The first thing I dreamed about was a woman.

She was a small, fragile looking creature, but her dark green eyes radiated a palpable energy that I could see even from where I was. Where was that, exactly? I rubbed sleep from my face. Oh right- John's couch. The only thing that was slightly out of the ordinary was that the couch was, of all places, in the middle of some gorgeous, enclosed courtyard that looked vaguely European. The hot, damp air around me smelled like mimosa blossoms and, strangely, coffee.

I knew it was a dream when I woke up on someone's couch, outdoors, in a place I'd never seen. It is a mark of how bizarre I am that I took this with a Zen sort of nonchalance, before thinking, John's wards didn't work for me.

I felt curiously disappointed.

Feeling also that a supine position would not be the best one if some nasty thing had come to play with me, I propped myself up so that I was at least sitting, not laying, against the fat cushions. Warily, I watched the tiny woman approach me, tottering even with the aid of her cane. She stopped almost a foot before me, eying me with an expression of mingled amusement and sternness. There was something about those eyes, set in a tanned face amid a sea of wrinkles, that made her familiar in a way I could not place.

Finally, she pronounced, "Well, you've done the best you can, haven't you, girl?" It was the thickest accent I'd heard in a long time- very Cajun. The ends of words were nearly entirely neglected, giving a liquid cadence to her speech. She wore a lurid blue dress that was spangled with yellow daisies.

"The best I can with..."

She guffawed. "Oh, just life."

"Ye-ah," I said. Was she a ghost who'd come to call? I looked around the courtyard. The intricate iron railings on the second story balcony were painted a deep indigo. Bougainvillea snaked their way up trellises and railings alike, wrapping bright pink blossoms and thorny vines around everything. It looked to be just about nightfall, that ambiguous time between dusk and night itself. "Where are we?"

"Somewhere your blood remembers," the old lady said, quite cheerfully. That sounded a little bit on the perverse side, but I didn't want to try and dictate the terms of conversation.

"Okay. Who're are you?" Dumb question, maybe.

"Oh child, those wards are working," she said dismissively, like she could see into the blurry mess that was my mind right now. "In point of fact, they helped draw me to you." Off my incomprehension, she elaborated, "Yes, I'm quite dead. Been dead for longer than I was alive." She sat down on the same side of the couch Chas had occupied earlier. "I'm a grandmere of yours- forget how many greats I have to add in, fewer if I go off of your father- on your father's side. Rosalie."

Suspiciously, I said, "But I thought... dad wasn't born in France then?" It was possible that, just like any other family, my own had several branches we just didn't know about. My father had also had a Cajun accent, not so obvious as this one, and I'd always chalked it up to his years in Louisiana. Many Cajun and Creole children learn French (or Creole, especially if their family is from, say, some of the Caribbean islands or Haiti) alongside English, and I was no exception. I didn't use it anymore, but you might say I had a knack still for French. I thought languages were really fun anyway.

"Your mother, yes. Your father, no. He was born in a little town- more of a settlement, really- none too far from New Orleans." The way she said "New Orleans" made me grin. "None of this is strictly relevant, young lady."

How would it not be, to me- when this was the very, very first time any dead relative had contracted me? I'd never once heard, or seen, my mother or father. By the way, they hadn't died particularly traumatically: my father suffered a heart attack when I was sixteen, and Mom was in a car accident with her best friend a year ago. The friend had died too, only she'd clung to life for another two days.

I shook my head. Everything was relevant, provided this woman really was who she said she was. I had my doubts, but staging this would be very elaborate for the most powerful demon, especially since I'd never seen this place or this woman in my entire life. There was no prior knowledge to take from me and shape into a convincing lie. As though she was peering into my brain, Rosalie scowled.

I said, "Sorry, I don't get this." I swept an arm around at our scenery. "And forgive me for being suspicious, but I've done some stuff recently that's attracted attention. I didn't mean to."

