Venom Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Novels of the Marvel Universe by Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dark Soul Drifting

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  War and Pieces

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  A Verdict of Violence

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Deadly Birth

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Symbiocide

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Frisco Kill!

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Author’s Acknowledgments

  NOVELS OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE BY TITAN BOOKS

  Ant-Man: Natural Enemy by Jason Starr

  Avengers: Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Dan Abnett

  Civil War by Stuart Moore

  Deadpool: Paws by Stefan Petrucha

  Venom: Lethal Protector by James R. Tuck

  Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther? by Jesse J. Holland

  Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover by David Liss

  The Marvel Vault by Matthew K. Manning, Peter Sanderson, and Roy Thomas

  Obsessed with Marvel by Peter Sanderson and Mark Sumerak

  MARVEL’S VENOM: LETHAL PROTECTOR

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789090468

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789090604

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: September 2018

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR MARVEL PUBLISHING

  Jeff Youngquist, VP Production Special Projects

  Caitlin O’Connell, Assistant Editor, Special Projects

  Sven Larsen, Director, Licensed Publishing

  David Gabriel, SVP Sales & Marketing, Publishing

  C.B. Cebulski, Editor in Chief

  Joe Quesada, Chief Creative Officer

  Dan Buckley, President, Marvel Entertainment

  Alan Fine, Executive Producer

  Cover art by Gabriele Dell’Otto

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  © 2018 MARVEL

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Dedicated to all the people out there, no matter how flawed they may be, who strive to protect the innocent.

  DARK SOUL DRIFTING

  1

  San Francisco, California

  THE SUN had dropped below the upper edges of the tall buildings around him more than an hour ago, so the crumbling granite facade was cool enough to make his shoulder ache as he leaned against it. The shadow leeched away the warmth, but it also provided him cover—a blind from which to hunt—and so he stayed still. His only movements were ragged breathing, a symptom of the illicit drugs that kept him going, and the glassy slide of his predator’s eyes.

  Jimmy spotted her when she turned the corner, her skirt flipping and flapping around exposed legs, waving at him, drawing his attention. She was as slim and sharp as the five-inch stiletto heels that matched her deep-purple tube top and skirt as she approached briskly from the direction of the Theater District. Either her date had gone badly, or she was the only one of a gaggle of girlfriends cheap enough to risk parking in the Tenderloin, instead of ponying up the cash for a valet.

  It didn’t matter which.

  Taking her in with his gaze he studied her, assessing her with all the criminal expertise he had gained over the years. He’d bet she didn’t have a weapon—not in the thin designer purse that hung low by her hip, and certainly not hidden in that dress.

  She probably had money, though.

  Pushing off from the cold building wall he began moving toward her, determined to reach her before another hunter could pick up her scent.

  * * *

  IT’S NOT much farther.

  A twinge of pain ran up the side of Lydia’s calf, a hot little electric jolt of it as she picked up her pace. Not running—that would be impossible in the knockoff Giuseppe Zanottis strapped to her feet—but moving with intent. They looked close to the fifteen-hundred-dollar shoes they mimicked, but felt like the twenty-five bucks she’d paid for them. She could hear her sister, forever in flats and sandals, the words ringing in her ears.

  High heels are designed by men to make it harder for women to run away.

  If she didn’t watch her step on the uneven sidewalk, a sidewalk left unrepaired for over a decade, the shoes would toss her into the street. So she kept her eyes down, watching her step, refusing to berate herself over her choice of parking. She wouldn’t.

  She didn’t have the means that Layla had, hadn’t lucked into the good position Maria had snagged. It was just her minimum-wage job, her too-expensive apartment with four roommates, and her twenty-five-dollar knockoff shoes.

  To distract herself she thought about the Tenderloin and the stories her father had told her, about how it was named by a former San Francisco police chief who, when transferred to the district, claimed that with the amount of graft and bribes he had begun receiving, he could “stop eating chuck steak and start eating tenderloin.”

  She also remembered telling that story to Brad the Cop on their second date and his condescending response that the Tenderloin got its name from the tender loins of the prostitutes who worked the streets after dark.

  That was their last date.

  She glanced up to see how low the sun had dropped. As she did, she felt hard hands close around her arms from behind.

  Her mind went blank with surprise as the hands dug deep into her flesh and propelled her sideways into the opening of an alley. One heel on her twenty-five-dollar knockoffs snapped at the change in direction and she stumbled, held up only by the grip of the person behind her.

  She was too scared to utter a sound.

  * * *

  HE FLUNG her against the back wall of the alley, snagging the strap of her purse as he let her go. It caught in the crook of her elbow, slewing her around as she staggered, knocking her hip into a metal garbage can so full of trash it didn’t even rock as she bounced off it and against the bricks of the wall.

