Sorry it's been so long in posting, everyone; I've been busy. Also sorry this chapter is so short. I intend to get around to more soon. Stay tuned!

Chapter 4

Autumn began to fade into winter, as the leaves on the trees in Central Park turned golden-brown and began to fall to the earth below. Temperatures began dropping; Clark knew this not as much from the sensations against his skin as the way that people dressed, spoke, and acted. He'd never known the bone-chilling cold that comes when the December wind whips down and tries to cut through your bones, just as he'd never known the fierce August sun as anything more than the source of his miraculous abilities. So it had always been with a sense of quiet interest that he'd watched people blow on their hands in the cold to warm them up, watched their cheeks grow rosy when the wind blew against them, listened to their teeth chatter and hear the cloth of their clothing vibrate as they shivered. There were times that he wondered, as anyone who's never experienced something, what it felt like to be cold like that. As a younger man – just a boy, really – he'd sometime wished to be human, so he could feel the pain and the heat and the cold that everyone else did, so that he could know what it was to get tired after a jog, so that he could know what his father felt when he strained to lift that fiftieth bale of hay of the day. That had lasted all the way until fifteen years old, when a freak accident temporarily ripped Clark of his powers and gave him a taste of what it was like to be at least physically human.

Ever since then, not so much, he thought as he walked northwards towards his Friday internship.

So he stood tall in the face of the bitter Canadian wind, let it rip across his face as much as it cared to while other people looked away to save themselves the discomfort. He breathed it in deeply – even with the pollution here, it was still wonderful. The air in New York had always smelled different than that of anywhere else to his Kryptonian nose, and he loved it. As he faced into the wind, a part of him – the wanderlust, the part of him that had taken over his life for a year and sent him across the globe – begged him to break free of the bonds of gravity and leap into the air, faster and faster, to feel the wind grow stronger against his face. But he'd long since learned to temper his superhuman impulses; after all, it wouldn't be good to smash down a wall every time he lost his temper.

However, some superhuman traits were easier to control than others. His hearing was the hardest of them all; it was so hard not to overhear things when he could hear a man talk ten miles away. After all, there was no way to close his ears like he could his eyes. But that was as much a strength as it was a problem – the way it was right then.

In the drifting wind, Clark heard a cry for help, from somewhere to his west. A young woman, from the sound of it. Of course, he didn't have a choice. Glancing around quickly, he saw enough people around that a sudden leap to super-speed would certainly be noticed, so he ducked into a side alleyway, tucked his eyeglasses into the inside pocket of his coat, and kicked into high gear, carrying himself up onto the rooftops.

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Stefan Andreski had been about halfway through his second Franklin Swicegood's pastrami-on-rye when a figure across the street caught his attention. He set down his copy of The New York Post and squinted into the light coming from outside. It was a young man – tall, and probably strong, judging by the way his thighs and calves filled out the legs of his jeans. Stefan had the strangest sensation he'd seen the man before, but he wasn't entirely sure where. But he was watching when the man seemed to stop and perk up, like a dog who'd heard a silent whistle. He was watching as the man glanced around nervously, all around him. He was watching as the young man ducked into an alleyway and pulled off his glasses.

And he was watching when the man disappeared.

The chunk of sandwich in his mouth fell to the plate, half-chewed in surprise. Stefan told himself that it couldn't have happened, that he must have been seeing things. Perhaps Franklin had put some tainted meat in his sandwich. No, Franklin might not have been Russian, but he was family – he'd been serving members of the Russian mob for twenty years, and with never a complaint.

Stefan abandoned the remains of his sandwich, his paper and his jacket and dashed out the door and across the street, almost being hit by a passing cab in the process. He barely noticed the fact that he'd come within two inches of death, his mind was so fixed on solving the puzzle in front of him. He jogged into the mouth of the alleyway – and stopped dead as he stared down to the brick wall at the end.

Nobody.

Stefan slowly reached into his trousers and pulled out his Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum revolver. A gift he'd "bought" for himself after finding it in a drug dealer's crackhouse seven years ago, he'd killed three people with it since that day. He'd even once shot a man through the leg with it – after the bullet had gone through a brick wall. It could stop just about anything known to man.

But he didn't know if what he was looking for was something known to man.

