Chapter Text
CHAPTER ONE
Greta hadn’t consciously felt the soul’s passing; but that was hardly surprising. There were too many every day, each in deaths more tragic than the last, but this one had left an acrid taste in the back of her throat. A taste that she’d tried to ignore, until it migrated from her tonsils to her tongue, and took root in the backs of her nostrils. Though she didn’t breathe, every passing breeze pushed it deeper into her brain, assaulting her senses until she had no choice but to give in to its whims.
You’d think, being dead, that any sensation would be a welcome one. But this wasn’t like the touch of a friend or how it felt when a spring breeze ran through her. It was similar to how it felt when she froze up or had electricity jolt across her skin, but without the feeling of death and destruction that those led to.
No, instead, the scent led her to a street corner in Gotham City. In the west, behind the arches of the trains that ran over top of the Bowery, the sun was setting – casting the grimy grim streets with golden haze. It was almost beautiful, if there weren’t such an aura of malice and desperation rising from the street like steam. Like a twisted Marilyn, the rising trauma caught in the billows of her coat and twirled around her ankles, along with the faintest traces of residual magic that clung to the pavement.
“Excuse me, love,” suddenly she felt a hand on her arm, gently guiding her out of the way from the centre of the pavement. Greta had made herself solid for the investigation – Gotham may have been used to bizarre phenomena on its streets in the form of Bats and Clowns, but she wasn’t looking to draw attention to herself. In the late June air, the memory of Tim’s birthday hung heavy – she had no idea whether Red Robin knew she had been there, or that she’d been the reason Bart had bailed early – but Greta had no interest in finding out.
In fact, she’d been steering clear of Gotham as much as he possibly could. Star City, too. Metropolis had been a safe place to lie low, for a while, but there was too much history in the East Coast for her to hide forever. And when bad feelings like this one grabbed her by the tonsils and pulled into an investigation, her personal life had to be damned.
“Do you mind?” She asked, looking up at the man who had moved her from where she had been investigating. He too, had stopped to linger, looking up and down the street.
“Not really,” he quipped back, in an accent she didn’t really recognise, “there’s some weird bollocks going on around here, and you were standing right in the middle of it.”
Greta squinted and looked at the figure more closely, “I know,” she said. The man lifted his head up from the ground finally to look at her, taking a cigarette into his lips and dragging on it. His tired eyes locked on to hers and Greta immediately ripped her gaze just past him.
“Do I know you?” He turned to face her more fully, revealing a white shirt under his own tanned coat, and scruffy five o’clock shadow on his chin. Greta felt the same sense of recognition stirring in her chest but couldn’t place his face.
“I don’t know,” the man raised his eyebrows at her sass – but Greta had very little patience for people these days, “do you?”
“Alright, Jesus, I was just asking.” He tapped ash from the end of his cigarette onto the ground, “so, who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Constantine,” he said, and took a step closer to her with his hand outstretched. Greta looked at it for a moment, and took his hand to shake it, “fuck,” he breathed as their skin touched. “You’re cold.” Greta pulled her hand back and held it against her chest. Constantine stared at her a moment longer, his blue eyes raking over her body. She could see it in his body language, how his mind seemed to sharpen as he focused on her. Greta used all the focus she had to hold herself together – but it wasn’t enough. “You’re dead, aren’t you?”
“Don’t—” she hissed, and shook her head subtly, “you don’t need to say it so loud.”
“Sorry love,” Constantine replied, looking up and down the street as the occasional bum ambled down the other end of the street. Though the sun was going down, it was still too early for the nighttime revellers to emerge from their homes and head to the bars – not that the Bowery saw too much reverie. “I’m just not used to my ghosts holding themselves together like you.”
“Your ghosts?”
“Yeah,” he looked down to the fading traces of magic around their ankles like scorch marks, “are you not here to haunt me, make me feel guilty or something? Won’t you tell me what happened here and twist my arm till I give you peace?”
Greta barked out a disbelieving laugh, breathlessly, and scrunched her eyebrows together. “You… think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”
“What?”
Greta laughed again, “I’m not here for you. I’m just… here.” She felt the edge of her body begin to melt away, and from the corner of her eyes she saw the tendrils of mist begin to smoke up into the sky, “I’m Greta, I’m…” she looked away again, raising her vision to watch the edge of her being mix with the smoke from his cigarette, “I’m the Warder?”
“You say that like it means something,” Constantine shook his head. If he was surprised as her body dissipated back into mist, it didn’t show on his features.
“You don’t know what the Warder is, but you’re friends with ghosts?”
“’Scuse you, I didn’t say they were my friends,” he corrected with the jab of his cigarette, “enlighten me then, if you’re so important.”
She rolled her eyes, looking past him and back into the street, “it’s not important.” She declared with a sigh, and then looked down at the ground, “what do you think is going on?”
