Chapter Text
It’s the summer of 1992. America.
The serial killer, The Corinthian, is active in New York again. So, Hob Gadling is back in the States.
He doesn’t want to be in the States, mind you, but this is the first-time news traveled fast enough for him to get there before the spree goes cold. Fast enough to get read on the hunting grounds. Clock the thing that’s killing folks before it does. The lead up to this has been so intense that finally committing – actually bloody doing it – Hob Gadling has the strangest sense of déjà vu as he slides into the space by his target at the bar.
Hob knows his mark well enough to understand his taste in victim. This particular monster likes nervous, eager, pretty things. Or…
“Hi,” Hob says, folding his arms on the bar.
He smiles, warm, a little crooked, legitimately enjoying the way The Corinthian’s head turns, surprised at the sudden proximity and address. It’s a brief emotion – a light lift in the eyebrows, lips parting as if on a question— before reassembling itself into an inviting smile. His head tilts a little, in a way that gives Hob a little more of the pale lines of muscle in his throat. He angles his body toward Hob, weight still on the bar, but attention shifted successfully from anyone else.
“Hi,” The Corinthian says back.
“Could I buy you drink?” Hob asks, one elbow on the bar, mirroring his monster.
“You could,” says The Corinthian, still smiling.
It’s a little unnerving how pretty this thing actually is.
This close: eerily beautiful, almost glowing in the flashing lights of the club. He’s air-brushed in a way that feels like glamour but it’s not. His skin is just like that, his smile just like that, his golden hair bringing out the gold undertones in his complexion like someone designed him to be looked at. Designed him to draw the eye in and get lost. Familiar. It takes Hob a moment to realize – with a conflicted clench of heat – that the monster has the same unreal and hyper-real beauty that his Stranger had.
Being in sudden proximity to that only throws him off for a moment. Not that The Corinthian seems to notice. If anything, catching Hob get a little distracted by him emboldens the predator beneath the facade. He smiles wider, briefly licking his lower lip before shifting his weight and looking away – as though catching himself in a dirty thought (It’s an affectation. Fake. Scripted.) and dropping his head a moment. Boyishly charming. Disarming.
Hob chases the script. “What’s your poison?”
“Whiskey,” says the monster.
Hob orders it and puts cash down.
The Corinthian tilts his head again. “You’re from England?”
“Yeah. I’m here now though, at least for the summer. Just having some fun.”
“What’s your name?”
“Robert,” he says, not bothering to lie tonight. In fact: “Hob if you want to be friendly.”
“Hob,” he repeats, deciding on friendly. The drink arrives so the monster picks it up, taking a mouthful. “That’s kinda cute.” His voice is warm and dark as the whiskey’s he’s drinking. “You can carry off any name you want though, can’t you?”
“You’re gorgeous,” Hob says, skipping through this part.
That almost seems to catch the monster off kilter. Hob can’t see his eyes through the black shades he’s got on – so opaque someone might assume they’re medical-grade of some kind – but his eyebrows lift and something in his shoulders slackens a little. Hob ignores his own drink on the bar, shifting his weight a little, so he’s closer to his monster who doesn’t recoil, but watches him close distance as if a little mesmerized. (Another affectation. Leaning into the new script.)
Hob laughs to diffuse the strong come-on. “I think you’re scaring half the men in here just standing there.”
The monster seems to like that.
(It’s a monster. It likes easy prey.)
He puts his drink down to pay attention.
Vain, stupid thing.
Hob leans in, close to his ear, to be heard over the music without shouting, “You’re gonna do what you want, but I want to tell you anyway. You’re stunning. I’ll be thinking about you no matter what you do tonight.” He moves his arm on the bar, slides his hand to his fingers settle on the monster’s wrist, brushing skin with his thumb as his lips brush the shell of his target’s ear. “If you let me, I’ll take you out of here and show you exactly what I want to do you though.”
He hears The Corinthian’s laugh, low and slow, as he turns his head to murmur in Hob’s ear, “Well, alright then. Show me.”
