###### The Undead Spider #101
Constantine was standing exactly where he'd left him with his hands in his pockets, and the expression on his face was the expression of a man who had sent someone into a situation expecting a particular outcome and received a different one entirely.
He looked at the grimoire.
He looked at Jake.
He looked at the building behind Jake, the dark window on the first floor, and then back at the grimoire.
"Bloody hell," he said, and it came out quiet enough that it was clearly not meant to be heard.
"Didn't think I'd make it?" Jake asked.
Constantine's mouth opened and the honest answer moved behind his eyes for a moment before the performed one arrived. "I thought you'd make it," he said. "I'm surprised you made it with the book."
"You doubted me."
"I've doubted better men." He took the dead cigarette from his lips and looked at it and put it away. "But if you make it a habit of surviving powerful demons like that, try a profession in exorcism." He studied Jake with the attention of a man recalibrating something. "Good hours, terrible pay. You'd be good for it."
"I'll start by defeating my own demons."
Constantine looked at him for a beat and then made a sound in his throat that might have been a laugh. "That's the spirit. Though I'll warn you -- I know how that story ends, and I don't think you'd carry a trenchcoat half as well."
"Is that what it represents?" Jake asked. "Your coat?"
The question landed differently than Constantine expected. Jake watched him absorb it, the way the easy surface of his expression tightened by a fraction before the fraction was managed, his shoulders pulling slightly inward into the coat's collar without him choosing to do it.
"It's just a coat," Constantine said.
"It's more than that."
"Right, we've covered this, the coat does--"
"It carries your depression and guilt," Jake said. "I noticed it when Nergal mentioned Newcastle. The way you went still."
The street went quiet around them. Constantine stood in the flickering light with his hands going deeper into his pockets and his chin dropping half a degree toward his chest, and for a breath he was only a man standing in the cold.
"I was starting to warm up to you," he said, and his voice had lost the performance, sitting flat and honest in the space between them. "And then you had to go and be very, very unlikeable."
Jake let out a short sound through his nose.
"I've got the grimoire," he said.
Constantine's shoulders dropped and some of the weight came out of the set of his jaw. He looked at the book in Jake's hand, flat and dark with its shifting cover and its cover-face that didn't resolve into anything, and his expression settled into something that was working hard at looking casual.
"Right," he said. "Now you hand it over."
He opened his palm and a flame appeared in it, high and copper and not casual at all, and he held it there with the patience of a man who had done this before and understood the shape of it.
Jake shifted the axe off his back into one hand and planted his feet on the cobblestones and held the grimoire at his side and looked at Constantine.
"No," he said.
The flame held.
"I can't cast the spell if I don't have the book," Constantine said.
"Then you don't have to. I can find someone else."
Constantine's eyes moved to the grimoire and back. "Good luck finding another caster with half the power or half the wits to attempt something this dangerous without killing themselves and you in the process. I'm the best available option and we both know it."
"Maybe," Jake said. "But it's a better gamble than handing you this and losing any chance I've got."
The flame sat in Constantine's palm for another breath and then he looked at it and closed his hand around it and it went out. He exhaled through his nose, and he rolled his neck once and put his hands back where they lived.
"What do you say," he said, after a moment, "to a game of poker."
"I don't gamble."
"I didn't ask you to. I find a few drinks alongside it clears the fog, helps me think." He pulled the dead cigarette out again, turned it between his fingers, a habit with no payoff. "We've both got something the other needs and we're standing in the street at God knows what hour talking about it. Seems like a waste."
Jake considered him. Then he reached back and planted the axe into the space between two cobblestones and it stood there, haft upright, the blade catching the lamp's light in a streak of dark metal.
"Open the portal," he said.
Constantine raised an eyebrow.
"To where you'll cast the spell," Jake said. "If there's a way this works for both of us we'll sort it there."
Constantine looked at him for a long moment with his eyes narrowed to the degree they went when he was running sums on something and wasn't sure he liked the result. Then he reached into his coat and his fingers found the coin and he turned it once and the air ahead of them opened along its seam, colors moving backward at the edges, and the street on the other side was gone.
This time Jake held his ground and gestured at the opening.
Constantine looked at him. Looked at the portal. Looked back at Jake with the expression of a man who has already used this move once in an evening and recognizes the position he is now in.
He stepped through.
Jake pulled the axe from the stones and went after him.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
The portal closed behind him and the sound arrived before anything else -- a low, constant movement of parts, layered and enormous and coming from every surface of the space at once. A sound that had so much age behind it that it had become the room's silence rather than a disturbance of it, gears and escapements and the long slow drag of weights on chains shifting in the dark.
Jake stood on a wooden platform with his hand still on the axe haft and let his sense read the space. Stone walls, cold, centuries of cold. Above him the tower rose in sections, each floor open to the one above through gaps in the planking, and in the gaps and through the gaps the mechanism ran -- brass and iron and weight and wire, all of it moving on its own logic with the calm of something that had not stopped since before anyone now alive was born.