Was that pity in her look? I mean, I was taking heart in the fact that she was actually having a conversation with me, instead of a) attacking me or b) ignoring my presence as she dragged a body behind her, or was followed by a swarm of some class of flying demon. "This is where I feel most comfortable talking to people," Rosalie said simply.

"And you need to talk to me."

"Briefly."

"About?"

"Your ability."

I drew my next breath in sharply. "Could you... were you a manipulator?"

"My husband was. I was a mambo."

"A voodoo priestess," I said flatly.

"Yep," said Rosalie happily, with a flick of her feet. "Not a special one, or anything, in particular."

This was completely beyond anything I'd expected. "So, you know how I work."

"More than you, maybe, but still not enough because everyone is always different," said Rosalie, watching as fireflies began to surface and glimmer. "Your grandpere, he was a quiet man. A very cornered man. Much like your Constantine." Her eyes flicked back to me. "Lots of pain behind the quiet."

"He's not mine," I protested readily. "We've just started... working together."

She had River's eyes! That was it. "You think that's coincidence, do you chere?"

I'd been starting to wonder that myself, back in the dormant part of my brain that I don't prefer to listen to. This dream also felt different from any of the others, which held things I was not supposed to see. Things I didn't want to see. This one felt right, in the sense that it was supposed to be mine. The couch was a nice touch, too: it gave everything a Surrealist aesthetic. "No," I admitted. "I don't think you're a coincidence either."

Rosalie patted my knee. "I'm not. You're a tough person to get to." Well, that was plain ironic. Here I was, with everyone plodding through my head whenever they wanted, and here she was, saying I was hard to get to. Maybe we were operating on different channels. I wondered, if she were to try River instead, would it be easier to get through? The dead aren't my vehicle of choice the way they are his. My mind reeled with the possibilities. "But about your power: use it as much as you can."

Possibly, that was what everybody heard about their power. "I don't think it's that easy."

"No," Rosalie said, "but it might become easier, and it might be in time."

"In time for what?"

"Preventing the world from becoming a living Hell," said Rosalie serenely, after clearing her throat. And that cleared that up: the dead officially had somewhere else to be other than our world. I felt only a fuzzy recognition of what she'd just said. I had no clue what it even meant. There were so many ways it could be interpreted.

My laughter was hysterical, and I had to curl back up into a ball. "Oh, spectacular." My distant female relative petted my hair like I was an animal who needed to be soothed.

"I can't say no more," Rosalie said softly. "And you got to wake up now."

I opened my eyes. I'd really spent the whole afternoon sleeping on John's couch. In his apartment. (He must have been thrilled.)

It was night now: my watch told me it was ten past two. I was surprised I hadn't been thrown out into the hallway, or roughly woken up and driven home. Blearily, I gathered all my thoughts about the dream I'd just come out of. Why had Rosalie told me I needed to wake up? As far as I was concerned, that was a crime. I'd just gotten more sleep than I'd had in a whole week. My eyes adjusted to the darkness that was punctuated only by the ambient streetlight falling gently in through the open window slats.

The darkness felt... wrong, somehow. Heavier? Noiselessly, I crept up from the couch and plodded to John's bedroom.

Just before I crossed the threshold, I felt a large, cold hand close over my mouth and I shrieked against it. Stupid reaction, really, when I knew the wards hadn't been broken. Still, the whole atmosphere felt charged.

He breathed harshly into my ear, "Shut up. There's something downstairs."

Why weren't we downstairs then? And why were we acting like we were hiding from S.S. Officers? Surely he had enough weaponry to deal with whatever it was. I thought a little. There was one problem with that. The bowling alley was not at all in a secluded location. And when you'd had as much police attention as John, you most likely didn't want any more of it.

"Mmph?" I said, and he took his hand away, putting a finger to his lips.

"And at the fucking windows," he said, slightly more audibly. He gestured, and I looked. Anticlimactically, I saw nothing, but he obviously saw some sort of threat. "You're trouble. If this is your trouble, that is." He didn't sound perturbed; I could have sworn he sounded mildly excited.

