Back to GatefoldIssue #8 by Meriades Rai
Oct 2009 |
PREVIOUSLY IN ULTIMATE DEFENDERS
Escaping from his other-dimensional prison, the being known only as The Ancient travels to Earth to recruit four disciples - four Defenders - in his battle against The Cabal, five entities of unimaginable evil who delight in feeding upon the pain and misery of humankind.
The Defenders are: Doctor Stefan Strang, an arrogant surgeon whose hands were amputated at the wrists following a car accident but who can now manipulate magical forces through a pair of mystic gloves; Samantha Parrington, a mentally disturbed girl able to manifest the persona of the warrior Valkyrie and who wields her sword Dragonfang, an enchanted blade that can slice through any known matter; Eric Brooks, known as Blade, a repentant murderer now an escaped convict whose hands have been transformed into living weapons; and Patsy Walker, the mysterious Hellcat, possessed of uncanny guile and skill and able to breath the green flames of hellfire, and whose lineage is a matter of some conjecture.
Baron Karloff Mordo, the human henchman of The Cabal, has been charged with gathering his own entourage of evil under the banner of The Order of the Damned: the reanimated corpse of spiteful psychologist Anthony Ludgate, slain by Valkyrie and now known as Druid; Jacques Roussel, a savage werewolf; Deacon Frost, once a fellow prisoner of Blade’s, now a vampire; and Clea Balsamo, once Strange’s lover, now transformed into a hideous spider-woman hybrid.
The Defenders have traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland via a mystic dimensional portal called The Void to try and save Clea, but are too late. Now they must face Mordo and the terrible might of The Order…
MARVEL 2000 PRESENTS
"TERMINATION"
Written by Meriades Rai
Lacourt-Saint-Pierre, Midi-Pyrénées, South of France.
Five Years Ago.
Jacques Roussel removed his work-shirt as the first peal of thunder echoed through the valley, lightning casting the hard muscle of his back and shoulders in a flare of white. Jacques was a young man, strong and virile, and the lust in his dark brown eyes was like a hunger. At his feet, the object of his desire - a barely-dressed woman, a temptress with a complexion like silk and red hair like cascading fire - stared up with wide, green eyes. She seemed… frightened, shivering, her hitherto lascivious smile now fading. Outside, the stormclouds darkened the afternoon skies, framed by the window of the vineyard storehouse where this secret dalliance now took place.
“What’s wrong?” Jacques asked, in French. “Losing your nerve?”
His tone was intended to be teasing, and on another occasion the woman would have responded in kind, but there was also a barely restrained anger in the boy’s voice that stilled her. Now when she looked at Jacques she didn’t see the familiar young laborer who’d been servicing her so energetically these past few weeks of harvest season, she saw… what? The lad’s silhouette in the lightning had roused unwelcome memories: an image of a chalk outline scratched into wooden floorboards soaked black with blood, with police officers and forensic analysts busying themselves with procuring evidence as a burnt, eviscerated corpse was ferried from the crime scene beneath a white sheet shot through with crimson. That was the last time she’d seen her mother. She’d been six years old. Now, twenty years later and half a world away, Patricia Walker could still smell the char of roasted flesh on the stormy air rather than the scent of grapes, or rain, or of her younger companion’s ardor.
And her father's blood red smile...
“Kitten? Are you okay?”
Kitten was Jacques’ pet name for her. He looked concerned now, bending down low so that when the next flash of lightning came it only touched the scruff of his russet hair. Patricia forced herself to smile again.
“Just… thinking,” she said, quietly. “Never recommended. In certain circumstances one should never think, only do. Yes?”
She reached out and pushed the back of her knuckles into the swell of the boy’s crotch. Despite this brief interruption he was still hard. Of course he was; he was just an animal, after all, and animals had needs. She could understand that.
“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Jacques murmured, gallantly.
“Your body says different.”
“My body has no concept of morality.”
“That’s okay. Nor does mine.” Patricia’s dark smile broadened. “Don’t worry, there’s no second thoughts on my account. We’re second cousins, not brother and sister. There’s no danger in that.”
“Danger? That’s a curious word.”
Patricia flinched. “Well… you know what families are like,” she said, quickly. “Some of them can… can be…”
What, Patsy? Does danger really cover it? How about… fatal?
A chalk outline, a scorched cadaver. And her father’s laughter, lingering still, his eyes bright and hot and red like all the blood and lightning of the most violent storm imaginable.
“Like what?” Jacques asked.
Patricia Walker shivered again, and cast her eyes away.
Like hell, she thought. Families are like hell. Just pray you’ll never have to find that out for yourself.
Jacques frowned, concerned once more, and was about to speak again - but then this incredible, intoxicating woman, this distant relative, she regained control in a heartbeat. Her searching fingers moved more determinedly to his zipper and then beyond, and in a few seconds Jacques had completely forgotten any anxieties he may have had.
Jacques Roussel: French, born in Lilles, twenty-one years old, currently a carefree vineyard laborer but destined to take a London apprenticeship with a prestigious finance company inside the next six months thanks to his mother’s connections, the first rung on what would be a rewarding career. Patricia Walker: twenty-six, Irish-English, visiting Lacourt-Saint-Pierre to attend a family wedding and now encouraging sexual relations with a lad who’d only been thirteen years old the last time she’d seen him but who’d since grown into a gorgeous and irresistible young man.
For the next five years Jacques and Patricia would remain friends and sometime-lovers, although they kept the latter secret. Patricia was one for secrets. Jacques had never suspected the truth about her, for example - why she’d never mentioned her parents, or where she’d been born, somewhere far more afield than Lilles.
It was a pleasant arrangement.
But then, five years on, everything changed…
# # # # # # # # # #
Lausanne, Switzerland.
Now.
The four Defenders of the Earth - Doctor Strange, Valkyrie, Blade and Hellcat - stood in the elegant reception hall of Clea Balsamo’s Swiss château, eerily lit by Strange’s swirling magicks, menaced on all sides by a motley collection of fiendish nightmares. To which the only appropriate, heartfelt response could be:
“Jesus fucking Christ up a tree.”
Blade turned towards Hellcat, scowling. “Do you have to blaspheme when you’re standing right next to me?” he snarled. “Some of us don’t exactly appreciate hearing our savior’s name taken in vain…”
Hellcat blinked, and then her eyes narrowed to a dark green smolder. “Oh, please,” she purred. “Are you kidding me? You do see that creature about to come charging down the stairs in our direction, ready to bite us in half at the waist? That’s a fucking werewolf. Fucking. Werewolf. Do you not see the fucking werewolf? Are you seriously more concerned with me swearing out Jesus than the probability that a motherfucking werewolf is going to chew off your bollocks at some point in the next ten seconds?”
Blade’s scowl deepened. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
Hellcat shook her head in dismay. “You… I… well, then. I guess that’s me told.”
