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  The two words lodged in his head, coming to the forefront of his musings.

  Completely. Insane.

  Peter had far too much experience with someone like that.

  Standing in the street outside the coffee shop, Pet slowly turned to face Harry, who was watching him through the window. Harry met his gaze, saw the suspicion in Peter’s eyes, and seemed to welcome it.

  Harry’s mouth twisted in a fierce and cruel smile. His expression no longer bore the slightest resemblance to any that Peter’s friend might have worn. But the question was moot: this wasn’t his friend, by any stretch of the imagination, who was looking at him now.

  This was the face of insanity. This was the Goblin.

  Before Peter could make a move, the waitress leaned in to clear the dishes from the table, blocking Harry from Peter’s view. When she moved aside, Harry was gone.

  He had to have gone out the back. Peter considered vaulting over the top of the restaurant, but far too many people were around. Plus who knew what resources Harry might have lying in wait, or who might get hurt if another struggle broke out.

  There was no way Peter was going to allow Harry to choose the time and place of their next battle… a battle that Peter was now eagerly anticipating. As he ran toward home and his costume, he pondered that he shouldn’t really be looking forward to such a conflict. But that concern was promptly shouted down by the part of him that wanted to knock that leering grin off Harry’s face once and for all.

  Harry Osborn, feeling more self-assured than he had in ages, sat in the great room of his town house, calmly stirring a martini with a long spoon. Suddenly he stopped, sensing a change in the atmosphere of the room. He turned and saw a figure standing in the doorway behind him.

  He exhaled a relaxed sigh, as if an old friend had come to call and have a pleasant chat. “What took you so long?”

  “That was quite a performance,” came the taut voice of Peter Parker.

  “It wasn’t all show. She did come to me.” Harry gingerly put the martini down on the table next to him, taking care not to spill it.

  He expected Peter to continue with the back-and-forth. To try to appeal to his better nature. To insist in mewling tones that Harry wasn’t in his right mind, that this could all be avoided.

  Instead, to his surprise, Peter advanced on him and announced, “I’m really going to enjoy this.” Remaining cool in the face of the unexpected, Harry replied, “Not as much as I enjoyed it when Mary Jane kissed me. It was the same way she always kissed me. And that taste…” He sighed again, recalling. “Strawberries.” He was utterly shocked as Peter hurtled through the air straight at him. Harry had about a split second to react, which wasn’t remotely enough time. Peter slammed into him, sending the table and martini crashing to the floor. The combatants fell over the chair, upending it, as both Peter and Harry tumbled across the room.

  Harry twisted, sending Peter flying overhead. Peter slammed into a set of shelves upon which various curios had been placed. The top shelf was jolted loose, fell onto the one below it, which fell onto the one below that, and so on until they all hit bottom, crushing all the curios into dust.

  Staggering to his feet, Harry raggedly said, “You’ll be hearing from my attorney about that. I hope you’ve got good liability insurance.”

  Peter wasn’t listening. Instead he covered the distance between himself and Harry in one leap, sending the two of them flying backward and crashing into the mirror hanging on the wall.

  Into it… and through.

  They landed inside the Goblin’s secret lair, and Peter looked around in confusion, startled over what he was seeing. With superhuman strength, Harry took the opportunity to grab a Sky Stick and swing it around like a baseball bat. It struck Peter in the side of the head, staggering him. Harry brought it sweeping back in the other direction… but Peter grabbed the flying device, yanked it from Harry’s grasp, and tossed it aside.

  He swung a punch at Harry, who ducked under it and came in fast with several quick blows to Peter’s gut. Peter faltered, recovered, and fired a blot of webbing at Harry’s feet. Harry tried to get out of the way, but the webbing affixed itself to him, holding fast. He tried to yank his feet free, but there was no time as Peter swung a vicious roundhouse that damned near took Harry’s head off. As it was, Peter solved Harry’s immobility problem, the blow so fierce that it knocked Harry right out of his webbed-up shoes. Harry was flat on his back, and Peter gave him no time to get up. He landed heavily atop Harry and, with an unbelievable ferocity, started hammering him in the face.

