He regretted going up the moment the smell hit him.
One second Constantine had been thinking to hell with it, you can't avoid a street for the rest of your life — and then the door had opened and the studio air had come out at him, and it was oil paint and turpentine and the specific combination that he associated with a person so completely that the room might as well have been a recording of her. Her elbows had never been clean. There was always paint on them. He didn't know why that was the thing he thought of first.
He walked to the canvas.
"The hair colour's wrong," he said, to no one in particular. The cigarette was burning down between his fingers, its smoke drifting across the painted face, and he let himself look at it for a moment that lasted longer than he intended. "She was more red than that. Not warm red. Blood red."
"You actually knew her." The painter sounded relieved, in the way of someone who'd been telling a story and finally found a person who could verify it. "I've only heard about her — from neighbours, mostly. I've been working on this since I moved in. Couldn't explain why."
"Yeah." Constantine walked to the window and looked down at the street. Clean concrete. Spotless, in the particular way of a city that moved on quickly from everything. No sign of what had happened there. He'd half-expected to see something, and there was nothing.
"Strange wind, they said," he said, mostly to the glass. "That she was blown off."
He didn't continue. Whatever Emma had experienced in those last seconds — whether she'd screamed, whether she'd been afraid, whether she'd resented him or resented herself or thought of nothing at all — those were questions the room couldn't answer and he'd long since stopped expecting them to be answered. There were no demons here. Just paint fumes and his own memory.
I have to go. There's nothing here except what I brought with me.
He stood a moment longer anyway.
"Was there a letter?" Jude asked from behind him. "Or anything she left?"
"No letter." The painter shook his head. "There was a package, though. Arrived a few weeks back, addressed to her. I sent it to the post office, but—" He made a gesture. "That afternoon, a car came through the post office. Mad driver, hit the building, storage room was completely destroyed. Everything in it."
Jude and Constantine looked at each other across the room.
"So the bottle's gone," Jude said.
"Let's go," Constantine said.
On the stairs going down he lit another cigarette, and Jude, following a step behind, did a quiet accounting of the man's condition. Hollow-eyed, jaw tight, running on bad sleep and grief and the particular stubbornness of someone who refused to let either of those things be visible. The British had a phrase for exactly this — something about a wet dog kicked in the rain. Constantine was walking the way wet dogs walked.
He was, in fact, kicked — an actual passerby on the wet pavement, not looking where they were going, caught him in the shin. Constantine's response was comprehensive and multilingual, covering the rain, the subway, the city, the specific nature of New York as a location, and several peripheral topics. Then he ran out of energy for it and went quiet, which was worse.
"Something to eat?" Jude offered. "Food helps."
"Jude." Constantine's voice had the flat quality of a man who'd set something down and wasn't picking it up again. "All I want is a bed. Leave it."
Jude left it.
They were almost at the corner when the voice came.
Constantine's feet stopped. Not a stumble — a stop, clean and complete, as if a signal had been cut. He turned.
A woman was standing further down the street, under the edge of a streetlight. Short hair, vivid red — not the faded, approximated red of the painting upstairs, but the real colour, saturated and specific, the kind that couldn't be replicated from someone's description of it. She was looking at him. She raised a hand.
"Emma?"
Jude turned immediately. His hearing was acute enough that he'd have caught footsteps approaching, breathing, the small sounds a person made just by existing in physical space. He caught none of those. No perfume. No trace of rain on fabric. Nothing.
He looked at the street and saw nothing where Constantine was looking.
He reached into his coat and took out a small blue porcelain bottle.
Cow Tears Cost: $1,000 AP Note: An item that occupies one inventory slot, offers limited uses, and whose effects are entirely superseded by Heavenly Eye or Eye Talisman abilities. Destined in most circumstances to be exchanged for loose change. That said — for ordinary mortals who simply need to see what's there, it remains the most convenient option available.
He poured a small amount of the clear liquid onto his fingertip and pressed it briefly to his eyes. Blinked.
The woman was there. Standing on the wet pavement under the streetlight, completely still, the colour of her hair improbable in the grey and orange of a New York street at night.
First ghost, Jude thought, with the mild interest of someone checking something off a list. He studied her for a moment. She looked entirely real. That was the unsettling part.
"You're not crazy," he said to Constantine. "She's actually there."
"My ex-girlfriend," Constantine said, staring at the same point in the street. "And what did you just put in your eyes? Is that holy water?"
"I'm not religious. In the tradition I grew up with, cow's tears let you see ghosts."
"Fantastic." Constantine's tone didn't change. "There's a dairy farm outside London. I'll start visiting."
"Cow's tears specifically won't—"
"Excuse me." Emma's voice cut across both of them, carrying the particular edge of a woman who had been standing there for several minutes and found the conversation happening around her less than adequate. "I am right here."
"I know, I'm sorry." Jude turned to face her properly. "First ghost. I'm a little nervous. I tend to talk."
Constantine had gone quiet. He was looking at her with the expression of a man who'd spent months preparing for a moment and found that none of the preparation had actually helped.
"You don't seem pleased to see me," Emma said. Then, more quietly: "Are you alright?"
The question landed somewhere that Constantine didn't let most things reach.
"Good question," Jude thought, and kept it to himself.
"What do you think?" Emma said. "I'm dead, Constantine."
The words settled over the street. Constantine stood in the rain and looked at her and — somewhere behind his eyes, in the part of him that managed these situations as professional necessities — made the calculation. If she was here for revenge, he didn't have the reserves for it right now. He needed what he had left for Mnemoth. And if she could be won over, if she was willing — she was there, which meant she was present in this world in some form, which meant she might be useful, which was a terrible thought and exactly the kind of thought he had.
You are a complete scumbag, he told himself. Use everything you have. You don't have time for guilt.
He took a long drag of the cigarette. Exhaled. Let the smoke go.
Then he raised his eyes to the woman who had died because of him, and gave her the smile she'd known — the one that had always been part genuine and part armour, and that she had always been able to tell the difference with.
"Emma," he said. "It's been a while."