Hob owns the building he brings The Corinthian back to.
He owns all three of the townhouses rowed along the greenbelt leading to a large public park, the back windows blocked by the enormous old growth of oak trees and birch. It’s only a twenty-minute walk from the subway station from downtown and it really says something about the predator’s charm that during their maybe thirty minutes alone together, smiling, and passing the transit time with the promise of something much rougher at the end of it…
The Corinthian is entirely easy to talk to.
Curious at all the right moments, easily filling the gaps in a conversation and generous with the right level of compliment or the exact right level of relaxed. Always no pressure. Always fun. Hob forgets at turns that the monster is a monster when he laughs at a joke or leans his weight in against Hob to say something to him in his ear, so the rest of the car can’t hear. He smells great, somehow. Not like he’s wearing cologne, but like the way Hob imagines someone might smell if they’re beautiful.
Glamour. Lure.
There’s no reason not to like it because Hob knows exactly how the evening is ending.
The flat he’s picked is on the end of the row and they are no sooner through the door that Hob turns and pushes his guest against the door and has his face against his throat, kissing, then licking, then biting gently until he gets an appreciative moan. He pulls Corinthian’s jacket down his shoulders, to his elbows, briefly taking advantage to kiss his guest deeply, pinning his head against the door and sliding his knee between The Corinthian’s legs.
“Fuck.” The Corinthian rasps the word, arching slightly as Hob presses up against him.
It’s important that he be convincing, because Hob has this feeling that whatever The Corinthian is, he’s a creature compelled to mimic and camouflage into context. So, if Hob doesn’t nail this bit, then he’s not going to get to the good part. So, Hob sets aside the part of his mind that intellectually protests doing anything nice with the thing he has in his foyer and inhales how fucking great The Corinthian smells until he’s so hard it almost hurts.
“You’re so fucking beautiful.”
He feels the monster shiver. Likes compliments, this thing.
Hob pulls them in a lust-clumsy stumble down the stairs, to the guest bedroom in the basement. Falls into the bed with the Corinthian cooperatively going down on his back in the comforter. He moans very prettily, arching his hips up a little when Hob travels down his body with hands and mouth, pulling his dress shirt open, the jacket abandoned on the stairs coming down. Hob pulls his lover’s clothes open at the same time The Corinthian is ripping the buttons apart down his chest and leaning up to lick his collarbone.
Christ, it’s a shame this is business.
Hob is naked in short order, his partner mostly naked beneath him, never quite getting enough space to shrug out of his dress shirt which is gathered around his elbows as Hob bends down to take his target’s pretty cock in his throat. This pace has his lover gasping, hips snapping reactively up against his jaw, but he grips The Corinthian at the waist. Making him still as he swallows, then starts to rock his head up and down.
Feels hands close in his hair, the blunt edge of fingernails dragging pleasurably along his scalp as his target holds onto him and groans, letting his long legs fall open around Hob’s shoulders. He’s pornographically reactive. Twitching and rocking, his thighs tensing and closing around Hob’s head at exactly the right moments as the pleasure threatens to overwhelm before collapsing back again, swearing.
Hob pulls head up at about the third time his lover’s brought, cursing, to the edge of climax.
“Oh, fuck you,” The Corinthian groans, lying panting in Hob’s bed. He laughs though, through the pleasure-hazed frustration. “What do I have to do, hmm?”
Hob has never considered whether or not he likes a specifically American southern accent, but hearing the slight drawl of it, subtle, like a background noise in The Corinthian’s throat, he thinks it’s going to feature more in his personal sexual fantasies going forward. But he sets that aside as he moves up his lover’s body, fingers smoothing possessively over sinew and sweat-sticky skin, kissing and biting just to feel the muscles tense beneath his lips and palms.
Hob takes Corinthian’s neck in his hand, pulling him in so he can kiss the words into his throat.
