Thor had gotten in on the tossing, but oddly enough he hadn’t won the impromptu contest with The Rock and The Mountain, much to his surprise. Anchored on the ground, Mr. Hill had quite the throwing arm, especially being able to reduce stuff to a fraction of the weight while he was throwing it.

Still, their distance-tossing and tank-skipping competitions got a lot of press. If it was humiliating to the Atlanteans, it still kept most of their gear out of surface-dweller hands. The Mick scoring a couple new engines for himself with extreme opportunism, well, stuff happens, y’know?

“He was definitely eyeballing your Doc’s wife. Is there something goin’ on there?” Hill asked, brow furrowed.

“He’s got the hots for Suzie is all. Steve says he’s quite the lady’s man, what with being their King and all.” Grimm looked at me as I sat down next to Mr. Hill. “You got the bins done already, Dealer?” he asked me.

“They’re all right as rain, Mr. Grimm.” Make Whole at VIII did the job nicely. “Which doesn’t mean we can’t charge them the going rate for the repairs, of course.”

“Well, of course!” Hill grinned coldly, sitting back. “It was a good day fer business! Master Wong, you’ve got every house you fixed recorded and witnessed, right?”

“Yes, along with the insurance and city inspectors. You may not have noticed, but Lady Flux got in on some of the work, since the Atlanteans are paying for it. I signed her on as a temporary employee,” the mystic replied calmly.

“You make damn sure she gets her share,” Hill nodded, “and you and Doc Strange, too. On video, witnesses. There’s a time to let this stuff go for charity, and time to soak them for everything... but don’t be lying.” He smirked. “I sent Attuma to Nelson and Murdock, who are already hiring the inspectors for the Atlanteans, using the same protocols we set up.”

“Any weregild being paid?” I asked archly. People had died, insurance was being paid out. It was a money issue.

Hill deferred to Grimm, who shrugged. “Diplomatic stuff. I think Steve is handling it. Won’t pay for dogs, though...”

Hill paused for a moment in mid-tilt, glancing at the bowls and bag of food off to one side, then slowly took his drink. We’d fixed the damage to the house already, of course. The smoking pit where a stray shell had landed and killed Clover with the concussion had been filled, but he’d still lost his dog.

They’d probably been trying to send a message to the Sanctum across the street not to get involved, not that they had a prayer of hurting that building.

It also meant I sure as shit was going to Ward this building to the fucking nines. Asshats!

“It’s fine. I found me a couple more, hiding in the ruins of the houses they were in. They’re upstairs now, shell-shocked and maybe deaf. One’s called Fritz, it was on his collar. The other I’m calling Lucky,” he said grimly. He held out his beer, and we all tapped it solemnly. “I didn’t have her very long, but Clover was a good dog.”

“To a good dog!” Grimm agreed, and we all took a drink.

“How’d you do, Marko?” Hill asked, as the drinks came down.

“Passed out a lot of cards,” the Sandman smiled. “Had a city foreman jogging along with me, approving emergency repairs right and left, rich people offering bonus money to fix up this and that first and fastest. We’ve got three major breaches into the sewers and stuff to fix up, a test run for a true contract. The sooner we get them done, the better.”

“We got the stuff?” Hill growled, looking at the clock on the wall, which read 3 AM. It had been a long day, and a grim night.

“I just need to walk it over,” Marko nodded. He’d literally gather it up into a massive version of himself, and walk it over to where it was needed.

“Everyone good, then? We finish our drinks, and get that little job done.” Hill held out his beer, and everyone tinked again. “To a good, Grimm business.”

“Cheers!”

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The next morning...

“Hey there, Mr. Parker.” I waved at him as I came up the drive, and he nodded at me from his chair.

He still looked middle-aged, but there was nothing soft about him now, his appearance exactly topical.

I had suggested he take a look at the energy empowering Lady Sersi if he could, and simply replicate it to some extent inside himself... and his wife.

The result was that he and May Parker had both reverted to their human prime, as the Celestial-class energy empowering the Eternal was replicated and did the job of upgrading him biologically all by itself, because he couldn’t quite get the hang of it mentally yet.

“Good morning, Dyna. You look tired,” he noticed quietly.

“It was a long day and night. I just came from filling in two major sewer breaches and a subway collapse.” I walked up on his new porch and sat down on the hanging swing. “How was your night?” I had a pretty good bad idea of it.

His brown eyes flashed. “Holding back not just reducing those blue guys to dust was pretty hard, Dyna,” he admitted slowly.

“I’m pretty sure that’s why Flux sounded the challenge horn, and The Mountain was told to take the challenge. Not that he wasn’t pissed enough to do it, anyway.” I sighed. “How’s Peter?” I inquired.

“We just got home about half an hour ago. He’s upstairs sleeping. School is closed for the day.”

The door opened, and May Parker came out. If you just looked at her, you’d see the same gray hair and blue eyes, but if you looked closer, you’d realize that she’d put on twenty pounds of muscle, and lost a lot of wrinkles somewhere, somehow. She didn’t move like an old woman anymore, either, but with the energy and confidence of someone in her prime.

