"That sick, perverted thing."
The cab driver didn't turn around — just aimed the words at the windshield and kept his hands on the wheel. "First the market tanks, then eggs go up three dollars a dozen, and now people are eating each other in broad daylight. What is wrong with this city?"
Nobody in the back seat answered him. Lester wasn't listening. He was staring at the radio with the focused horror of a man watching something confirm his worst fears in real time, and when the next segment came on — another account, another neighbourhood, another incident — he grabbed Constantine's arm.
"He's here, isn't He." His voice had gone thin. "Mnemoth. John, He's here, I can feel it, I knew He'd come, I knew He'd find me, He's been in my head for weeks and now He's—"
"Lester."
"—going to kill me, He's going to make me eat myself alive or something equally awful, John, you have to—"
"Lester. Breathe."
Constantine's face remained completely expressionless, which was the face of a man who had been listening to this without interruption since Heathrow and had run out of visible reactions somewhere over the Atlantic. He'd had about four hours of sleep in the past two days. He was on his seventh cigarette of the morning. If Lester were not, technically, his friend, he would have found a use for the hypothetical gun he kept imagining.
Jude reached over and set the hood back on Lester's head. The change was immediate — the white-knuckled grip on Constantine's arm relaxed, the breathing evened out, the frantic light in Lester's eyes settled.
"Thank you," Constantine said, without looking at Jude.
"Don't thank me. He needs to stay lucid."
On the radio, the debate had evolved.
"The victims present with compulsive ingestion behaviours directed at their primary obsession — in one case, currency; in another, gemstones; in another, printed matter. This is consistent with a viral or neurological trigger causing—"
"Absolute nonsense. This is divine warning. The Lord speaks through catastrophe, and those with eyes to see—"
"Dr. Arnold, Father Bansrener, I'm going to stop you both — we've just received a report from the Bronx. A thirty-year-Juden has choked to death attempting to consume his collection of rare comic books."
Constantine listened to this with something approaching philosophical satisfaction. Two entirely opposing frameworks, both completely confident, both completely wrong. The truth was sitting in a magic bottle somewhere in New York City feeding on the city's appetite for excess, and neither the virologists nor the clergy were going to get anywhere near it.
People really do choose their sides first and find their evidence after, he thought. Some things never change.
Forty floors above the street, in a building that looked like it had been designed to impress by people who'd succeeded, the whispers had already arrived.
The penthouse was not what anyone would have expected to find at the top of a Manhattan high-rise. The glass exterior wall let in the last of the afternoon sun in broad golden sheets, and that light fell across palm fronds, bromeliads, maidenhair ferns, the trailing roots of banyan trees — a rainforest in miniature, contained, thriving, filling the thousand-square-metre space with the density and smell of something that hadn't been built so much as grown. Small shapes moved in the undergrowth. A bird called from somewhere deeper in.
It had cost a serious fortune. The man who'd paid it didn't think about that.
Papa Midnight emerged from the vegetation carrying a human skull, which caught the gold light at an angle that made it look like something from a museum — if museums kept items that still had opinions. He was broad, dark-suited, moving with the unhurried deliberateness of a man who'd never needed to rush anything in his life.
He held the skull up and addressed it directly.
"You feel that?" He walked toward the glass wall, where the city spread out below them in every direction — the grid of midtown, the green smear of the park, the water on three sides catching the failing light. "Something moving out there. Something hungry and new. Come on, Sister. Pull yourself away from hell's entertainments for five minutes and tell me what we're dealing with."
He waited. The answer, when it came, was audible only to him — murmured from somewhere beyond the ordinary walls of the world, carried on a frequency that required specific equipment to receive.
"You don't recognise it." He studied the skull with something between disappointment and respect. "Sister, I'd have thought you knew every demon below. If it's not in your catalogue—" He thought for a moment. "Then it never came down from above or below. It was born here. In the human world. No constraints. No ceiling on what it can become." He exhaled slowly. "Hungry spirit is exactly the right name for it."
He carried the skull back to the altar, set it down, pressed the intercom.
"Servant. Bring me a white rooster."
The sound that came back through the speaker was not speech, exactly. It was acknowledgement in the register of something that had partially outgrown language. A moment later: silence.
Downstairs, in the lobby, Jude looked up at the building's atrium and revised his estimates.
"This is where Midnight lives?"
"Don't let the African grandfather thing fool you." Constantine dropped his cigarette and ground it out. "The man is a voodoo practitioner, which means he has a fairly robust relationship with blood and sacrifice — but he's also made an extraordinary amount of money, and he's spent a serious percentage of it on collecting. Magical weapons, artefacts, objects with history. He doesn't have much in the top tier, but the mid-tier is well-stocked." He paused. "He's not the kind of man who controls things. He's the kind of man who can cause significant disruption to things. There's a difference."
Jude noted this. Papa Midnight as he appeared in his universe had been much the same — a figure who kept carefully out of direct conflict while accumulating the tools to intervene decisively if he chose to. Weapon master was about right.
They found a fire door at the far end of the ground floor. Constantine pushed it open, and the smell hit all three of them simultaneously — thick, animal, barnyard, carrying underneath it something older and more complex that Jude couldn't immediately identify but didn't especially like.
"Christ." Constantine recoiled slightly. "What has the man got in there?"
Jude was already listening past the smell. Chickens — several, close by, agitated. And underneath that, heavy footsteps, slow, deliberate, moving in their direction.
"Wait." He caught Constantine's arm before the man could stride through. "We don't know what's in there."
"It's Midnight's building," Constantine said, with the confidence of someone who'd never let not knowing stop him. "Same old ceremony materials, same old eccentric nonsense. Come on." He stepped inside. "Hello? Sorry to bother you — it's Constantine, I rang ahead—"
He stopped walking.
Jude came through the door with Lester and got his hand on his gun in one motion, scanning the space ahead. His eyes adjusted to the dimmer light.
Chicken coops, stacked three high along one wall, white-feathered birds pressed against the wire, clucking with the specific anxiety of birds that had recently been moved somewhere unfamiliar for unfamiliar purposes. And in the middle of the room, standing with one of the coops in one hand and the other hand hanging loose at his side, was a man. Massive — the breadth of him was architectural — dark-skinned, wearing only a loincloth, with the particular expression of someone who'd been interrupted in the middle of something important and was still deciding what to do about it.
His eyes moved slowly across the three of them. Something in them was not quite focused.
Constantine cleared his throat. "Terribly sorry to intrude—"
The man opened his mouth and produced a sound that was less a word than a force of nature — a roar that filled the room completely and bounced off the walls twice before it finished, sending the chickens into immediate hysterics.
Jude adjusted his grip on the gun. Lester made a small, despairing sound behind him.
Constantine, to his credit, didn't step back.