“Let me tie you up a little.” He bites, feels his pretty beast shiver, and roll his neck for more, so he does it again licking, and murmuring, “I’ll fuck you so hard you see stars, love. But let me tie you up, yeah?”
The monster laughs, a little condescendingly, Hob is certain.
“Sure, sweetheart. Tie me up.”
What does a monster fear from a human after all? What’s a little thing named Robert going to do to a creature that’s killed over eighty people (at least that the police have found) in the last fifty years. How many hollowed out, skull-gored men or women thought tying him up would be any protection in an intimate moment? Hob reaches up to the headboard, to the slightly silvery cord knotted to the industrial-strength eyelet bored into the load-bearing steel beam in the wall behind his target.
Corinthian lies back cooperatively, his wrists crossed over his head as he smiles up at Hob.
No idea, this is the last moment he has a free creature.
Hob already has the slip-knot loops set into the cord. So, it’s a split of a second between when Hob loops the rope around his wrists and when he cinches it tight. So, it’s too late when The Corinthian feels the material bite into his skin. The rope flares. Blinding silver, like moonlight, and of its own accord the binding rope comes alive and snaps a noose around the monster’s neck and snakes three more coils of the rope around his wrists.
The Corinthian goes berserk.
Hob kicks back off the bed, landing, then rolling out of the way as the thing in his bed goes ballistic, thrashing like a fox caught in a snare. Which, honestly, is accurate to what’s happening. The Corinthian yells, voice degrading from an amused alto drawl to a sudden bestial scream, a tri-tonal howl and snarl. The headboard explodes in sections of splinters, finger-shaped grooves, and fistfuls missing from the wood. Hob can’t even follow the speed. Blurred snapshots of motion and destruction that has Hob genuinely worried The Corinthian is going to chew through the fucking support beam.
But before that happens, the binding cord flares again, ignites briefly into flame, and Hob’s pretty blonde date for the night collapses onto the bed, screaming, skin blistering at the wrist and throat.
By then, Hob’s darted to the bedside, flipping up the rug. He does that to access the warding circle carved and painted with iron-flake paint into the floor. He grabs his knife where it’s taped under the nightstand and immediately cuts his forearm, letting the blood run into the grooves at his knee. There’s a pulse through the room, like something going taut in the air and The Corinthian, previously distracted by being on fire, twitches like an animal hearing a loud noise and looks honest to God afraid.
Hob does not care. He slams both hands to the circle edge.
“Bound thing,” Hob says, not in English but an older tongue. The circle responds. The iron in the paint super heats to a hell-bright orange. “By the Laws, I’ve named you. By the Laws, I’ve found you. By the Laws, I’ve snared and trapped you.”
“NO!”
The Corinthian’s entire body blurs again. The frame of the bed buckles as he thrashes, trying to get loose but the magic in the binding silk holds the monster caught. Unable to step between realities and teleport itself to safety. Bound in the body. Bound in Hob Gadling’ goddamn bed. He stops thrashing long enough for Hob to see his face between the gap in his curled arms, his expression pulled in terror.
“By the Laws of hunt and hunter and the primal law of prey, I bind you in your bones here. Chain you – blood to lawful claim.”
The second invocation has teeth. The circle flare and The Corinthian screams, this time in agony as the rope cuts into his neck and wrists, curling him naked and bleeding on the sheets, the blood burning away into particulates that are strangely like silvery sand in the air. Like damaging the monster reduces it to some elemental ephemera. The human-form continues to scream, clawing at the bed, at the rope, writhing in a terrible anguish.
Hob Gadling, calm as a fucking sunrise, says, “I am the one that you call hunter. You’re the thing that I call game. I invoke the Laws to hold you: The Corinthian by name.”
There’s a shriek, the air roaring for a moment as something goes taut in the universe… and then the lights go out. Literally. The electricity in the house dies as the light from the foyer and dim can lights overhead go dark for a moment, then slowly brighten. When the shadows recede, The Corinthian lies still in the bed, shivering slightly, hands curled in a rictus of pain. But he’s not struggling anymore.
