One name on the roster.
That was what the rope from last night was anchored to — one name, a kitchen gone to instant coffee and cigarette smoke, and a quiet that had already made up its mind.
John sat at the kitchen table with a mug gone cold and the roster open in front of him.
Samuel Weaver, deceased, who’d answer if called because John had done the work and earned it.
One honest marker in a city full of debts he’d just mortgaged himself to clear.
Eddie was fine.
That was the point.
Eddie had gone home to his granddaughter, walked through his own door without a collection notice waiting, and he’d never know what it cost because John wasn’t going to tell him and Sabnock wasn’t in the business of follow-up interviews.
The front door opened.
Gary Green came in carrying two paper bags that smelled of grease and optimism, which meant he’d found the one diner in Atlanta that still believed in hash browns as a food group.
“Breakfast!” Gary announced, like he was unveiling a civic monument.
“Also I got you the thing with the eggs, John, because Chas said you don’t eat enough and I figured—”
“Gary.” John didn’t look up.
“It’s one in the afternoon.”
“Breakfast is a state of mind.” Gary set the bags on the table, slid one toward John with the care of a man defusing a landmine.
“Also I saw the smoke again.
The floaty glyphs.
When you were talking to Eddie outside the shop.”
John’s hand stopped halfway to the cigarette pack.
“You were across the street,” John said.
“Yeah, but the window was open and the light was wrong and I saw it, John.
The symbols.
Like a— like a grid, or a phone screen, but it was smoke, and it was coming off you.” Gary sat down, leaned in, eyes bright and too awake for a man who’d been up till three helping Chas organize the Mill House’s disaster of a storage room.
“So I’ve been thinking—”
“Dangerous habit, that.”
“—and I think I get it now.
It’s a system, right?
Like— like a contact list.
But for magic.
A group chat.” Gary’s voice dropped to a reverent hush.
“Of the damned.”
John looked at him.
Gary looked back, earnest as a dog with a tennis ball, waiting.
“Gary,” John said.
“That is the single worst thing I’ve ever heard anyone call it, and I’ve heard a demon describe it as a LinkedIn for the morally industrious.”
“But I’m right.”
“You’re not wrong, which is worse.”
Gary sat back, grinned, and pulled a hash brown from the bag like a man who’d just won a prize.
“I want in.”
“No.”
“Come on—”
“No.”
“I could help!
I’m good at phones.
I’m very organized.
I know how to mute group chats so you don’t get the notification noise at weird hours—”
“Gary.” John lit the cigarette, let the smoke out slow.
“It’s not a phone.”
“But it works like one.”
“It works like a noose.” John tapped ash into the mug.
“Every name on it is someone you owe or someone who owes you, and the second you call in a favour the whole bloody marketplace hears it and starts calculating what you’re worth.
You don’t want in.
You want to stay the single person in this house the crossroads haven’t heard of.”
“But I’ve already seen it,” Gary said.
“Twice.
Doesn’t that mean I’m, like— verified?”
John choked on the smoke.
“Verified,” he said, once he’d stopped coughing.
“Yeah. Get faster updates on g.com.
Like— I’m in the system now, right?
I’ve seen the UI.
That’s gotta count for something.”
“Gary, mate.
Love of my life.
Light of the occult underground.
It does not work like Twitter.”
“But if I’m already in the system—”
“You’re not in the system.
You’re standing next to a man who is, which is the worst possible place to stand, and the fact that you’ve seen the smoke twice means you’re too bloody close and I should’ve sent you home a week ago.”
Gary stopped mid-bite.
Put the hash brown down.
His face did something complicated.
“You’re trying to keep me safe,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“By keeping me out.”
“That’s generally how safe works, Gary.
You stay away from the fire, you don’t get burned.”
“But you didn’t keep Chas out.”
“Chas has been in since before you were born and I didn’t have a say in it.”
“And Zed—”
“Is none of your business.”
Gary looked at him.
The earnestness was still there, but under it now was something quieter, sharper, the thing John kept forgetting Gary had — the brain that had gotten him into the Time Bureau before it collapsed, the brain that noticed patterns and asked the wrong questions at exactly the right time.