  Harry’s mind was swimming. This wasn’t the Peter Parker that he’d encountered last time. To some degree, he’d counted on the notion that, in a head-to-head battle, Peter would always hold back. It was a weakness in Spider-Man’s character—a reluctance to be up-front about the murdering cretin that he truly was—that Harry had come to expect. Not this time, though—Peter was cutting loose with the sort of murderous intensity that he had no doubt unleashed upon Norman Osborn.

  Harry was on the receiving end of as brutal a pounding as anyone had ever endured. If it weren’t for the heightened strength that the green gas had given him, he’d have been long dead. As it was, the room was spinning around him, and Peter wasn’t letting up for even a second. The blows came fast and furious; Harry couldn’t even begin to mount a defense. His head slumped back, and Peter cocked a fist, looking ready to punch it straight through Harry’s head and into the floor below.

  Through lips that were thick and swollen, Harry managed to say, “You gonna kill me like you killed my father?”

  “Your father was a monster!” Peter shouted. “And you know it! He tried to stab me in the back! I jumped out of the way. He got what he meant for me.” He brought his face close to Harry’s, and Harry saw a terrifying grin. “He never loved you. Who could love you? No one. Not your father. Not Mary Jane.”

  Peter was just trying to give back some of the same mind games that Harry had dished out, but he was infuriated nevertheless. “My father loved me!”

  “He despised you! You were an embarrassment!”

  Reveling in tormenting Harry, Peter let down his guard for a second, and Harry seized the opportunity. He brought a fist around and slugged Peter in the side of the head, then hit him again, and a third time. Peter fell sideways off him, and Harry crab-walked backward, scuttling quickly toward a rack that was lined with pumpkin bombs. In a crouch, he grabbed one off the shelf. Harry was having trouble seeing, his right eye having swollen closed, the left not far behind, so he hurled the bomb as best he could.

  Through the slit of vision he had left, he saw Peter snag the bomb with a web strand. Harry reached for a second one, then he froze as Peter snapped the bomb around like a yo-yo and sent it hurtling right back at Harry. He threw up his hands to try to ward it off. Too slow. The bomb exploded in Harry’s face, blasting him backward, the room immediately filling with acrid smoke.

  Harry hit the floor, the nerve endings in his face screaming as if they were on fire. He’s going to kill me. This is it. I’m helpless. He’s going to snap my neck or stab me in the chest. I’m sorry, Dad. I tried. I tried so hard…

  But the death blow never came. Only silence. Deciding that he had nothing to lose in trying to get out of here, Harry started hauling himself across the floor. He was having no trouble gripping the surface, as his hands were sticky with blood. He registered this fact distantly, as if it were relevant to someone else.

  Every movement agonizing, he managed to make his way out of the Goblin’s lair. He squinted through his one working eye and saw no sign of Peter. So typical. He had Harry at his mercy, and instead of killing him, he’d decided to leave him alive so that Harry could worry about the next time he’d attack.

  Well, that was going to be a mistake, oh, yes. Because next time…

  With smoke billowing past him, Harry looked down and saw a large shard of the shattered mirror door on the floor in front of him. He glanced into it and gasped, w
ondering who the hell that poor, grotesque devil was looking back at him. It took Harry a few moments to realize that it was himself.

  His horrified, sustained scream resounded through the penthouse.

  Some distance away, the black-suited Spider-Man landed on a rooftop, but it was Peter Parker who reacted to the far-off howling that he knew, beyond question, was his friend.

  He pulled off the mask and forced himself to remain there, motionless, until the scream finally faded.

  At first he felt guilty over what had transpired, but his heart hardened. He’d left Harry alive after Harry had tried, on more than one occasion, to kill him. Harry Osborn was the single greatest threat in Peter’s life—knowing his identity, capable of coming at him at any moment. Yet Peter had chosen to be merciful. What reason did he have to feel guilty over the fate that Harry had brought upon himself, just as Harry’s father had likewise done?

