"John, I… I miss you so much. It's so lonely, where we are."
We. The word snagged in Jude's mind like a hook. Before he could pull on it, Constantine asked the same thing.
"We?"
Emma's gaze was steady, mournful, her blue eyes carrying the particular weight of someone who had already done all their crying. "Your old friends are all together," she said. "You haven't forgotten us, have you? Strictly speaking, John — we all died because of you."
"You…" Constantine's jaw tightened. "You didn't go where you were supposed to go?"
Where you were supposed to go. Jude filed that away. Constantine meant heaven. He clearly wasn't optimistic about his own odds.
Emma's mournful eyes stayed on Constantine's face until he dropped his gaze, taking a long drag of his cigarette to cover the silence.
"Why am I here, John? Think about it." Her voice was patient, like she'd rehearsed this. "If I weren't a wandering ghost with nowhere left to go, I wouldn't be standing here with you. We can't go to Heaven. And we won't go to Hell." She paused. "We're not so different, you and us."
"My dear girl." Constantine exhaled smoke through his nose. "My head's a proper jumble right now. I can't concentrate. I'm in a bit of trouble."
"I know." There was no accusation in it. "I've been watching you. You've been circling the crime scenes." She studied him with those pale, sad eyes. "You're trying to deal with Mnemoth, aren't you?"
"Yeah." He took another drag and smiled — the helpless one, the honest one. "He's too strong. It'll take some doing."
"You need an assistant." Emma stepped closer. "A ghost would know more about that world than any living person you could find."
"Thank you, Emma."
And there it was — the same smile Jude had watched Constantine give Lester when he handed him off to Juden Midnight. Warm, certain, grateful. Constantine even reached out to rest a hand on her shoulder, the way you would with an old friend.
Comforting, Jude thought. Encouraging, even. But not love. Definitely not love.
His hand passed straight through her, fingers closing on nothing but cold air. Emma watched it happen and laughed — a small, bright sound, as real as anything Jude had heard on this street.
Well. Easy to please, isn't she? Even after dying once, a kind word is still enough.
Constantine looked at that smile and said something quiet and unflattering to himself behind his eyes. But he kept walking, fell into step with the two of them, and for a stretch of blocks he let himself pretend. Chatting, laughing — the old rhythm, the old ease, as if nothing had changed and Emma was simply between apartments.
The tension in his shoulders dropped by degrees. His face stopped doing the thing it had been doing since Greenwich Village.
Jude, for his part, was completely unbothered by being a third wheel. His attention was somewhere else entirely.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
Mission Complete: Tracing the Roots (100%)
Reward issued: Basic Energy Affinity (Magic)
Bloodline confirmed: Japanese. Energy attribute: Magic.
Congratulations. You now have a mana bar. Try not to waste it on something embarrassing.
Jude minimised the notification and pulled up the shop, turning the completed mission over in his mind. The ox tears had cracked something open — he'd seen Emma, actually seen her, and that meant there were other things out there to be seen. Things like Mnemoth.
He started browsing.
Heavenly Eye — opens third-eye perception; enables sight of ghosts, spirits, and supernatural entities; passive mana drain during use. 20,000 AP. So cheap?
He almost laughed. After the prices he'd been staring at in this shop, twenty thousand felt like a clearance sale.
Seventy-Two Earthly Fiends Divine Powers — Art of Communicating with the Netherworld. Observes the netherworld and hell. Dispels illusions, reveals truth. 500,000 AP.
He didn't even finish reading the description.
Right. Moving on. The Six Supernatural Powers of Buddhism — also exceptional, but requires sustained meditation practice. Hard pass.
He authorised the Heavenly Eye purchase without further deliberation. It was the only item on the page that fit both his budget and his immediate problem — the next time Mnemoth showed up, he wasn't going to be standing there guessing at buzzing sounds like an idiot.
The noise hit them before they saw it.
A low, clamorous drone rising from half a block ahead — chaotic and layered, threaded through with something that made the back of Jude's neck prickle. Not just sound. Intent. Hunger wearing a sound's clothes.
"Let go of me! I need to eat meat!"
"Are you insane?! I asked you to watch yourself — I hate you right now!"
A couple had spilled out of a doorway argument onto the sidewalk. The man shoved his girlfriend back hard enough to make her stumble, then barged through the entrance of a supermarket, grabbed a raw cut of meat straight from the display case, and stuffed it into his mouth before the first employee could shout.
"I need to taste it — blood, flesh, I need it, I need to chew—"
"Eddie! Oh God, you swore you'd gone vegetarian—"
"I'm not a vegetarian anymore!"
The man was already elbow-deep in the display case, head half-inside it, tearing and swallowing with the systematic desperation of someone who hadn't eaten in weeks. Around him, the other customers had gone very still. This wasn't hunger. Everyone watching understood, on some animal level, that this wasn't hunger.
Jude clocked the flies first — the faint black halo orbiting the man's collar, too organised to be accidental. The ox tears had long since worn off.
Right. Time to spend that twenty thousand.
He closed his eyes for half a second and let the new ability settle into place. It didn't feel like anything dramatic — just a slow, even warmth moving through him, a steady resonance gathering between his eyebrows until his vision shifted like a camera pulling focus.
The world had another layer.
He opened his eyes.
The man was barely visible beneath it. A dense, seething cloud of insects wrapped his entire body from collar to ankle — not buzzing randomly, but feeding, actively and methodically, consuming flesh and blood at a rate that the man's desperate swallowing couldn't begin to match. For every mouthful he forced down his throat, the swarm took three from somewhere deeper. His internal organs, Jude realised with a cold, clinical detachment. They were eating him from the inside out.
He had minutes. Maybe fewer.
And then — as if a frequency had finally tuned — Jude understood what they were saying.
Not words. Never words. But the message was clear, simple, and ancient, older than language: hungry, hungry, hungry, give us more, we are always hungry, nothing is ever enough.
The moment comprehension clicked, a sharp, hollow pang hit him somewhere behind the sternum — not his stomach, but the part of the mind that processes want. His hood responded instantly, that familiar calm settling over him like a deadened switch, cutting the signal before it could take root.
He let out a slow breath.
So that's it. They weren't silent before because someone was controlling them. They were silent because I couldn't hear them — my senses weren't calibrated for their frequency. The third eye isn't just sight. It's the whole receiver.
He watched the swarm work, and something crystallised.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
You have observed components of Mnemoth's essence.
You have determined parts of Mnemoth's nature.
You have confirmed Mnemoth's true name.
You have ascertained Mnemoth's origin.
Prerequisite condition for "I Have Taken No Life" has been satisfied.
This skill may now be used on Mnemoth to prevent it from launching a fatal attack.
Jude stared at the notification for a long moment, then looked back at the man in the supermarket — still eating, the swarm still feeding, the gap between those two speeds closing by the second.
Good, he thought. Now I know what I'm looking at.
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