“You keep deciding what people get to risk,” Gary said.
John went very still.
“What?”
“You do.
You decide.
Chas doesn’t get to be on the Line because you won’t let him, even though he’s died for you nine times and probably knows more about your work than I know about anything.
Zed—” Gary hesitated.
“I don’t know what you decide for Zed, but I’ve seen the way you look at her when she’s drawing the smoke-shapes, and it’s the same way you’re looking at me right now.
Like you’re measuring how far away to push her so she doesn’t get hurt.”
“That’s called caring, Gary.”
“No.
Caring is when you tell someone the risks and let them choose.
You just— you decide they’re better off away from you.
And maybe they are.
I don’t know.
But you’ve never once asked them.”
The words landed in the kitchen like spent shell casings.
John took a drag, let it burn down to the filter, stubbed it out in the cold coffee.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Maybe not.” Gary picked the hash brown back up, bit into it, chewed thoughtfully.
“But I know I want to help.
And I know you’re going to tell me I can’t.
And I know that’s you deciding for me, same as all the others.”
He stood, picked up his bag, wandered toward the stairs.
“I’m gonna go reorganize the protective sigil drawer,” he said.
“Chas has them alphabetical but I think categorical makes more sense.
You know, by function.
Banishing, warding, summoning—”
“Gary.”
Gary stopped, looked back.
“Don’t touch the summoning glyphs.
Any of them.
Ever.” Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Gary grinned.
“See?
You do think I’m useful.”
He went upstairs, humming something off-key that might’ve been a Spice Girls song or a hymn.
John couldn’t tell.
The kitchen went quiet.
John sat with the roster, one name on it, and Gary’s voice still hanging in the air like smoke that wouldn’t dissipate.
You’ve never once asked them.
He pulled the cigarette pack out.
Lit another.
The flame caught, steady, and he watched it burn down to his thumb before he shook it out.
Gary was wrong.
Gary was an idiot, a puppy in human shape, a man so terrifyingly sincere he’d probably try to hug a demon if John didn’t stop him.
Gary didn’t understand the first thing about the Line, about the weight of it, about what it did to people when they got close enough to read the terms.
John had asked.
Once.
A long time ago.
And the answer had been a girl dragged to Hell and a name he still couldn’t say out loud without tasting ash.
He wasn’t going to ask again.
The roster sat open.
One name.
One earned marker.
One man who’d died already and couldn’t be hurt by proximity to John Constantine because the worst had already happened and John had given him the one thing he’d wanted — to go home.
John added a note in the margin, small, in his own shorthand: Gary Green — keep clear.
Then he crossed it out.
Then he wrote it again.
Upstairs, something clattered.
Gary’s voice: “I’m fine!
The sigils are fine!
Nothing’s on fire!”
Chas’s voice, dry: “That’s a low bar, Gary.”
John closed the roster.
Drank the cold coffee.
Stared at the empty bag Gary had left on the table, which had a receipt stapled to it and a smiley face drawn in biro next to the total.
You decide they’re better off away from you.
He’d decided.
He’d been deciding for years.
It was the one trick that worked, the one mercy he had left to give — distance.
The space between him and everyone else, measured in lies and deflection and the occasional cruel word to make them leave before the bill came due.
And Gary, the idiot, the puppy, the man John liked more than he’d ever admit, had just named it in a kitchen over hash browns like it was the simplest thing in the world.
John lit a third cigarette.
Gary was wrong.
He had to be.
Because if he wasn’t, then every person John had pushed away, every name he’d kept off the Line, every time he’d chosen their safety over their choice—
The smoke curled up.
He didn’t look at it.
Didn’t need to.
He knew what it would say if it said anything, and it wasn’t saying anything, because the Line didn’t comment on his personal damage.
It just logged the debts and kept the tally and waited, patient, for him to call.
Upstairs, Gary was humming again.
John sat in the kitchen, alone, with one honest name on the roster and a lie he couldn’t stop telling, and decided — again — that keeping people away was the same as keeping them safe.
It had to be.
The alternative was thinking about what he’d do if they chose to stay.
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The throne acknowledges.