The possession was a simple one, which was the problem.
Simple meant fast, and fast meant choices, and John Constantine had learned over the course of a very long and very bad career that the fastest choice was almost always the wrong one for somebody who wasn’t him.
The man thrashing on the warehouse floor was named Eddie Kade.
Sixty-two, pawnbroker, decent enough by the standards of a city that didn’t have many.
He’d called John three nights ago with a voice like gravel and shame, said he’d opened a box he shouldn’t have, and now there was something in him that wouldn’t leave.
John had told him to hold on.
John had told him it would be fine.
John had lied on both counts, which was traditional, but Eddie had believed him anyway, which was the part that sat wrong.
Now Eddie was on the floor with his hands clawing at his own throat, and the thing inside him was laughing with Eddie’s mouth, and John was running out of options that didn’t involve someone paying a price Eddie couldn’t afford.
The salt circle was holding.
Barely.
The demon—low-grade, possessor-class, nothing fancy—was old enough to know John’s name and smart enough not to give its own.
It was playing for time, wearing Eddie down from the inside, and in another twenty minutes Eddie’s heart would give out and the demon would slip free and John would have another name for the coat lining.
He needed an anchor.
Something to pin the bastard long enough to pry it loose.
And he had one—a contact in Savannah, a medium named Iris Kern who owed him nothing but had the kind of gift that could hold a demon’s attention long enough for John to work the blade.
The problem was that Iris Kern was careful.
She didn’t take jobs for free, and she sure as hell didn’t take them from John Constantine without collateral up front.
And John didn’t have collateral.
What he had was a very good lie, pre-loaded and ready: he’d promise her a cleaned relic, something she’d been hunting for months, tell her it was hers once this job was done.
She’d believe him, because people always did, and she’d anchor the demon, and John would finish the exorcism, and by the time she realized the relic didn’t exist he’d be three states gone and she’d have learned a valuable lesson about faith.
It was the sort of trick he’d pulled a hundred times.
It was the sort of trick that had gotten him here in the first place—wearing a dead man’s coat and a dead man’s debts and waking up every morning to a line of smoke that signed his name wrong.
Eddie screamed.
It was a wet sound, all throat and breaking.
John reached for the Line.
The smoke rolled up from nothing, fast and cold, and the names lit behind his eyes—the list of people he’d banked, the web of favours owed and debts unpaid.
Iris Kern’s Seal sat near the top, cool and dormant, the icon of a woman who’d never taken a bad deal and didn’t plan to start.
He shaped the call in his head.
The promise.
The lie.
The price he wouldn’t pay.
The Line went dead.
Not silent.
Not absent.
Dead—like a phone line cut mid-dial, the hum dropping to nothing, the Seal in his vision greying out, locked, unreachable.
And in the space where the connection should have been, a single line of text, rendered in that dry mercantile script he was learning to hate:
⸸ TERMS VIOLATED.
CHANNEL B SUSPENDED.
John stared at it.
His hands were still raised, fingers halfway through the gesture that would’ve made the call.
The smoke was gone.
The list was gone.
The Seal was a dead icon, greyed and cold, and the sending sat there like an invoice for something he hadn’t known he’d bought.
“What,” he said aloud, flat and furious, “the hell do you mean, violated?”
The Line didn’t answer.
The Line never answered.
It just sat there, locked, a tool he’d been counting on now uselessly inert, and on the floor Eddie Kade made a sound like a dog dying and the demon laughed louder.
John swore.
Then he swore again, in three languages, none of them polite.
The possession was going to kill Eddie in fifteen minutes, give or take.
The fastest fix had just evaporated.
Which left the slow way.
The hard way.
The way that was going to cost John more than a phone call and a broken promise.
He dropped his hands.
Pulled the cigarette pack from his coat, lit one, took a drag, and thought very unkind thoughts about Hell, its bookkeeping, and the smug bastard who’d decided to give him a line with a conscience.
“Right,” he said, to no one and to Eddie and to the thing inside Eddie.
“We’re doing this the old-fashioned way, then.”
The old-fashioned way meant an anchor John made himself.
No outside help.
No borrowed gift.
Just his voice, his will, and a binding sigil drawn in his own blood, which was the sort of thing that sounded romantic in the old books and in practice meant John was going to spend the next ten minutes carving his palm open and hoping he remembered the words.
He did remember the words.
He always remembered the words.
That was the worst part—the rotting knowledge in his head, half-reliable, good enough to get him killed if he leaned on it wrong.
He knelt outside the circle, flicked the cigarette into the corner, and pulled the knife from his belt.
