Constantine Read Free Page B

itself-
    He had to look away. He’d glimpsed something he didn’t usually see in a possession, and he had a gut feeling it wasn’t smart to look at it directly, not for long. Constantine understood exactly what gut feelings were, and why you never, ever ignored them.
    The creature in the little girl’s bruised, rag-fluttery body seemed to tense, as if about to tear itself free and leap at him - and then hesitated, sensing…
    Recognizing Constantine, knowing how many of its kind had been repatriated to Hell, the dark spirit quivered in fear and fury both… and a wind exploded toward Constantine, generated by demonic energy, making him sway, nearly fall. He held his ground, and pulled back the sleeves of his coat and jacket to show the tattoos, the sigils on his forearms that seemed to writhe in anticipation of his retaliation.
    The demon looked away at the sight of the tattoos, gathering its strength for a killing assault.
    Constantine checked his watch. Then he strode across the room to the window - deliberately showing no fear, not watching his back. It was as much about the psychological as the psychic, and even demons had a psychology. He had to be in charge here. The demon would resist it, but Constantine already had the psychological leverage he needed.
    Disliking daylight, the demon had left the curtains intact, and closed. Constantine drew them open with a sweep of his hand, and the room flooded with the amber light of sunset.
    The light struck the girl - the demon - and she made that sickly rattling, that polyglot muttering, deep within her. Then, head shaking in a blur, she went to moaning, and the moan sounded like a little girl’s voice for a moment, before the seething voices, the roaring rattle returned.
    Constantine kept his hands extended, letting the psychic energy flow through him - a particularly fine grade of energy called astral light by the hermeticists. He drew it from above him, into the back of his head down through his spine, out through his arms, so that the “feelers” with which he normally tested the psychic air became channels for divine power - which closed around the demon, contracting to hold it pinned… He didn’t trust those improvised straps. There.
    That would hold her… it… just long enough.
    He lowered his arms, squinted against the smoke rising from the cigarette in his lips as he removed his coat and laid it aside. He coughed, took the cigarette out long enough to spit a little blood, and then took another drag. He laid the butt on the remains of a table, then took a key chain from his pants pocket. On it were house keys, keys to a car he couldn’t legally drive anymore, a Ralph’s Supermarket swipe card, and a set of small, very old silver medallions, each with an image of a saint. When Constantine got to Saint Anthony of the Desert, standing with one foot on the head of a gorgon, the demon reacted with a wet chattering glossolalia.
    Ah--that’s the one, is it? Constantine thought, stepping onto the bed, squatting to straddle the girl.
    Sending his field energy out along his arms, into his fingers, Constantine raised his hands, making the passes, the runic shapes, that directed the energy.
    Then he snarled at the demon, so that its master - who heard whatever the demon heard - would know:
    “This is Constantine. John Constantine, asshole!”
    He pressed the medallion against the girl’s bruised forehead. The metal began to glow red-hot, and smoke rose from burnt skin. The child - and the demon - screamed and convulsed.
    All the time, Constantine was careful not to look directly into the child’s face as it flickered in and out of shadow - but seeing out of the corner of his eyes, he had an impression of the girl’s face alternating with another. One that should not be visible at all in the world of men.
    The girl jolted on the bed, the bonds cut into her wrists and ankles, and then her eyes snapped open and Constantine found himself looking into them as the demon