Constantine finished his cigarette down to the filter, dropped it, and ground it under his heel. The shaking had mostly stopped. He glanced sideways at Jude and almost managed a real smile.
"Not bad, mate. Not bad at all." He nodded at the coat where the wooden sword had disappeared back to. "What was that thing, exactly? And the light — that was a hell of a beam."
"Lightning-struck peach wood sword," Jude said. "Paired with a demon-slaying technique. Old remedies from the ancestral catalogue. Deep enough cultivation, they can handle most things."
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
Lightning-Struck Peach Wood Sword — 10,000
A rather elderly magical artefact. Carved from peach wood struck by lightning at the twilight of the Dharma era — which is why it carries a trace of red lightning naturally. The ancestors had good taste.
Seventy-Two Earthly Fiends Divine Powers — Demon Slayer — 60,000
Ordinary iron is no obstacle; divine weapons are the proper tool. Effective against evil spirits, demons, and monsters of all classifications.
He'd bought both items with a specific outcome in mind: combine the sword with the technique, hit Mnemoth with everything at once, and end it cleanly. What he hadn't accounted for was how much ground the demon had covered since arriving in New York. Two days of feeding on an entire city's worth of excess had pushed it well past the threshold where a single strike would be sufficient. He'd poured every drop of mana he had into that swing and managed a serious injury.
Serious, not fatal. The talisman would hold it through the night. After that was a different conversation.
"So where does that leave us?" Jude asked. "The binding won't hold longer than tonight. We can't leave it sitting in that church indefinitely."
"Tonight?" Constantine visibly relaxed at the word. "Then tonight, we rest." He patted Jude on the arm. "People aren't machines, Jude. Even you need to recover. We go find Midnight and Lester tomorrow, put a proper plan together, and finish this as a group."
"And tonight you're going to recover your energy by—"
"By not sitting in a small room staring at the wall, yes." He was already reaching into his coat. "Midnight sorted us rooms — here's the address. Grab a cab, get some sleep. I'll see you there later." He pressed a folded note into Jude's hand, gave him a wave, and turned down the street.
"I feel like something's off about this man," Jude said to no one in particular.
Constantine had a taxi before Jude finished the sentence.
"Midnight Casino," he told the driver, and tossed the cigarette butt out the window before the door had fully closed. "And step on it."
The driver pulled out and stole a glance in the rearview mirror — the blond passenger, the heavy London accent, the complete lack of any tourist energy whatsoever.
"You know your way around, huh," the driver said. "Most guys from England, from Europe — they don't know about the underground spots. They definitely don't know that word."
"Don't try it," Constantine said pleasantly. "I'm not a first-timer. Just drive."
He watched the city scroll past the window and thought about Mnemoth — about the geometry of tomorrow, about what it would take, about the one piece he hadn't fully decided yet.
Lester.
His fingers found another cigarette without his conscious direction.
I need him. The thought had the flat, settled quality of something he'd already argued with and lost. That's just the shape of it.
The Midnight Casino was loud and dim and smelled like recycled air and old money. Chips clinked. The gamblers wore the focused, slightly vacant expressions of people who had outsourced their emotional regulation to probability. Some of them had come in wealthy and would leave having rearranged that. The whole room carried the particular perfume of greed under pressure — not unpleasant, to Constantine's nose. He'd spent a lot of evenings in rooms like this.
He did a full circuit and didn't find the man he was looking for.
Another night, he thought, almost regretfully, I might actually play a few hands.
He caught a cab outside.
"Midnight Club."
"Dancing?" The driver's face lit up. "Good choice — five minutes, easy."
It took ten.
The club was everything it needed to be: the mirror ball throwing light in every direction, the crowd moving in that collective, boneless way that only works at a certain volume, music loud enough to function as a second skeleton. A genuinely good place to disappear into for a few hours.
Papa Midnight was not in it.
Constantine leaned against the bar for sixty seconds, confirmed this, and walked back out.
Third cab. "Midnight Boxing Club. Quick."
The driver's smile this time had a different quality. The knowing kind. He didn't say anything else.
The boxing club occupied a basement that smelled like blood and sawdust and the particular excitement of a crowd that has stopped pretending to be civilised. Constantine took the stairs down and pushed through the door into the roar of it.
The octagon at the centre of the room was doing what octagonal rings in underground venues do: two men, a metal baseball bat, and an audience that had paid for permission to want someone dead. As Constantine watched, one of the fighters connected with a swing that bent the other man's leg backward at the knee. The sound of it reached him a half-second late. The crowd erupted.
Papa Midnight stood ringside in a suit, watching with the serene attention of a man reviewing quarterly figures. He didn't turn around.
"Constantine," he said. "I'd have thought this was exactly your kind of entertainment."
"Two blokes swinging bats at each other until one of them stops moving?" Constantine settled in beside him and lit up. "Not really my aesthetic."
"Violence is symbolic." Midnight's eyes stayed on the ring. "It provides a container for bloodlust. You can't see it anywhere else the way you can see it here — smell it, hear it."
Around them, the crowd had found its rhythm again: Kill him, kill him, kill him. The tickets in their hands had made the arithmetic simple. The bloodier the stage, the louder the math.
Constantine looked at the fighter still standing — the methodical way he moved, the economy of it, the absence of exhaustion that living muscles always carry.
"Must be rough," he said. "Busy your whole life, and then you die, and someone puts you back in a boxing ring."
Midnight smiled. "Dead men are always preferable to living ones for this kind of work."