We weren't very far from each other, so I could speak very quietly. "Isn't Bee down there?" I hadn't been too clear on where the guy lived, but from what I could gather it was somewhere in the building.

"His hackles are raised- same as ours," said John... not that it was very clarifying.

"Why are we being so... why are we hiding?" I demanded.

That was when I saw he gave off a faint glow: his magic was buffering through his body. I noticed the glow after noticing he was wearing only a pair of boxers. God, I was worse than a teenage boy. "Attracting attention isn't always good," he said obliquely. This coming from the man who strode down the street every day deporting demons back to Hell. I barely kept from rolling my eyes.

A crackle of magic tingled in the air. "Someone's trying to break the wards," I said, after feeling a small pull on my aura. I was sure that was it. It wasn't very nice; in fact, it stung, kind of like a bad paper cut. "So, there are things waiting outside, and something trying to crack the locks."

John's eyes glinted in the low light. While I couldn't see him entirely clearly, except for the faint, constant glow, I could make out his eyes. The stinging sensation continued, which began to piss me off. My instinct was to fight it, so I did. In some weird bend of logic, that only made it feel worse. But John said, urgently, "Whatever you're doing- don't stop." Then, I felt a pressure being added to my own resistance, something cool and resolute. From the way John had gone taut, I rightly concluded the pressure came from him. We were basically adding a bulwark to the, well, bulwark. This whole learning from experience thing was interesting, because in reality I didn't know exactly what we were doing... only that it was working. Best way to learn. Learn fast or die, right?

A few more minutes came and went, and the ominous weight in the air totally lifted. Apparently, the menace at the windows dissipated: John made it over to the glass in easy steps, and smirked at what he saw. He turned back to me, and I found I was sweating from effort. "Your anti-trespassing clause worked. I'm going back to bed." Too much magic. I'd done too much magic today: I felt shaky, like I'd caught the flu. Was this the cost of tapping into my natural inclinations? "I'll be gone in the morning." I stopped myself and leaned on the door. "Wait. I should probably tell you something."

"What?" He approached me.

I gulped. "I had a dream. One of my relatives was in it. She... mentioned something about the world becoming a living Hell."

Silence fell. "What if it was just a real dream?" he asked dangerously. "Or what if it was something else?"

"I don't have normal dreams," I said. "Ever. She said the thing we did with your wards helped her come through to me." My eyes narrowed. "I'm not dumb. I had thought of it."

John sniffed; he was almost as close to me as he'd been before. I shifted uncomfortably and met his eyes. He'd inclined his head towards mine, and I didn't think it had much to do with the speaking volume required. Even in my state, I felt my heart beat faster. Certainly, he was easy on the eyes.

I had the nagging thought that I was another exotic pelt to add to his harem of bizarre lovers: the reputation this man had was either admirable or repulsive. I couldn't make my mind up as to which. It depended on your views, and I didn't have my scales handy to weigh the balance.

We regarded each other steadily, during which time the distance between our faces closed to mere centimeters. "I'll let people know."

The demons had to know something. Ellie with her snide hints. Definitely Balthazar, if he was so all-important. Were there people from the other side we could tell? If there were demons, there had to be angels around too. But I'd been told there was a balance, and what was happening now was upsetting it. John didn't particularly believe in any balance anymore- he seemed to feel it was beneath him- and having just learned about it myself, I wasn't sure what to think.

"That'll help? What the fuck do we do about something like that?" If it turns out to be true, I reminded myself.

"Stop it," said John.

I laughed the same hysterical laugh I'd given Rosalie. "Easy, yeah?" I quelled my giggles.

"Hopefully," he said. "I don't get much of a choice either way, but I'm sure everyone else who does, doesn't want to end up in a Hell on earth." His voice forbade any sympathy, but it was such an odd statement, I raised my eyebrows in a question.