Hob stands up then.
The Corinthian speaks first. He looks up, over his bare bicep.
“What the fuck did you just do!?”
“I think you know,” Hob says, unconcerned, moving to pick up his pants and combat knife from the floor. “You’re mine under magical law now. And I command you to shut the fuck up.
The Corinthian’s mouth shuts immediately, then he looks horrified at the fact.
“Good. Also, don’t move or try to hurt me or escape. Just be a good boy and sit there.”
Hob sits down on the bed beside his bound monster, blowing air between his lips.
The Corinthian struggles briefly, before the command forces him still, then he just lies there, quiet.
“So,” Hob says, “you killed a couple of my friends about twenty years back? Alejandro Sanchez and Jordan Kim. Probably don’t remember. But, you know, I wasn’t in the mood to lose more friends at the time, so I took it personal. And, well, nobody was investigating the murders of openly or suspected gay men back then, so I had to look into it myself. Honestly, it’s your bad luck.”
He casually pulls his pants back on, bouncing slightly on the bed to get them up to his hips.
“You now, I wasn’t the first person to clock that The Corinthian and his copycat killers might be the same damn monster. Literally. I’m just the only asshole petty and dumb enough to do something about it.”
Hob rubs his neck, rolling it a little to loosen the muscle.
“God, I’ve been planning this sting for decades. I can’t believe it worked honestly. Do you know how hard it was to trade for that fucking spell? And the rope? And the oracle to confirm your stupid killer pseudonym is name enough to bind you?”
The Corinthian says nothing of course.
Hob shifts his weight onto the bed and moves to kneel over the monster.
“Look up at me.”
He does, but like someone is forcing his head up. He’s still so pretty, honestly. Hob reaches down and rather ungently yank the sunglasses off, but Corinthian turns his face away when he does it, so Hob moves his hand to cup The Corinthian’s neck – so very much like he had as a lover just minutes before – but gripping tight and forcing the monster to look up at him.
Hob blinks. Okay. That’s… different.
The Corinthian is still eerily beautiful. But his eyes under the dim lights are empty hollows lined with human teeth. A set of… ocular mouths built into his eye-sockets. Their shape is normal, the eyelashes pale and pretty, fanned gold across his cheekbones when he starts looking around as if to get away from Hob’s stare. They’re eyes un-lined by any real age or stress and when he looks up at Hob, he can see the shape and color of tongue and the darkness suggesting a throat behind. The fine muscles around his eyes still flicker and tense when Hob runs a thumb along the delicate skin beneath his lower waterline.
“So,” he says, “this is the last thing they saw?”
The Corinthian says nothing.
“Answer me.”
“The last thing Jordan Kim saw before he stopped being able to see, was ceiling fan above his bed before his optic nerve came out of his skull while he was still—”
“Stop talking,” Hob says.
Corinthian immediately loses the ability to speak.
“You take the eyes,” Hob murmurs. “I was going to cut yours out as payback, but I guess that’s not an option.”
The Corinthian smiles at him. Bares all three sets of teeth.
It’s fucked up, but he still looks beautiful.
Then he looks beautiful and surprised when Hob promptly slams the point of his KA-BAR into the hollow at the base of The Corinthian’s throat. Blood wells immediately from the wound gushing to fill the grooves of his collarbones and throat, running down Corinthian’s perfect shoulders into the bed. He looks up at Hob with this momentary outrage, Hob watches, fist still tight around the handle, as blood wells up behind Corinthian’s teeth and overflows down his chin.
Hob waits for the monster to bleed out.
The problem presents itself about five minutes later when The Corinthian is just glaring at him, still very much alive, while the blood on his skin fades like a bruise until there’s no sign of damage save the blade itself lodged bloodlessly in the creature’s chest. Hob, pragmatic about this, yanks the knife out and stabs Corinthian about a dozen times in the heart, belly, lungs, and through the fucking eye socket into the brain. He cuts every major artery in the monster’s seemingly human form.