Blade sniffed. Then grudgingly, he smiled.
“You’re right, though,” he said. “That is a fucking werewolf…”
The beast in question was beginning to descend a grand staircase directly ahead, slowly at first with arched back and elongated head and neck held proud, but then - suddenly - with a shocking turn of speed, its powerful legs thrusting hard beneath its belly to propel itself forward. Had Blade been standing alone against the creature he wouldn’t have stood a chance; fortunately for him, Hellcat possessed a preternatural agility of her own.
Curling at the waist, the woman launched herself sideways to counter the incoming werewolf’s trajectory, slashing at the monster’s momentarily exposed gut with a fistful of claws and then slamming her shoulder into its ribcage to disturb its flight. The beast was more than twice her size and a lot heavier to boot, but she’d gauged the angle of attack with clinical judgment - pushing it clear of Blade’s back-peddling form by inches - and had torn a savage wound in its stomach into the bargain.
A lesser enemy might have fallen. The werewolf barely even faltered.
Hellcat tensed as the beast turned upon her, snarling deep in its throat. Her eyes flickered and her claws clenched. “Okay, then,” she breathed. “Getting its attention may not have been one of my better ideas…”
The werewolf advanced carefully, black fur flattened against its powerful haunches, its lips furled over rows of gleaming, dagger-sharp teeth. Its eyes glowed blood red. Hellcat’s gaze flicked left and right, searching for he best avenue of avoidance for when the next inevitable attack came… but then she froze, nose twitching, her senses suddenly flaring.
“What?” she whispered, a distinct scent - one that was impossibly familiar - sparking recognition in her brain. “Jacques…?”
Cousin Jacques. The boy from the barn, rutting with her to the sounds of the storm. The man who’d occasionally shared her bed here in London in the five years since that day.
She could hear her father's laughter...
Hellcat’s hesitation was fatal. Screaming, the werewolf lunged once more, its jaw snapping closed about its victim’s leg…
# # # # # # # # # #
Some twenty feet distant, Blade wasn’t aware of his companion’s plight. He’d been fully intending to join Hellcat in her fight against her bristling foe, however futile that might have proved, but before he’d got the chance another adversary had attacked him from behind. It wasn’t until he’d been hurled bodily to the floor and then grasped by the scruff of the neck and slammed face first into the nearest wall with enough force to dislodge a cloud of stone and marble dust that he even snatched a glimpse of his assailant.
His eyes shot wide.
“Frost,” he murmured. “Deacon Frost. No wonder I suddenly feel like slitting my own throat…”
Blade was experiencing something that was as distasteful as it was uncanny - the oily flood of darkness in his veins and soul that occurred whenever he was in the proximity of a vampire. Ironically, it was only this empathic symbiosis that meant he wasn’t dead of a broken neck or shattered skull right now; the process augmented his own body with the essence of a vampire’s strength, durability and speed, as well as its healing factor. It was just a shame it made him feel like scrubbing himself inside and out with scalding water and a wire brush…
Blade stared at the creature before him, with its ghastly white flash and red marbles for eyes and its black slit of a mouth punctuated with a pair of sharpened canines. He snorted. “Frost, last time I saw you there were creatures from the pits of hell chewing on you like a leg of chicken,” he said. “Let me tell you, boy… you’ve looked better.”
Deacon Frost smiled a black smile, a foul gasp escaping from his mouth. “I’ve been dying for a taste of you, Brooks,” he sighed.
Blade shook his head in dismay. “Yeah. Little bitch like you locked up for so many years in a big man’s prison? I can believe it.”
Frost screamed and darted forward at incredible speed, shifting from side to side, flash-flash-flash. And, with a snarl of rage, Blade rose up to meet him…
# # # # # # # # # #
“Do you recognize me, my dear? The face is new, I admit - you rather ruined the one I was born with - but perhaps there is an aura about me you find familiar…?”
Valkyrie scowled as she stepped forward to meet her own enemy, a shambling, hunchbacked corpse with a bloodied countenance held in place by an edging of smoldering black pins. “You’re the psychiatrist,” she murmured. “Doctor Ludgate. The man who treated my other, Samantha Parrington, back in that godforsaken hospital. The fiend whose intent was to make that poor girl believe she was insane.”
The zombie gurgled with rotten laughter. “Oh, such symmetry,” he rasped. “Here you are, still that frail little schizophrenic murderess despite your obvious magical… enhancements. And here am I, reanimated by a similar, otherworldly process, and suffering now from an identical malaise. His name was Druid, you see - the fellow whose face I now wear since it was removed from its owners head with a scalpel and a deft touch. And, seeing through his wounded eye sockets and speaking through his bloodied lips, I can’t help but feel… separate from myself. Is this what you experience, Samantha? Do you slip from one skin to another like shedding a silken robe, abandoning the weakness to embrace the delights of the new, powerful flesh?”
Valkyrie’s eyes darkened to black slits and she hefted her sword, Dragonfang. The nigh-invisible blade, so thin it could carve between molecules, sparked momentarily in the glow of Strange’s magical light.
“My name is not Samantha,” the blonde woman hissed. “And you, abomination… you shall not imply acquaintance!”
She struck then with a fierce elegance, shrieking in rage as she swept her weapon from left to right across her foul adversary’s exposed throat. The strike mirrored the killing blow she’d administered to Doctor Anthony Ludgate back at the Gartnavel Royal Mental Hospital in Glasgow on the first occasion that the warrior spirit of the Valkyrie had fully manifested - but this time the outcome was different. There was no gout of blood and no fatal near-decapitation; instead, Druid’s head merely lolled for a second or two as dark, flickering magic burned and spat about his new wound, but then the dead flesh began to knit together once more, stitched by threads of black sorcery. Valkyrie’s glacial blue eyes shot wide.
“I am already dead, girl,” Druid breathed, the loose mask of skin shivering in delight upon his bloodied face. “You can’t kill me twice. But I can even the score, yes…?”
# # # # # # # # # #
Doctor Strange still didn’t fully understand the sorcerous powers he’d inherited, but he knew enough to be certain that they didn’t grant him the gift of telepathy. He could, however, sense the base emotions of his colleagues - an empathic comprehension of the essence of their thoughts, if not the thoughts themselves - and he recognized their horror as they found themselves in battle with all-too-familiar adversaries. Thus, even though the hideous creature presently advancing upon him wasn’t immediately identifiable, it was with a sinking hollowness of heart that he guessed who it - she - had once been.
“Clea,” Strange breathed, as the spider-woman skittered through the shadows towards him on eight long, spindly legs, her bloated abdomen raised and her multiple eyes glittering in the dark. The sound of her scuttling across the wooden floor was like the drag of corpses, the click of her mandibles like the stark sweep of carving knives.
He was in no doubt that the woman he’d once loved was now far more monster than beast, and that her only desire was to eat him alive.
