In response to a
panicked call for help from Patsy Walker while they were in London, Doctor Strange,
Valkyrie, and Daimon Hellstrom, Son of Satan,
dash to her home in Montclair, New Jersey, in their most spectacular
fashion, terrifying the neighbors. Hellstrom’s trident detects something amiss
so Strange casts a spell that reveals the house is a ruin, the basement full of
spears to kill anyone who unwittingly walked through the door. They find a
seriously injured Dolly Donahue in the ruins. She relates how she saw Patsy
carried off through the air by a gargoyle, who turned and demolished the house
with a gesture as he fled….
In the Christiansboro,
Virginia, City Hall, the Gargoyle is presiding over a service worshipping the
demon lord Avarrish, which will involve sacrificing Patsy….
Hellstrom blames himself
for this. Sometime earlier, he had been trying to aid a possessed girl who
spoke of a cadre of demons called the Six-Fingered Hand and saw a vision of
them menacing the Defenders but said nothing. With his magic he learns of
Patsy’s whereabouts and the three of them fly to her rescue, Dr. Strange
pausing to tell Clea he’ll be out late. Clea, meanwhile, goes upstairs at the
Sanctum Sanctorum to find that the paralyzed Nighthawk is missing…and a
fearsome stranger is outside….
Dr. Strange, Val, and
SoS arrive in Christiansboro, Virginia, but Avarrish detected their arrival and
dispatched a horde of weird demons, led by the Gargoyle, to defeat them. There
is a huge battle in the streets, Hellstrom enjoying his destruction of the
enemies while Gargoyle tries to tell him that Avarrish helped the town, not
harming it, and advises him to leave before he ruins everything. And then the
real Hellcat arrives, Patsy as possessed by Avarrish and she battles her
friends. She takes down Hellstrom, then Strange, but when she engages with
Valkyrie, Val talks her into fighting the demon inside her and it is cast out.
The citizens of the town emerge from City Hall, having been freed of the
binding spell which made them worship the demon. They all go to the Mayor’s
office to confront the town father Isaac Christians and discover he is the
Gargoyle. He confesses that the town’s descent into poverty and ruin led him
unwisely to dabble in black magic. Avarrish promised to help the town in
exchange for Christians being transformed temporarily into Gargoyle and helping
capture Patsy. But because he tried to warn the Defenders, he was punished by
becoming Gargoyle permanently. Strange is determined to destroy the
Six-Fingered Hand and Gargoyle asks to join them. But Patsy’s greater trauma…is
that her life was promised to the demons, by her mother….