The staff at the hospital had already been interviewed by the LAPD earlier in the day. At the behest of the police, the victim's room had been left undisturbed. Chloe couldn't help but notice the undertone of annoyance from the administrator at having to keep a bed empty.

Still, the administrator's pique meant Chloe got access without having too many questions asked about Constantine tagging along. The sooner the police were done, the sooner that room could be used again.

Not that Constantine was that much stranger a tagalong than Lucifer usually was. Wearing a fresh shirt with his tie done up and his trenchcoat draped over his arm, Constantine almost looked respectable.

Chloe herself had a sense of deja-vu as she headed toward the ward the victim had walked out of. She'd been here before, minus the elevator ride. By the looks of it, she was one floor above the ward where she'd recovered from her poisoning.

The nurses on the ward itself were happier at having the room vacant. They didn't enjoy going in there, and most patients who had been put there had complained after a day or so. The room also had issues with the overhead lighting. Over the past year, they'd burned out more bulbs in that room than in the rest of the corridor put together. There were never any malfunctions in the medical equipment, they stressed to add. Just the overhead lights.

"Does any of this sound like a haunting?" Chloe asked Constantine before they entered.

"It could be," he replied. He shook out his trenchcoat and put it on, patting his pockets to check their accessibility. "Or there could be bad wiring in the nonessential power circuits."

Huh. A sensible explanation, lacking further context. "I hadn't thought you'd be much of a skeptic."

Constantine shrugged. "You advertise as an occultist, you also get called in to the stuff that's as mundane as can be. If I went in assuming the worst every time, I'd have nothing left for when it gets serious." He put his hand on the door. "Let's see what we've got."

He thrust the door open and resolutely stepped in.

Into an empty hospital room. There was still a little sunlight entering through the blinds. The lights were on, driving any shadows into the further corners of the room. It looked peaceful.

To Chloe, following close behind him with her hand on her gun, their entry felt … anticlimactic.

She stepped up beside Constantine, who had frozen in place at the foot of the bed. "So… faulty wiring?"

Constantine took a deep breath. "No." He swallowed, then pointed up. "The light isn't flickering."

Chloe looked up at the completely-steady tube light. A chill went down her spine.

The light fuzzed at the edges. Something closed around her, sending cold through her limbs, making it hard to move. The light above her darkened further.

Chloe tried to call out, but she couldn't get control of her vocal cords. She was still drawing breath, but it didn't seem to reach her lungs. She wanted to raise her hand, but her muscles were failing to respond. The light shrank to a tiny pinpoint.

Constantine shouted something Chloe couldn't understand. He sounded like he was coming from a million miles away. The last speck of light disappeared.

Heat burned at her back, from her back pocket. Light leaked back into her vision from the lower edges. Soon, a warm brightness filled her field of vision. She could raise her hand. Once she'd raised it, someone grabbed it.

And the ordeal was over as unexpectedly as it had started.

Chloe toppled forward, fighting for breath. Constantine caught her. He put his other arm, the one he wasn't using to hold her hand, around her waist to keep her upright. "Easy, love." He guided her away from the spot where she'd stood.

Chloe blinked a few times, trying to get the afterimages out of her eyes. She felt as if she'd been staring at the sun while standing in a deep freezer. "What the hell was that?"

"That," Constantine said as he guided her to the chair next to the door, "wasn't a ghost."

He let Chloe sit in the chair while he approached the bed. He spoke words that Chloe couldn't understand. As he did, something like black smoke flowed from his hands and formed two dark pools. One on the floor just off the foot of the bed, where Chloe had been standing. And one right above the bed.

Constantine stepped back. "These are portals. Something big came through here from Hell." He looked over at the other portal. "Maybe two big somethings." He walked around the two pools of smoke that were now fading away. "It left the way open for other things to come through. Seems likely that one of them possessed your victim."

"And tried to possess me," Chloe continued for him.

"Yeah." Constantine nodded. "Well done, fighting it off."

Chloe frowned at him. "I didn't do anything. I heard you shouting. I thought you cast a spell or something."

Constantine matched her frown. "Much as I'd like to take credit, that started out as a shout of surprise and turned into a spell that bounced off. I didn't do anything."

"Then what…?" Chloe started to ask, but remembered the heat coming from her back pocket. She felt in her pocket. Her jeans were still intact, but the pocket that should have had Lucifer's feathers in it instead had….

She closed her hand around the contents and brought them forward.

Earlier today, she'd had complete, bloodstained feathers in her back pocket, the white parts still faintly glowing. Now, all she had were a few bloody shreds that were barely recognizable as having once been part of a feather.

Constantine picked up the largest segment, which still had a bit of the shaft attached. He studied the fragment for a few seconds, then licked it. He nodded. "Those would have done the trick, all right." He stared at Chloe for several seconds. "Where the hell did you get angel feathers?"

"Lucifer," Chloe said, and immediately regretted it. The decision to use Constantine for her own purposes had proved a good one. But he didn't need to know how far her rela— association with Lucifer went.

She'd given something of that up; she could tell by the way Constantine was looking at her. "And you don't owe him anything," he stated, coolly. "That must have been some favor you did him."

Chloe straightened in her chair, refusing to acknowledge that statement further.

"Right." Constantine nodded, then felt inside his pockets. He pulled two sticks from an inner pocket of his trenchcoat and handed her one. "You can help me close these."

Chloe examined the "stick" she'd been given. "This is a flare."

"An enchanted magnesium flare, Detective." Constantine gestured to the two dark pools that had now all but disappeared. "These are portals of darkness. You close them with light. No need to make light with magic if chemistry does the job." He moved to stand over the portal at the foot of the bed and motioned for Chloe to hold her flare over the one on the bed. "I just add that little bit extra." He nodded at the flare in her hand. "Light that when I light mine."

He moved his free hand around the flare he held. He spoke more words that made no sense whatsoever. They were… maybe Latin? But they bore no resemblance to the language Chloe had heard in Latin prayers when she'd accompanied Dan to Mass.

As he spoke, Constantine's voice acquired a resonance it hadn't had before. His eyes glowed, too. She pulled the cord to light the flare when he did. Instead of illuminating the room, the light from the flare flowed out like the smoke had done earlier, into swirling patterns centered on the portals. The patterns spun there for a few seconds, then collapsed on themselves. And everything looked normal again.

Well. As normal as they were ever going to get, now.

"That's it?" she said.

Constantine nodded at her question. "That's all I can do." He huffed out a breath. "Of course, if you want to close them properly, you'd have to go to Hell and close them from that side." He shook his head. "Not volunteering for that."

Chloe was about to ask what could have done this. But she found she already knew, deep down. Like she'd already known that what Lucifer had been telling her had been true, after she'd opened her eyes on that rooftop. Lucifer. Again.

She'd been in this hospital, one floor down. And she'd been told that Lucifer had retrieved the formula for her antidote. From a dead man. She'd just gotten a big, big clue as to how.

She owed Lucifer her life, at least two — no, three —times over. And all he seemed to want, by his own words at least, was to stay by her side. Something that had worked out incredibly to her own advantage over the years, current heartbreak and confusion notwithstanding. How else would she ever have found out how large the world was? What favor had she done him?

Her phone rang. Lucifer's number. Maybe she could find out.