DISCLAIMER:Hellblazer and all related concepts belong to DC. Angel and all related concepts belong to Joss Whedon.
NOTES:Isabel/Israel is mine, mine, mine and no one else can use her unless they ask nicely. Angel doesn't actually end up in this one, but he will be in part 1.
FEEDBACK:Send lots and lots to Pretty please with brimstone on top?
"There's no such a thing as a happy ending. If you think otherwise you're just kidding yourself. 'Happily ever after' usually lasts about two days, tops. No heroes, either. People'll call practically anyone a hero. Hell, I've been called one. If that doesn't prove my point, I don't know what does. Superman? Spider-Man? They all have their motives. Trust me. I know about this kind of thing. And bad guys? They win all the time. Almost always." The blonde young woman paused and drank some of her whiskey. One of the objects of her lecture said something. "Magic? Sure it adds a new variable into the equation. But it depends on whose using it, to some extent. And you've got to realize that no matter how real it is, the basis is still just--"
SMOKE AND MIRRORS-Prologue a rules of arcania storyby RhiannonAmaris
September 1990
The house looked as if it was perfect. It was pale yellow with matching green trim, surrounded by a white picket fence. It was suburbia distilled, like so many others around it. And, like so many others, the gentile facade masked something more sinister.
A group of teenagers mingled in an overly decorated rec room. A blond young man took his black haired friend aside. "Harry, this is stupid, dude," he said in a low voice.
"Yeah, but it scares the chicks..."
"And we comfort them... You rock man. We are so getting laid tonight!"
"Damn straight, Paul, damn straight." Harry straightened his T-shirt a bit and made a production of checking the designs drawn onto the hardwood floor. 'If these stain mom's gonna kill me.'
At his signal they gathered, each taking a post at a juncture in the design. Harry nodded and they all lit black candles. He smirked to himself. Most guys would set up something out of bad B movie, but not him. He had gone through the old book very carefully. He had found it in his great-uncle's attic that summer when his parents had roped him into cleaning it when the old bastard had died. If this didn't work, no big. Like Paul had said, the girls would be a bit freaked and they could probably be talked into spreading. But on the off chance it did work... He'd be a fucking god.
He turned to a page near the back of the book and began to read from it in a clear, strong voice. The first part of the spell was in Latin, but then it switched to English. "Atronon, dark one, I call thee. Atronon, keeper of the Dark Flower, I call thee."
The electricity in half the block went out. The only light to be seen was from thirteen guttering candles. The seven girls made various noises of dismay, music to his ears. Next to him Paul cackled. "This is so gonna get us laid, man. You'd think this bullshit was gonna work."
"Atronon, the manipulator, I call thee." The room's French windows flew open; a gust of wind blew out the candles as lightning struck a house down the street. The girl seated to his left was about to abandon her place and cling to him, but froze at the glare Harry sent at her. "Atronon, the defiler, I beseech thee, appear!" The design began to glow with unholy light. The center of it was almost blinding.
"What the fuck..." Paul said dully.
'HE is going to be the first one to die.' Something that smelled of sulfur began to rise out of the center. One of the girls, a blonde cheerleader named Cheri, fainted. "Atronon, son of Wolfram, I bind thee here!"
The huge, black scaled, vaguely human shaped creature fanned out a pair of black, bat-like wings and then settled them around his shoulders. "It would seem," it said in a voice that sounded like rocks grinding together, "that you have some explaining to do, little mage."
Harry grinned from ear to ear. "It's pretty simple actually. I want a deal." The rest of the teens had long since broken the circle and now they began to run for the door. It wouldn't open. Harry had the only key in his pocket. He walked over to the windows and shut and locked them. "This is the ritual of Fallon. We've got a servant that would be me; five sacrifices that would be those asses: and seven slaves."
Atronon stepped out of the circle and pinned a red-haired girl -- Anne, Harry thought her name was -- against the wall. He forced her chin up with a claw talon. "Which would be these lovely things. I shall probably accept. Now what is it exactly you want?" He was obviously distracted.
"Oh, not much." He walked over to where Cheri lay sprawled on the floor and slipped a hand inside her thin sweater. "Not much."
Soon after that things had truly gone mad. The boys finally realized that there was no way in hell the door was going to budge, and stopped trying to batter it down. Paul tried to rush Harry, who was... occupied with Cheri. He wasn't nearly as distracted as the other young man thought. He grabbed the dagger he had kept close at hand. Paul nearly ran onto it. Harry smiled as life seeped out of his dull blue eyes.
"Looks like I'm a fortune teller," Harry murmured. "So it begins." Paul was the only one he killed himself. The rest Atronon dispatched. It was done too slowly to be efficient, but too precisely to be anything else. Harry watched for a few minutes before growing bored. "My lord?" The demon paused in the slaughter for a moment and turned his head in his servant's direction. "May I..." He made a gesture in the direction of the girls.
"Yes, yes. By all means. But save the redhead for me."
"As you wish."
He started with the still unconscious Cheri. Not long after, she came to. She tried to fight him off for a few minutes before she fainted. Harry slapped her until she woke up. Her struggles began anew and then slowed to a stop. Atronon's influence and the power of his servant came to the forefront and soon she was begging him to do as he wished with her, all the while her eyes screamed in pain and horror. It was the same with all the others.
The next morning Harry awoke to the caresses of a trio of beautiful girls. Anne, Sandra, and Miranda. Sandy and Mandy were brunettes and identical twins. He looked at their willing bodies and screaming eyes and smiled. "You two."
"Yes, my lord." They spoke as one.
He pointed to the floor. "I want to watch you two together. Now."
They went down slowly, trying to resist the power behind his command and failing. He leaned against a wall and Anne knelt in front of him. Atronon had broken her in so well that she needed no order.