“You couldn’t save your lady in body or spirit, Doctor,” Baron Mordo murmured, watching on with an expression of eerie sorrow rather than delight. “But be thankful you’ll never know how she suffered in the final days of her life. And, because of you, she did suffer…”
At that, Strange jolted and his eyes darkened. Momentarily paralyzed by the sense of his own failure, as Mordo was keen to demonstrate, the very idea of what torments Clea might have experienced at the hands of her husband Giuseppe and these this devil… it was too much. It sliced open his heart and bled him of the canker that lodged there as surely as a surgeon’s scalpel.
That used to be me, his thoughts whispered. The physician. Steady of hand, cool of mind. I could throw myself into battle with all the spells and wild enchantments I could muster… but it’s that clinical composure that’s needed now, isn’t it?
It was as if the Defenders’ absent mentor, The Ancient, was present in mind; or perhaps it was another spirit, the soul of his runic gloves, through which he channeled such arcane, otherworldly power.
Whichever, that was the split second when Doctor Strange understood what he needed to do.
Baron Mordo’s ploy was inspired. Each of these four demons of darkness, the Order of the Faltine, had been created to stifle their immediate opposite, and then eventually wear them down and defeat them. Strange didn’t doubt his companions’ abilities, but he instinctively recognized the implications of counter-magic even if, again, he didn’t understand it. Valkyrie, Blade and Hellcat - and he himself - would be vanquished. Unless…
Strange faced the spider-woman head on as she lunged at him, all quivering legs and dribbling fangs. He raised his hands, as if the conjure a desperate, last-second warding spell… but then inside he whirled to his left and allowed the sorcerous energies to flow through the runes adorning his gloved palms, generating a different enchantment entirely. An aggressive spell, and one intended not for his immediate foe but for another.
Clea, the spider-woman, slammed into Doctor Strange and hurled him to the floor, shredding his black suit and cloak and the tender flesh beneath, causing the air to fog with his blood and screams in equal measure. But it was too late. Instinctively, with mystical intuition, Strange had seen the flaw in the Order’s strategy and he’d been willing to sacrifice himself to exploit it.
Some ten feet to the Doctor’s side, a soft, glimmering wave enveloped the struggling forms of Hellcat and Jacques Roussel, the werewolf. It was like a shower of pixie dust, beautiful and blinding, and to Hellcat it felt no different to a gentle powdering of moonlight - but to the wolf it was devastating. Just as the beast was pinning its victim to the floor with one massive claw and preparing to disembowel her with a sweep of the other, the rain of microscopic fragments of argentum adhered to its hide of thick, black fur and then penetrated the skin beneath, all the way through from flesh to bone and then deep into the marrow itself.
Argentum was the chemical element silver, sorcerously rendered into its finest form, and through its base properties of being the metal most highly conductive of electricity, heat and raw magic - especially in this concentrated state - it was devastatingly toxic to those transformed by the curse of lycnathropy. Touched by silver, a werewolf fried as surely as if it were doused in water and gasoline and then tethered to the electric chair.
In written legends and their celluloid equivalent, werewolves were often conquered by silver bullets. There was truth in the myth, in both scientific and magical terms… and Jacques never stood a chance.
Hellcat scrambled weakly to her feet as soon as she felt the wolf release its grip on her and then stagger backwards, no longer a dervish of slashing claws and teeth - not even thrashing in its agonies - but rather semi-frozen in a rictus of pain and disbelief. And then, before her eyes, the beast began to howl and to dissolve into a crackling fog of fire and blood and smoke and dust, slowly transformed into a sifting shadow of itself, a burning silhouette imprinted upon the very air.
A silhouette of a scorched cadaver, and the charred stench of roasted flesh upon the storm…
Hellcat turned away as her sometime lover perished, tears stinging her green eyes. She almost fell, ravaged as she was - her colorful robes and the soft flesh beneath were washed scarlet with the blood of her wounds, inflicted by the wolf’s claws - but there was a core of steel about her and she refused to buckle. It was one thing for her to be unwilling to raise a hand against Jacques, as per Baron Mordo’s scheme, but it was quite another to be altogether passive; Patricia Walker, in any guise, was not a docile creature.
Realizing that it was Doctor Strange who’d aided her she whirled towards her companion and his own adversary, but even as he suffered the hideous spider-woman’s attentions he waved her away, directing her instead towards the next battle along. Hellcat glanced across to see Valkyrie faltering in her attempts to mete out a single telling wound against the zombie Druid and her expression contorted with rage.
“Guess you fare well enough against a magic blade,” she snarled. “But I’m thinking the kiss of hellfire is something entirely different…”
She threw back her head then and opened her mouth, and all the furious hostility she’d been unwilling to unleash on her own cousin now came rushing forth in a river of crackling green flames. The fire, like dragon’s breath, engulfed the undead Druid from the side and hurled him away from his struggle with Valkyrie, who herself was momentarily singed before she could instinctively scramble for the floor, arms raised protectively about her head. Druid screamed, arms flapping and hands beating at his own body as the fetid morgue shroud he still wore was consumed in the hellburn, quickly followed by his rotting, death-white flesh and the twisted soul that inhabited the unloving shell by virtue of the flame of the Faltine.
Anthony Ludgate’s second death was, deservedly, even more horrific than his first.
Hellcat helped Valkyrie back to her feet, and for a moment she was anxious that the warrior’s spirit had retreated and been replaced by the far less potent personality of Samantha Parrington - but it had not. The Valkyrie was merely shaken for a second, watching Druid writhe and burn, but then - slowly, coldly - she smiled in triumph.
“My gratitude, friend,” she said, her glacial eyes drinking in the sight of victory. “May those flames burn everlasting if it rids this world of such an outrage against nature.”
“Absolutely,” Hellcat purred. “And speaking of outrage…”
Blade was struggling to gain any kind of upper hand against Deacon Frost and his frustration was readily apparent. The vampire was carving shreds of flesh from his enemy’s now bare upper torso, having already torn away his leather jacket, but these wounds were healing with impossible haste as Blade continued to replicate Frost’s regenerative capabilities simply through close proximity. In contrast, if he could only unleash a true strike of his own he knew he would inflict irreparable damage, his fists being deadly weapons that were fatal to vampirekind. Knowing this, and possessing greater speed of thought and movement than his opponent, Frost was keeping Blade pinned and off-balance, causing the Defender to grow more and more incensed. Frost’s ghastly, clawed hands were also attempting to close about Blade’s throat and twist his hand from side-to-side, an attack that made little sense - until Hellcat observed the vampire’s intent and her eyes widened in shock.
“He’s trying to decapitate him!” she hissed. “Odds are there’s no way back from that. Fucking bastard, I’ll - ”
“No,” Valkyrie murmured. “Stay your hellfire. This one belongs to me.”
