Constantine emerged from the Houston Street station with the expression of a man who'd survived something and wasn't sure the survival had been worth it. He found a section of railing that wasn't occupied, leaned against it, and lit a cigarette with the deliberate attention of someone reclaiming something that belonged to them.
Jude came up behind him without particular difficulty. The midnight crowd parted for him the way crowds did for people who moved like they'd done it before.
He'd spent five years navigating a campus cafeteria at peak hours. He'd survived Gotham's East End. He'd stood in a room with the Joker. Honestly, the New York subway at midnight was fine — overcrowded, warm, smelling of a few hundred people's wet coats and the permanent underground, but navigable.
He thought, briefly, of the morning commute back home: the early-rising office workers, arriving without coordination to fill the same cramped cars at the same time, heading toward the same B-grade offices they'd inhabited for years and might inhabit for another ten or twenty or thirty. Dozens of pairs of eyes, the specific light in them that wasn't quite despair but had given up arguing.
If supernatural entities are drawn to concentrated human suffering, he'd thought more than once on those commutes, subway stations should be haunted beyond all reason.
They walked north from the station. The rain had softened to something between drizzle and mist — still present, still cold, just less aggressive about it. The streets of Greenwich Village were quieter than midtown, narrower, the buildings lower and older, the whole neighbourhood carrying the specific atmosphere of a place that had made peace with its own history.
Constantine's pace slowed without him seeming to notice. At each corner, something happened to his face — a small adjustment, a tightening around the eyes, a blankness that came from actively not looking at things he was looking at anyway. The street was doing something to him. Jude watched it happen without commenting.
The memories came whether Constantine reached for them or not. That corner. That particular shape of doorway. The angle of light from a window above a restaurant that was still there, unchanged. Each one was a handled thing, polished smooth from being picked up and put down so many times that the act of not reaching for them had become its own kind of reaching.
He was fighting the urge to turn around. Jude could see that too.
They stopped in front of a building — old brick, fire escapes, a buzzer panel that had been there long enough to have acquired a personality. Constantine looked at it with the face of a man who'd arrived somewhere he'd known he'd have to arrive and had been hoping circumstances would prevent.
"It's this one," he said. "Lester sent the bottle here. Fourteenth floor. Go up and find out which apartment the painter Emma lives in." He took a pull on his cigarette. "Ask around."
Jude looked at him. "You're not coming up."
"I don't want to go up."
"She's your girlfriend and you're going to send me instead."
"Yes."
"What am I supposed to say — 'Constantine's downstairs, he doesn't feel like it'?"
"She won't be there anyway." Constantine's voice had gone very flat and very even, the tone of a man controlling something with considerable effort. "She's dead."
Jude was quiet for a moment.
"Ah," he said.
And then, because that covered most of what needed covering: "Is there anything specific you need me to look for?"
"The bottle. Lester sent it to her address. If we're lucky, it wasn't opened — or it was, but nothing got out. Just find out what's there." He flicked ash onto the wet pavement. "That's all. Go. I want to find a hotel and sleep before dawn."
Jude went. He crossed the lobby, took the elevator to the fourteen, and stepped out into a corridor that smelled immediately and comprehensively of paint — not fresh paint, but paint in the way that some places smell of coffee or salt water, saturated into the walls over years of exposure. Turpentine beneath it. Linseed oil. The particular chemical personality of a working studio space that had been lived in for a long time.
There was only one apartment on the floor that could belong to a painter. The smell told him which door before he'd read the numbers.
He knocked. Listened. Footsteps — heavy, deliberate, a man's gait on wooden boards.
The door opened the width of a fist. A man with long red hair and a pointed beard looked through the gap with the cautious expression of someone who answered knocks this way as a matter of habit.
"Who are you looking for?"
"Emma. I'm here on behalf of her boyfriend — mind if I come in for a moment?"
The man looked him over: Asian, well-dressed, nothing alarming in the body language. He stepped back and let the door open.
The room was dense with the evidence of work — canvases stacked against every available wall, flower petals dried and pressed between sheets of paper, half-finished pieces on easels, paint in various states of use and abandonment spread across surfaces with the organised chaos of someone who knew where everything was even if no one else could find it. The new tenant was a painter too. He'd taken the space that had belonged to Emma and filled it with his own version of the same occupation.
Jude moved through it in a few careful steps, cataloguing as he went. No insect smell. No glass-and-magic residue — he'd handled the bottle enough times in his mind from Lester's account to have a sense of it, and it wasn't here. Whatever scent it might have carried, the fat man's and Lester's handling had marked it, and neither of those marks was present.
Not here.
He turned to the canvas nearest to him — large, in progress, a streak of vivid red descending from upper left to lower right, and in the lower portion, a face emerging from the paint. A woman, young, striking.
"Is this her?" he asked. "The one who fell?"
"Yeah." The painter looked at the canvas without any particular discomfort. "I wasn't close with her. But it affected me, you know? The way it happened." He shrugged in the way of someone who'd rationalised this to themselves more than once. "It gave me something to work with."
Jude glanced at him and decided not to say anything about that. Artists.
"You didn't get it right, though." The voice came from behind both of them. Quiet, flat, carrying the specific weight of someone who knew the subject matter from the inside. "The mouth especially."
Jude didn't startle. He'd heard the footsteps in the stairwell three minutes ago and tracked them up, recognised the particular rhythm of them from two days of walking alongside their owner. He'd been wondering whether Constantine would make it through the door or stop at the landing.
"You might as well come all the way in," he said.
Constantine stood in the doorway. He didn't answer. After a moment, he stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and stood facing the canvas.
He breathed in the room — the paint, the turpentine, the specific arrangement of this specific air — and let it happen. Let the room be what it was. Let the painting be wrong in the particular way that all paintings of someone you knew were wrong, because they were made from the outside and you'd known the inside.
He didn't say anything for a long time.
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