“Hello, Dyna.” She handed me a big cup of coffee in a 1964 World’s Fair mug, which I took gratefully; she handed another to Ben before she sat down next to me. We all sipped in the cool morning air.

“How many?” I asked him softly.

He closed his eyes and exhaled. “One hundred and thirty-four,” he almost, but not quite spat out.

I closed my eyes and took another drink.

The Master Vampire of Queens was no more. They’d made the mistake of taking the night of the attack as an opportunity to have a rare feast, grabbing people who could ‘go missing’ in the chaos of the attack.

There’d been heroes out all over the city, along with SHIELD, and even some of the villains had helped out.

The Spiders were perfect for facing vamps: capable of sensing their attacks, following them physically, stronger, faster, and more agile. Add some Essence of Garlic to their webs, and they could wrap up vampires quite nicely, too.

The kids hadn’t wanted to believe it, but I’d shown them vampires at work months ago, staked them, and burned them away in the morning sun. They’d made up the web formula long ago, partially for if they were too squeamish to do the kill themselves. When morning came today, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island had all had a bunched of trussed vampires burning away in the morning sun, the Night Webbing lasting all the way to sunlight instead of merely an hour.

Harlem just had a bunch of dead vamps, as they did over in Jersey, where Castle’s team had been pretty damn busy all night, too.

When I’d met with Mr. Hill’s team across from Strange’s house, it had been after I’d had a brutal set of vampire clashes and ambushes across half of Manhattan Island. They’d carefully stayed clear of the Sanctum, and Mr. Hill had made it obvious he was walking around the slum areas, just looking for trouble and some bounty money to fall into his lap. It was when he’d picked up the two dogs.

Dr. Strange, Wong, and the ghost Magnus had been tracking the vampires everywhere, and we’d been killing the blood-suckers. I had hunted down over two dozen of them through streets, alleys, rooftops, abandoned buildings, and crowds as Dynamo, firmly establishing my vampire-killing creds here on the East Coast.

Even the Sandman had wiped out over a dozen who thought they could mess with him. Magnapsium nodules left their mental attacks useless, silver sands did the rest. Why were they attacking someone with sand for blood, anyway?

Nova was actually the star of the night. With his great speed, he could get to any needed location within no time at all, and he had zipped around everywhere he was needed, two silvered heavy knives in his hands, taking heads with grim determination.

That said, even the Avengers had been out there, although I heard Iron Man had real problems because his suit couldn’t register any of the vamps. The FF had also coordinated and done their part, with Mr. Fantastic’s incredible reach proving exceedingly deadly on the hunt, while Cyclops’ heat beam and Iceman’s ability to immobilize and separate vamps had also proven quite lethal.

Turning into gas don’t help when you’re encased in ice, after all, and a bright blast of orange was the last thing a lot of vamps had seen last night.

New York’s vampire population had plummeted.

There had been almost no hero-types active in Queens, because there didn’t need to be. Ben Parker had been told of the identities of the vampires some weeks before, found where they lived, and watched them. If they paid for their blood, he had no cause to do anything.

When they went hunting, he had surrounded them in globes of solid air and sent them ten miles up into the air. Come the morning sun, all those bubbles had popped as vampires burned.

“How many did you and your friends kill last night?” Ben Parker asked, a grimness to his voice that hadn’t been there before.

“How badly do you want to know?” I replied, taking another sip. May Parker looked on in worry and silence. As a functioning neo-Eternal, she could probably hand a vampire its teeth right now, too.

Ben Parker closed his eyes, and seemed to slump a little. “That bad?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s more?”

“Just in New York City? Of course. Some didn’t come out to play. Some realized what was happening, and ran fast once they did.”

“You said the United States has more vampires than the rest of the world combined.”

I nodded once. “Werewolves, too. I expect there’s at least one vampire in every town with more than a thousand people in the country. Werewolves, they tend to be in packs and families more, not as many lone individuals...”

He slowly lifted his hand. “You realize, that if I could, I would reach out there right now and kill every last one of them on the planet, right?” Ben Parker stated softly. “Surround them in solid air, and lift them right into space to enjoy the sunlight.”

I sighed, long and deep. “That’s what a good man would do, Mr. Parker,” I agreed. “It would get rid of them for a time, before more dark gods re-inflicted the curse on the living, but it would be nice.”

His hand fell, and he slumped into his chair, sighing. “I asked Lady Sersi how she managed to withhold herself.”

“She is very old, and very wise,” I said with a nod. “What did she say?”

“She said there are always more, and until mortals rise up and learn to stop them forever, there will always be more.” He took a deep breath. “She sounded very sad when she said that, you know?”

“Watching us fail to rise up again and again will do that to someone who lives so long,” I agreed. “Watching that Curse proliferate and then die out, yet we always fail to finish the job correctly.” I inhaled the smell of the coffee again. “And then, to find that the federal government is working with such a great and ancient evil... well, yes, I imagine she was quite depressed.

“We have great heroes, great villains, and great, great fools, Mr. Parker.”

“That we do, Dyna, that we do.”

People... who just didn’t want to take responsibility for their actions...