The warrior didn’t know why her blade had been so ineffective against Druid; perhaps it was simply that the magic of the Faltine countered that of Dragonfang, or perhaps there was some arcane law exploited by Mordo’s scheming that decreed that a murderess couldn’t kill her victim twice. She was convinced, however, that Blade’s enemy was another matter. If Frost believed that removing Blade’s head would be a mortal grievance that no regeneration factor could repair then it stood to reason that the same treatment would prove fatal for the vampire whose powers Blade was assimilating.
Valkyrie shifted her weight to her left as she swept in, brandishing her weapon at the perfect angle for the killing blow. Frost saw her and reacted immediately, almost quicker than the eye could follow, flash-flash-flash, darting from one side to the other before lunging -
Shuk.
Valkyrie, unlike her host body Samantha, was no novice in the arts of combat. Her adversary was quicker, but she was smarter; she knew well enough to disguise her initial attack but, once committed, knew also not to waver. She drew Frost in on her right and then reversed her thrust, even while the vampire’s movements remained so fluid that her eyes deceived her and conscious instinct screamed for her to anticipate his lunge at an entirely different point.
In short, Valkyire kept her head… and the end result was that Deacon frost lost his.
The vampire’s decapitated body slumped, arms thrashing, as his severed cranium rolled away across the floor of the reception hall. Valkyrie held out a strong arm, grasping Blade about the scruff and hauling him to his feet. Behind them, Hellcat bellowed a warning - and when they whirled the saw the next incoming threat, a tide of wriggling, seething darkness surging from the shadows.
Spiders.
“For fuck’s sake,” Hellcat despaired. “Because that’s just what we needed.”
Overhead, Doctor Strange’s magical light suddenly began to dim. As Hellcat stepped forward to meet the wave of killer arachnids so Blade shot a glance to where Strange was lying, still, beneath the triumphant, skittering form of the spider-woman. Was it too late…?
Hellcat dived forward, executing a graceful pirouette in mid-air, then opened her mouth wide and disgorged a second barrage of crackling green flame that overwhelmed the onrush of spiders. Valkyrie had never heard a spider scream; now a thousand tiny, inhuman shrieks were raised in chorus as they writhed and spun and burned in the conflagration. For Blade’s part, he paid no heed to this horror, fully concentrated instead on hurdling the still-smoldering form of Druid where he lay twitching and leaping towards the creature that had once been Clea Balsamo.
The spider-woman rose to meet him on her back legs, mandibles snapping and spitting venom, her eyes bright. Still invigorated with vampiric energies - and protected by his healing ability - Blade met his enemy in mid-lunge, ignoring the toxic bile that squirted into his eyes and the fangs that sank into his chest and focusing only on clenching his hands into flat, spearhead-like weapons and piercing the spider through its hideous head from either side. He then shifted his weight, using stolen vampire strength, and heaved the spider-woman backwards through the air, her useless legs now flailing upwards and coils of oily black silk seeping from her clasping spinnerets.
Where she landed, the beast’s soft underbelly was exposed - and Valkyrie stole in for the kill, sweeping Dragonfang’s nigh-invisible blade across the spider-woman’s gut, dispatching her with cold aplomb.
In the shadows, the army of arachnids hitherto controlled by the spider-woman and yet to be consumed by green fire were now released from their psychohypnotic spell and scurried away back into the darkness. Hellcat whirled, exhausted and dripping with blood from the werewolf’s attack but buoyed with the thought of victory. It was then that the light above their heads faded still further, now no brighter than a slowly drifting candle flame - and Hellcat saw that Doctor Strange remained unmoving.
From up ahead, at the crest of the grand staircase that dominated the reception hall, there came a slow, deliberate handclap in the gloom.
“A fine show,” the voice of Baron Mordo murmured. “Such speed of thought and instinct from a disparate horde, now forced to work together as a team. You did well against the first Order of the Faltine, I’ll admit. But if you believe yourself all-conquering after just one battle, my brave Defenders, I’m afraid you are deluded…”
Hellcat, Valkyrie and Blade moved to the side of their fallen comrade, aware of Mordo’s burning eyes mocking them from the darkness.
“Is he dead?” Valkyrie asked, a telltale tremor in her habitually emotionless tone.
“His wounds…” Hellcat breathed. “The spider’s venom. I’ll heal quickly from my own injuries, that’s part of what I am, but him…?”
“We have to get him back to the Sanctum,” Blade snapped. “To the Ancient. He - ”
“We’re in Switzerland, Eric,” Hellcat said, quietly. “Remember? We got here through Stefan’s magic, his manipulation of The Void. Without him to guide us back…”
Mordo laughed then, although it was a sad and lonely sound rather than any true delight in his enemies’ despair. Hellcat whirled towards him, bounding for the stairs, mouth already wide to deliver another avalanche of unholy green fire - but it was too late. Mordo was already vanishing, using his own magicks gifted to him by Dormammu of The Cabal to step outside of reality into another plane of existence.
“Your greatest asset has fallen,” the Baron’s disembodied voice whispered in the smoky shadows. “And now I shall raise another Order, and with them at my side I’ll return to slaughter the rest of you in the name of my masters…”
“Fucker!” Hellcat screamed. “You murdering fuck!”
But Mordo was gone.
Hellcat turned back to where Valkyrie was standing over Doctor Strange’s body, head bowed, while Blade stared upwards at the final vestiges of the sorcerer’s light, now little more than a prick of starlight in the dark. Hellcat’s eyes narrowed, her night vision sharp as glass.
“It’s not over,” she snarled.
Blade’s head fell now also. “It is,” he said. “Yes, it is. We lost. You understand? You heard what that son of a bitch said, these monsters we killed here were just the first wave. He and his sodding masters can throw more at us, and keep throwing. We can’t stand against that.”
“We can if we have help.”
“But you said yourself, The Ancient - ”
“I’m not talking about him,” Hellcat hissed, smoke pouring from her lips in rage. “That stupid old man? He means well, and he gave us these magic charms we wear, but he’s not a fighter. He set us up to fail. Jacques, Stefan… they’re gone because of him. We don’t need righteousness on our side… we need to fight fire with fire.”
Valkyrie looked up, her blue eyes searching the darkness. “Meaning?”
Hellcat paused. She shivered suddenly, her heart seizing in her throat.
A chalk outline, scorched flesh, mocking laughter on the wind.
The man - the thing - who’d sired her, then burned her human mother alive on a whim some years later, just to impress his unholy power on the six-year-old girl standing, weeping, in the corner of the room.
The beast. The beast.
“What does any girl do when she gets herself into the kind of trouble she just can’t deal with on her own?” Patricia Walker whispered.
“She goes and begs help from her Daddy…”
NEXT ISSUE: Is Doctor Strange dead? Can The Defenders rise again? Who is ‘Daddy’? (Hell, I’m pretty sure you can guess…) And, most importantly… how does all this end? Find out in Ultimate Defenders #9, the series conclusion!
