"What just happened?" Jude looked at the stretcher being loaded into the ambulance. "That's never failed before."
[SYSTEM — SKILL ANALYSIS] The lethal force responsible was not observable by you at time of deployment. Unobservable force cannot be understood; force that cannot be understood cannot be countered. Current skill level insufficient.
"What if I upgrade it?"
[Upgrade requirement: skill level must exceed lethality level by ten tiers to forcibly interrupt.]
He did the math and did not enjoy it. Since reaching level five, I Didn't Kill Anyone had been costing $200,000 asset points per tier. His total reserves were just over a million. Even spending everything he had, he'd reach level ten — which was apparently not enough for whatever had just eaten Henry alive from the inside.
[SYSTEM — NEW PART-TIME OPPORTUNITY] Please check your inbox.
[MISSION: Gluttons Who Starved to Death]
Introduction: For reasons no one has satisfactorily explained, a fat man became a thin man in minutes, a living person became a corpse in minutes, and a glutton starved to death in front of a restaurant full of witnesses. London has never been a city governed by reason — but as the saying goes, when the sky falls, look for the tall person standing underneath it. This is a truth one particular legendary magician has had considerable opportunity to reflect on.
Note: The obvious candidates have already been tried. The point is not to become the tallest person in the room. The point is to find the person who's already taller.
Status: Pending (0%) Reward: Basic Occult Knowledge Proficiency
Jude scratched his head. The mission text was doing everything short of spelling out a name. Paranormal event. London. Legendary magician. He ran through what he knew about the DC universe's occult landscape in the UK, and one name came up immediately, the way only one name ever comes up when you're asking that particular question.
A seasoned, technically untrained mage. Blond. Trench coat. Perpetually bad luck, most of it self-inflicted.
He pulled out his phone and started looking for him.
Twenty-two minutes into a traffic jam that had started moving and stopped again, the passenger in the back seat of the cab made a decision.
"Alright, mate." He leaned forward. "I'm getting out here. If I'd walked from the airport, I'd be home by now."
The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. His passenger had beautiful blond hair and the kind of face that read as roguishly handsome right up until you noticed the state of the trench coat — dark yellow wool over a suit and tie that had once been expensive and were now just wrinkled and slightly stained, carrying the particular air of clothes that had been worn through at least one minor catastrophe and never quite recovered. The whole ensemble said: this person makes an effort, but the effort has limits.
In fact, this assessment was entirely correct.
"Sixteen eighty, my friend."
Constantine paid without comment, got out with his suitcase, and walked directly into a puddle that smelled like wet garbage and something older. The smell climbed up his sinuses and found the airplane food already residing there, and the two of them had a brief, unpleasant conversation somewhere in his stomach.
A gust of cold, wet air hit the back of his neck.
He pulled his collar up, held it there, and then stopped holding it together.
"Bloody airplane food." He addressed the rain and the street and the general situation in equal measure. "Bloody rain. Bloody England."
He walked. The streets were crowded and wet and full of people who seemed to have somewhere to be, which was more than he could say for himself at the moment. He hadn't been back to London in months — Nergal-related business in South America had turned into the kind of extended engagement where you didn't count the days because counting the days only made it worse. He was home now, or getting there, and that was sufficient.
Twenty minutes of walking brought him to his street. He passed the van parked outside his building — Nando Clean, pest control and house cleaning, logo cheerful in an aggressively corporate way that he found faintly threatening — and frowned at it for a half-second before deciding he was too tired to investigate.
He reached the front door and reached for his keys.
His hand stopped.
...Right.
The keys were in Baghnatia. In a jacket pocket, specifically, in a jacket he'd left in the apartment of a woman whose name he was choosing not to think about, in a country he was very much choosing not to return to in the immediate future.
He pressed the doorbell.
"Who is it?"
"John Constantine."
The latch clicked and the door opened on Mrs. M — gray hair, expression of a woman who had been disappointed by a specific person many times and had developed a practiced fluency in communicating this through body language alone.
"You left without telling anyone," she said. "Months. No word."
"Just wandering, Mrs. M." He stepped past her into the narrow hallway. The smell of stewed cabbage reached him immediately from the kitchen, reliable as a compass pointing toward something he didn't want to eat. "You know how it is."
"There's something I need to—"
"Mrs. M." He was already moving toward the stairs. "I am genuinely exhausted. Whatever it is, can it wait until morning?"
This was a lie. He wasn't exhausted, he was depleted, which was different — exhausted implied a problem sleep could fix. But the lie was reflexive and he'd used it on her before and she'd let it go before, and all he wanted right now was the specific silence of his own flat.
She knew him too well for that.
"I didn't ask him to leave," she called after him, her voice carrying up the first three steps, "because I knew he was your friend. But I want you to know that I didn't like it, and this is a respectable house, and—"
He stopped on the stairs. Turned.
"What friend?"
"The drug addict." She waved her hand as if dispelling the details. "His name was — Gary? Lester? Something like that. I can never remember."