"This is Chas," Constantine said, patting the man on the shoulder by way of formal introduction. "One of my oldest friends. My best friend, if I'm being honest, which I generally try to avoid."
Chas extended a hand and shook Jude's without ceremony. "Hello."
"And you are—" Constantine turned. "Christ, I've been talking to you for twenty minutes and I don't actually know your name."
"Jude." He kept it simple. "Interested in the occult. Currently between jobs. Call me whatever you like."
Constantine raised an eyebrow. Between jobs. American English, well-dressed, apparently capable of wiring ten thousand dollars without checking his balance — between jobs. There was something off about the man, and he filed it under ask later, probably. The deposit was already in his account. If the client turned out to be a problem, he could always sell him out. That was just good contingency planning.
On the sofa, Lester had his head in his hands and was repeating something in a low, shaking loop — I'm sorry, I'm sorry, he made me do it, he made me, I'm sorry — the way a broken clock keeps showing the wrong time. His eyes weren't focused on anything in the room.
Chas looked at him with the expression of a man who'd seen things but still found some things depressing. "Where'd you dig this one up?"
"Bathtub," Constantine said. "I thought it was a spider."
He exhaled a long stream of smoke and settled back. "Gary Lester. We go back. Used to be something like friends, until we had a falling out — some business in Northampton, England, years ago. After that, nothing. Last I heard, he was in Morocco. Writing a book about his vices, apparently — drugs, drink, boys, God knows what else. Wallowing in it." He paused. "At least he doesn't hurt himself. That's something."
"Didn't you lot used to be in a band?" Chas said mildly, not looking up from what he was doing. "Rock and roll, rebellion, all that."
"There's a difference," Constantine said, "between living it and using it as an excuse to fall apart."
Jude watched as Chas methodically prepared what he'd brought — drawing the contents of a small vial up into a syringe with the practiced patience of someone who'd done this before and didn't especially enjoy it. It took him a moment to understand what Constantine had meant by let him have his fill first. When he did, he set down his own bag and put a hand on Chas's arm.
"Hold on. Tip it down the sink. I'll handle this."
"Oi, hang on—" Constantine looked up from his newspaper. "The man is in a bad state. We need him lucid enough to talk. It's not like we're torturing him." He squinted at Jude. "Are you Chinese?"
"Japanese."
"Ah." A beat. "Well. Look, when in Rome, yeah? This is London. You can't personally reform every addict who crosses your path, and you've paid me to get information out of him, which means sometimes you have to make a small sacrifice for the larger—"
"John." From the sofa, Lester had spotted the syringe in Chas's hand. His whole body had gone forward, reaching, the way a drowning man reaches for a rope. "Give it to me. Please. Please. Stop doing this to me, just give it to me—"
"You see?" Constantine spread his hands.
"He'll buy it himself in three days regardless," Jude said, reaching into his coat pocket. "That's his business." He unwrapped two small candies and tossed them into Lester's open mouth. Then he unclipped the hood from his jacket and settled it over the man's head.
What happened next made Constantine go very still.
The sunken hollows of Lester's face filled out. The grey undertone of his skin warmed to something closer to living. The dark rings beneath his eyes, the cracked lips, the needle tracks along his forearms — all of it retreated, smoothed, vanished. And then the hood went on, and the frantic, scattered light in Lester's eyes settled. Not dulled — settled. The difference between a shaken snow globe and still water.
In thirty seconds, Gary Lester looked like a man who'd had a difficult week rather than a man who'd been dissolving from the inside out.
Jude could have spent significantly more to achieve the same result — there were options available to him — but he'd looked at Lester and done the arithmetic. Physical addiction, psychological dependence, years of accumulated damage. Relapse probability: one hundred percent. Some investments simply weren't worth the capital.
Chas took one look at Lester, picked up his bag, and walked quietly to the bathroom without a word.
Constantine watched Jude with eyes that had gone unreadable. He'd been in the same room as that hood for the better part of an hour and hadn't registered it as anything at all — no familiar resonance, no occult signature he recognised. The candies, the hood, the effect — none of it fit any tradition he knew. This supposed enthusiast with no job and an American accent was sitting in his living room with artefacts he couldn't identify, which was not a situation Constantine found himself in often.
He filed that too, and approached the sofa.
"Guys," he said — his old nickname for Lester, the one that had survived even the falling out. "I was going to try a hypnotic technique, but you seem remarkably together. Safe to assume I don't need to tie you down?"
"No need." Lester leaned back, stretching the stiffness out of his shoulders. His hands were still, which was a small miracle. He still wanted it — he'd always want it — but the want had moved to a distance he could hold for now, and there were more important things. "It started in Tangier. That's what I came to tell you."
Tangier, Morocco. Summer.
The heat was a physical thing — not warm but pressing, filling the throat, turning the air above the streets into something that bent and shimmered at the edges. Lester moved through the old city in sunglasses and a soaked short-sleeved shirt, and even the shade between buildings offered only marginal relief.
Around him the medina moved at its own rhythm: merchants calling from stalls, fabrics hanging in bright columns, the smell of spice and exhaust and something animal underneath it all. A man with a broken leg sat folded into a slice of shadow at the corner of an alley, hand extended. Children in knitted hats tugged at passing tourists, offering what they were selling in small, clear voices.
Twenty dirhams. Four pounds. Five dollars.
Lester walked past all of it. He had more immediate problems. His hands were shaking slightly and his skin felt like it was trying to escape from his body. He needed something, and he was completely, thoroughly broke.