Small, silver, sharp enough to matter.
The kind of knife you kept for work, not for show.
Eddie’s eyes rolled back.
The demon grinned with his mouth.
“You could leave,” it said, in a voice that was Eddie’s and wasn’t.
“Let the old man go.
He’s had his run.
No one’ll miss him but the girl, and she’s young.
She’ll forget.”
“Shut up,” John said, and opened his palm.
The blood came fast, hot, the pain sharp and immediate and grounding.
He let it pool in his hand, then pressed his palm to the concrete and began to draw—three lines, a bind-rune, an anchor sigil older than Latin and meaner than anything Hell had patented since.
The demon hissed.
It knew what he was doing.
It didn’t like it.
“This is going to take,” it said, and its voice was losing Eddie’s shape, going thin and multi-toned.
“You’re going to lose him.
He’s old.
His heart’s going.
You’re drawing a sigil when you should be calling someone who knows what they’re—”
“I said shut up,” John said, and finished the rune.
The anchor caught.
It wasn’t clean.
It wasn’t fast.
But it held—a grip on the demon’s essence, the part of it that wasn’t Eddie, pinning it in place long enough for John to speak the unbinding.
The words came out hard and sharp, older than the city, older than the country, old enough that the demon couldn’t twist them.
It fought.
Of course it fought.
They always did.
But the sigil was drawn in blood that mattered, and John’s will was the kind of will that had dragged him out of one life and shoved him into another, and he was furious now, the kind of cold fury that didn’t shout, didn’t break, just pressed down like a boot on a neck until something gave.
The demon gave.
It came out of Eddie in a rush—smoke and bile and a sound like tearing cloth—and the sigil caught it, held it, and John spoke the last word that sent it screaming back down to whatever hole it had crawled up from.
The smoke dissipated.
The air went still.
Eddie collapsed, breathing hard, alive.
John sat back on his heels, his palm bleeding onto the concrete, and felt the exhaustion hit him like a freight train. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
His hand hurt.
His head hurt.
The binding had taken more than blood—it always did—and he could feel the weight of it settling into his bones, the kind of tired that wasn’t going to leave with a night’s sleep.
But Eddie was breathing.
The demon was gone.
The job was done.
And John Constantine, con man and exorcist, had kept faith for once in his miserable life, and he hated how much that mattered.
The Line came back ten minutes later.
John was outside the warehouse, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette and trying to remember if he had any bandages in the car.
His palm was wrapped in his handkerchief, red seeping through, and Eddie was inside sitting on a crate and shaking like a man who’d just met the thing under his bed and lived.
The smoke rolled up, unbidden.
The list flickered back into view, every Seal live again, Iris Kern’s icon no longer greyed but glowing faint and cool at the top.
And below it, a single sending, rendered in that dry, merciless script:
⸸ KEEP FAITH, OR KEEP NOTHING.
John stared at it.
Took a drag.
Let the smoke out slow.
“Right,” he said quietly, to the Line, to the night, to the bastard in Hell who’d decided he needed a leash.
“Got it.
Loud and clear.”
The sending faded.
The list stayed.
He thought about Iris Kern, the lie he’d almost told, the price he’d almost made her pay.
He thought about Eddie, inside, alive because John had done it the hard way instead of the fast way.
He thought about Newcastle.
About Astra.
About every time he’d promised something he didn’t intend to keep, and every time someone else had paid the tab.
The Line had caught him mid-con.
Mid-lie.
Mid-bad-faith.
And it had locked him out, stranded him, forced him to solve honestly or not at all.
It had a conscience shaped like a leash.
And John, who had spent a life not keeping faith, understood with a cold and creeping certainty that he’d bonded himself to a tool that would make him better or make him powerless.
He hadn’t decided yet which he hated more.
Inside the warehouse, Eddie called his name.
Weak, grateful, alive.
John finished the cigarette.
Dropped it.
Ground it under his heel.
He’d kept faith.
He’d solved it honestly.
And despite himself, despite everything, the Line had logged it—a marker banked, a debt Eddie now owed, fair and square and clean.
The irony tasted like blood and ash.
He went back inside to make sure Eddie wasn’t going to collapse, and to tell him the job was done, and to not mention the part where John had almost sold him out for the sake of a phone call and a lie.
Some things, Eddie didn’t need to know.
Some things, John was going to have to carry.
And somewhere in the smoke and the static, the Crossed Line logged another name, another job, another marker earned the hard way.
The leash held.
The work continued.
And John Constantine, damned and bound and learning the rules one locked channel at a time, walked back into the warehouse and did the next thing that needed doing.