The Spectre returned to his work, and Thea returned to the problem of how to end it.
She brought her right hand in line with his chest—first two fingers extended, the rest curled—and compressed pure light-attribute magic down to the smallest surface area it would hold. The construct blazed like a second sun against the black sky. Even in the dark of Blackest Night, it was impossible to look at directly.
The Spectre's hand came up to intercept.
She turned her wrist as she released the shot, redirecting the beam upward toward his head.
"Do not impede the work of God's judgment." His voice was thunder shaped like language.
"You're not the Spectre," Thea said. She kept her voice flat and carrying. "You need to hear that clearly: you are not the Spectre. You are a copy of Jim Corrigan's memories wearing his body. You are not the host. You are not the being. You are a corpse pretending to be both of them, and you are neither."
The figure went still.
She moved into the gap—a compressed-light blade, drawn twice across his chest in an X, directly over the Black Lantern insignia. Eight or nine meters of wound on a hundred-meter target. It healed in seconds. The tissue closed like water over a stone.
She looked across to the Phantom Stranger, who was watching with arms folded in the specific posture of a man who has bet on the underdog and is very carefully not showing it.
Then she reached into her coat and retrieved a ring.
Saint Walker had given it to her as a keepsake when he'd declared her the Blue Lantern Corps's honorary leader—a gesture, a token of a title she'd carried for a while without really examining. She'd worn it exactly once since receiving it, just to verify it fit.
She put it on now.
The ring recognized her immediately. She had hope—genuine, fundamental, unperformed—and the ring took that and reflected it back amplified a hundredfold. The effect expanded outward from her in a wave. Something changed in Gotham: not a physical thing, but a quality of the air, the way sound carried, the posture of people huddled in basements and doorways. Something lifted slightly, like a window cracking open in a sealed room.
And she used the ring to build.
The Phantom Stranger, standing beside her, watched the construct take shape and went very still.
It was him. An exact rendering of the Phantom Stranger, scaled up to match the Spectre's current height—blue cloak, blue wide-brimmed hat, the same slightly aggrieved set of his shoulders. At range, in the middle of a combat where close attention was a luxury, it was genuinely difficult to tell which one was the construct.
"You didn't," the Phantom Stranger said.
The timing was very good.
Inside the Black Lantern Spectre, something stirred.
Jim Corrigan had been a Gotham detective before an act of betrayal and a gang's worth of bullets had made him extraordinary against his will. He was ordinary before that, too, by most measures—except for the stubborn, low-burning quality of his will, which had proven rather more durable than expected. It was still present in there, faint and nearly buried under the Black Lantern consciousness, but intact.
He had a long memory. He remembered being a man living a difficult life. He remembered someone he'd trusted passing that trust like currency to his enemies. He remembered the specific sensation of bullets.
The construct of the Phantom Stranger, enormous and unmistakable, floated in front of him.
Something older than Black Lantern conditioning took over.
"Phantom Stranger." The voice was different now—rawer, the divine thunder undercut by something more personal, more human. "Deception. You stand condemned."
Thea bit down on a laugh. She caught the Phantom Stranger's expression and swallowed the rest of it.
"Get in there," she said.
The Phantom Stranger produced a sound that conveyed philosophical resignation in a single exhale, and rose to meet the construct version of himself.
What followed, viewed from street level, was one of the stranger sights Gotham had seen during an event that had already generated significant competition.
Two identical blue-cloaked giants and one green-cloaked giant, trading blows in the sky above the city.
The Black Lantern Spectre was losing. He was strong—diminished divine wrath was still divine wrath—but two on one, at reduced power, wasn't a winning arrangement. He compensated the only way remaining to him.
"Phantom Stranger—you are guilty!"
"Phantom Stranger—you should not exist!"
"Phantom Stranger—"
"Why is he only going after you?" Thea said, landing a strike against the Spectre's shoulder roughly the size of a building. "We're both hitting him."
"I betrayed the man," the Phantom Stranger said, in the tone of someone very tired of a true thing being true. "The host's memories are dominating his responses. I am the relevant grievance."
"That's incredibly awkward for you."
She was tracking something else, though—a shape at the edge of her peripheral vision that hadn't been there a moment ago. Two shapes.
The Spectre's hand swung down. She was already reading that it wasn't aimed at her, but the angle—
"Hank, look out!"
She turned.
Hawk and Dove. Hank Hall and Don Hall, brothers—the Avatars of War and Peace—she hadn't known they were here. Hank wore white combat gear with a red cape, wings spread wide, already banking hard away from the incoming strike. Don was in front of him, trying to put himself in the path of it—
The wrong instinct. Don Hall was so spiritually clean that the Spectre's hand passed straight through him without friction. It landed on Hank Hall with the full weight of divine judgment behind it.
There was no sound—not really. The Spectre's condemnation did what it did. Where Hank Hall had been, there was nothing: not ash, not residue, not a trace. Not even a soul. The divine judgment had been absolute.
Don Hall looked at the space where his brother had been.
"No."
"You have no sin," the Spectre said, turning toward him with something that might have been an attempt at restraint. "Stand back."
Don Hall did not stand back.
He hit the Spectre.
Thea maintained her attack from one side, the Phantom Stranger from the other. Within a few exchanges, both of them had pulled away.
The space around Don Hall had started to glow.
It was the specific light of someone who had spent every day of their life being exactly what they were—no performance, no compromise—and the sanctity that accumulates in a person like that when they go to war for someone they love. It built as he fought and kept building, and the radius of it expanded until Thea, maneuvering above, had to shield her eyes.
Zauriel—the angel who had been following the Phantom Stranger at a respectful distance for what amounted to several thousand years—stepped out of that distance.
He stared.
"That man." The awe in his voice was uncontrolled. "I couldn't have imagined—in all my time—a human being with this much—"
"I know," Thea said.
"Compared to him, I—"
"I know."
Standing next to Don Hall's light, a genuine angel of Heaven read as the cheaper product.