From the perspective of Mnemoth:
At dawn, as the first pale light touched the edge of the sky, the scent reached me.
I had been circling. Patient. Hunger is not suffering when you have no capacity for suffering — it is simply a direction, a compass needle swinging toward its north. And this scent was north. The most complex thing I had smelled in New York, which was already the richest hunting ground I had ever found: layers of experience compressed into a single human presence, the particular flavour of a soul that has been slowly rendered by its own choices over many years.
We hummed as we rose — a low, pre-feast hymn, the only form of anticipation available to us. Below, something on the rooftop of a tall building answered in kind: drums, blood, the specific vibration of a ritual being assembled.
The ingredients smelled like birds. Like blood and old power. I didn't mind. A well-prepared meal is still a meal.
I am not particular about food. I am as indiscriminate as this city — this magnificent, inexhaustible city full of people who want things they cannot name, who reach and consume and reach again, producing a constant, fragrant surplus of desire that I have been drinking since I arrived. New York feeds me in ways the African plains never could. It is not just hunger here. It is ambition, grief, lust, envy — all of it rendered into the same sweet nectar by the tongue I use to drink.
I flew toward the rooftop garden where the scent was strongest.
The hungry spirit arrives.
Lester had stopped fighting the zombies somewhere around the second floor.
He was too far gone for it to be worth the energy — two days in Midnight's holding cell, no drugs, no sleep that counted as sleep, cold sweats that had soaked through everything he was wearing. The men carrying him were enormous and entirely indifferent to his weight or his protests, and he had learned by now that protesting to them was approximately as effective as protesting to furniture.
They set him down on the rooftop in the pre-dawn grey, and Papa Midnight was already there, checking his watch with the unhurried precision of a man running a schedule.
Ten minutes until sunrise. Ten minutes until the church seals failed.
"What are you doing?" Lester's voice came out thin and cracked. "Where are you taking me — what is this?"
"We discussed this yesterday," Midnight said, without looking up. "You are the bait, Lester."
"Already? Can we — can we just wait a little while, I'm not—"
Midnight didn't answer. His attention had moved to the array of items laid out on the rooftop surface: tattoo needles, ink, a straitjacket, white powder, a chair. He inventoried each one with the methodical satisfaction of a craftsman before a job.
He paused at the chair.
"Where did you get an electric chair?" Lester stared at it.
"Private auction. It came out of a state prison." Midnight ran one hand along the armrest. "Over three hundred executions. The residue is significant."
"I tested its output," Midnight said. "Excellent instrument."
"I'll take your word for it," Lester said weakly.
Seven floors below, in Constantine's room, the lights came on.
Constantine had been lying in the dark, completely awake, performing sleep with the dedication of a man who had been acting his entire life. The herbal tea Jude had given him at three in the morning had been, he was forced to admit, somewhat too effective — the specific relaxed alertness it produced made the pretence of drowsiness genuinely difficult to maintain. He'd been staring at the ceiling for ninety minutes, running through the shape of the next few hours, and doing a passable impression of someone unconscious.
He dropped it when the zombie walked in and started shaking his shoulder.
"Alright, alright." He opened his eyes and looked at the enormous figure beside the bed. Fully awake, which meant his face was doing the wrong things. He let exhaustion replace alertness and blinked like someone surfacing. "Christ. Can you not do that? Tap the door like a normal person?"
He was dressed in four minutes. Cold water on his face, coat on, into the elevator. Seven minutes total, which was faster than strictly necessary but not suspiciously so.
Old actor, he reminded himself. You've been doing this longer than most people have been alive.
The rooftop was dim, the sky somewhere between black and grey, the city laid out below them still humming with its overnight business. Lester was already in the chair, two of Midnight's men standing on either side of him. Midnight himself stood at the edge of the ritual space, a white rooster held by the feet in one hand and a ritual knife in the other, looking like a man about to begin a meeting he had prepared extensively for.
"Good morning, Constantine." He glanced over. "The building's exit cameras show your other associate left last night."
"I sent him away." Constantine lit a cigarette. "Too decent. Would have complicated things."
He looked up at the city skyline and exhaled smoke into the lightening sky. "Lovely morning for it."
Midnight glanced at the sky — solidly overcast, not a star visible, the clouds low enough to look structural. He looked back at Constantine.
"For what, exactly?"
"Knight business." Constantine took another drag. "Race you to the bottom."
Midnight stared at him.
"Save your energy," he said finally. "You'll need it for Lester."
Constantine went quiet. Midnight turned back to his preparations.
The setup was complete: magic circle chalked beside the chair, the chicken blood ready in its golden bowl, the drums about to begin. He picked up the rooster and the knife, and nodded to the two zombie assistants at his sides.
The drums started — low, arhythmic to an untrained ear, but Jude would have recognised the pattern as entirely deliberate. The sound moved across the rooftop and out into the morning air like something cast.
Constantine walked over to the chair.
"Morning, Gary." He kept his face even, for Midnight's benefit. "How are you holding up?"
"I can't do this, John." Lester's hands were shaking where they were strapped to the armrests. He looked like a man who had lost approximately fifteen pounds since they'd last been in the same room. "I really can't. I'm not — I don't have anything left."
"You've said that before." Constantine patted his arm. "You've said that about six times since I've known you, and you're still here. This is just a bit of tattoo work." He held up the syringe he'd palmed from the table. "Straight from Thailand. Top quality. You do this, and I'll see you right afterward."
Lester stared at the syringe. Then at Constantine's face.
"Can't I have it now?"
"After." Constantine stood, pocketing the syringe. "Brave boy."
Midnight, drawing the knife across the rooster's throat, allowed himself a small, satisfied expression. Constantine's tongue remained, after all these years, one of the finer instruments he'd ever witnessed in operation — capable of making a condemned man feel comforted while walking him toward his own end. The ritual was already moving. The circle was drawn. The blood was running into the bowl.
He began to murmur the incantation.
On the other side of New York, the seals on the church doors finished their last hour. They had held exactly as long as they were designed to hold, and not a moment longer. The wood cracked. The doors gave way.
Mnemoth poured out into the morning air like smoke from a chimney — unhurried, uncoiling, already orientating toward the signal that had been building for the last hour on the Midnight Building rooftop. The drums. The blood. The specific, extraordinary scent.
It rose over the city and turned itself in that direction.
The hungry spirit arrives.