  As he tore open the purse she stood there, frozen, staring at him, holding onto the wall behind her. It took a couple of seconds to find the two fives and a ten that were the only money in the purse. Fury building inside of him, he crumpled the bills in his fist and waved them at her.

  “This ain’t nothing but chump change, lady!”

  She didn’t s
peak, just stared open-mouthed through a whorl of wavy brown hair that had stuck to her face. Her eyes were wide.

  Jimmy liked that.

  “Maybe I’ll hafta take my pay some other way!” he snarled at her, enjoying the raw fear of her expression. He lunged forward, clamping his hand over her mouth, her teeth hard against his palm. This close he thought he could smell it, the copper tang of terror that hung between them like ozone, crackling in his nose, lighting up his adrenal glands in a tight clutch across the small of his back.

  “That scare ya?” he asked as he leaned close enough to make her cheek moist with his breath. “Good! I always like seein’ fear in my victim’s eyes.”

  Then he realized her eyes weren’t focused on him, but were looking up and behind him. A tiny whimper escaped her lips.

  “What a coincidence!”

  The snarling hiss of a voice came from above. It wasn’t quite human. The filtered light of the falling sun cut out, dropping predator and prey both into shadow. The chill that ran up his spine didn’t come from the sudden dark, however.

  “So do we!”

  He turned to find the darkness falling on him, broken only by the stark white impression of a spider, two pale Rorschach blots, and teeth… so many teeth in a raw red mouth.

  The thing was human, sort of, but it was big. Really big. It dropped down beside him, all swollen muscles coated in inky darkness. Tendrils of the blackness swirled off of its limbs, looking like windblown ink as the newcomer hunched there. Instantly it shrugged upright, turning toward him, and he realized the white splotches were eyes. Eyes that were blank and menacing on the round head of the creature. Eyes that hovered over the mouth full of murderous teeth.

  Those eyes broke him, shut down every bit of feral courage the streets had instilled in him. His guts went to water and his knees went to rubber, and even though he still clung to his victim, Jimmy wanted nothing more than to flee.

  Before he could turn to bolt, to run, to escape, the creature’s hand shot up, black claws clamping on his throat like a collar.

  “You’re despicable!” it gritted as he felt the sharp bite of talons digging into his neck, stabbing under his jaw. Sharp points separating skin in spikes of pain he felt even though his brain had gone into screaming, staticky panic.

  “You and all your kind…”

  The talons flexed, digging deeper for purchase. The muscles bulged in the black-covered arm, and Jimmy was in the air, feet flailing off the ground. He hung in that grip for only the briefest moment. A blink. A thought. A nanosecond came and went, and he was moving.

  Fast.

  In a violent crash, he slammed into the brick wall. A brilliant flash of white light exploded in his head. The impact drove all the air out of his chest but cleared his mind enough to hear the creature as it continued to growl.

  “Preying on the defenseless, bringing nothing but misery!”

  Pinned to the wall by a clawed hand that was crushing his windpipe, Jimmy’s whole world became the creature—its blue-black skin, its blank eyes, its teeth bristling from a low-slung jaw. It growled and jerked the hand that was holding him, bouncing his skull off the brick in a teeth-clacking rattle.

  “Pain!” it growled, jerking him again.

  He couldn’t breathe.

  “DEATH!” it screamed.

  He gurgled behind gritted teeth and his eyes went even wider as inky tendrils rose off the creature’s arm. Swirling, reaching for him, until they caressed his face gently and he was reminded of his granny’s frail fingers as she used to stroke his cheek before tucking him into bed with a prayer.

  “You make us sick,” the creature hissed.

  Still choking in the grip of those talons, Jimmy sucked in a long rasp of air through a throat that felt as if it was coated in ground glass. Desperately he opened his mouth to gasp.

  “Wh-what’re you—?” he choked.

  The hand flexed and his mouth gaped open, trying to pull in oxygen for his lungs. The tendrils waved eagerly in front of him, as if encouraged by his fear, feeding on his desperation. They went blurry as his vision began to slip away in a red-rimmed haze of black static. Then they swirled together and plunged deep into his mouth, slithering up to fill his nostrils.

  Raw, primal panic engulfed him as he choked and the darkness invaded each cavity, shoving its way to fill his sinuses, cracking his esophagus as it poured into his lungs, rupturing them like overfull water balloons.

  As Jimmy died, he never got a chance to scream.

  * * *

  LYDIA TRIED to be very, very still.

  Inky tendrils pulled away from the dead criminal’s face with a sickening wet sound, reeling back into the skin of the hulking creature. The taloned hand opened, letting the body fall to the filthy concrete in a boneless pile. Still she didn’t breathe, even though she wanted to scream.

  “It’s over,” the creature said, looking down at the corpse. “Now you’ll do nothing but decay, running in rivulets of rot and corruption. Mingling with the rest of the filth in the sewers of—”

  The creature stopped. She didn’t move. Her muscles were locked, like a rabbit frozen and trying to remain invisible. But the creature still turned toward her, and…

  Smiled.

