Peter wasn’t moving when Mary-Jane found him. He was in his apartment, halfway in the process of winding a bandage around his arm, but he’d long since just frozen. The bandage had slipped from his hand and was stirring across the floor in the breeze from the air conditioner. She set her things down on his desk, rounded the couch to him, and took the end of the bandage, tying it off at his elbow. He wasn’t crying, though his eyes were red.

There were bloodstains on the couch he was sitting on, and Mary-Jane tried to think up what to say as she checked his injuries. She settled on the timeless classic of “Are you okay?”

“I thought I would be,” Peter said. He rubbed at his nose, his damp eyes. “It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Doctor Octopus is dead.”

“So… one down, one to go?” She punched his arm.

“It’s not like that!” Peter hissed, looking up at her. He instantly softened, regretting the harsh words, and gave her a consoling half-smile that died momentarily. “You didn’t know him before the accident. Ock… Otto was a good man. It was one thing when he sacrificed himself to save us – he was sane and, and righteous. But like this…”

Mary-Jane found a bowl of bloody water with a washcloth in it. She wrung the washcloth out, dipped it in a glass of water, and dabbed at Peter’s more cosmetic wounds. Dried blood and weird bruise striations. “You can’t save everyone.”

“I didn’t even try. I wrote him off. Didn’t even put any thought into it, just…” Peter lifted his hands in a helpless gesture. “I softened him up for the Hobgoblin. He was sick, and I should’ve helped him. That’s what I do, right? Help the weak, the defenseless. Where was I for him?”

Mary-Jane wiped at his split lip, shutting him up. “Otto didn’t want your help. He made a decision. You said it yourself. He was sane, but he decided to go down this path.”

“What kind of a choice did he have? Those damn tentacles attached to his body, his wife dead…”

“We always have a choice,” Mary-Jane said. She wiped the last of the dried blood from Peter’s brow. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

She kissed him, gently, and after a moment he opened his arms to let her embrace him. It didn’t hurt, her kneeling on the couch beside him, leaning into his touch, smelling of nature and strawberries and nothing like the smog of New York City.

“I don’t deserve you.”

She brushed some hair out of his face. “Yes. You do.” She kissed him again, longer, before drawing him into a prolonged hug. “I know what’ll cheer you up. Harry’s party.”

“I’d forgotten,” Peter said dryly.

“I didn’t.” Mary-Jane picked up a garment bag from the desk. She unzipped it, revealing the velvet darkness of a tuxedo. “Try it on.”

Peter liked the mischievous grin MJ had at the thought of him in a tux almost enough to smile. “Yes ma’am.”

Captain George Stacy felt old. He’d felt old since Giuliani was mayor. Gwen was getting to that age where the media insisted she’d be experimenting with… stuff. Going to raves, getting stuff slipped into her drinks, drinking and driving. He just wanted to keep her safe, but now there were freaks of all sorts flying around the city, burning up town…

Well, scratch one off the list. And good riddance at that.

He walked through the busy police station, relaxing with the knowledge that Dewolff would be handling clean-up. She seemed like a capable officer, though they hadn’t formally met yet.

George dodged out of the way of the mayor’s representative, making his way into his office. Harry Osborn was waiting for him, looking antsy. Practically crawling out of his chair. George almost would’ve pegged him for an addict, except the Osborn kid froze and fixed George with a grin that no speed freak could’ve managed.

“How you doing, son?”

Harry neatly folded his fidgeting hands together. “I would like to get back to running my business, if you don’t mind.”

George sat down on the edge of his cluttered desk. “Mr. Osborn, a death threat by Otto Octavius is nothing to laugh at…”

”He’s dead, isn’t he?”

George held up a hand, cautioning the young man. ”That is, as of yet, unconfirmed.”

”Unconfirmed?” Harry slid to the edge of his seat, hands white-knuckled on his knees. “Couple thousand commuters see him getting blown up in mid-air and it’s unconfirmed?”

”We’ll still sweeping the bay. You know how it is. If you don’t see a body…”

Harry stood, cracking his neck. “I don’t need to see a body. He’s dead. Now I would like to attend to more pressing matters. Many important people have been invited to my birthday party and I’m not going to let some dead fruitcake intimidate me into rescheduling…”

”Mr. Osborn, I urge you to reconsider.”

”Urge away. But I’m leaving. So either charge me with a crime or get out of my way.”

George tried to stare the kid down. He’d done it before, with a million young Turks, but for some reason this one didn’t back down. His brown eyes, flecked with green, stared into George’s without blinking or wavering. George had seen suspects quail under his will, but Harry just kept staring. And slowly, George began to wonder if a rabbit felt like this when an eagle was staring at it, about to strike.

George looked away, missing Harry’s triumphant smirk. Osborn walked away. George’s phone was ringing anyway.

He picked it up. The voice on the other end he’d heard before, but only in snippets, terse replies, or more likely the sharp quips heard through news feeds. But over the phone, with crystal clarity, it set off a bomb-blast in George’s mind.

”George Stacy?”

”Spider-Man.”

The voice didn’t lighten, or joke, or quip. “Yeah. The Hobgoblin is Roderick Kingsley. Roderick Kingsley.”

Dial tone.

George set the phone down. Then he dialed the district attorney. “I need a warrant.”