Escaping from his other-dimensional prison, the being known only as The Ancient travels to Earth to recruit four disciples - four Defenders - in his battle against The Cabal, five entities of unimaginable evil who delight in feeding upon the pain and misery of humankind.
The Defenders are: Doctor Stefan Strang, an arrogant surgeon whose hands were amputated at the wrists following a car accident but who can now manipulate magical forces through a pair of mystic gloves; Samantha Parrington, a mentally disturbed girl able to manifest the persona of the warrior Valkyrie and who wields her sword Dragonfang, an enchanted blade that can slice through any known matter; Eric Brooks, known as Blade, a repentant murderer now an escaped convict whose hands have been transformed into living weapons; and Patsy Walker, the mysterious Hellcat, possessed of uncanny guile and skill and able to breath the green flames of hellfire, and whose lineage is a matter of some conjecture.
Baron Karloff Mordo, the human henchman of The Cabal, has been charged with gathering his own entourage of evil under the banner of The Order of the Damned: the reanimated corpse of spiteful psychologist Anthony Ludgate, slain by Valkyrie and now known as Druid; Jacques Roussel, a savage werewolf; Deacon Frost, once a fellow prisoner of Blade’s, now a vampire; and Clea Balsamo, once Strange’s lover, now transformed into a hideous spider-woman hybrid.
The Defenders have traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland via a mystic dimensional portal called The Void to try and save Clea, but are too late. Now they must face Mordo and the terrible might of The Order…
MARVEL 2000 PRESENTS
"TERMINATION"
Written by Meriades Rai
Lacourt-Saint-Pierre, Midi-Pyrénées, South of France.
Five Years Ago.
Jacques Roussel removed his work-shirt as the first peal of thunder echoed through the valley, lightning casting the hard muscle of his back and shoulders in a flare of white. Jacques was a young man, strong and virile, and the lust in his dark brown eyes was like a hunger. At his feet, the object of his desire - a barely-dressed woman, a temptress with a complexion like silk and red hair like cascading fire - stared up with wide, green eyes. She seemed… frightened, shivering, her hitherto lascivious smile now fading. Outside, the stormclouds darkened the afternoon skies, framed by the window of the vineyard storehouse where this secret dalliance now took place.
“What’s wrong?” Jacques asked, in French. “Losing your nerve?”
His tone was intended to be teasing, and on another occasion the woman would have responded in kind, but there was also a barely restrained anger in the boy’s voice that stilled her. Now when she looked at Jacques she didn’t see the familiar young laborer who’d been servicing her so energetically these past few weeks of harvest season, she saw… what? The lad’s silhouette in the lightning had roused unwelcome memories: an image of a chalk outline scratched into wooden floorboards soaked black with blood, with police officers and forensic analysts busying themselves with procuring evidence as a burnt, eviscerated corpse was ferried from the crime scene beneath a white sheet shot through with crimson. That was the last time she’d seen her mother. She’d been six years old. Now, twenty years later and half a world away, Patricia Walker could still smell the char of roasted flesh on the stormy air rather than the scent of grapes, or rain, or of her younger companion’s ardor.
And her father's blood red smile...
“Kitten? Are you okay?”
Kitten was Jacques’ pet name for her. He looked concerned now, bending down low so that when the next flash of lightning came it only touched the scruff of his russet hair. Patricia forced herself to smile again.
“Just… thinking,” she said, quietly. “Never recommended. In certain circumstances one should never think, only do. Yes?”
She reached out and pushed the back of her knuckles into the swell of the boy’s crotch. Despite this brief interruption he was still hard. Of course he was; he was just an animal, after all, and animals had needs. She could understand that.
“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Jacques murmured, gallantly.
“Your body says different.”
“My body has no concept of morality.”
“That’s okay. Nor does mine.” Patricia’s dark smile broadened. “Don’t worry, there’s no second thoughts on my account. We’re second cousins, not brother and sister. There’s no danger in that.”
“Danger? That’s a curious word.”
Patricia flinched. “Well… you know what families are like,” she said, quickly. “Some of them can… can be…”
What, Patsy? Does danger really cover it? How about… fatal?
A chalk outline, a scorched cadaver. And her father’s laughter, lingering still, his eyes bright and hot and red like all the blood and lightning of the most violent storm imaginable.
“Like what?” Jacques asked.
Patricia Walker shivered again, and cast her eyes away.
Like hell, she thought. Families are like hell. Just pray you’ll never have to find that out for yourself.
Jacques frowned, concerned once more, and was about to speak again - but then this incredible, intoxicating woman, this distant relative, she regained control in a heartbeat. Her searching fingers moved more determinedly to his zipper and then beyond, and in a few seconds Jacques had completely forgotten any anxieties he may have had.
Jacques Roussel: French, born in Lilles, twenty-one years old, currently a carefree vineyard laborer but destined to take a London apprenticeship with a prestigious finance company inside the next six months thanks to his mother’s connections, the first rung on what would be a rewarding career. Patricia Walker: twenty-six, Irish-English, visiting Lacourt-Saint-Pierre to attend a family wedding and now encouraging sexual relations with a lad who’d only been thirteen years old the last time she’d seen him but who’d since grown into a gorgeous and irresistible young man.
For the next five years Jacques and Patricia would remain friends and sometime-lovers, although they kept the latter secret. Patricia was one for secrets. Jacques had never suspected the truth about her, for example - why she’d never mentioned her parents, or where she’d been born, somewhere far more afield than Lilles.
It was a pleasant arrangement.
But then, five years on, everything changed…
# # # # # # # # # #
Lausanne, Switzerland.
Now.
The four Defenders of the Earth - Doctor Strange, Valkyrie, Blade and Hellcat - stood in the elegant reception hall of Clea Balsamo’s Swiss château, eerily lit by Strange’s swirling magicks, menaced on all sides by a motley collection of fiendish nightmares. To which the only appropriate, heartfelt response could be:
“Jesus fucking Christ up a tree.”
Blade turned towards Hellcat, scowling. “Do you have to blaspheme when you’re standing right next to me?” he snarled. “Some of us don’t exactly appreciate hearing our savior’s name taken in vain…”
Hellcat blinked, and then her eyes narrowed to a dark green smolder. “Oh, please,” she purred. “Are you kidding me? You do see that creature about to come charging down the stairs in our direction, ready to bite us in half at the waist? That’s a fucking werewolf. Fucking. Werewolf. Do you not see the fucking werewolf? Are you seriously more concerned with me swearing out Jesus than the probability that a motherfucking werewolf is going to chew off your bollocks at some point in the next ten seconds?”
Blade’s scowl deepened. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
Hellcat shook her head in dismay. “You… I… well, then. I guess that’s me told.”
Blade sniffed. Then grudgingly, he smiled.