Then he watches the blood and wounds melt away, leaving a panting and furious Corinthian still bound and naked in his bed, but unharmed.
“Hmm,” Hob says, rubbing his chin. “That’s tricky.”
Corinthian isn’t allowed to talk but he does look just a little bit smug. Hob stabs him through the meat of his thigh and leaves the knife there while the creature goes tense in pain, growling in agony, while Hob ponders.
“Well, shit. I guess that’s my bad for assuming you were just some kind of ghoul. That’s cold iron too.” Hob sits back on the bed, glaring at the ceiling. “Goddammit, I do not know enough monster hunters for this shit.” He turns to look at the Corinthian. “Hey, wanker, tell me how to kill you.”
Corinthian glares, then says, “I can’t be killed, asshole.”
“I command you never to lie to me again from this moment forward.”
“Super,” Corinthian says, eyes wide. “When I get out of here, I’m going to kill you and everyone who knows you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Hob says. “Tell me how to destroy you.”
“Summon my master and make him kill me. Outside of that, there are thousands of demi-gods and deities that might unmake me, Hob, all of them beyond you. So, give up your wet dream of killing me by your own fucking hands to avenge your dead fucking friends.”
Hob grabs the knife and twists it. The Corinthian, expecting that, yells in pain but bears through it, laughing.
“Who is your master?”
“Morpheus.” Corinthian relaxes into the bed, rolling his shoulders.
“Who is that? How do I get hold of him?”
“My creator and lots of ways.” That customer service smile. “But he won’t answer because he hates being summoned and he’s fucking busy right now.”
Hob narrows his eyes. “What are you?”
Corinthian bats his eyes. “A killer.”
“Tell me what you are.”
A shrug. “I’m The Corinthian.”
“No, tell me what kind of monster you are.”
“A serial killer.” He says it in a sing-song voice.
“Bloody irritating,” Hob mutters. Then, “Okay, your master made you, right? Other than The Corinthian, what would he most frequently say that you are?”
Corinthian thinks about it, then, “He called me ‘annoying’ alot, in the end there.”
Hob yanks the knife out of The Corinthian’s thigh, ignores the growl of pain and stands up. “I’m gonna turn off the lights and lock you in here now. Dunno when I’ll be back.” He watches for any sign of distress in his captive but get a glare for his efforts. “When I come back, I’m gonna try to kill you again. And I’ll keep trying until you’re dead, but you might be here a while.”
Hob walks back toward the door, picking up his shirt and pulling it on. He turns off the lights and stands for a moment in the doorway, looking back over his shoulder.
“It was nice to meet you, love.”
Then Hob shuts and locks the door. The next day, he installs a heavy-duty digital combination lock on the knob, and he doesn’t think about the creature locked in his basement for a while.
It’s the winter of 1994 that Hob opens the basement door again.
The Corinthian doesn’t say anything to him. He can’t refuse when Hob makes him drink a cocktail of poison and one extremely powerful annihilation curse. It’s about thirty minutes of screaming and watching The Corinthian burn from the inside, then recover and burn, then recover and burn before it magic runs out and leaves the creature insentient, a dying coal of magic inside in his ribs pulsing slower and slower with every breathe.
“We’ll try again next year,” Hob says.
Corinthian coughs smoke.
“Fuck you, Hob.”
It’s the spring of 1995 that Hob opens the basement door.
This time, he cuts Corinthian’s fucking head off with his old broadsword.
The head dissolves into sand and almost immediately reconstitutes into the same pretty face and horrible eye-mouths as they were previously. His captive monster gives Hob a look like that was incredibly rude. Hob just shrugs and notes that since The Corinthian’s blood just vanishes, that explains a lot about why so many of his murders were not only unsolved but instant cold cases even well into the time of forensic technology. He speculates loosely that probably means whatever fluid he ejaculates must disappear too. Convenient.
He never did get as far as finding out come to think of it.
He cuts Corinthian’s head off half a dozen more times just to make sure.
