The moon was up and the clouds were coming in fast, the kind that pressed the city lights back down against the streets and made everything feel closer than it was.
"There's an old saying," Constantine was telling Midnight, "that when a tiger is eating, the whole jungle holds its breath."
"We have the same idea," Jude said. "Two tigers cannot share one mountain."
Constantine turned and gave him the look of a man who had been building toward a rhetorical point. Jude met it pleasantly. Constantine turned back.
"The point being," he continued, "what serious power is going to tolerate a demon feeding openly in its own territory? Think it through, Juden. This isn't just about the city."
Midnight stood at the glass wall with his back to them, looking out at the New York night. His reflection in the glass was dark and unreadable.
Constantine drifted toward the altar, found a candle, and lit his cigarette from it with the comfortable irreverence of a man who'd desecrated more sacred spaces than this one. He blew a long stream of smoke into the greenhouse air.
"I know how to put this thing down. What I need is a magician with real power and real resources." A pause. "And ideally one with a reason to care who doesn't require a fee."
Strong, resourceful, and willing to act for free, Jude thought. He's describing someone who considers this their problem already. He kept that to himself.
"Ask your skulls," Constantine said agreeably. "I'll come back in a bit. And give my love to your sister — she was remarkable."
"She still is," Midnight said, without turning.
Constantine clapped him once on the shoulder, picked up Lester by the elbow, pointed him toward Midnight, and said, "Do me a favour and keep an eye on this one. He's not at his best." Then he was heading for the door.
Jude hadn't moved. "You're leaving him here."
"He'll be fine." Constantine didn't slow down.
Lester, still holding the rooster, had already sidled up to Midnight with the expression of a man who'd located what he was looking for and was now working out how to ask for it. Something in his posture suggested he and Midnight had come to a mutual understanding that neither Jude nor Constantine was party to.
Jude swallowed what he'd been about to say and followed Constantine out.
Through the closed door, just barely, he caught Lester's voice drifting after them: "Mr. Midnight, sir — John said you might be able to help me with something. High-purity, if you have it. I'm not fussy about—"
"Constantine," Jude said, keeping pace with him toward the elevator.
"Mm."
"There's an old saying from home. The country is easy to change, but the nature is hard to change."
"What's that in English?"
"A dog can't change its habit of eating shit."
Constantine made a sound that was almost a laugh.
What neither of them heard, after the elevator doors closed:
"Tell me about your old friend," Midnight said, settling himself near the altar. "And the stranger. How long have you known him? Do you trust him?"
Lester considered. "The stranger — Jude — he's only been with John a few days. We're not close. I don't know much about him." He shifted the rooster to his other arm. "Japanese. Has money. Interested in the occult, or says he is. Seems calm, but he likes to manage things — everyone around him, what they eat, what they take. I don't especially like it." He thought about the candy. The hat. The way both had worked in ways he couldn't entirely account for, though he'd been in bad shape and wasn't certain what had been real. He said nothing about those. "I don't trust him."
"Hm." Midnight absorbed this with the equanimity of a man who'd heard this description before. He'd met plenty of wealthy outsiders who discovered the occult and concluded that money could buy access to it. They always thought the same things: that a dollar figure could be placed on a miracle, that the exchange rate between cash and fate was simply a matter of finding the right seller. They never understood that the more valuable the thing they wanted, the more the price diverged from anything financial. Fate, lifespan, the soul itself — these were the currencies that moved in the world he inhabited. Dollars were a foreign denomination.
Jude sounded like another one. He let the matter go.
"And Constantine? Do you trust him?"
Lester was quiet for a moment. Not hesitating — thinking.
"John," he said, "yes. I trust John." Another pause, and then something that came from somewhere further back than the last few weeks: "I've put my life in his hands before."
Outside, the rain arrived without warning — a cold gust and then the full weight of it, the streets going dark and bright at once under the streetlights. The few cabs that had been moving pulled over or vanished.
Jude looked out at the wet pavement and the people who were still moving through it — not rushing, just moving, the particular New York quality of treating rain as a personal inconvenience rather than a reason to stop — and thought, as he sometimes did, that Gotham would never look like this at night. Gotham emptied when the weather came in. New York just got wetter.
"Did you bring an umbrella?" he asked.
"Subway's close." Constantine tucked his coat collar up. "You've been in America before. Now you're in New York — go enjoy it. Have a night off."
"You're trying to get rid of me."
"I'm going to see my girlfriend."
Jude looked at him.
"Right. Okay." He thought about it. "But Emma — if she's been in the city, she may have been exposed to Mnemoth. Be careful on your own. Don't let the thing get a foothold through her."
Constantine had already opened his mouth to say something dismissive. He closed it. Opened it again. Closed it.
"...You have a point," he said, with visible reluctance. "Come with me."
"I was being polite." Jude stepped back. "I was expressing concern. You don't have to actually—"
"Come on." Constantine had him by the arm and was already moving toward the subway stairs. "I'll need you later. Stop talking."
The uptown platform was packed in the specific way New York subway platforms got packed at night — everyone damp, coats steaming faintly, the air carrying the combined weight of several hundred people's wet fabric and the permanent underground smell beneath it all. Constantine pressed himself into the car with an expression of a man storing up grievances.
Jude walked in beside him and immediately began moving — not pushing, not forcing, just reading the geometry of the crowd and finding the spaces as they opened, passing through a dozen small gaps in the time it took Constantine to establish a position near the door.
Constantine stared at him.
"How are you doing that."
"Crowd navigation," Jude said. "Back home I went to a university with sixty thousand students and one main cafeteria. You either learned this or you didn't eat lunch." He settled into the space he'd found and held the overhead rail easily. "Five years of that, and New York feels relatively manageable."
Constantine looked at the packed car around them, and then at Jude standing in it like a man in an empty room, and said nothing for a while.