“You’re right, though,” he said. “That is a fucking werewolf…”
The beast in question was beginning to descend a grand staircase directly ahead, slowly at first with arched back and elongated head and neck held proud, but then - suddenly - with a shocking turn of speed, its powerful legs thrusting hard beneath its belly to propel itself forward. Had Blade been standing alone against the creature he wouldn’t have stood a chance; fortunately for him, Hellcat possessed a preternatural agility of her own.
Curling at the waist, the woman launched herself sideways to counter the incoming werewolf’s trajectory, slashing at the monster’s momentarily exposed gut with a fistful of claws and then slamming her shoulder into its ribcage to disturb its flight. The beast was more than twice her size and a lot heavier to boot, but she’d gauged the angle of attack with clinical judgment - pushing it clear of Blade’s back-peddling form by inches - and had torn a savage wound in its stomach into the bargain.
A lesser enemy might have fallen. The werewolf barely even faltered.
Hellcat tensed as the beast turned upon her, snarling deep in its throat. Her eyes flickered and her claws clenched. “Okay, then,” she breathed. “Getting its attention may not have been one of my better ideas…”
The werewolf advanced carefully, black fur flattened against its powerful haunches, its lips furled over rows of gleaming, dagger-sharp teeth. Its eyes glowed blood red. Hellcat’s gaze flicked left and right, searching for he best avenue of avoidance for when the next inevitable attack came… but then she froze, nose twitching, her senses suddenly flaring.
“What?” she whispered, a distinct scent - one that was impossibly familiar - sparking recognition in her brain. “Jacques…?”
Cousin Jacques. The boy from the barn, rutting with her to the sounds of the storm. The man who’d occasionally shared her bed here in London in the five years since that day.
She could hear her father's laughter...
Hellcat’s hesitation was fatal. Screaming, the werewolf lunged once more, its jaw snapping closed about its victim’s leg…
# # # # # # # # # #
Some twenty feet distant, Blade wasn’t aware of his companion’s plight. He’d been fully intending to join Hellcat in her fight against her bristling foe, however futile that might have proved, but before he’d got the chance another adversary had attacked him from behind. It wasn’t until he’d been hurled bodily to the floor and then grasped by the scruff of the neck and slammed face first into the nearest wall with enough force to dislodge a cloud of stone and marble dust that he even snatched a glimpse of his assailant.
His eyes shot wide.
“Frost,” he murmured. “Deacon Frost. No wonder I suddenly feel like slitting my own throat…”
Blade was experiencing something that was as distasteful as it was uncanny - the oily flood of darkness in his veins and soul that occurred whenever he was in the proximity of a vampire. Ironically, it was only this empathic symbiosis that meant he wasn’t dead of a broken neck or shattered skull right now; the process augmented his own body with the essence of a vampire’s strength, durability and speed, as well as its healing factor. It was just a shame it made him feel like scrubbing himself inside and out with scalding water and a wire brush…
Blade stared at the creature before him, with its ghastly white flash and red marbles for eyes and its black slit of a mouth punctuated with a pair of sharpened canines. He snorted. “Frost, last time I saw you there were creatures from the pits of hell chewing on you like a leg of chicken,” he said. “Let me tell you, boy… you’ve looked better.”
Deacon Frost smiled a black smile, a foul gasp escaping from his mouth. “I’ve been dying for a taste of you, Brooks,” he sighed.
Blade shook his head in dismay. “Yeah. Little bitch like you locked up for so many years in a big man’s prison? I can believe it.”
Frost screamed and darted forward at incredible speed, shifting from side to side, flash-flash-flash. And, with a snarl of rage, Blade rose up to meet him…
# # # # # # # # # #
“Do you recognize me, my dear? The face is new, I admit - you rather ruined the one I was born with - but perhaps there is an aura about me you find familiar…?”
Valkyrie scowled as she stepped forward to meet her own enemy, a shambling, hunchbacked corpse with a bloodied countenance held in place by an edging of smoldering black pins. “You’re the psychiatrist,” she murmured. “Doctor Ludgate. The man who treated my other, Samantha Parrington, back in that godforsaken hospital. The fiend whose intent was to make that poor girl believe she was insane.”
The zombie gurgled with rotten laughter. “Oh, such symmetry,” he rasped. “Here you are, still that frail little schizophrenic murderess despite your obvious magical… enhancements. And here am I, reanimated by a similar, otherworldly process, and suffering now from an identical malaise. His name was Druid, you see - the fellow whose face I now wear since it was removed from its owners head with a scalpel and a deft touch. And, seeing through his wounded eye sockets and speaking through his bloodied lips, I can’t help but feel… separate from myself. Is this what you experience, Samantha? Do you slip from one skin to another like shedding a silken robe, abandoning the weakness to embrace the delights of the new, powerful flesh?”
Valkyrie’s eyes darkened to black slits and she hefted her sword, Dragonfang. The nigh-invisible blade, so thin it could carve between molecules, sparked momentarily in the glow of Strange’s magical light.
“My name is not Samantha,” the blonde woman hissed. “And you, abomination… you shall not imply acquaintance!”
She struck then with a fierce elegance, shrieking in rage as she swept her weapon from left to right across her foul adversary’s exposed throat. The strike mirrored the killing blow she’d administered to Doctor Anthony Ludgate back at the Gartnavel Royal Mental Hospital in Glasgow on the first occasion that the warrior spirit of the Valkyrie had fully manifested - but this time the outcome was different. There was no gout of blood and no fatal near-decapitation; instead, Druid’s head merely lolled for a second or two as dark, flickering magic burned and spat about his new wound, but then the dead flesh began to knit together once more, stitched by threads of black sorcery. Valkyrie’s glacial blue eyes shot wide.
“I am already dead, girl,” Druid breathed, the loose mask of skin shivering in delight upon his bloodied face. “You can’t kill me twice. But I can even the score, yes…?”
# # # # # # # # # #
Doctor Strange still didn’t fully understand the sorcerous powers he’d inherited, but he knew enough to be certain that they didn’t grant him the gift of telepathy. He could, however, sense the base emotions of his colleagues - an empathic comprehension of the essence of their thoughts, if not the thoughts themselves - and he recognized their horror as they found themselves in battle with all-too-familiar adversaries. Thus, even though the hideous creature presently advancing upon him wasn’t immediately identifiable, it was with a sinking hollowness of heart that he guessed who it - she - had once been.
“Clea,” Strange breathed, as the spider-woman skittered through the shadows towards him on eight long, spindly legs, her bloated abdomen raised and her multiple eyes glittering in the dark. The sound of her scuttling across the wooden floor was like the drag of corpses, the click of her mandibles like the stark sweep of carving knives.
He was in no doubt that the woman he’d once loved was now far more monster than beast, and that her only desire was to eat him alive.