“Any recommendations?” Hob asks, sheathing his weapon at last with a sigh.
“Stop. Fucking. Killing. Me.”
“Ha. No. See you next year.”
It’s the summer of 1996 that Hob opens the basement door again.
“Do you know,” he says, “what a bloody pain in the ass it is to maintain a flat in America just to house you, you inconsiderate twat?”
The Corinthian is less responsive than last time and raises his head from where he’s lying on his side, blinking slowly. Hob crosses the room and slings his duffle bag to the floor, pulling out a series of increasingly cursed and magical weapons he bought from a variety of incredibly shady places for the purpose of murdering his un-murderable prisoner. Hob notes that The Corinthian is starting to leave a dent in the mattress from lying in the same spot for the past four years.
“It’s really fucking boring in here,” says The Corinthian when none of the bloody useless pieces of shit do anything useful to kill his still very naked monster. “Could you at least, like, fuck me or something before you leave?”
“You’re deranged.”
“No,” he says, “I’m bored.”
Hob stands there, glaring at his duffle bag.
“At some point, I’m gonna need to relocate you to London. I can’t keep flying out here just for an annual murder attempt.”
“Sounds dangerous,” Corinthian says mildly. “If you fuck it up, I’m gonna rip your head off.”
“Well, that’s my problem. Not yours, yeah?”
There’s a long pause.
“I could just fill this fucking room with concrete and leave you here forever,” says Hob quietly.
The Corinthian reacts to that. Or rather, he doesn’t react a little too much, going extremely still and quiet like a dog does when it senses it’s about to get struck and needs to be small. Hob isn’t sure why he thinks specifically of that example, but he grabs his duffle bag, turns out the lights and leaves again, locking the place up behind him.
It’s the summer of 1997 that Hob opens the basement door again.
“That him?”
“Yeah.”
Johanna looks over her shoulders Hob, dark eyes scanning Hob’s face. Constantine doesn’t spook so it’s not fear in her stare but a kind of recalculation. Adding into her math what kind of a man can keep a creature locked in his basement for five years, unflinching, when it looks so much like human being. More specifically, it looks a lot like an extremely beautiful man tied to a bed in his goddamn basement.
“Is someone there?” The Corinthian shifts slightly, shoulders shaking, like it’s too hard to even lift his head. “Please. Please, help me. He’s keeping me here.” He starts a really… terrifyingly convincing bout of hysterical crying, so real Hob knows immediately he’s parroting the last words of one of his victims. “He’s going to kill me! I’m begging you, please—”
“Can it, mate!” Johanna tosses her kit bag on the floor and crouches to dig around in it. “I know you’re a serial murdering monster with a triple digit body count.”
The crying immediately stops, and Corinthian’s pretty golden head comes up, regarding both of them with a predatory intelligence and loathing. He uncurls a little, sitting up a little until his neck comes up at the end of the noose, keeping him partially reclined in the dilapidated bed.
Johanna looks up at Hob. “Okay. I do this once and only once and then we are square.”
“I just need the once.”
She nods and finishes her summoning circle, her ward inlays, and the salt circle. Then she very calmly flips her little black book of spell work open and starts the ritual. Hob has seen, maybe, five summoning’s in his 600 years of life and this one is the nastiest. The room immediately crawls with shadow and a sudden suicidal urge latches to his heart, then peels off like paint under Constantine’s protections. She’s bed rock in an earthquake. Lighthouse in a hurricane. Unflinching as she tears open a portal to the deeper pits of hell.
Hob knows Latin well enough to follow some of it, but it’s not all Latin and the last word is a name. And the name leaves his eyes burning and his lips cracked as something appears in the circle.
It’s hard to look at even, rearing up to its full seven feet in height, six heavy breasts hung in gold and chain down its abdomen, face that is nothing but a mask of hammered gold in the platonic ideal of a human woman, but contorted in pain. Its hair is braided and dirty, dripping gore and mud. In one of its four hands is the head of Hob’s dead son and he turns his eyes away, biting back bile before turning to look again.
