The Undead Spider #102
The last of the dark energy left the blade in a slow current and the axe above the circle dissolved as it went. The iron went thin and then gone, drawn into Jake's chest.
The weight of it settled in him like something returning rather than something new, and the axe was simply no longer present in the air.
Jake's hand came up to his chest and stayed there.
"I feel strange," he said.
He meant it as an observation. It came out as neither alarm nor complaint, only the flat reporting of a man monitoring his own systems while standing in a clock tower at an hour he'd stopped tracking.
The mechanism above them ran on, gears completing turns in the dark, and then his right hand went slack at his side as though the signal reaching it had been interrupted somewhere along the wire. The mechanical arm remained exactly where it was, gripping the grimoire with the indifferent certainty of something that did not need to be told twice.
Jake rolled his shoulder and the signal didn't return.
"My hand," he said. "I can't feel my hand."
Constantine was watching him from the edge of the circle, chalk still on his fingers.
"The demonic energy is concentrating," he said, and crossed the distance between them to look at the slack hand, turning his head to examine it from an angle. "Seems like it's a beacon for dark energy."
Jake looked at it. The hand hung at the end of his wrist and did nothing. He looked at Constantine.
"Let's finish this before I lose another arm."
Constantine moved toward the grimoire and reached for it, and it stayed where it was, the mechanical fingers not releasing. Constantine pulled. The arm didn't negotiate.
"The book stays with me," Jake said.
Constantine straightened and looked at him and withheld his objection. "You really do have trust issues." He held the look for a breath, then lifted both hands and turned away from the grimoire. "But you're right. For what comes next, it's better in your--"
The book moved on its own.
The pages began to turn, rapid and successive, fanning through the air in the tower's cold draft, and the mechanical grip held the spine but the book pulled upward and out of it and rose into the air above the circle with its pages settling open on a spread Jake couldn't read, and he reached for it and his hand closed on nothing.
Constantine was already moving. His hand traced a shape in the air and directed the book sideways -- not to the mechanical arm, which had held it and lost it, but to the right hand, the slack one, the one still hanging without sensation at Jake's side, and the pages folded against the palm and Constantine spoke a short sequence of syllables and a band of light crossed Jake's wrist and the book's spine simultaneously, wrapping once, holding.
"It's better if it's in your actual flesh-and-bone arm," Constantine said.
The book lay open in Jake's grip, held there, the pages no longer moving, sitting still against his palm.
Constantine looked at the spread and then at Jake and said, "Now," and there was nothing casual in his voice. "Say with me."
He began.
The words had hard consonants and the gears above them responded to it, their turns accelerating by a fraction, finding a faster period, and Jake's mouth opened and the sounds came out of him in time with Constantine's without his willing it.
His lips shaped syllables he'd never learned in a language that had no alphabet he recognized, and the sensation of producing them was the sensation of biting into something sour with no preparation, a sourness that went past the tongue and into the back of the throat and sat there. He didn't stop speaking.
The circle on the boards brightened.
The chalk lines loaded with something that wasn't light and wasn't dark, and the chalk's geometry stopped being marks on wood and became the thing the marks had always been gesturing toward. The angles pulled inward, finding their intent, and the dark residue in Jake's right hand rose through his palm and fed the circle the way water feeds a root.
The gears turned faster.
The tower had been running at its own pace for centuries and now it was running at the wrong pace, the pendulums sweeping wide and faster than their lengths should have permitted, the escapement clicking at intervals that didn't match anything mechanical, and somewhere above them a bell began to ring -- not in sequence, not in the counted order of an hour being marked, but in the inconsistent overlapping pattern of something that had lost its sequence entirely, bell following bell with no logic between them except urgency.
Constantine raised his voice and Jake raised his with him and the effort of it was the effort of speaking into a current, a current that pressed against his chest from all sides and wanted him to stop. The tower walls streamed with something that wasn't wind, streams of it visible, running in spirals from the floor upward and collecting around the edges of the circle in a mass that turned and fed itself.
A voice arrived in the middle of it.
Old and distant and not pleased, speaking from somewhere that predated both of men by enough time to make the distinction irrelevant. It warned in a language the hard consonants of the spell had been translated from, the original and the copy running simultaneously in the air of the tower.
The bells rang over it and the gears turned over it and Jake kept speaking.
Then something happened in his chest.
A strand came out of it -- from somewhere behind the sternum, through the fabric, golden and luminous and thin as spider silk. It rose into the air above him and found the main current circling the room and wrapped around it in a spiral, once and twice and then the third turn completed and the strand held and the current held it back, like a web anchored to a living point.
The system interface in his peripheral vision went white.
Screens populated faster than his eyes could track them, columns of data scrolling too fast to grasp, and the chanting in his throat nearly stopped because reading the screens while producing the syllables was not a division of attention he had the bandwidth for.
Jake forced the words, his tongue finding the shape of the next consonant by feel rather than recognition, and he held the sequence while the screens populated and the strand from his chest pulled at the current and the bells rang in their wrong order and Constantine's voice drove through all of it with authority.
The blinding light arrived without preamble.
It came from the circle and moved outward in all directions and for a moment the tower was a column of white with no walls and no mechanism and no floor, only the light and the sound of the bells and the feeling of the current running through his right arm from palm to shoulder in a sustained pressure that he understood was the spell completing its last movement.
And then it came down.
