The Undead Spider #99
"You look pretty stealthy to me, mate." Constantine's eyes traced the line of Jake's shoulders, the hood still pulled low, the mask catching the construction site's last working floodlight. "Move like a ghost and dress like one. So what do you actually need a cloaking spell for?"
Jake set the axe down, blade-first into a gap between two steel plates, and the haft rose to the height of his shoulder, and he left his hand on it while he found his footing on the concrete, settling his weight the way a man does when he's about to say something he's said before in his own head and not yet out loud.
"I don't need to hide my movements," he said.
Constantine waited.
"Just my kills."
The silence that followed had texture to it. Constantine's cigarette had burned to the filter while he was working the last of the copper light through Nergal's body, and he hadn't noticed until now, and he noticed now by looking at it rather than at Jake, which was the whole of his reaction for a breath and a half.
"From death," Jake added.
Constantine dropped the filter and his hand came up to his face and he pressed his palm flat against his mouth for a moment, a man holding in something that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite the opposite. He lowered his hand. He looked at Jake. He looked at the axe. He looked back at Jake.
"Right," he said. "So the first part, I thought, this fella's gone round the bend, bit of the construction site fell on his head, tragic. Happens. But the next part--" He stopped. Started again. "Bloody hell, mate. Bloody absolute hell."
"What's it going to take?"
Constantine's eyebrows went up. "Are you hearing yourself? You want to cloak your kills from death. From Death, as in the cosmic event, the one constant in the universe, the thing nothing escapes, the -- what part of that sentence sounds sane to you?"
"The part where I need it to."
"That's not -- that doesn't answer the--" Constantine pressed his fingers to his temple. "Alright. No one can do that. Full stop. It's death we're talking about, mate, the only road that goes one direction, and she's at the end of every road no matter how you walk it. Last time I checked, she's inevitable."
Jake's hand stayed on the haft of the axe. "Even for you?"
Constantine went still in the manner of a man who has been asked a question he's been avoiding for several decades. His hand found the inside of his coat, came back with a fresh cigarette, and he stood there with it unlit between his fingers for a moment.
"That's different," he said.
"You've given her more trouble than anyone I know of," Jake said. "Multiple occasions. Multiple modes. You keep turning up."
"That's luck. Miserable, catastrophic luck and nothing else."
"I call it a proof of concept."
Constantine looked at him with an expression that was working hard at staying unimpressed. He lit the cigarette. He exhaled. He said nothing for long enough that the smoke had time to go somewhere else.
"And if you need something more concrete," Jake said, "I've developed a certain habit of defying her myself."
Another exhale. Constantine tilted his head and looked at Jake the way a man looks at a building he's trying to decide is load-bearing or not.
"Yeah," he said, slower now, the performance of ease dropping away into something genuine. "Yeah, you've got the look of it. I thought it was the demons back there -- people come out of a proper scrap looking hollowed out in all kinds of ways. But now that the smoke's cleared." He took another drag. "Dead man walking. That's what I'm looking at."
"Then you understand why I need it."
"What I understand," Constantine said, "is that if you can leg it from her, you shouldn't need a cloaking spell at all. So what's changed."
Jake looked out across the site, at the place where Nergal's runes had been burning, the concrete still fractured in radiating lines from where his heels had planted. "She's gotten more involved. Sent someone after me."
"Then you should be lying low instead of--" Constantine gestured at the axe, at the site, at the general circumstances of the evening.
"I can't stop."
Constantine waited.
"Stopping would accelerate the other problem."
"My survival problem."
Constantine pulled on the cigarette and held it and let it out slow. "Right. Well. Even if I could put a cloak on it -- and I'm not saying I can -- death doesn't need you to act for her to find you. She's not tracking the kills, mate. She can find you anywhere. Whenever she wants."
"I don't think she can find me that easily."
Constantine looked at him. Looked at his suit, the mechanical arm, the axe. Looked at his mask. The looking had a specific quality to it, the way a man looks when he's trying to find something that will explain the gap between what he's hearing and what common sense is telling him.
"You're not the cosmic type," he said. "I can see that straight off. So trust me when I tell you she can find you whenever she chooses."
"If that were true," Jake said, "London would already be burning."
Constantine opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at the cigarette. His expression was doing quiet arithmetic.
"She's not what you're painting her as, you know," he said, and his voice had lost the performance, dropped into something flat and honest that sat differently in the air between them. "You've got this picture of some monster that's got her eye on your throat. But from everything I've seen -- and I've been closer to that conversation than most -- she's kind. Possibly the most decent force in existence, given what the job actually involves and what she actually does with it."
"I've met her," Jake said.
Constantine paused.
"Doesn't change what I need," Jake said. "I need to be careful around her. And I know you've got a way to help with it."
Constantine finished the cigarette down to where the heat reached his fingers and dropped it. His hands went into his pockets, and he stood there with his shoulders settled into the coat, looking at Jake with the expression of a man who has been outmaneuvered and is deciding how he feels about it.
"And what makes you so sure I do?"
"Because you're John Constantine," Jake said. "You spend every second of your life thinking about how to be somewhere else when death comes looking. If a way exists, you know of it."
The corner of Constantine's mouth moved.
"Alright," he said. "Stop caressing my ego, it's unbecoming." He looked across the site. "I don't know of a way. I've heard of one." A breath. "But I don't think you're going to like the price."
"I can handle it."
"That's the spirit." Constantine looked at the axe. "Bring that. You'll need it."
He reached into his coat and his fingers found a coin that seemed to shift its shape in the light from one moment to the next. He turned it in his hand once and the air in front of him opened along a seam that hadn't existed a breath before, the edges of it running colors that moved the wrong direction, and on the other side was a street -- stone buildings, well-kept, a lamppost with a warm globe throwing yellow light across wet cobblestones.