In its other hand is the head of a little girl, dark skin, her kinky curls gripped by the thing’s claws.
In the other two hands – Hob and Johanna’s own dead skulls.
“Abasha,” says Johanna, still completely unflinching. “You’re bound by book and law. You owe me a boon and I’m cashing in.”
The thing in the circle tilts its head, and the metal face warps into a rictus of joy.
“Constantine. At last. I hate to owe debts. What’s your pleasure?”
Johanna points to the bed. “The being in that binding circle. I want you to destroy him.”
The demon Abasha turns, looking at The Corinthian.
Then, “Oh fuck, Corinthian? Is that you?”
“Don’t start,” says Hob’s prisoner.
Abasha starts laughing. It’s sanity-stripping noise, high, shrieking and Hob isn’t certain, but it might be snorting with hysterics. It turns back to Johanna.
“I cannot destroy him. He’s dreamstuff, little exorcist. And more besides, he’s one of the Dream King’s Major Arcana. I can tear him asunder, but he may simply reform in the bosom of the Dreaming, rotten as it is. Besides—” the demon waves two dismissive hands, “I don’t want the Lord of Dreams and Nightmares taking some petty revenge on me for killing his pet if I do succeed. No, Constantine, I cannot repay your debt this way.”
“Shit.” Constantine thinks. Then, slowly, “But you know what he is?”
Abasha’s golden mask grins wider. It’s awful.
“I do. If I answer your questions, will you consider our debt paid?”
“Bitch!” Corinthian yells from his bed.
“Yeah, tell us what he is. Proper. What do you mean he’s dreamstuff?”
“He’s The Corinthian. A nightmare from the Realm of the Dreaming.” Abasha gestures with her four arms. “An old one. A powerful one. One of the arch nightmares fashioned by the hands of the Lord of Dreams and Nightmares. Morpheus. Also called Dream of the Endless. Dreams are hard to kill you see and nightmares just as difficult. The best you can do is shred them for a while or capture them as you have done, but killing dreams is the providence of very, very few.”
“Shit,” says Hob.
Johanna isn’t distracted. “His boss. He could do it?”
“Dream? Yes, Morpheus could, but I doubt it. He made this one special—”
“I’m gonna remember this,” says Corinthian suddenly, “and hunt you down, Abasha.”
A pause. Consideration.
Abasha goes on. “Dream is also missing. Which is why this one is running amok in your world I imagine. Usually, rules would forbid dreamkin to walk The Waking and harm mortal kind. The Corinthian is being very bad. Bad enough that, if Dream does return, I imagine he’ll be angry enough to kill his creation.”
“Is there anyone else,” Johanna asks, “anyone who could kill him until Morpheus comes back?”
Abasha laughs high and loud and the walls shake.
“Oh yes! You could summon more arch devils and demon lords a plenty, but you’ll have to hold them and trade with them to do it and the price, Constantine, for killing a favorite arch nightmare will be steep.” Blood is gushing from the mouth of the golden mask and its eyes. “Dream King is irrational and mercurial. Only he is allowed to break his toys, little mortals, and he could be back any day now. You might have to wait.”
Johanna glances at Hob.
“Is there anyone else who can hold him?”
Abasha thinks, then says, “Sell him to me.”
There’s a long pause.
From the bed, The Corinthian says, “I’m gonna volunteer something here: If you sell me to anyone in hell, you are effectively handing demons a weapon that can walk into The Waking World at any time to do murder and other shit you don’t approve of.” He shrugs. “Just saying.”
Abasha also shrugs.
Hob and Johanna exchange a look.
“Yeah. No deal.”
“A shame. How about this?” Abasha tilts her head, snaking closes to Constantine. “Let me into his circle so I can torture him for a while. Let him tear and rape and rend him to my satisfaction, until he is broken and begging for the mercy. I’ll make him manageable, and I’ll owe you another favor, Johanna Constantine. Do you accept?”