Slowly, the light receding back toward the circle and the circle releasing its load, the chalk lines dimming from their loaded brightness to ordinary chalk marks on ordinary boards, the gears above slowing through their wrong pace back toward their right one, the bells completing their last inconsistent sequence and then silence, the pendulums settling, the mechanism returning to itself with patience.
Jake stood in the dark of the tower with his arm at his side and his chest rising and falling.
"Bloody bollocks," Constantine said.
He was looking at the circle and the boards.
Jake felt his arm. He flexed the fingers of his right hand and they responded, all of them, the sensation returned, and he let the grimoire drop from the loosened band at his wrist and it fell to the boards and he rolled his neck once, the vertebrae finding their adjustment, and he looked at Constantine.
"Did it work?"
"I've learned," Constantine said, still looking at the circle, "to set the bar low enough that failure feels like a choice I made." He exhaled through his nose and turned toward Jake. "Give it a minute."
Jake held his right hand in front of him and watched it. His fingers moved when he asked them to, all the signals running in both directions, and the hand was his in every measurable way -- but he stood there watching it anyway, because there was something in it that hadn't been there before the tower and the circle and the strand from his chest, something he could feel without being able to name, a density in the palm, a presence in the knuckles that wasn't pain and wasn't nothing.
He held it still and listened to it.
The sensation that arrived was every nerve ending in the hand registering simultaneously, a fullness that pushed against the skin from inside, and he looked at it and said, "Pain. Why is it painful?"
"Possession will do that to you," Constantine said.
"Is that the only consequence?"
Constantine looked at him. "I'd figured that was enough to make you want to cut it out."
"I'm not severing another arm."
"Then expect worse." He paused, almost in consideration. "On the bright side -- it lives to serve you, if you keep it." He held Jake's eyes. "Look at your palm."
Jake turned his hand over, the movement slow, the shaking in it fine and continuous, and opened the fingers.
"The axe is in it," Constantine said.
The axe manifested in his grip.
Not falling into it from somewhere above -- present, suddenly and completely, the haft solid in his palm and the blade catching the tower's ambient light in a streak of dark metal, and his fingers closed around it before he chose to close them. He rotated it once and looked at the blade and the residue on it had changed, the dark energy sitting differently now, closer to the surface, more responsive.
"You wanted a way to act without Death noticing," Constantine said. "Use that."
Jake rotated it again. The axe sat in his hand with no weight at all, which was wrong in a different way than the pain was wrong, and he looked at it and said, "It's weightless. And far too impractical."
"Then it's a sword."
The axe shifted. The haft shortened and the blade elongated and the balance changed through his palm and became a sword, and he held it and looked at it and Constantine said, "Or a dagger," and it shifted again, the blade compressing, the haft finding a new proportion, and Jake said nothing because his attention was on the metal and how it moved, the transformation happening through his palm rather than at it.
"Whatever works best for you," Constantine said.
The form continued shifting on its own -- a batarang, flat and winged, balanced across two fingers, and then a bow, which Jake looked at for a moment before Constantine said, "It's an extension of your hand. Which means it doesn't work ranged. Distance defeats the mechanism."
Jake held the shape it had settled in and looked at it and said, "I was wrong earlier."
"About?"
"It's not painful." He held it still. "It's throbbing."
Constantine looked at him for a moment. "You're an awfully positive man for someone carrying that much darkness around."
Jake let the weapon dissolve back into his palm and looked at Constantine. "Sounds like your work here is done."
"That it does." Constantine dusted the chalk from his hands, most of it going, some of it staying in the creases of his knuckles, and looked at the boards where the grimoire had fallen. "If you could hand me the book."
Jake looked at where it lay. He looked at Constantine. His hand dropped toward it and stopped.
"You've got what you wanted," Constantine said. He spread his hands. "That's a completed transaction."
The web line crossed the room and the grimoire came off the boards and Jake caught it and threw it at Constantine in one motion, and Constantine caught it and had it shut before the motion completed. Jake held Constantine's eyes.
"Not quite," he said, and let his eyes move to the coat on Constantine's shoulders and back. "But you've been more honest than I expected." A beat. "I'll give you a head start. Before I come after you."
Constantine looked at him. The corner of his mouth moved and his hand found the coin in his pocket and turned it once, and the air opened along its seam in front of him, and the street on the other side was different from the one they'd left -- further away, warmer.
"I'd lower the bar on that one, mate," Constantine said, one foot already through. "You will end up regretting ever crossing paths with me."
He stepped through and the portal closed and the tower held its cold and its mechanism and its silence.
Jake stood in it for a moment.
Then he raised his right hand and let the weapon come into it -- a short blade, curved, the one form that had felt most natural through the rotation -- and he cut once through the air in front of him, a short testing arc, and watched the dark residue trail behind the edge and dissipate.
He dropped his hand and looked at the navigation thread in his peripheral vision.
The restless spinning from when Constantine stepped through the portal slowed through its last rotation and settled and held, pointing through the tower's stone wall in the direction of a portal that had closed and a man who was already somewhere else.
Jake looked at the thread.
One problem down, on to the next.
A/N:
And he never listened.
I've been plotting throughout the weekend. Expect more chapters from now one. Find the roadmap pinned in Patreon.com/mimiclord
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I'd also like to thank everyone still supporting this fic through Patreon, comments and/or power stones. I'm happy you're reading this!