"So." Constantine tucked the rolled sketch inside his coat. "We leave tomorrow morning. Do you have somewhere to sleep?"
"I have money," Jude said. "Is there a hotel nearby?"
"I'll walk you over."
He did. And downstairs at the hotel entrance, when Constantine made his invitation to dinner with the easy confidence of a man who considered refusal improbable, Jude declined without particular ceremony.
He'd done his reading on John Constantine before making contact. The man's reputation in certain circles was comprehensive and consistent: reckless with power, cavalier with consequences, and possessed of what could charitably be called an unrestricted approach to companionship. As best Jude could determine from the available sources, Constantine's preferences in that department were bounded by approximately one criterion — interesting — and the criterion was applied broadly. Men, women, things that were neither. Beings from planes of existence that didn't have a consensus taxonomy.
If he'd been born into the Warhammer universe, Jude reflected, watching Constantine accept the rejection with theatrical disappointment, Slaanesh would've had him on speed dial.
"Fine, fine." Constantine sighed. "At least let me borrow the hood. I've never seen that type of artefact before and I'd like to study it."
"And once it's in your hands," Jude said pleasantly, "what are the odds it finds its way back?"
"You wound me."
"Your reputation is extremely consistent across multiple independent sources. I trust the sources."
They parted on reasonable terms.
Back in his hotel room, Jude searched for Mnemoth — cross-referencing occult databases, mythology indices, digitised grimoires, anything that might have a record. He found nothing. No name, no entry, no footnote.
Which told him something important: this wasn't a catalogued infernal entity with a formal position in Hell's hierarchy and the limitations that came with it. This was something older and more local — an indigenous evil spirit, born in the human world, operating by human-world rules. No power constraints. No oversight from either management.
That's bad, he thought. That's quite specifically bad.
Constantine didn't sleep.
He sat by the window in the dark with a cigarette burning down between his fingers, watching the street below — the orange smear of the streetlights, the late traffic, the few people still moving through the small hours — and let his mind drift where it wanted to go. It went, reliably, where it always went when he wasn't keeping a careful eye on it.
Emma was what Lester had said — in America. Except she wasn't, actually. Constantine looked at the street and didn't correct the memory. He just watched the cigarettes burn, one after another, small orange points in the dark, until the sky on the far side of the buildings began to go grey.
The call came just after nine. Constantine was downstairs, apparently functional despite everything, and coming to collect him.
Jude was still in bed with his tablet open on the system shop, working through his options. Fighting ordinary people, fighting enhanced individuals, fighting something genuinely supernatural — the toolkit wasn't identical across those categories, and he'd learned enough from Lester's account to have specific questions about what he was walking into. He made a few selections before getting dressed.
"Where are we going?" he asked, when Constantine appeared.
"You'll see." Constantine noticed the book in Jude's hand — a thick volume on Western mysticism with a price sticker that suggested it had been purchased from a well-lit shop rather than a crumbling back-room. He made a sound of contempt. "Put that down. It's window dressing. Whoever wrote it either knew nothing real or deliberately removed everything useful. If you try to use anything in there against an actual evil spirit, you'll die tired."
"I know." Jude kept reading. "I'm checking how much of what I paid for was accurate."
"How much did you pay?"
"A few hundred dollars. Long time ago."
Constantine said something unflattering about the ease with which Jude apparently acquired money, and Jude turned a page.
After a few minutes of walking, Constantine spoke again, in a different register — the one that meant he was saying something he actually meant.
"Here's something, though. There's a reason those books exist in the form they do. Counterfeit goods, sanitised folklore, everything defanged and made safe for a general audience. People who know what they're doing made it that way on purpose. Because the real material—" He paused. "If a toy breaks, you lose the money you paid for it. If the wrong person finds a real grimoire, the damage radius is considerably wider."
"Probably too late for that advice in my case," Jude said. "I already know a fair amount of the real thing. Can't unknow it."
"How?"
"Occupational exposure." He closed the book and glanced sideways at Constantine. "But I do know enough to maintain appropriate respect for things I don't fully understand. And I've never been interested in gifts that don't come with a visible price tag."
Constantine looked at him for a moment that lasted slightly longer than casual.
"Smart," he said. "Because nothing in this line of work is free. Magic, miracles, favours from things older than language — there's always a cost. But if that's true—" He nodded toward Jude's coat, where the hood was clipped. "What's the arrangement with those? The hood, the candies?"
"Less magic than mechanics," Jude said. "Everything I use has a disclosed price. It costs a specific amount, it does a specific thing, and the terms don't change after the fact."
"Transparent pricing." Constantine turned this over. "I've spent thirty years in this industry and I've never heard of anything like it."
He didn't say what he was thinking — which was that everyone who'd ever made a deal with something infernal had believed the terms were clear. That was the craft of it: the parchment that looked like one layer always had more underneath. He'd watched brilliant people, people who should have known better, walk into arrangements they thought they understood and not come out the same way.
The man beside him seemed intact. Seemed, genuinely, fine. But perhaps he simply hadn't reached the real price yet. Constantine knew someone like that — Zatanna, who carried the specific tragedy of magic taken at face value. He filed the thought, said nothing, and kept walking.
Jude, for his part, wasn't thinking about Constantine's silence. He was reading the notification that had just appeared in his peripheral vision.
SYSTEM: NEW PART-TIME OPPORTUNITYMission: Tracing the Roots
Nobody expected that a disaster spreading across London would trace back to one catastrophically irresponsible individual in Tangier. Having such a civic-minded friend who exports his problems internationally is truly a gift to the British nation.
Note: Standard narrative structure requires that answering one question generates three more. The first question is already answered. The remaining questions: Where did this child come from? Who placed the spirit inside him, and how? And what was the purpose? These will not answer themselves.
Status: Pending (0%) Reward: Basic Special Energy Affinity — Single Energy Type, Limited
Jude read it twice. The reward was more significant than anything the system had offered him in a long while, and he recognised what it meant.
If he completed this, he'd finally unlock his blue bar.
He pulled up the item description.
[Basic Special Energy Affinity — Single Energy Type, Limited]
Note: The source of this ability is bloodline, so don't bother asking why you're getting a mana bar instead of a conventional magic pool — the underlying mechanism is the same and the distinction is mostly academic. On the positive side, you will technically be the first demigod in DC. Congratulations. Probably.
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