If you'd like to support me or read extra content, you can find me on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The whiskey burned going down, but John Constantine barely noticed. He sat hunched over the bar in some dive in Hell's Kitchen, nursing his third or was it fourth? glass of the night. The bartender had stopped asking if he wanted another; the bloke just poured and moved on.
Outside, New York hummed with its usual cacophony. Sirens wailed somewhere in the distance. A couple argued on the street corner. But inside Constantine's head, it was always Newcastle. Always Astra.
"Please, John! Don't leave me here!"
Her voice echoed in his mind, a ghost that wouldn't lie down. Eight years old. Blonde pigtails. Terrified eyes as the demon dragged her down to Hell. He'd tried to save her bollocks, he'd caused it. His arrogance, his certainty that he could handle a demon, had damned an innocent child.
The glass trembled in his hand.
"Another," he muttered, shoving it toward the bartender.
The man grizzled, weathered, probably seen everything this city could throw at him raised an eyebrow. "You good, pal?"
"Never better," Constantine lied through his teeth.
He downed the fresh pour in one gulp, grimacing as the liquor seared his throat. The alcohol dulled things, sure, but it never made them go away. Nothing ever made Newcastle go away.
A flicker of movement caught his eye. There, in the mirror behind the bar a pale face, childlike features contorted in anguish. Astra's face.
Constantine spun on his stool, heart hammering. The bar was empty save for two drunks in the corner and the bartender wiping down glasses. No little girl. No ghost.
"Christ," he breathed, running a hand through his hair.
But when he turned back to his drink, the whiskey had frozen solid in the glass. Frost crept across the bar top, spreading in crystalline patterns that looked disturbingly like grasping fingers.
The temperature plummeted. Constantine's breath misted in front of him. The lights flickered once, twice, then steadied but the bulbs had taken on a sickly yellow-green hue that made everyone's skin look corpse-like.
"What the bloody hell?" The bartender backed away, eyes wide.
Constantine was already on his feet, hands moving through the familiar gestures of a warding spell. The words came automatically, muscle memory from a thousand exorcisms: "Esse deinde filius, valete ad Gehennam "
The frost shattered. Shards of ice exploded outward, embedding themselves in the wooden bar top. The temperature snapped back to normal so quickly that condensation immediately formed on every cold surface.
The drunks in the corner stumbled to their feet, swearing and making for the door. The bartender stared at Constantine with a mixture of fear and accusation.
"I didn't " Constantine started, but the words died in his throat. What was the point? He had done this. Maybe not directly, but Astra's ghost wouldn't be haunting him if he hadn't fucked up so spectacularly in Newcastle.
He threw a crumpled twenty on the bar and stalked out into the night.
The streets of Hell's Kitchen had their own kind of menace after dark. Not the supernatural kind though Constantine was learning that Marvel's New York had plenty of that but the purely human variety. Dealers on corners. Working girls in doorways. Desperate people doing desperate things.
Constantine lit a Silk Cut and inhaled deeply, letting the nicotine steady his nerves. Three blocks later, he felt it again that creeping cold at the base of his skull that meant something unnatural was watching.
He ducked into an alley, drawing a piece of chalk from his coat pocket. Quick, efficient movements sketched a circle of protection on the grimy concrete. He stepped inside and waited.
The shadows at the alley's far end deepened, coalescing into something almost human-shaped. Not Astra this time this thing was older, angrier. Its form flickered between states: a towering figure in rotted Victorian dress, a writhing mass of darkness, a grinning skull with too many teeth.
"John Constantine," it rasped, voice like gravel in a blender. "The Constant Mage. We've heard of you even here, in this strange new Hell."
"Flattering," Constantine drawled, though his heart raced. "But I'm not in the mood for visitors. Piss off before I make you."
The entity laughed a sound like breaking bones. "You carry such guilt, magician. Such delicious, exquisite suffering. A child's soul on your conscience. We can taste it from here."
Constantine's jaw clenched. "Stay out of my head."
"Why?" The thing drifted closer, testing the circle's boundary. Where it touched the chalk line, sparks of sickly green light flared. "You've damned yourself already. The girl's torment is your doing. Her screams echo through dimensions. Did you know that? Even here, so far from your native Hell, we hear her crying for you."
"Shut up!" The words came out strangled. Constantine's hands blazed with golden light as he prepared a banishment spell.