  “Oh.” Its voice rose, sounding more human and becoming almost… playful? “Forgive us,” it said. “We’re being rude.” It turned until it was facing her, stepping into the weak, watery light that fell from above, causing its ebony skin to break into blue highlights.

  “Hi! We’re Venom.”

  She couldn’t speak, couldn’t respond, even though she could tell that was what the creature… Venom… wanted from her. She could only stand, braced against the dirty brick of the alleyway wall, eyes pinned open and unblinking as she watched Venom bend and pick up her purse from beside the cooling corpse of her assailant. The strap snagged on something as Venom lifted it; he pulled it free and pushed it into her hands.

  She grabbed it out of instinct.

  “Here,” Venom said. “You’re safe now.”

  Without taking her eyes off the monster that stood before her, she scrabbled at the purse’s clasp, opening it, and reaching inside.

  Venom’s hand shot out, talons extended.

  She flinched.

  He patted her head.

  Once. Then twice. As if she were a pet.

  “No, please, there’s no need to thank us.”

  Lydia pulled her phone out of the purse. The screen had cracked at some point in the struggle. Between that and her trembling fingers, it took three swipes to open up the camera.

  Venom leaned back, watching as she lifted the phone between them. The white blots of his eyes widened and his mouth stretched impossibly to expose each and every finger-long tooth. Spittle ran off the needle-sharp tips, slipping down his chin and running off his massive chest.

  It took a long moment for her to realize he was smiling.

  The phone flashed as she hit the button to take the picture.

  Venom nodded.

  “You get a photo of our handsome face, and we get the reward of your joy.” He nodded again. “It’s enough to send me leaping happily on my way!” With that he crouched, muscles bunching along his thighs and lower back. In a blur he leapt twenty feet up the side of the building, digging into the bricks with talons and scrabbling upward as he disappeared from her sight.

  Lydia watched numbly, then peered down at the phone. With motions that came automatically she shared the picture to her social media. As the image of Venom began zooming across the internet, she looked down at the dead criminal at her feet.

  She began to scream and ran toward the entrance to the alleyway, struggling with her missing heel.

  2

  THE LAST waning rays of the sun shining in from the Pacific were warm against his skin as he swung between buildings. He stretched through the open air, moving like ink through water. Reaching forward, he enjoyed the pull as a bit of him thwipped out of the back of his hand, a supple cord
of symbiotically generated thread in the form of a line of webbing.

  It hit high on the building in front of him, latching onto the stone and metal. His hand turned instinctively, rolling his wrist smoothly as the web line broke free from himself, then catching the end. Gravity pulled him down, his weight stretching the line until he gave a sharp pull, swinging himself back up in an arc, moving quickly over the streets below.

  He loved web-slinging.

  Reach, shoot, thwip, snag, swing, pull, release, repeat.

  It felt good.

  He felt good.

  “Yes, I agree,” he said aloud to his Other. Venom was an individual made of two parts, human and otherworldly symbiote combined to create a new creature. “Protecting innocents is satisfying indeed,” he continued.

  Reach, shoot, thwip, snag, swing.

  Pull, release, repeat.

  “After all, we were innocent once” —he pulled left, veering smoothly around a water tower— “before that vile Spider-Man shattered our lives!” Swinging over a wide street made wider by streetcar rails, he let go of his web and dropped, still talking as he fell. “You, my alien friend, were rejected when you tried to bond with him, to become his living costume” —he arched, dropping fast at an angle toward the streetcar that was trundling along the rails— “a gift I accepted gratefully!”

  Venom sprung the moment his feet struck the metal roof of the streetcar, leaping high and shooting a new line of webbing. He ignored the startled outcry of the streetcar’s passengers.

  “Once, as Eddie Brock, I was a journalist, and a good one at that,” he said, frowning beneath his artificial skin. “But that was obliterated by the Web-Slinger’s callous, self-serving publicity ploys!” Swinging high, momentum carrying him over rooftops, he went silent—listening to a voice with no sound—and scanned the street below. “True,” he said, “in his own twisted way, Spider-Man also helps innocents. That’s why we’ve… reconciled our hatred and come here, to the town where I was born, to start our life anew.”

  Giving in again to the exhilaration, he hopped from one rooftop to another, coming to a stop on the top of a dilapidated old hotel. Crouching on the edge of the parapet he looked down. Once the building had been covered in a lovely ivory-toned plaster veneer, but most of it had cracked and fallen off, leaving wide patches of exposed brick. The fire escapes were more rust than iron, their brackets holding them loosely on the side of the building. All of the windowsills were peeling paint in long flat strips. His symbiotically enhanced sense of smell picked up the scratchy scent of asbestos dust as it rose on warm air currents, up through the ventilation duct on the roof next to him.