“You couldn’t save your lady in body or spirit, Doctor,” Baron Mordo murmured, watching on with an expression of eerie sorrow rather than delight. “But be thankful you’ll never know how she suffered in the final days of her life. And, because of you, she did suffer…”
At that, Strange jolted and his eyes darkened. Momentarily paralyzed by the sense of his own failure, as Mordo was keen to demonstrate, the very idea of what torments Clea might have experienced at the hands of her husband Giuseppe and these this devil… it was too much. It sliced open his heart and bled him of the canker that lodged there as surely as a surgeon’s scalpel.
That used to be me, his thoughts whispered. The physician. Steady of hand, cool of mind. I could throw myself into battle with all the spells and wild enchantments I could muster… but it’s that clinical composure that’s needed now, isn’t it?
It was as if the Defenders’ absent mentor, The Ancient, was present in mind; or perhaps it was another spirit, the soul of his runic gloves, through which he channeled such arcane, otherworldly power.
Whichever, that was the split second when Doctor Strange understood what he needed to do.
Baron Mordo’s ploy was inspired. Each of these four demons of darkness, the Order of the Faltine, had been created to stifle their immediate opposite, and then eventually wear them down and defeat them. Strange didn’t doubt his companions’ abilities, but he instinctively recognized the implications of counter-magic even if, again, he didn’t understand it. Valkyrie, Blade and Hellcat - and he himself - would be vanquished. Unless…
Strange faced the spider-woman head on as she lunged at him, all quivering legs and dribbling fangs. He raised his hands, as if the conjure a desperate, last-second warding spell… but then inside he whirled to his left and allowed the sorcerous energies to flow through the runes adorning his gloved palms, generating a different enchantment entirely. An aggressive spell, and one intended not for his immediate foe but for another.
Clea, the spider-woman, slammed into Doctor Strange and hurled him to the floor, shredding his black suit and cloak and the tender flesh beneath, causing the air to fog with his blood and screams in equal measure. But it was too late. Instinctively, with mystical intuition, Strange had seen the flaw in the Order’s strategy and he’d been willing to sacrifice himself to exploit it.
Some ten feet to the Doctor’s side, a soft, glimmering wave enveloped the struggling forms of Hellcat and Jacques Roussel, the werewolf. It was like a shower of pixie dust, beautiful and blinding, and to Hellcat it felt no different to a gentle powdering of moonlight - but to the wolf it was devastating. Just as the beast was pinning its victim to the floor with one massive claw and preparing to disembowel her with a sweep of the other, the rain of microscopic fragments of argentum adhered to its hide of thick, black fur and then penetrated the skin beneath, all the way through from flesh to bone and then deep into the marrow itself.
Argentum was the chemical element silver, sorcerously rendered into its finest form, and through its base properties of being the metal most highly conductive of electricity, heat and raw magic - especially in this concentrated state - it was devastatingly toxic to those transformed by the curse of lycnathropy. Touched by silver, a werewolf fried as surely as if it were doused in water and gasoline and then tethered to the electric chair.
In written legends and their celluloid equivalent, werewolves were often conquered by silver bullets. There was truth in the myth, in both scientific and magical terms… and Jacques never stood a chance.
Hellcat scrambled weakly to her feet as soon as she felt the wolf release its grip on her and then stagger backwards, no longer a dervish of slashing claws and teeth - not even thrashing in its agonies - but rather semi-frozen in a rictus of pain and disbelief. And then, before her eyes, the beast began to howl and to dissolve into a crackling fog of fire and blood and smoke and dust, slowly transformed into a sifting shadow of itself, a burning silhouette imprinted upon the very air.
A silhouette of a scorched cadaver, and the charred stench of roasted flesh upon the storm…
Hellcat turned away as her sometime lover perished, tears stinging her green eyes. She almost fell, ravaged as she was - her colorful robes and the soft flesh beneath were washed scarlet with the blood of her wounds, inflicted by the wolf’s claws - but there was a core of steel about her and she refused to buckle. It was one thing for her to be unwilling to raise a hand against Jacques, as per Baron Mordo’s scheme, but it was quite another to be altogether passive; Patricia Walker, in any guise, was not a docile creature.
Realizing that it was Doctor Strange who’d aided her she whirled towards her companion and his own adversary, but even as he suffered the hideous spider-woman’s attentions he waved her away, directing her instead towards the next battle along. Hellcat glanced across to see Valkyrie faltering in her attempts to mete out a single telling wound against the zombie Druid and her expression contorted with rage.
“Guess you fare well enough against a magic blade,” she snarled. “But I’m thinking the kiss of hellfire is something entirely different…”
She threw back her head then and opened her mouth, and all the furious hostility she’d been unwilling to unleash on her own cousin now came rushing forth in a river of crackling green flames. The fire, like dragon’s breath, engulfed the undead Druid from the side and hurled him away from his struggle with Valkyrie, who herself was momentarily singed before she could instinctively scramble for the floor, arms raised protectively about her head. Druid screamed, arms flapping and hands beating at his own body as the fetid morgue shroud he still wore was consumed in the hellburn, quickly followed by his rotting, death-white flesh and the twisted soul that inhabited the unloving shell by virtue of the flame of the Faltine.
Anthony Ludgate’s second death was, deservedly, even more horrific than his first.
Hellcat helped Valkyrie back to her feet, and for a moment she was anxious that the warrior’s spirit had retreated and been replaced by the far less potent personality of Samantha Parrington - but it had not. The Valkyrie was merely shaken for a second, watching Druid writhe and burn, but then - slowly, coldly - she smiled in triumph.
“My gratitude, friend,” she said, her glacial eyes drinking in the sight of victory. “May those flames burn everlasting if it rids this world of such an outrage against nature.”
“Absolutely,” Hellcat purred. “And speaking of outrage…”
Blade was struggling to gain any kind of upper hand against Deacon Frost and his frustration was readily apparent. The vampire was carving shreds of flesh from his enemy’s now bare upper torso, having already torn away his leather jacket, but these wounds were healing with impossible haste as Blade continued to replicate Frost’s regenerative capabilities simply through close proximity. In contrast, if he could only unleash a true strike of his own he knew he would inflict irreparable damage, his fists being deadly weapons that were fatal to vampirekind. Knowing this, and possessing greater speed of thought and movement than his opponent, Frost was keeping Blade pinned and off-balance, causing the Defender to grow more and more incensed. Frost’s ghastly, clawed hands were also attempting to close about Blade’s throat and twist his hand from side-to-side, an attack that made little sense - until Hellcat observed the vampire’s intent and her eyes widened in shock.
“He’s trying to decapitate him!” she hissed. “Odds are there’s no way back from that. Fucking bastard, I’ll - ”
“No,” Valkyrie murmured. “Stay your hellfire. This one belongs to me.”
