The old medina was a maze, which was part of the appeal and part of the problem. You could lose hours in it without trying, and everything was for sale — goods, services, people, information, silence. Lester had been there long enough to understand that this was its own kind of Night City, low-budget and sun-bleached, where the truly absurd was just Tuesday.
He hadn't expected the boy.
It happened at the entrance to a sweatshop — a narrow doorway in a wall the colour of old bone. A man in a long robe emerged, threw a boy out onto the street with the perfunctory efficiency of someone discarding a defective tool, and went back inside without looking to see where he'd landed.
Lester stopped. He looked down.
The boy was Black, Sudanese by the look of him, though Lester couldn't say for certain. Thin enough that the outline of his ribs was visible beneath his shirt. He was convulsing slightly, eyes rolling, unable to speak — Lester would discover why in a moment. His upper body was covered in markings: dense, intricate patterns and runes that ran from his forehead down across his arms and abdomen, packed together so tightly they seemed to breathe. Grotesque and precise at once. Ancient and deliberate.
Lester had taught himself the occult the same way Constantine had — from books, from mistakes, from necessity — and the moment he crouched down and looked at the boy, something moved in him. A pull, like the feeling before a storm.
"He was a slave," Lester said, accepting the cigarette Constantine held out to him and drawing deeply before continuing. He was staring at the ceiling now, not at them. "I looked into his eyes, and I knew — the same way I knew in Newcastle."
At that, Constantine's face changed. Just slightly. Just enough. Lester didn't notice.
"There was something inside him. I couldn't leave it alone. So I took him with me."
The room he was staying in was cramped and hot even with the curtains drawn. Lester pulled them shut anyway, killed the lights, and blocked every crack where daylight might get in. Then he moved the boy to the bed, lit a single candle, and brought out the bottle — long-necked, old, the kind of vessel that had purposes ordinary glass didn't. In the near-dark, a rainbow-coloured light moved across its surface.
And he began to sing.
The chant that came out of him was something between liturgy and invocation, older than anything he'd formally studied, the kind of thing that arrived complete when you needed it. The moment the first syllable left his mouth, a sound rose from the boy's body — dense, layered, terrible — a buzzing that started in the sternum and spread outward until the walls were vibrating with it. The boy convulsed against the bindings, twisting without sound, because he had no tongue to scream with.
Lester kept singing.
Bubbles formed along the boy's dark skin — hundreds of them, thousands, rising to the surface and breaking as the buzzing deepened. The noise filled the room until it filled Lester's skull, until the street sounds outside and the boy's strangled breathing and the scrape of the bed frame against the floor tiles all dissolved into it, leaving only that immense, reverberating hum, like a cathedral bell struck from the inside.
Then the first blister burst. Then all of them.
What came out of the boy's flesh didn't crawl — it poured. Mosquitoes, flies, things without names, emerging from the skin the way insects emerge from a cocoon after the change is complete. They rose and gathered and coalesced in the air above the bed, forming something vast enough to fill the room: compound eyes the size of dinner plates, articulated limbs, mouthparts working at nothing, a pair of wings whose span was invisible because the room wasn't big enough to contain them. The buzzing became a roar.
Lester felt the power of it pressing against him — enormous, ancient, hungry — straining at the boundary between what it was and what it wanted to become.
He did not let it go. He sang louder.
Time dissolved. He couldn't have said afterward whether it lasted seconds or hours. He only knew there was a point at which his voice and the demon's resistance were the same intensity, and then a point at which they were not — and then the thing in the air was gone, and the buzzing in the bottle was the only sound left, and Lester collapsed forward onto his hands and knees on the floor, emptied of everything.
"I overwhelmed him," Lester said, exhaling slowly, eyes still fixed on some private ceiling. The ghost of a smile. "Completely. I trapped him in the bottle with magic. I was stronger." A breath. "It was the first time I had ever actually done it. Not like Newcastle, John. This time, it worked."
Constantine said nothing. He listened.
"And the boy?" It was Jude who asked it — quietly, evenly, though his hands had closed in his lap.
Lester blinked, and refocused, as though being asked about something peripheral to the main story.
"Dead," he said. "Looked like it'd been turned inside out. Bloody mess."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Jude's jaw tightened. He didn't speak.
"Anyway." Lester seemed to collect himself, resurfacing from wherever the memory had taken him. He raised his hands as if cradling something invisible — an old bottle, an old weight. "It was churning inside the glass. Even through the wall of it, I could feel him. The hunger." His expression drifted toward something harder to name than contentment. "He wanted me. And I wanted — I wanted to feel it. Inside me. Scratching."
Chas, in the corner, did not look up from his hands.
"But I held back." Lester let his arms drop. "The feeling lasted until late that night — the exhilaration, the high, better than anything I've ever taken. And then it dropped away, and I was just on the floor next to the bed, curling up, and the panic hit me like a wall."
He'd lain there in the dark with the cramps starting and the cold sweat coming, and then he'd turned his head and seen — by candlelight, just beyond the edge of the mattress — a small, mangled hand. Blood dripping from stiff fingers onto the side of the bottle. Tick. Tick.
And then the buzzing started again. Not from outside. From inside his head.
The demon speaking. A million voices at once, each one saying the same name, over and over and over, layered until they sounded like one continuous tone. Lester had tried to shut it out and couldn't. It spoke through the night — pleading, threatening, singing, wheedling, describing. It knew what Lester wanted, the way all truly dangerous things know what you want, and it fed that want in the dark with patient, methodical care.
By the time the light came back through the curtains, Lester was still on the floor.
And the voice was still talking.
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