"I'm a damn suicide," he said callously. And that explained a lot in a very short amount of time. The idiot was trying to buy his way back into Heaven. I'd never heard of anything so desperate, sad, or commendable. Note to self: don't commit suicide. Everything your parents told you about killing yourself was true.

"You're not dead now."

His brittle smile made me wince. "Ah, they brought me back." He eyed the hair that hung in my face: it must have been pretty tangled, considering I'd just been curled up on a sofa for like seven hours. "God doesn't care how long you're dead. If you've killed yourself, that's the end of it." Was he telling me this so I'd feel sorry for him? Probably not, but this was a different conversation to have when you were trying to seduce someone. In our world, this wasn't such an different conversation after all.

He licked his lips; I threw down the impulse to nip one of them. Stupid, stupid. I blinked, looked back up into his eyes. The door, at my back, creaked before it clunked against the wall. Aside from this being an abrupt time to find a new fling, it was also dangerous for me to have this particular man as a fling. Shadow walking might parry whatever supernatural energies he brought into play, I thought wildly. And Chas was not a ghost. Yet. I felt John's arms rest on my shoulders. Fuck.

"Not the best idea," I said, pleased that my voice hadn't come out as unsteady as I thought it would. I wanted to know how many people he'd been with. Not in a gross way. I was just curious. How many were still alive?

"No," he said, but he didn't exactly encourage me to go about my business when he added, "Why do you care?"

Sternly, I reminded myself that I was not astounding (this was routine for John, for all I knew), it was the heat of the moment, magic was pulsing between us with a false sense of closeness... blah, blah, blah. All those things we tell ourselves when we're trying to rationalize good behavior. Although- I'm not in the habit of one night stands, especially with someone who could both kill you at will, and habitually slept with beings who weren't even on his philosophical side. That was really twisted to my way of thinking. Yes, I did mean Balthazar and Ellie.

Fine, so getting the two dudes in bed might have given me reason to reconsider, and they'd probably kill each other before they thought of me. If I couldn't be in between them, hey, I could watch.

"Oh, I have lots of reasons," I whispered. "A few to start with? The ghosts that are lurking just over your shoulder." They never truly left. Currently, it was like being crowded by voyeurs, and on a less humorous level: they were a very tangible reminder of what John did with himself. Out of nowhere I had a random bout of furious behavior while more reasons came to me. It'd been a bad week, okay? My voice got louder and more vehement. "The demons. That's just plain masochistic. If you want to deport them, just fucking do it already and stop screwing them." Truth was, this whole new dimension of the world I was experiencing scared me. I think it was just catching up with me. "Your priorities are messed up."

I inhaled, trying to get a grip. But I'd just blown a fuse, or something. I felt energy building up and seeping out of my pores. At least I wasn't glowing? He felt it too- a dull, burning tingle close to pins and needles- because the next minute his arms weren't around my shoulders anymore, his fingers not twined in my mess of hair; they were hanging at his sides. I'd investigate that later: he was kind of a magical conduit anyway, so I wasn't surprised that if I was giving off anything, he'd received it.

And then I thought I might be strangled for saying all of that: anger, quite simple and undiluted, flared in his expression. His hands clenched. I flinched. But all he said- in a mild tone- was, "Go back to sleep." Perhaps nobody had told him to go fuck himself quite so eloquently, and he could make neither heads nor tails of it. I couldn't. "It's not coming back tonight."

"Er- good night then," I said awkwardly, feeling the color rise in my cheeks. Which, possibly, wasn't the only thing rising, but I wasn't about to find out and tempt myself more than I had already. Hooray for having moral caliber.

Before I could go away, he kissed me: enough of a kiss so that it wasn't chaste, but not insistent enough to make me want to hit him. His lips were warm. He was definitely not a gentleman, I decided, as if I'd had any lingering hopes. I'd have more room to protest if I wasn't busy kissing back.