The warrior didn’t know why her blade had been so ineffective against Druid; perhaps it was simply that the magic of the Faltine countered that of Dragonfang, or perhaps there was some arcane law exploited by Mordo’s scheming that decreed that a murderess couldn’t kill her victim twice. She was convinced, however, that Blade’s enemy was another matter. If Frost believed that removing Blade’s head would be a mortal grievance that no regeneration factor could repair then it stood to reason that the same treatment would prove fatal for the vampire whose powers Blade was assimilating.
Valkyrie shifted her weight to her left as she swept in, brandishing her weapon at the perfect angle for the killing blow. Frost saw her and reacted immediately, almost quicker than the eye could follow, flash-flash-flash, darting from one side to the other before lunging -
Shuk.
Valkyrie, unlike her host body Samantha, was no novice in the arts of combat. Her adversary was quicker, but she was smarter; she knew well enough to disguise her initial attack but, once committed, knew also not to waver. She drew Frost in on her right and then reversed her thrust, even while the vampire’s movements remained so fluid that her eyes deceived her and conscious instinct screamed for her to anticipate his lunge at an entirely different point.
In short, Valkyire kept her head… and the end result was that Deacon frost lost his.
The vampire’s decapitated body slumped, arms thrashing, as his severed cranium rolled away across the floor of the reception hall. Valkyrie held out a strong arm, grasping Blade about the scruff and hauling him to his feet. Behind them, Hellcat bellowed a warning - and when they whirled the saw the next incoming threat, a tide of wriggling, seething darkness surging from the shadows.
Spiders.
“For fuck’s sake,” Hellcat despaired. “Because that’s just what we needed.”
Overhead, Doctor Strange’s magical light suddenly began to dim. As Hellcat stepped forward to meet the wave of killer arachnids so Blade shot a glance to where Strange was lying, still, beneath the triumphant, skittering form of the spider-woman. Was it too late…?
Hellcat dived forward, executing a graceful pirouette in mid-air, then opened her mouth wide and disgorged a second barrage of crackling green flame that overwhelmed the onrush of spiders. Valkyrie had never heard a spider scream; now a thousand tiny, inhuman shrieks were raised in chorus as they writhed and spun and burned in the conflagration. For Blade’s part, he paid no heed to this horror, fully concentrated instead on hurdling the still-smoldering form of Druid where he lay twitching and leaping towards the creature that had once been Clea Balsamo.
The spider-woman rose to meet him on her back legs, mandibles snapping and spitting venom, her eyes bright. Still invigorated with vampiric energies - and protected by his healing ability - Blade met his enemy in mid-lunge, ignoring the toxic bile that squirted into his eyes and the fangs that sank into his chest and focusing only on clenching his hands into flat, spearhead-like weapons and piercing the spider through its hideous head from either side. He then shifted his weight, using stolen vampire strength, and heaved the spider-woman backwards through the air, her useless legs now flailing upwards and coils of oily black silk seeping from her clasping spinnerets.
Where she landed, the beast’s soft underbelly was exposed - and Valkyrie stole in for the kill, sweeping Dragonfang’s nigh-invisible blade across the spider-woman’s gut, dispatching her with cold aplomb.
In the shadows, the army of arachnids hitherto controlled by the spider-woman and yet to be consumed by green fire were now released from their psychohypnotic spell and scurried away back into the darkness. Hellcat whirled, exhausted and dripping with blood from the werewolf’s attack but buoyed with the thought of victory. It was then that the light above their heads faded still further, now no brighter than a slowly drifting candle flame - and Hellcat saw that Doctor Strange remained unmoving.
From up ahead, at the crest of the grand staircase that dominated the reception hall, there came a slow, deliberate handclap in the gloom.
“A fine show,” the voice of Baron Mordo murmured. “Such speed of thought and instinct from a disparate horde, now forced to work together as a team. You did well against the first Order of the Faltine, I’ll admit. But if you believe yourself all-conquering after just one battle, my brave Defenders, I’m afraid you are deluded…”
Hellcat, Valkyrie and Blade moved to the side of their fallen comrade, aware of Mordo’s burning eyes mocking them from the darkness.
“Is he dead?” Valkyrie asked, a telltale tremor in her habitually emotionless tone.
“His wounds…” Hellcat breathed. “The spider’s venom. I’ll heal quickly from my own injuries, that’s part of what I am, but him…?”
“We have to get him back to the Sanctum,” Blade snapped. “To the Ancient. He - ”
“We’re in Switzerland, Eric,” Hellcat said, quietly. “Remember? We got here through Stefan’s magic, his manipulation of The Void. Without him to guide us back…”
Mordo laughed then, although it was a sad and lonely sound rather than any true delight in his enemies’ despair. Hellcat whirled towards him, bounding for the stairs, mouth already wide to deliver another avalanche of unholy green fire - but it was too late. Mordo was already vanishing, using his own magicks gifted to him by Dormammu of The Cabal to step outside of reality into another plane of existence.
“Your greatest asset has fallen,” the Baron’s disembodied voice whispered in the smoky shadows. “And now I shall raise another Order, and with them at my side I’ll return to slaughter the rest of you in the name of my masters…”
“Fucker!” Hellcat screamed. “You murdering fuck!”
But Mordo was gone.
Hellcat turned back to where Valkyrie was standing over Doctor Strange’s body, head bowed, while Blade stared upwards at the final vestiges of the sorcerer’s light, now little more than a prick of starlight in the dark. Hellcat’s eyes narrowed, her night vision sharp as glass.
“It’s not over,” she snarled.
Blade’s head fell now also. “It is,” he said. “Yes, it is. We lost. You understand? You heard what that son of a bitch said, these monsters we killed here were just the first wave. He and his sodding masters can throw more at us, and keep throwing. We can’t stand against that.”
“We can if we have help.”
“But you said yourself, The Ancient - ”
“I’m not talking about him,” Hellcat hissed, smoke pouring from her lips in rage. “That stupid old man? He means well, and he gave us these magic charms we wear, but he’s not a fighter. He set us up to fail. Jacques, Stefan… they’re gone because of him. We don’t need righteousness on our side… we need to fight fire with fire.”
Valkyrie looked up, her blue eyes searching the darkness. “Meaning?”
Hellcat paused. She shivered suddenly, her heart seizing in her throat.
A chalk outline, scorched flesh, mocking laughter on the wind.
The man - the thing - who’d sired her, then burned her human mother alive on a whim some years later, just to impress his unholy power on the six-year-old girl standing, weeping, in the corner of the room.
The beast. The beast.
“What does any girl do when she gets herself into the kind of trouble she just can’t deal with on her own?” Patricia Walker whispered.
“She goes and begs help from her Daddy…”
NEXT ISSUE: Is Doctor Strange dead? Can The Defenders rise again? Who is ‘Daddy’? (Hell, I’m pretty sure you can guess…) And, most importantly… how does all this end? Find out in Ultimate Defenders #9, the series conclusion!