"Zombies don't feel pain." Midnight's tone made clear this was a statement of fact, not a defence. "They don't feel anything. What interests me is the crowd." He glanced back at the ring, where the noise had peaked into something almost liturgical. "Voodoo draws power from many sources. Those roars — that collective release — they become something I can use. Which happens to be exactly what dealing with Mnemoth requires."
"And a touch of cunning," Constantine added.
"I've always had faith in your cunning, Constantine." Midnight's smile didn't reach his eyes. "Your friend told me quite a lot about you while you were away." He turned to face him fully. "Hypocritical. Heartless. His words."
A spray of blood from the ring caught Constantine across one cheek. He wiped it away without looking down, the way you'd wipe off rain.
"Nobody's perfect," he said.
"See that you remember that." The warmth dropped out of Midnight's voice entirely. "If you can't go through with it — if you hesitate when the moment comes — we lose. New York loses. Keep that in mind."
"Don't worry about me."
"I never do." Midnight turned back to the ring. "I worry about outcomes."
Constantine lit another cigarette and let the silence settle between them for a moment.
"Where's Lester?"
"Lambs belong in a pen."
Constantine knew exactly what Midnight meant by that. The sub-basement level. The holding space he used for the zombies when they weren't performing — a small, private cell block that smelled like old concrete and something else Constantine preferred not to name.
"Take me to him," he said. "I need to talk to him."
The corridor was so quiet you could hear the fluorescent lights working. That particular silence — the kind that presses against your ears — had a way of expanding to fill any space it was given. Constantine had been in rooms like this before and knew what they did to people over time.
He heard the footsteps coming from above before Lester did. But Lester heard them eventually, and when he did, his head came up off his knees like a man breaking the surface.
He'd been on the floor against the far wall of the cell. However long he'd been there was visible in his face — the hollowed-out, desperate quality of someone who'd had nothing to do but wait and think and feel the absence of everything that had been keeping the edges of his mind together. When he saw Constantine at the bars, something in him broke in the other direction.
He was on his feet and across the cell in seconds.
"John!" His hands grabbed at the bars, then at Constantine's sleeve through the gap. "Man, what the hell is going on? He doesn't have anything — he didn't give me anything, he just locked me up — John, what is this, why is he locking me up—"
"John, I'm scared." His voice dropped to something raw. "I think he's going to kill me. Just give me something, please, some medicine, anything—"
Constantine recognised the register — had heard it before, from Lester and others. The more desperate the pleading, the more pliable the person. He'd known this for years. He was using it now.
"Hey." He kept his voice level and easy, the way you'd talk to someone on a ledge. He gently peeled Lester's grip off his sleeve. "You're going to be fine. But you need to stay down here a little longer, and you can't take anything right now — you know that." He held his gaze. "We haven't finished what we came here to do. Mnemoth is still out there."
"It recognises you, Gary. It wants you." He tilted his head toward Midnight, who had stayed back in the shadows at a distance that was deliberately readable as patience. "All we need is for you to get its attention — draw it close enough. Then Midnight handles the rest. That's it. It's over after that."
"No." Lester's face collapsed. "John, please — you don't understand what that thing is like, you don't know what it does to you, you haven't heard it—"
"I know," Constantine said quietly.
He thought about the man on the supermarket floor. About what it looked like when Mnemoth finished with someone.
"I know exactly what it does. But we don't have another option, Gary. You let it out." He held the silence for a beat. "That's just the shape of it. You're responsible for that."
Lester opened his mouth. Closed it. His hands fell away from the bars.
"But—"
"Have I ever lied to you?"
A long pause.
"No," Lester said finally. "No, John."
"Then trust me." Constantine let himself smile — the real one, the one that had always worked, the one that was half true and half armour and that Gary Lester had never once been able to tell the difference with. He raised two fingers through the bars in a small, certain gesture. "The plan is moving. Tomorrow night this time, we're going home. Yeah?"
Lester looked at him for a moment longer. Then, slowly, the desperation in his shoulders eased by a fraction.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
In the corridor outside, Midnight watched Constantine emerge. That smile again — precise and cold, a scalpel rather than a grin.
"He told me you've been friends since childhood," Midnight said.
"Shut up." Constantine kept walking. "I mean it."
He took the elevator up. His room was on the same floor as Jude's; no sound from next door, which meant the man had done the sensible thing and gone to sleep. Constantine stood in the middle of his own room for a moment.
He was soaked through. Hadn't fully registered it during the running and the church and the cab circuits, but now the wet clothes were sitting against his skin with clammy insistence. He'd been out in that rain for hours.
He moved toward the bathroom.
Is there anything left that can actually make you cry, Constantine?
The thought arrived without context and left just as quickly. He pushed it out.
Just tired. That's all. Tired people think too much. Shower, then sleep.
He opened the bathroom door.
An elderly nun was sitting on the toilet, both hands folded around a crucifix, looking directly at him.
He knew her. Anne Maria.
"Christ!" He slammed the door, grabbed his head with both hands, and stood in the middle of the room breathing hard. "What have I done to deserve this?!"
He went to the wardrobe to get dry clothes.
Two more people were inside it.
Frank. Benjamin. He knew them too.
Constantine stood very still with the wardrobe door open. Then he noticed a pair of feet extending from beneath the window curtain.
Something cracked, somewhere behind his sternum — the particular sound of a man who has been holding a very heavy thing for a very long time finally setting it down, hard.
He grabbed the curtain and yanked it back.
Emma. Of course.
"What the hell!" His voice came out louder than he'd intended and he didn't care. "What do you want?! Why is my room full of dead people?! Why?!"
The four of them looked at him. Pale. Still. Silent.
"In London — dead people! In New York — dead people! Every single room, every single night, do you lot work shifts?! Is this a rota?!"
Nothing. Four pairs of eyes, patient and unblinking, watching him the way you'd watch a small animal do something.
"Say something!" His hands were shaking. "Go on, I'm asking you to say something!"
Silence.
"Don't look at me like that." His voice broke apart and he didn't stop. "Don't you dare look at me like that — I know what you're thinking. I'm sad, alright? I'm sad about Ravenscar, about what happened to all of you — it almost killed me too — you know that! You know that!"
He was yelling now, in a wet shirt, in a hotel room in Manhattan, at four dead people who wouldn't speak.
"We knew the stakes. We took the biggest gamble anyone's ever taken and sometimes — sometimes — the gamble doesn't pay. That's what gambling is! You all knew the risks!"
His throat tightened.
"And Lester — you think I want to do this? You think I've been looking for a reason to feed him to it? Tell me another way. Go on. Tell me another way."
No one moved. No one spoke.
"There isn't one." The heat had gone out of it now, leaving something flatter underneath. "This is what warlocks do. We solve problems with crooked methods and bent tools and nothing is clean and there is no perfect ending, there was never a perfect ending — this isn't a story where someone finds the right answer." He looked at them — at Emma especially. "We never had a choice. I've never had a choice."
He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth for a moment.
"If I don't do this," he said, quieter now, "New York dies. That's the actual equation. That's what I'm working with."
Four faces. Unchanged. Watching.
"I'm the victim here," Constantine said.
No one agreed. No one disagreed. The room stayed exactly as silent as it had been before he started.
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