As he slowly advanced, gun extended, he thought back to his childhood in mother Russia, when his grandfather – who'd been one of the original Leninists, having met the "hero of the Soviet Union" several times – had spoken of his days on his family farm, when a mysterious beast had ravaged the lands for weeks. It first came one night in the spring, and slain a dozen cattle – every bull they'd had - with its razor-sharp talons. The next night, it had killed seventeen cattle; the night afterwards, it had finished the herd of 47. Strangely, it hadn't seemed to eat the beasts; from the strange pattern of wounds on the animals' flanks, it had seemed as though the beast was merely killing to cause its victims pain. The following night, his grandfather's family had prepared to make a last stand to save their horses and their remaining animals. They had called together their neighbors, gotten ever firearm they could find, and set a trap for the beast – three of one of their neighbors' bulls. Sometime around midnight, the beast had come. They hadn't seen it coming, nor heard it – but they'd known it was there. They could feel the fear creep up the back of their throats. Then the smell had come; like rotting flesh and sulfur, Stefan's grandfather had said. But they didn't hear a sound until one of the cattle screamed in pain. At the sound, one of the farmers had lit the trench filled with oil and wood they had dug around the cattle to illuminate it.

It was at this point Stefan's mother had always told his grandfather to stop, because Stefan wasn't old enough. It wasn't until he was thirteen that he'd finally managed to convince his grandfather, now well into his eighties, to describe the beast. He'd been worried that his grandfather's age would keep him from remembering the beast's features. His worries had been unfounded.

"It was eight feet tall, at least," his grandfather had said, his eyes slipping into the past to see the terrible beast as clear as day. "A head shaped like a plow, the size of a cow's face. Two terrible, sharp red eyes that pierced into your soul and tried to tear it out. A body that bent in all the wrong places, like a man you see at the circus. Long, long arms, each one as long as my father was tall, and hands! Hands like nothing else. Threshing blades on each finger, a foot long, they were red, from the cow's blood. It had legs like a bird; they stuck out backwards, with two knees each, and each ended in three claws. But the worst of all was the mouth…it was an evil, evil mouth. It…smiled. Even through the teeth, like shark's teeth, it smiled. Not the way a lizard smiles, when it's mouth is always stuck like that. It looked straight into me, and its lips curled upwards for a second – and I wet myself."

The night after hearing that story, Stefan had wet the bed for the first time in ten years.

But his grandfather's tale went on, he recalled as he slowly edged his way down the New York City alleyway. The sudden fire had startled the being; it had recoiled from the flames, bumping into one of the cattle as it scrambled backwards. His grandfather had recalled the god-awful screech the beast had made in that moment as "a thousand tea-kettles." But Stefan's grandfather was, if not a soldier yet in rank, then one in heart – he'd never wanted to be anything else. So his instincts had taken over; he'd aimed his rifle straight at the beast's heart, and felt his mind push away all the fear as he realized that he could stop the creature, here and now, and be a hero. An old Russian curse had gone through his mind in that moment, as the trigger had broken against his finger – and the beast's eyes had gone wide, as though it understood.

The shot rang out, straight and true…and took the bull inbetween the ribs.

One second, the beast had been there, the next second, it had been gone. Stefan's grandfather had hunted all sorts of game by that point in his life, and he knew when a shot was going to hit. He knew when that bullet would leave the chamber, and that once it did, he already knew if it would hit or miss. Every sense had told him that it would strike the beast.

But the beast had been gone.

Which meant it must have run away – быстрее чем ускоряющаяся пуля, his grandfather had said.

Faster than a speeding bullet.

Sweating profusely, Stefan kicked aside the last piece of cover in the alleyway with his finger half an inch from putting a bullet into whatever might be there. Nothing. He was at the end of the alleyway; he'd checked everything. The…man? Thing? That he'd seen, it was gone. He recalled that night in the whorehouse, with the man who'd caught the bullets out of the air. Faster than a speeding bullet.

He wondered, strangely, if he should stock up on oil torches.

But instead, he pulled out his cellular telephone – a cloned one, like all the ones he had – and dialed in a number he had memorized long ago.

"Zapolev? It is Stefan. I believe I may have nearly met our