Curt wasn’t woken up by pain, even though his skin was clinging to the stake-sharp tip of his stump’s armbone like it was the rib of a famine victim. He was woken by hunger.

There were some pork chops that were still in the shrink-wrap, red and unseasoned and barely frosted from the refrigerator. He heated them in the microwave until they smelled sickly sweet to his nostrils, like too many candy canes sweating on a Christmas morning, and then he ate them raw. Didn’t even bother with a fork, just ripped them to shreds in his teeth.

Licking his fingers clean, he sat and looked at a piece of paper held to the fridge door by magnet. It was an article from Popular Science. An article he’d written.

It all started off so simply. A lizard can release its tail from its body when confronted by a predator, leaving the amputated body part squirming to distract the predator as it seeks shelter. Amazingly, a new tail grows back. An entire body part from nothing! Using neogenics, the manipulation of DNA itself, this process can be transferred from reptiles to mammals.

Connors looked at it with a slit-pupiled eye.

His son was asleep in bed. His dog was asleep in the backyard. Where was his wife, his woman, his mate?

Headlights cut off at the end of the street and the car glided in through darkness, parking in the driveway. Even from the kitchen, Curt could smell the perfume. The sweat. And underneath it, something salty and guilty.

He stood, walked, sifting through the shadows until he heard a key turn in the lock. Martha walked in. Her dress was short, her make-up made her look as garish as a clown. He waited for her to notice him, breathing in and out, blinking only once in a lifetime.

“Oh, Curt, I didn’t see you there.”

He walked forward, now not bothering to compensate for an arm that wasn’t there, a phantom limb that threw him off with its weightlessness.

“I was just going out to get ingredients for tomorrow night, but the stores were closed… apparently one of the restroom toilets backed up…”

His sole hand flexed and squeezed and tightened into all sorts of interesting fists.

“I can smell him on you,” Curt said.

Martha looked over him in a kind of panic. “Curt, you were…. All that time on that weird project of yours, and he, he, he was just so attentive, so nice…”

“And he had two arms. Didn’t he.”

“It wasn’t like that, we barely even… we just talked… Curt, your arm is bleeding.”

Blinking rapidly, Curt held his hand up in front of his face.

“Not that arm.”

With a tearing sound more wet and slick than any paper, a jagged edge of bone poked through the skin of his stump, finally letting loose a splatter of blood that jolted the white plaster wall.

Curt raised his arms to shield his face from this new threat, this monster growing out of his own body, and his new elbow bent obligingly, spilling more blood. Then the bleeding stopped. The bone glistened a dark crimson in the moonlight before the skin grew over it, once more sealing it in. Curt used his real hand to try to wipe the blood from his face, but only succeeded in smearing it further into his skin. He laughed, turning to Martha as she stared in horror.

“It worked.”

Everything was coming up Kingsley. He’d made a big splash in New York, first with the progressive policies he’d brought to Oscorp, then on the social scene. He had golf with the deputy mayor. He checked his appearance in the mirror for a half-second. Pristine, as he knew it would be. Satisfied and even more self-satisfied, he walked out of his bedroom to go through the living room of his apartment to the front door.

There was an obstacle in his way. Harry Osborn was dressed in unseasonable black clothes, sitting on Kingsley’s favorite chair.

“I know what you’re doing to my company, Kingsley. I don’t like it.”

Kingsley didn’t ask how Osborn had gotten into his apartment. That would just be giving in to these psychotic scare tactics. “Well, the stockholders do. Maybe you can take it up with them.”

Harry stood, dusting himself off. “Your butler let me in,” he said, apropos of nothing. “I have urgent business regarding the future of Oscorp.”

Kingsley pinched his white golf clothes. “I tee off in twenty, make it quick.”

”Yes. Quick. But not painless.”

The punch broke Kingsley’s nose in the space of a nanosecond. Blood spurted, flecks of it invading the pristine tastefulness of his living room set. Kingsley went down hard and instantly scuttled back on his elbows and pedaling feet, away from Osborn.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Harry laughed humorlessly, stepped forward, laughed again. His laugh deepening into insanity, into a sound that would be joyful if it weren’t so chilling. He picked Kingsley up by the throat.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

He let Kingsley go, only to kick him in mid-air. Kingsley soared like a soccer ball, hitting the top of a towering bookcase and then dropping. Fortunately, he landed on a sofa. Unfortunately, the bookcase fell over. Books landed like bombshells all around him before the bookcase itself hit, smashing the sofa into tenders. Kingsley had tried to run for it, but not far enough. The bookcase pinned him down, smashing his legs beyond recognition.

Harry walked toward him now, laughter the throttling rev of a chainsaw ready to cut. He stepped onto the bookcase, adding to the weight crushing Kingsley, and pulled a length of webbing from his pocket. Kneeling, he wrapped it around Kingsley’s neck and pulled like it was the reins to a bucking bronco.

Kingsley gagged, gasped, and tried to pick at the webbing with his fingernails, but it was no good .With an agonizing wrench his damaged spine cracked and his upper body scissored upward, vomiting out his last breath.

Harry released him, the webbing still biting into his neck, and breathlessly adjusted his patent-leather gloves. “Nice doing business with you,” he panted, with a slight giggle at the end.

As he exited, he passed the butler, head twisted around 179 degrees. Harry extended a finger, pushed it around to a full 180, then exited with a cheerful hum.