  “He deserved worse,” Peter said tightly.

  And so did Mary Jane. As demented as Harry had been, Peter was now convinced that he was telling the truth about Mary Jane’s coming to him. And she had told him about what was going on in her life without mentioning one word to Peter. She wasn’t blameless in any of this.

  He wasn’t about to go find Mary Jane and pound on her, obviously. But other means of revenge could be just as satisfying and—most important—wouldn’t risk getting blood on his nice black suit.

  But he had other priorities to attend to. First and foremost…

  … hunting season was now open.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty

  ALL THAT JAZZ

  Curtis Connors, working late in his lab, held the phone close to his ear while he waited for the young woman who had answered the phone to summon Mr. Parker from wherever the devil he was. Some half-eaten Chinese food sat in its cartons on the lab table behind him. “Mr. Parker!” he said when he finally heard Peter’s voice on the other end. “Dr. Connors here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Peter’s voice sounded a little deeper than usual, and Connors almost wondered whether he was speaking to the right person.

  Glancing at a small sample of the black goo that was currently sitting on a microscope slide, Connors said, “Quite a specimen you left me, Parker. Its chemistry is not unlike material found in that chondritic meteorite in the seventies. You know it, Parker?” He was reasonably sure that Parker did. Chondritic meteorites were pieces of space rock that had fallen to earth with relatively little differentiation from the stone body from which they’d originated. Connors was referring specifically to the Jilin meteorite shower of 1976, in which—among other things—the largest, single, known chondritic meteorite ever discovered, weighing 1,770 kilograms, had fallen in the People’s Republic of China.

  But Peter didn’t answer immediately. “Parker?” Connors prompted.

  “Yeah.” Peter sounded almost indifferent, which Connors found disturbing.

  “My findings are very preliminary, but this substance seems to be an entire living organism.” Parker was acting in an unusually distracted manner, and Connors was hoping he was speaking with enough emphasis to get the boy’s attention. He had no idea why Parker sounded so disinterested. Maybe the girl who’d answered the phone was doing a striptease for him. Whatever the reason, Connors didn’t care. “A living organism,” he emphasized. “Possibly a parasite. It amplifies characteristics of its host… especially aggression.”

  He glanced across the room at the cage that had contained two lab mice. He had put a minuscule amount of the parasite on one of the mice and left the other alone. He had then watched in shock as the treated mouse ripped its companion to shreds. “This could be dangerous,” he said, which was possibly an understatement. Suddenly a thought occurred to him. “Peter… you didn’t keep any, did you? Peter?”

  Peter laughed in response. “Doc… I’m not stupid. Thanks for the information. Let me know what else you find.”

  He hung up before Connors could say another word.

  The following day was a blur to Peter.

  He woke up knowing one thing above all else: life was simpler with the suit on. Priorities remained in order, and pesky questions of morality simply didn’t apply. Matters had become overly complicated, and he was tired of it. Putting on the black suit was like causing the rest of his difficulties to disappear into a pleasant haze of white noise.

  His first stop was the Daily Bugle. He knew he would always cherish the sight of a sputtering J. Jonah Jameson as Peter strutted into Jonah’s office, flopped into a chair, tilted it back, and placed his feet up on Jameson’s desk.

  “Shoes?” said a stunned Jameson.

  Ignoring Jameson’s shock, Peter pulled three photos from his portfolio, flicking them across Jameson’s desk like cards from a Las Vegas dealer. Each one landed squarely in front of Jameson, one next to the other. His little hunting expedition the previous night had borne fruit, and Jameson was salivating over the trophies: superb shots of a diamond heist in progress, being thwarted by a menacing Spider-Man in his black attire.

  The subject of Peter’s feet forgotten, Jameson asked, “How much?”