Constantine gestured at it. "We're going to have a word with an old friend."
He stepped toward the portal and then stopped. Turned. Looked at it and then at Jake with a calculation that was trying to look like generosity.
"You first," he said, gesturing.
Jake looked at the opening and then at Constantine.
"Three weeks of bad luck," Constantine said, by way of explanation, with the slightly too-casual delivery of a man stating something he hopes sounds reasonable. "I've had portals go sideways on me. Odds of that happening twice are low, but I'm not a gambling man when the losing side involves being deposited somewhere unpleasant." He held Jake's gaze. "You said nothing you can't handle, right? Consider this me taking you at your word."
Jake held his spider-sense open against the portal's edge, reading what came through -- the cold air of the street, the weight of stone buildings, the particular stillness of a road with no foot traffic and no intent behind it. His sense found nothing crouched on the other side and waiting. He stepped through.
The street was quiet in the way that streets are quiet when everyone in the buildings along it has had long enough in this address to stop noticing the things about it that would unsettle a newcomer.
The buildings rose on both sides with the confidence of old money -- broad facades with clean cornicing, tall windows whose glass had thickness to it, iron railings at the steps that had been painted often enough that you could see it in the layering if you looked.
One of the lamps had a flicker to it, a minor burn somewhere in the glass, but the rest held steady and threw their light across wet stone with the indifference of something that had been doing this a long time.
Jake stood in the street with the axe across his back and the navigation thread spinning in his peripheral vision, circling without settling, and he watched the portal and waited.
It sat open and nothing came through.
He watched it.
The thread spun.
He looked both ways along the street. Looked at a wide Georgian face building with a black door and three shallow steps and a brass plate beside the frame that was too far away to read in the dark.
The building had a presence that the others on the street didn't quite share -- it was the same age, same stone, same cornicing, but there was a weight to the space it occupied that the others didn't carry, as if the air around it had been asked to do more than air is normally asked to do and had complied, and had been complying for a long time.
The curtains on the first floor were thick and dark and sitting with the absolute stillness of curtains that had been chosen to sit that way. A slim light leaked from around the edge of the right one.
Jake looked back at the portal.
The thread spun another full rotation and then went still, pointing back at the opening like a compass finding north.
Then Constantine came through sideways, at speed, coat catching on nothing and settling, and he straightened and put both hands back into his pockets and looked at the street with the face of a man who had arrived exactly where he intended.
"Your friend has expensive taste," Jake said.
"Don't let the outside mislead you. He's a good man. Loves collecting things. Keeps to himself. Loves his books, above all." Constantine was already moving toward the black door. "We're going to ask to borrow one."
"A grimoire."
"Precisely. One of Merlin's finest works, as it happens -- the Chronos Temporis, if you're interested in the provenance. It doesn't do what the name suggests, not exactly. It bends time, but not in the way people mean when they say that. More in the way of --" He waved a hand. "Your problem is time. The book is the solution. That's what matters."
Jake looked at him. "That's not an explanation."
"No," Constantine agreed, and knocked on the door.
He stood with his knuckles resting against the wood in the moment after and turned his head slightly toward Jake. "I should warn you. He won't give it up without a conversation, and the conversation will be a fight, and the fight will be mostly him. Under no circumstances make him angry."
"Why."
Constantine's mouth opened. Closed. "He's got -- the anger's real, let's say. Genuinely real. In a way that goes beyond what you'd expect from a man of his -- "
The door opened.
The man on the other side was broad through the shoulders and not young and had the face of someone who had been historically good-looking and had moved through it into something more settled and harder to read.
He wore a dark shirt with the sleeves pushed up and held a book with a finger keeping his place, and he looked at Constantine the way people look at weather they have learned to take personally.
"Jason," Constantine said, warmly, spreading his hands, the whole of him radiating the ease of a man arriving at a house where he is welcome. "Bloody hell, it's been a minute."
"Three weeks," Jason Blood said. His voice was measured and low, the kind of measured that comes from practice rather than nature. "And it has never once been enough time away from you."
He looked at Jake. Looked at the axe. Looked at Constantine. "Whatever you're in, I won't help. And be warned: I've updated the wards since your last -- situation -- and you won't find any gaps. You might as well leave now."
He shut the door.
The latch caught.
Jake looked at the closed door and then at Constantine.
"Your friend," he said, "is not very fond of you."
"You heard him," Constantine said, without any visible distress. "We're not friends." He was already studying the front of the building, the line of the window frames, the gap between the door and its frame, with a specific and detached attention. "Makes it easier to go in without wrestling with the ethics of it."
"I'm certain that's never stopped you before."
Constantine's eyes slid to him with something in them that was almost warmth. "You do know me."
"I know you well enough," Jake said. "Same way I know you're not sending me in there because you want to help me. You want something in that house. You've wanted it for three weeks and you couldn't get to it on your own and now you've got someone to walk in first."
A pause.
"You're a smart spider," Constantine said.
"One you shouldn't trick."
"I try not to cross people I don't like." He held Jake's gaze. "I am famously discerning in who I don't."
"Lean into that wisdom," Jake said.
"What's the plan?"
Constantine looked at the door. At the windows above it, at the gap in the curtain on the first floor where the light from inside was slightly warmer than the lamp on the street. He took one more cigarette from his coat, looked at it, decided against it, put it back.
"The plan," he said, "is not to make Jason angry under any circumstances."
"Then what is the axe for?" Jake asked.
"When you do," Constantine said, without missing a beat.
Not if. When.
~MimicLord
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