"You're in hell, you know." The stone-like voice came from across the room. Harry tore his eyes away from the appealing and appalling sight in front of him. Atronon crouched over a body, picking the meat from it, while his tail snaked across a raven haired girl. The corpse was unrecognizable. A quick glance told him that they all were, except Paul's.
His eyes went back to the twins with rapt attention and he grabbed onto Anne's hair. "If this is hell, who needs heaven, my lo-" All words were forgotten as the twins began to cry out.
Atronon did something to what was left of the corpses.
"What's this then, lord?" Harry examined the sacrifices -- they were as whole as they had been before all this had began.
"These are imps. Very minor ones, but I'm sure they can manage to impersonate teenaged boys well enough."
"Sir?" Harry was even more puzzled now.
The demon sighed. It sounded more like a growl. "It would be noticed if they disappeared. Or if their bodies were found here."
The boy straightened and began to open his mouth. Atronon raised a finger. "And that wouldn't suit either of us. This--" he waved his arm around the room, "is just a start. And you being in jail would make luring in new blood in a bit hard. If you don't mess up, we'll corrupt half of this town before anyone notices a thing. And when this hunting ground has thinned, we'll move on to the next. You'll bring in new slaves, and the slaves will bring the sacrifices in by their balls. It's quite simple."
"Of course, my lord."
December 1990
John Constantine ignored the come-ons of a teenaged prostitute and walked into a small diner in Gotham just to get out of the wind and snow. It was weeks like this one that made him wonder why he'd gotten into magic in the first place. He sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee. Oh well, it was over -- no point in dwelling on it. This time next week he'd be taking Jane (Arcania, a small part of his mind yelled stubbornly) to Liverpool to visit the family for Christmas. He was still surprised that Fionia was letting him. Then again Buckingham was probably all too happy not to have his wife's child by John out of his house, for however short a time.
The waitress brought him his cuppa and shook her head at something on the small black and white TV on the counter. "That's just horrible. I can't believe no one noticed that all those poor children were in some kind of cult."
John raised an eyebrow at the peroxide blonde. "What's that then, luv?"
"You haven't heard? You're English though, so I guess you wouldn't have. In LA about thirty boys went and killed themselves, and about fifty girls are missing. Just terrible, don't you think?" She batted tarantula-like lashes at him.
"Awful." On the TV an attractive but less than articulate anchor woman was talking about one of the missing girls, some hotshot lawyer's daughter. "The authorities are saying that the missing girl that stands out the most is Isabel Hart, oldest daughter of LA attorney, Adam Hart." He knew that he knew that name, but he couldn't place it for the life of him. "While all of the other victims attended the same public high school, Isabel attended an exclusive private academy..." He stopped listening and looked at the picture on the telly. Isabel was a pretty girl of sixteen or so, with light brown hair and brown eyes. Eyes that looked like the girl had been through a war zone, or something worse. Eyes that he had seen very recently.
He gulped down the rest of the rather foul brew and left a dollar and a half on the counter. Constantine turned up his collar and went out to brave the cold again. The young whore was still leaned up against a street light, shivering in her too short skirt and light shirt and jacket. Obviously dyed black hair fell over her brown, war zone eyes. "Hullo, Isabel." Her head snapped up and she looked like she was going to do a runner. "Your dad didn't send me, girl."
"Who's fuckin' Isabel, and why would her dad send anybody after her?" Only her voice betrayed her -- far too educated for what she was doing, the accent Californian.
"Don't play with me, gel. I'm on your side."
"I'm sure. Who the hell are you?"
"Don't fuck around, kid. I just want t' talk to you. Let's just go into the diner an' get out of the cold an' I'll buy you something to eat."
A few minutes later they were in a booth and Israel, as she had told him to call her, was devouring a hamburger like she hadn't seen food in a week. Halfway through it, she looked up at him. "So who the fuck are you, anyway?"
"John Constantine."
Her eyes went wide. "Wow. Really? My dad's scared of you. His partner is scared of you."
That brought a wolfish grin to his face. "Thanks. What do you know about what went down in LA?"
She washed down a wad of fries with a gulp of coffee. "Something to do with some demon. I noticed and took the opportunity to make good my escape. Figured it would make it a bit harder to figure out what happened to me." She shrugged. "Sorry, 'mate'."
He could tell that she was telling the truth, but was holding back. "That all?"
"Yeah... Well, this is just a theory, right?" She said it cautiously, as if afraid. He just nodded. "I think the guys were dead for a while before everything went down in the end. I ran into some of them and I'm pretty sure they were some kind of demons. Not the girls, though. They just seemed brainwashed, but like they knew it. I think I can tell the difference between demon and human evil, you know."
"I should think so, Iza. I'm sure you've seen enough of both. I don't think disappearing with everyone else is gonna put off your dad, though."
It was her turn to grin now. "He thinks I'm stupid. Does rituals around me and leaves grimoires lying around. I'm a quick study. And do you really think I'd actually sell myself? I just put the whammy on the johns and take the cash."
"And if the whammy doesn't work?"
"Then it's nothing that hasn't been done to me before." Her eyes had become lighter throughout the conversation, but now they were war scarred again.
"Doesn't make it right, though. Thanks for telling me what you know. Take care, Iza." He sighed as he got up. There went the hols with Arcania, Cheryl and Gemma.
"Since when do you go around playing at being Batman, Constantine?" The words hit his back as he paid and came back with the tip.
He grinned at her and handed her a fifty. "You're right. Merry Christmas, Iza. Take care of yourself, gel." The world could bloody well take care of itself.
She smiled wryly. "I'm an atheist, but thanks."
END OF PROLOGUE