  “Well,” Peter replied in leisurely fashion, “seeing as how I’m the only photographer you’ve got…”

  He lowered his feet, leaned over, and picked up Jameson’s personal candy jar. He popped the top before Jonah could say a word, extracted a fancy caramel, unwrapped it, and flipped it into the air.

  “… more.” He caught the caramel in his mouth.

  “More caramels? Because if that’s what you really want—”

  Peter half-smiled, knowing that he had the upper hand and reveling in it. “More money. More than you paid Brock. More than you paid me. More than you paid anybody, ever.”

  “I can’t afford that!”

  “Then I walk these over to the Globe, and we don’t do business anymore. Can you afford that?”

  Jameson gave Peter a reptilian glare. “Where the hell did this come from? I get rid of one punk and another sprouts up, like weeds. You used to be a cream puff.”

  “Yeah, well…” Peter smiled. “Now I have layers.”

  Beneath his clothing, the black costume approved.

  With more money in his pocket than he could remember having in quite a while, Peter strode the streets of New York as if he owned the city.

  He winked at passing women and received approving smiles. He passed one particularly sexy young woman and didn’t hesitate to reach back and pat her behind. She whirled angrily around, facing him, and he tossed off a flashy finger/thumb wave, as if to say, The two of us are lookin’ good, and we got it goin’ on. She returned the wave, although minus the thumb and with a different finger extended, but Peter was already sauntering away.

  He paused outside a men’s clothing store with a sign that read: DISCOUNT ITALIAN suits. The mannequins in the window had solid black heads, and black arms sticking out from the sleeves. It made it easier for Peter to imagine the suits on him, and he decided that there was no reason to settle for imagining it.

  A half hour later, he emerged from the store outfitted in a flashy new suit with new boots just for a hint of the truly audacious. He rocked back and forth on the boots. Peter once again thought of Travolta and performed a few experimental pelvis thrusts, back and forth, back and forth. Nodding in self-approval, he strutted down the street.

  He glanced at his watch and noticed that he had, yet again, missed class. Somehow that didn’t bother him at all. It wasn’t as if Connors were going to say something that Peter didn’t already know. He’d already lost a bit of respect for the old doc after Connors had called the symbiote a “parasite.” How could Connors have gotten it so wrong? A parasite was something that simply took from its host without giving anything back. The symbiote, the “organism” as he’d called it, didn’t take; it gave. It gave him more confidence, enabled him to see just how the world should be treating him… and how he should treat it in return.

  There was still enough time, tho
ugh, to get over to ESU and accomplish something really important.

  Peter flagged a cab and urged the driver to lay on all possible speed, assuring him he’d cover any tickets the guy might get. Both of them were fortunate that no police cars stopped them, although it might have been that they were moving so fast that the cops thought they couldn’t catch up. Peter leaped out of the cab, tossing a twenty to the cabbie while telling him to keep the change, and ran across the campus.

  Gwen Stacy had just emerged from the science building when someone seemed to appear out of nowhere directly in front of her. She jumped, so startled that she dropped the books she’d been carrying. Peter deftly plucked them out of the air and restacked them before she’d even registered who the new arrival was.

  “Peter!” she exclaimed, taking the books back from him. “You weren’t in lab! Where’ve you been lately?”

  “TCB.”

  She looked confused.

  He ticked off the letters on his fingers. “Taking. Care. Of Business.” He stretched his arms in either direction and turned in place.

  It took Gwen a moment to comprehend that he was waiting for a comment on the suit. “Oh. Very nice. New outfit. And…” She stared at him, puzzled. “Are you… taller?”

  “When a guy’s with you, he’s always gonna walk a little taller.”

  Gwen smiled at that and flushed slightly. “Well, now aren’t you the smooth talker. So where have you been?”

  He waved off the question as if it weren’t worth his time. “That’s the past. I’m thinking about the future… namely this evening.”

  “What about this evening?”

  “You and me. We”—he smiled—“are stepping out.”

  “Mr. Parker,” said Gwen coyly, “are you asking me out on a date?”