I yawned over the enormous caramel coffee concoction (two extra shots, caramel on the bottom, not the top) Chas had brought me. Today was another slow day. We both listlessly watched a short girl with long, bleach-blond hair dressed up in goth attire comb through the section on Wicca. She was, unfortunately, a walking stereotype. Poor girl. Momentarily, I realized Chas was enthusiastically talking to me. "What?" I asked, his face coming back into focus. Today he wasn't even wearing his hat.

"I said, you and John- did you, ah, make any headway last night?"

That was it. He knew. My freaking aura, or some other mystical thing, told him we'd made out. Progressed to slightly more than that in spite of all my better judgment. "Yes? Well, no. Um-"

The exorcist's apprentice gawked at me like I'd sprouted an extra head. Understanding dawned in his slightly tanned face. He smiled all too knowingly, a rat scenting cheese. "With the magic," he clarified, like he was talking to a mentally slow person.

I perked right up. His bright eyes weren't suspicious, or even exactly annoyed. I scanned them briefly to see if he was feeling me out- because I felt a little guilty. I was quickly gleaning that relationships in the occult world weren't always like "normal" ones. Everyone had basically slept with everyone else: a little like eighteenth century European nobility. Don't ask, don't tell- but everyone knows- at its finest. If you're attached to someone, that seems to be okay, but not the usual.

"Not really. Something tried to get in to the apartment at about half past two. He said it was downstairs, and there was something at the windows, but I couldn't see it." I swirled my very hot drink in my hands to mix the milk and caramel. "I had a dream about my great-great-great times like five grandmother."

"So the wards didn't work?" Chas asked, pulling a face. "That sucks."

"She said they did," I shrugged. "She dropped a hint about what might be happening around here- said something about earth being turned into a Hell."

He busied himself putting price stickers on the stack of books in front of him, like that was an ordinary thing to tell somebody. "You believe her? Like, she wasn't a demon or something?"

I crossed my arms, a little defensively. "I just know she wasn't." Chas, immediately contrite- I noticed we really did have almost the same social relationship as River and I had- shook his head.

"Sorry, I've just been trained to take nothing at face value. Even pretty little shadow walkers," he said, grinning. I did look more girlie than I had since the night at Midnite's: today was very warm, so I was wearing a white sort of sundress that had an overlay of cream-colored lace. It was literally the most feminine thing I had in my closet, and it was good to wear to Pulp because it fit in with all the vintage stuff we had laying around.

"Especially pretty little shadow walkers," I muttered.

"True."

The goth girl finished perusing her corner, and left without buying anything. That was happening more and more often, which didn't bode well for business. It was already seven, and I contemplated closing. We'd only made three sales since we'd opened at one. At least one sale was a two-hundred dollar edition of Edgar Allen Poe. Just when I was about to suggest this to Chas, Angela rushed in. Chas and I stared at her. "Oh good, you're here," she said to me. Her long dark hair was back in a clip and she wasn't in uniform, but we could see she was clearly on the job right now.

"Me?" I said, unnecessarily. I was becoming so popular nowadays. I thought she'd never want to see me again, after what I'd forced her to admit. "Yeah, I'm always here. I don't have a life."

"I need a favor," she said, a little crossly. I wouldn't want a favor from me either.

"What sort of favor?"

Angela sighed, looking at me with a slight plea in her face. "It might not be a favor- there's something I need you to look at... and you," she said to Chas, "You work with John Constantine, right?"

Chas nodded, still nonplussed. "Yeah, although I'm more like his unpaid driver and slave all rolled into one tidy package. But you could call it working with him."

"I'll do what I can," I said uncertainly. "You know he'd be the one to help, though." If she needed occult knowledge, I could help, but John would be the ideal one to ask. A dark look came into her greenish brown eyes.

"Yeah, I know," she said in her brusque way, "but I don't want him at a crime scene. He's got enough on his record; I don't need my supervisor taking him in for some dumb reason. Not right now." She shifted her weight from foot to foot. "Please come?"

A crime scene? Oh boy.