"John! Where are you, John? It hurts, it hurts so much!"
Astra's voice, but wrong somehow. Distorted. Coming from everywhere and nowhere.
"She calls for you," the entity purred. "In this reality. In yours. In all the spaces between. You cannot escape what you've done, Constantine. No matter how far you run."
The golden light in Constantine's hands intensified, forming complex sigils in the air. "Fiat voluntas discede daemon IMPERIO TE!"
The spell hit like a thunderclap. The entity shrieked, its form unraveling, dissolving into wisps of shadow that the wind scattered. The unnatural cold retreated, leaving only New York's typical October chill.
Constantine sagged against the alley wall, suddenly exhausted. The Silk Cut had burned down to his fingers. He dropped it, grinding it under his heel.
"Bollocks," he muttered. "Absolute bollocks."
But the entity had been right about one thing: running hadn't solved anything. He'd crossed dimensions, left behind everything he knew, and Astra's ghost had followed him here. Or something was using her memory to torment him. Either way, ignoring it wouldn't make it stop.
He pulled out his mobile still getting used to the fact that Stark's technology made his phone work across realities and scrolled through his limited contacts. Spider-Man. Zatanna. Strange, though that git was always busy. A few others he'd met since arriving.
None of them could help with this. This was his burden to bear.
Constantine pocketed the phone and started walking. Not back to his flat he couldn't face those four walls right now. Instead, his feet carried him south and west, toward the river. Toward the parts of the city that still felt like they had secrets.
Near the Chelsea Piers, he found what he was looking for: a homeless encampment under an overpass. Cardboard boxes, shopping carts, the dispossessed and forgotten huddling around barrel fires.
But Constantine saw beyond the mundane. His magical sight revealed the truth: these weren't all living people. Scattered among the homeless were ghosts, spirits, lost souls clinging to the material world. Some didn't even know they were dead.
An old woman in a tattered shawl stared into a fire that produced no heat for her. A young man with a needle still in his arm wandered in circles, confused. A child Christ, another child sat alone, crying silently.
Constantine approached the child first. Up close, he could see she was maybe six years old, with dark hair and darker eyes. Her clothes were from the 1980s, he'd guess. Blood stained the front of her shirt.
"Hello, love," he said softly, crouching down. "What's your name?"
The girl looked up at him. "Amy. Are you my daddy?"
"No, sweetheart. But I can help you find him." Constantine's voice was gentler than anyone who knew him would believe possible. "Do you remember what happened?"
"I was playing." Her lip trembled. "There was a man. He said he had candy. Mommy always said not to go with strangers, but..." Tears rolled down her translucent cheeks. "It hurt. It hurt so bad. And now I can't find Mommy."
Constantine's hands clenched into fists. He'd heard variations of this story a thousand times, and it never got easier. "I know, Amy. I know it did. But that's over now. The hurting's done."
He stood, beginning the ritual to help her pass on. It wasn't complicated just opening a door, really, and showing the lost soul where to go. The words flowed automatically, a prayer older than Christianity, older than most religions.
Golden light enveloped the child. Her eyes widened.
"I see them," she whispered. "Mommy and Daddy. They're waiting for me."
"Then go to them, love. They've been waiting a long time."
She smiled the first genuine expression of joy Constantine had seen on her face and faded into the light.
One down.
Constantine moved through the encampment, helping each lost soul he found. The man who'd overdosed and didn't understand why his friends couldn't hear him. The old woman who'd frozen to death three winters ago but refused to leave her spot. A teenage boy who'd been shot in gang violence. Each one, he guided toward the light.
It didn't absolve him. Helping these souls cross over wouldn't bring Astra back, wouldn't undo Newcastle. But it was something. It was what he could do.
By the time dawn began to paint the sky pink and orange, Constantine had helped seventeen souls find peace. He was drained, magically and emotionally, but there was a grim satisfaction in the work.
As he trudged back toward his flat in the growing light, his mobile buzzed. A text from an unknown number:
"The girl's soul isn't where you think it is. If you want answers, come to the Sanctum Sanctorum. - S.S."
Constantine stared at the message. Strange? But why now? What did the Sorcerer Supreme know about Astra?
His exhaustion forgotten, he changed direction, heading toward Greenwich Village. Maybe just maybe there was hope after all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you'd like to support me or read extra content, you can find me on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/