Three Days Later

Georgetown, Washington

The man standing in front of the door smiled with glee as the lock clicked open. He stood up and turned the knob as quiet as he could, reaching to the back of his coat and retrieving a revolver. He thumbed back the hammer as he pushed the door open and reached for the light switch with the other hand.

Five iron-firm fingers, each one as cold as death gripped his switch before his right hand found its target. And faster than he could panic, he'd been pulled into a headlock and heaved, sent flying through a wooden table.

His gun had slipped away from his grip as he hit the wood, he felt around seeking it. He found himself being forced to his feet and being forced through French-doors and over the railing of a balcony.

Those same cold fingers gripped his ankle, keeping gravity from doing what gravity does. The man flailed around as he was suspended seven stories above ground, until a growl came from above.

"Who sent you?"

"Jesus! Pull me up!"

"Who sent you, was it Josephine or Leiter?"

"What?!"

"WAS IT JOSEPHINE OR WAS IT BENJAMIN?"

"I don't know who the fuck you're talking about!"

There was a moment of silence before the man was pulled up and unceremoniously tossed on the tiled floor of the balcony. He lay down for a few moments, breathing deep.

"I believe you, you get to live for now. But the welfare of your kneecaps depends on telling me how you found me?"

"Ways and means, you son of a bitch. But it wasn't easy, Priest, I'll tell you that."

"Who told you about me?"

"Spike sends you his regards."

"Spike? And why has that yob drunk been talking about me? Who are you?"

"I'm Constantine; John Constantine, asshole. I'm here to help you."

"There she is."

Constantine stepped into the darkened room, Priest following right behind him. He could smell the stench of sulfur Priest spoke of, and despite the darkness, could make up restrained motions on the bed.

Priest flipped a switch on the wall, and light filled the room. Lucy was on the bed, spread-eagled from all limbs, ties to the bed posts and legs. Blood stained the top of her white cream blouse, and she had a black eye.

She jerked toward them, her one good eye filled with hellish rage and malice. Slobbering franticly through a clenched jaw, she growled something in a language that Constantine didn't understand.

""Hmm. The possessed often speak in their native languages." said Constantine as he lit a cigarette with an ornate Zippo lighter, "'She Dutch?"

"She's German."

"Do you know what she just told me?"

"She said that your mother sucks the flaking cocks of lepers in the deepest circles of hell."

"Hmph. Does she swallow?" asked Constantine as he blew smoke onto Lucy's face, then turned around to leave the room, "It'd probably be awful if she had to swallow."

Priest turned off the lights and followed Constantine out.

"Can you help her?"

"Sure…. It'll be tricky, though." Said Constantine as he sat down on a couch.

"Why did you come after me, Constantine?" asked Priest as he stood by the shattered French doors.

"A few months after you left LA, there was a blip on the psycho-ethereal radar. Several people had dreams of you and your friend and the end of the world.

"Papa Midnite, the man who owns the club where you used to fight, got me to try and get to the bottom of this, figure up which end is up. I worked my way over here, following a lead from a friend of mine who spoke of an 'Invisible war' in his suicide note. I paid the guy downstairs fifty bucks to call me the moment you were out. Which begs the question, how come you aren't?"

"I caught you tailing me, and caught on to your deal with the concierge, which was why I snuck right back in here after I'd walked through the front door."

"I wasn't tailing you. I made a point to stay the hell away from you, but whatever.

Look, Priest, the deal is this; I pull the demon out of your girlfriend, you tell me what's going to happen."

"It has nothing to do with Angels or Demons or the second coming or the apocalypse."

"I'll be the judge of that."

"Fine, you help Lucy, and you have my word I'll tell you everything."

"Awesome." Said Constantine as he headed to the door, "I'll need to pick up a few things. I'll be back in a couple of hours."

Later

"So… about Midnite….Does he-?"

"Yeah, he knows about your little scam, taking a dive when you've bet a lot of money on the underdog." said Constantine as he dragged a rusty dagger on the wooden floor, carving an arc of separate sigils. With each carving completed, Lucy would thrash more and more, struggling against the strong knots, and trying to hurl obscenities through a gagged mouth.

"How long do these things take?"

"It depends."

"On what?"

"Exorcism isn't an exact science; I've done exorcisms that last three minutes, and spent a month doing another. Females are harder, an older person is harder, and psychics are very fucking harder.

"The good news is, the demon only manifested after the spell. Most possessions are gradual, take weeks for someone to start acting like your friend. That means it hasn't really dug in, yet.

"It'll definitely take all night, probably some of tomorrow too. And then you'll have to live up to your end of the bargain."

"Are you sure you weren't following me?"

"I'd remember if I was."

"You've done this a lot, haven't you?"

"Since I was twenty-three."

"Did you ever fail?"

There was a long pause, before Constantine answered with attempted indifference,

"Once or twice."

The following morning

Priest opened his eyes slowly, feeling nothing at first, not panic nor rage, not even surprise.

Priest had heard many a gunshots in his protracted life, on the bad streets of Chicago, to the beaches of France and darkened Mexicans barrooms. The gunshot sound from far below was unexpected, but now that he heard it, he knew it did not sound final at all.