“No idea,” Constantine replied, letting his previous question die on the vine without any protest. If the little lady didn’t want to tell her what she was, it probably meant it was big and nasty… He wasn’t entirely stupid – he could see the death behind those cornflower eyes, but it was clear that she knew it too. But if she hadn’t pegged that it would take more than a little bit of eternal damnation to give him the willies, he wasn’t going to tell her. Either way, the streets of Gotham seemed to have made them bedfellows – and, if John as being honest, he’d had stranger. “I got an omen in a dream, it led me here, here I am.” He paused to raise his hand and mutter an incantation, and with a pulse of light and a pinch of magic, the two women who had been walking towards them stopped and realised they were heading in the wrong direction. “What about you?”
“Omen is a good word for it,” she agreed, looking from the scorch marks on the floor to Constantine, who was still studying her like she was an irritating crossword clue. “But someone used magic here,”
“How can you tell?”
“I… I can see it.”
“Clever trick,” Constantine concurred, flicking the end of his cigarette into the gutter. The butt hit the bars, but fell into the water below with the precision of a man who plays a mean game of darts – magic or no. “But how did you know it was here?”
“I got a feeling,” Greta continued, “it was a particularly gruesome death—”
“Death?” His eyebrows arched into his forehead and a disbelieving grin peeled his lips into a strange sort of grimace, “he’s dead?”
“Did you know… him?”
“Fuckin’ hell…” Constantine shook his head and reached for his next cigarette. He tapped it out of the packet, into his lips, and lit the end with one fluid motion that had had years to perfect. “Hang on a minute,” he mumbled through the filter, “are you Secret? Or Susan, whatever?”
Then, it was Greta turn to raise her eyebrows, “I thought you hadn’t heard of me.”
“I remember Brand mentioning some dead girl he met when that randy fucker got turned into a kid,” Constantine blew his smoke out into the air, studying her face again, “that was you, right? I thought you were a kid yourself?”
Greta sighed and let go of the final grasp of control she had over her form. Though she couldn’t feel her features changing – melting back into their prepubescent natural state – the look on Constantine’s face as she emerged from the mist, a child, said it all. “I was,” she agreed, “but that was like, six years ago?” There it was – in his eyes and all over his dropped jaw – the pity, and the subtle horror that came from knowing some evil bastard murdered a twelve-year-old girl in cold blood. “It’s not like I enjoy keeping a child’s face, years after the fact.”
“Fuckin’ Christ…” John shook his head and took a drag of his cigarette. He hadn’t really been prepared to see the ‘Secret’ of Brand’s stories from years past – he’d seen a lot of nasty shit, but dead kids never stopped hitting him like a steel-toed kick in the nuts. John cleared his throat and shook his head, remembering that throat-punch of seeing Greta stood before him had been the chaser to the right hook of remembering that they were allegedly standing on the death site of another of his friends. He certainly did know how to pick them. “But yeah,” he cleared his throat and took a drag, “you could say he was a friend of mine – a fella named Tricks, on account of his… magic tricks.”
“Any idea who would want to hurt him?”
“Aside from a city’s worth of loan sharks and stiffed stage managers?” Constantine shrugged, “not a scooby.”
Greta looked up and down the street once more, as the sun dipped ever lower on the skyline and behind the railways. “There’s a security camera on the deli across the street,” she motioned to it lazily, “could you hack into it?”
“Computers aren’t really my thing, love.”
“Then could you do a séance? Cast a spell?”
“On what?” He scoffed, “the ground? Constantine shook his head, “I didn’t exactly know what I was walking into, love, it doesn’t quite work like that.”
“Then we’re screwed.”
“Nah, nah – now, come on,” Constantine absent-mindedly stuck out his hand to lift her chin, but stopped himself just short of clipping through her jaw like a Bethesda game, “I can chat to the deli owner, I’ll lay it on nice and thick and we can meet up again tomorrow if I find something.”
Greta looked up at him through her eyebrows, “you’re going to charm the deli owner?”
“Sure, or flirt with ‘em, whatever works.” Constantine shrugged and flicked his new dwindling cigarette into the same gutter as before. “But meet me back here tomorrow, and I’ll tell you what I find.”
“I thought… You seem like the kind of guy who works alone.”
“Oi, you’re not so social yourself, love.” Constantine cocked his head to the side and grinned like an old-fashioned conman. Except for the pearly whites, his teeth were stained nicotine yellow and undeniably British, “but you seem like the kind of girl who wants to help. For… whatever reason.”
Greta hesitated, “I… I think this is bigger than Trick.”
“Right,” John shrugged, knowing that he hadn’t actually asked, “whatever reason. So, I’ll meet you back here tomorrow night. Same time, Secret.”
“See you then, Constantine,” Greta agreed softly and waited for the man to nod his head and turn to leave. She stood in the shadows of the street corner, wand watched his own tan trench coat flap with step, until he was a blur amongst the distant crowds.