"Clock tower," he said. "Unexpected."
"Oldest one in London." Constantine was already crouching with chalk in his hand, drawing the first lines of a circle on the boards with the fluency of a man who had drawn enough of them to stop thinking about the geometry. "People underestimate places like this. All that accumulated time, all those counted seconds, stored in the stone and the metal without anyone ever meaning to store it."
He drew another line, connected it, began the interior marks. "For something drawn out of a book like that one, you want as much concentrated energy in the room as you can get. This place has centuries of it."
"Will it be enough for two spells?"
Constantine kept drawing. "Possibly."
"You're lying."
"I'm speculating." He sat back on his heels and looked up. "I don't have enough to work with, mate. Two spells from the Chronos Temporis in one casting, with the energy available in this room -- I can't promise both hold. One, certainly. Two is the part I can't guarantee."
Jake looked at the axe in his hand.
The blade still carried the residue of the night -- the dark energy from Nergal's grip, the copper light Constantine had pushed through it at the barrier, both of them present in the metal and neither of them fully gone. He turned the haft in his palm and felt the weight of it redistribute.
"The axe," he said. "It belongs to a demon lord. That has to be enough to supplement the energy in this place."
Constantine went still with the chalk in his hand. He looked at the axe and his expression did something with its lower half that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't far from one.
"That," he said, "is exactly the solution and exactly the problem, in the same breath." He stood, the chalk marking his fingers gray and copper. "A relic from a demon lord -- and that axe is a relic, make no mistake, it's got Nergal's entire claim to this plane written into the metal -- carries enough potency to anchor both spells to the same casting. No question."
He looked at Jake. "The problem being that a relic only carries that potency while it belongs to the demon lord in question. The moment it officially changes hands, the link to Nergal severs and the charge goes with it."
"So it needs to stay linked to him," Jake said.
"It would need to remain linked," Constantine said. "Without being directly held." He paused in a way that suggested the next sentence had been there for a while. "Which is possible. If the axe were to pass into another owner through demonic possession rather than transfer."
Jake looked at him.
"Possession," Jake said. "By an axe."
"By an axe. Yes."
A gear somewhere above them completed a long turn and the click of it moved through the floor and up through both their feet.
"Do it," Jake said.
Constantine looked at him with the expression of a man who had expected more resistance and was now deciding whether the lack of it should concern him. "You understand what you're adding to the consequences here. On top of everything else the spell involves."
"What are the consequences?"
Constantine turned the chalk over in his fingers once and set it on the boards beside the circle. He straightened and his hands went into his pockets and he looked at Jake with the flat honesty he kept underneath the performance, the voice that had no London in it because London was a surface and this came from somewhere below that.
"There's a reason the Chronos Temporis spell has never been cast," he said. "Or if it has been cast -- and I think it probably has, once, somewhere, in the last thousand years -- no one remembers it, and that's the point. Once the spell is used, regardless of whether it holds, regardless of whether it does everything you need it to do -- the one who casts it and the one it's cast for are written out. Forgotten by Time. The current moves on around the space where you were and nothing in it has any record of you having been there."
The clock's sound filled the space where Jake's response should have been.
"You're telling me now," Jake said, "because you're being frank, or because you're hoping I step back."
The corner of Constantine's mouth moved. "Little bit of both, if I'm honest."
"Then it's a good thing I run on my own personal clock," Jake said. "Do it."
Constantine looked at him for one breath longer, and then something in him settled, and he turned to the circle on the boards and extended one hand toward Jake.
"Hand me the axe," he said.
Jake set the axe into his grip.
Constantine didn't hold it long. His free hand moved through a sequence of shapes Jake couldn't follow and the axe rose out of his hand without being thrown, rising until it hung in the air above the circle with its blade pointing down and the dark energy in the metal beginning to surface, rising through the iron like heat through stone, and the copper light in Constantine's palms built and climbed to meet it.
He began to speak.
The language was full of hard consonants, and the clock's mechanism above them responded to it, the gears turning faster by a fraction and the pendulums finding a new period, the whole tower leaning into the sound as if it had been waiting for someone to say these words in this place.
The axe rotated.
The dark energy left the blade in a slow current, drawn downward toward the circle, and where it touched the chalk lines the lines held and brightened and the geometry of the circle began to mean something, its angles loading with intent, and then the current found Jake.
It hit his chest at the sternum and moved inward and the sensation wasn't pain -- it was a deep structural pressure, like something finding a place in him that had always been shaped for it without him knowing.
His hand came up to his chest without his choosing and stayed there, and the axe above the circle turned on its axis and the runes along its blade pulsed once in the dark of the tower and then again, finding a new rhythm that matched something internal to him that hadn't had a rhythm before.
Above them, the clock counted on.
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