"CONSTANTINE!" yelled Priest, bolting to his feet and heading to Lucy's room. He pushed the door open to see Constantine hunched over Lucy's body, pressing some sort of amulet onto her skin. Lucy hissed and thrashed violently as she attempted to break free.

"I heard." Said Constantine, "Look, there's something I didn't tell you."

"No shit."

"I didn't get a tip in a friend's suicide note, I conned someone into telling me what they knew."

"Who?"

"A foot soldier of The Damnation Brigade." Said Constantine as he stepped away from Lucy for a second, "They're an Aryan supremacy-slash-satanic cult. They have an Oracle who for predicted your arrival. They must have been the ones following you."

"What do they want with us?"

"They don't want shit to do with you, they want Lucy. She's some kind of fucked up messiah to them; powerful psychic possessed by a demon, and look at her; she's miss Germany."

Priest heard machine gun fire distantly, and took a hard look at Lucy, she was a frantic as ever, showing no signs of being cleanses from the abomination that had taken her over.

"You're not nearly done, are you?"

"No. You'll have to take them on, buy me time." Said Constantine as he returned to his work, picking up an old yellowed book and reading from it in Aramaic.

"And how do I know that you're not one of those fucks downstairs?"

Constantine shut the book and looked at Priest in shocked awe.

"For god's sake, people are dying!"

"Fuck them!"

"What?!"

"You lied to me, you probably drew them here. I should throw you out a motherfucking window!"

"Do that and there'll be no one to help your friend." Answered Constantine.

Priest hung his head and retreated out of the room and headed to what was left of the table he'd sent Constantine through last night, and picked up the gun from among the broken pieces of wood before heading back into the room and handing it to Constantine.

"You need it more than I do." said Constantine.

"No, not really. Did Spike tell you a lot about me?"

"You're wasting a lot of-" said Constantine as he took the gun before he was cut off.

"Did Spike. Tell you. A lot. About me?"

"He told me some."

"Did he tell you about Alabama Boris?"

"Yeah…" answered Constantine uncomfortably as he seemed to recall something he rather didn't, "You scalped him with a spoon over an insult."

"Exactly." Said Priest as he walked away, "Keep that in mind, Constantine."

Later

Priest squeezed the bridge of his nose with one hand, as he often did to cope with stress, and poured himself a glass of Vodka with the other. Filling the glass, he pushed away a dead body half-hunched over the bar and set the bottle in the empty spot.

Despite the simple effort, it made him wince in pain.

Priest leaned down and took a butterfly knife off of another dead body and then unbuttoned his own blood soaked shirt and looked at the few doe or so bullet entry wounds. The cultists had come armed with machine and shotguns, and whatever shots they got at him, most had already exited his body, but enough remained to bother him. He flipped the knife open and poured the Vodka from the bottle onto his chest, and then took to digging the bullets out.

It was nine a.m.; he'd last seen Lucy and Constantine over three hours ago, slightly longer then from when the last of the Aryan brigade had his throat ripped out.

The police were outside, and had attempted to charge in a few times, but were scared away by gunfire from the man inside who could hear them coming from a mile away.

Priest dug up the last of the bullets, then closed his shirt and buttoned his jacket, picked up his glass and gulped it at once, then stood scanning the hotel lobby, painted sangria with the blood of belligerent and victim alike.

The telephone rang. Priest threw the glass against a wall and picked the receiver up, speaking calmly,

"You've reached the front desk at the Georgetown Reservoir Hotel, how may I help you?"

"This is Constantine, its over."

Priest could feel Lucy tremble in his arms as he carried her through the sewers.

Constantine wasn't pleased with what Priest had told him, and obviously was a bit skeptic. Priest's tale of an invisible cold war between two secret factions was far from the cataclysmic apocalypse of meteorite showers and plagues crows that Constantine was expecting. Nonetheless, each departed with what they bargained for, with the occultist choosing to flee above ground.

Before he left, he'd told Priest of what had happened. During the course of the thirteen hours exorcism, Constantine had learned the demon's name was Pazuzu, and that he held some power once, but lost a great deal of it following its catastrophic possession of Regan MacNeil in the early seventies, that ended with the deaths of Fathers Merrin and Karras, the latter of which had jumped to his death seconds after the demon had begun consuming him. MacNeil survived, but Karras' soul was bound to Pazuzu, who could neither inflict any control nor venture back to hell, and as such the two had been keeping each other's hellish company for the past thirty-five years.

Lucy was more or less cured, but the ordeal had taken a toll on her. The exorcist told him she'd be incoherent for some time, and that she might be feverish for the next few days, but would be back to normal eventually.

The worst of it was behind them, and Priest regretted ever making the trip. He'd had to stand by helplessly for days trying to figure out what to do until Constantine's unexpected visit, without which Lucy might have been lost forever.

And for what? A second hand account from a character as shady as Constantine of a hell spawn boasting to have possessed MacNeil decades ago. Priest wondered why the League even bothered to hide it.

Even if they had proof, and if when presented to the press and it was spun to bring up questions regarding her mental health, it was an entirely recoverable PR hiccup. He'd certainly seen less favorable politicians recover from worse.

"we… need to…" mumbled Lucy weekly.

"Shhhh. It's alright. You rest; we'll head to New York as soon as it's dark."

R&R

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