Before that it was Triad remnants." She pulled the cloth through her fingers, folding it. "I run a dojo on Bayard. This is my block. I've been handling all of them."
"By yourself?"
"I have a partner. Misty Knight. We run a detective agency out of the same building." She said it flat. "But the Hand is different. They don't just control territory. They recruit. Convert. Their soldiers believe they're dying for something holy."
"And then they dissolve into smoke."
"Death-worship magic. The Beast grants resurrection to the faithful. What you saw is what happens when the resurrection fails. The body returns to what it was. Smoke."
Peter stared at the black residue on the chain-link. The webbing was still there, curled around nothing. He'd heard weirder. He was Spider-Man in a universe where gods walked around in capes. But watching four men turn to smoke in a Chinatown alley hit different than hearing about cosmic entities in a SHIELD briefing.
"How many of them are in the city?"
"Enough." She looked at the alley. The dumpster with a dent from the first fighter's body. "There are more of us than you think. People who fight for their blocks. A man in red in Hell's Kitchen."
Peter's chest tightened. The figure Felicia had described. Dark red suit. Moving across rooftops in Hell's Kitchen without webs, without flight. Territorial.
"A man with unbreakable skin in Harlem," Colleen continued. "An Iron Fist, though he's traveling." She paused. "We don't have a name. We just show up."
Four people that he knew about. At least. Probably more. A network of street-level fighters defending their neighborhoods the same way he defended Queens. They'd been out there the whole time. While he'd been figuring out web fluid ratios and getting punched by guys in animal costumes, there was a woman with a katana clearing Chinatown alley by alley and a man in red he'd never met holding down Hell's Kitchen.
"You've got a cut," he said. He pointed at her forearm.
She looked down. The cut was shallow, running three inches along the outside of her left arm. She'd been fighting with it open for the entire conversation and hadn't acknowledged it.
"It's nothing."
He shot a small web-patch over it before she could move. The organic adhesive hit her skin warm and tacky and sealed over the cut. The webbing was thin, translucent, designed to dissolve in about an hour.
She stared at her arm.
"Did you just bandage me with a web?"
"Organic adhesive. It'll dissolve in an hour."
"That's disgusting."
"You're welcome."
The corners of her mouth pulled up a fraction. Her jaw was still set and her posture was still straight and the katana was still on her back and she almost smiled. Almost. She caught herself doing it and stopped.
She tore the web-patch off. It came away clean, the cut sealed underneath, her skin red where the adhesive had stuck. She examined the patch between her fingers. Balled it up. Dropped it in the alley.
"Stay out of Chinatown, Spider-Man. I handle my territory."
"Friendly."
"I don't do friendly. I do effective."
She turned. Started walking toward the dark end of the alley. Her gait was measured. Shoulders level, hands at her sides, the katana handle jutting above her right shoulder. The streetlight caught the dark hair tied at the nape of her neck and the line of her shoulders through the fitted top and the cut of her waist above the belt. Peter watched her go and caught himself doing it.
She stopped.
"One more thing." She didn't turn around. "The Hand isn't just recruiting foot soldiers. They're targeting specific people." A pause. She looked over her shoulder. "A young woman. Greek. Natchios family. Martial arts prodigy. She lost her father recently." Her voice was flat. Reporting. "They want her grief and her talent."
"Who is she?"
"If you hear the name Elektra, pay attention."
She walked into the dark. He watched until there was nothing left but the alley and the smoke stain on the fence.
He stood there for a minute. The alley smelled like incense and rot. The web-patch Colleen had torn off sat balled up next to the dumpster. His spider-sense was quiet. Somewhere above him a kitchen vent pumped out the smell of roasting duck and garlic and the warmth of it had no business being in the same alley as a man-shaped smoke stain.
He climbed to the roof. Chinatown spread below him in neon and steam. Hell's Kitchen to the west. Harlem to the north. Queens behind him.
Elektra. Natchios family. Greek. Martial arts prodigy. Grieving.
He didn't know the name. He should have. It sat just out of reach. The MCU had so many people in it and he'd watched the movies like a normal person, not a scholar, and most of the names had blurred together.
But Colleen had said it like a warning. And she didn't seem like a woman who wasted warnings.
He shot a web-line and swung north. The wind caught the suit and the lavender smell was gone, replaced with Chinatown and cold and the smoke residue still in his nose. The scratch marks on his back pulled when he stretched for the next anchor point. Felicia's marks. Cindy's web-traces around his wrist, faded. Colleen's web-patch balled up in a Chinatown alley.