"I know you're in a hurry," Jude said, "but hold on a moment."
Constantine's hand was already half-raised in the universal gesture for out you go. He kept it there, waiting.
"This morning," Jude continued, in the calm, factual tone of someone describing a traffic report, "I watched a man starve to death. He'd just finished eating half a restaurant's worth of food. There were flies. A lot of them."
The hand came down.
Constantine took a slow drag of his cigarette and ran through what he'd just been told with the efficiency of long practice. First: whatever Lester had picked up, it wasn't staying contained — it was already on the street. Second: a man who'd just eaten a full meal wasting to nothing in minutes wasn't any kind of disease on God's green earth; it was something else entirely. Third: this stranger had seen it happen, recognised it for what it wasn't, and been clever enough to find a specialist rather than ring 999. Fourth: gluttony. Flies. Together. And that combination was giving him thoughts he didn't particularly enjoy having.
"Right," he said finally, dropping into his chair and stretching his legs out. "Wherever you heard my name, mate, I'll tell you this for free — since whatever this is hasn't come for you yet, my honest advice is to walk away. Go back to your hotel. Sleep. Forget today happened. Trust me, that's the sensible option."
"Is it?" Jude seemed to consider this with genuine politeness. "I did some reading before I came. Baal — leader of the seventy-two demons in Canaanite mythology — corresponds to Beelzebub in the Judeo-Christian system. Lord of Flies. King of Plagues. Deputy of Satan. And his particular sin is gluttony." He paused. "It wasn't hard to find."
Constantine's eyes narrowed.
He'd spent twenty years wading through every occult text worth reading and most that weren't, and the name this stranger had just assembled from publicly available mythology was — accurate. Uncomfortably, specifically accurate. His first thought had been exactly the same: Beelzebub. Prime Minister of Hell. One of the great infernal powers, and one of the Seven.
But.
"Listen, son." He allowed himself a thin smile — the one he used when he wanted someone to understand they were out of their depth without actually being cruel about it. "You've done your reading, fair enough. But you don't know what you're talking about. Not really. You've no idea how vast His power is, or what His authority in Hell actually means. If He had come to Earth — if the real thing had walked through that restaurant door — you wouldn't have made it to the street. There'd have been no one left alive to tell me anything."
He leaned forward slightly. "Can you imagine an elephant trying to get through an ordinary door? Now make that a T-Rex. Now make it Godzilla. That's the ratio we're talking about. The human world has limits. Even a fraction of a power like His, projected into this plane, would shake the foundations of the whole bloody thing. He'd have to shed most of what He is just to fit — and why would He bother? For a handful of human souls? Not worth His time. Not worth the cost."
What he didn't say — because some things didn't need to be said out loud — was that the rules upstairs and downstairs were clear enough on the subject: angels and demons entering the mortal plane did so in diminished form, human-shaped, power constrained. The management on both sides took a dim view of infernal royalty turning up and redecorating the landscape.
Jude absorbed this. "So if it's not Him," he said, "then who?"
Constantine glanced at Lester without meaning to. His old friend had dried off and changed while they'd been talking — he was sitting on the sofa now, shoulders hunched, staring at the middle distance with the thousand-yard look of a man who'd been somewhere horrible and hadn't quite come all the way back. He needed to be asked about all of this. Just — not yet.
"In any case," Jude said, "think of it as a commission. Help me understand what we're dealing with, and I'll pay you twenty thousand dollars."
The shift in Constantine's expression was immediate, total, and entirely without shame.
"Well." He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and reached for another one. "Since you've put it that way. I should mention — dark magic, evil spirits, the whole business — it's never without risk, and I can't guarantee your safety once you're involved. You want to back out, now's the moment."
"What about the deposit?"
"The dep— I'm talking about your life, man."
"Right, but if I back out now, do I get the deposit back?"
Constantine stared at him.
"...How much are we talking?" Jude asked pleasantly.
"Ten thousand. Up front."
"Fine. Account number?"
Constantine gave it. Thirty seconds later his phone buzzed with a transfer notification. He looked at it, looked at Jude, and experienced something he rarely felt anymore: a flicker of genuine appreciation for a fellow pragmatist.
BYD, Jude muttered under his breath, seemingly to himself — a expletive Constantine didn't know but recognised by tone — I know that one too. Any others?
"That's the lot," Constantine said. "Welcome to London. Welcome to the completely insane supernatural world. Try not to die."
He took a long drag, and something like amusement settled across his face. He'd already planned to investigate Lester's situation regardless — he owed the man that much, even if the man was a catastrophic nuisance. He simply hadn't anticipated making ten thousand dollars before Chas even arrived.
Jude, for his part, was running his own quiet arithmetic. Twenty thousand dollars converted at the going rate to a perfectly respectable pile of asset points — and unlike Gotham, where his reputation as a living disaster zone preceded him into every negotiation, he'd managed to conclude this one without anyone trying to shoot him. It was, genuinely, a pleasant change.
The two of them sat in the comfortable silence of people who have just reached a mutually beneficial arrangement and are privately pleased about it, each keeping their own reasons to themselves.
Then: boom boom boom. Three heavy knocks at the front door.
"That'll be my friend." Constantine was already on his feet, cigarette migrating from one side of his mouth to the other. "Sit tight."
He went out and pulled the door open. The man on the landing was broad-shouldered and unremarkable — the kind of face that disappeared into a crowd without trying, dressed in a plain jacket, expression carrying the settled resignation of someone who'd long since accepted that his life was going to involve unusual requests at inconvenient hours. Chas Chandler. One of Constantine's oldest friends, and almost certainly his most durable.
"You alright?" Constantine embraced him. "Did you bring the methadone?"
"I brought it." Chas's voice was flat. "Still don't like it."
Constantine looked past him at Lester on the sofa — damp hair, borrowed clothes, head in his hands, muttering something low and continuous to himself like a broken radio signal — and drew another long breath of smoke.
"You've gone soft in your old age," he said. "Let him get it in him before we start asking questions. He's no use to anyone like this."
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