Johanna immediately says, “No fucking way. I don’t wanna see that shit you exhibitionist freak.”
“His owner doesn’t seem to mind,” says Abasha, looking at Hob.
Johanna looks at Hob sharply, nostrils flaring like an angry bull.
“I don’t give a shit,” she says, never breaking eye-contact with Hob. “This is my summoning. I don’t do that. You’re done Abasha. We’re even.”
Abasha laughs. “Had to try. Good luck, Constantine. If you change your mind, summon me again.” The demon looks at Hob. “Or learn to summon me yourself, old soul. We could have fun.”
Constantine snaps her book shut and blows out the candle at the edge of the circle.
Abasha is gone.
Constantine gathers up her kit, wordless, furious.
“I wasn’t going to say yes,” Hob says, walking her out to her rental car.
“Fuck you, Gadling. You’re a maniac.” She slams her car door after tossing her bag inside, wheeling on him. “You never ever bind something to you before you know what it fucking is. You have some kind of magical fucking nuke in there. Abasha is a not a chump-change summon in the hierarchy of hell and she didn’t wanna touch him with a ten foot pole.”
“We confirmed his name. She named his master, right? Dream of the Endless or whatever.”
“Fairy stories,” she snaps. Then sighs, “Or so I thought. Look, Gadling, like it or not you’re stuck with that thing so figure your shit out. Move to America and just deal with it.”
“I can’t. I need to stay in London.”
“Why? This is incredibly bloody important and you’re rich, goddammit. Clean up your mess.”
“I’m trying, but I need to be in London.”
“Then take your monster to London with you somehow, you prick. This is no longer my circus or my monkeys and I’m making a ward just to fend of that little fuck face if he ever gets loose.” Constantine stalks around the font of her car to get into the driver’s side, pausing just a moment. “Don’t… get crazy on me, Hob. You’ve been massively fucking nice to have around and I don’t want you going bloody mad over a boogeyman you have locked in your basement. Do you hear me?”
“I do.”
“Lines. Draw yourself some. Stay behind them.”
“I wasn’t going to take her deal,” Hob says flatly.
Johanna looks at him. “Maybe, but you didn’t bloody mind, did you?”
Then she gets in her car and takes off.
Hob goes back downstairs just to shut the lights off. But as he’s closing the door, Corinthian says, “Thanks,” loudly enough to be heard.
He says it like Hob just passed him some pepper at the table and he finds himself pausing in slamming the door. He waits. The Corinthian doesn’t say anything else, lying on his back in the darkness with his arms tied over his head. The band of light from the stairwell is laid across his bare stomach and ribs, so they glow, cut out of the pitch darkness. After a while, Hob senses though he can’t see that the nightmare he’s bound down here turns his head to look at him.
“Unless you want to do it,” he says.
Hob slams the door.
Hob gets a little busy in London redoing his identity and it’s in the fall of 1999 that he unlocks the basement door.
The room smells like dust and, strangely, only just now is it starting to smell faintly like The Corinthian’s skin does in close proximity, like whatever The Corinthian is, it’s just not as substantial in this world and he doesn’t leave a mark like a human being locked in a room for seven years would. Hob finds his prisoner exactly where he left him, curled up on the bed, face tucked into his curled arms, legs folded up against his chest as if for warmth.
“Oi, you awake?”
“You’re late,” Corinthian says, but quietly.
Hob drops his bag to the ground and starts unzipping it.
“What are you going to do this time?”
Hob ignores him. “Roll onto your stomach and don’t bloody fight me or try to move.”
“Kinky. What are you doing?”
Hob sighs, and pulls the small machine and its requisite inkbottles, sharps, and power cord from the bag. The Corinthian sits up as far as the noose around his neck will allow, squinting at the collection of parts for a moment before recognizing the coil tattoo machine. Hob ignores his prisoner who goes very still for a while Hob assembles the lot.
That’s a good sign if he’s not mouthing off immediately.
“Don’t worry,” Hob says, sitting in the middle of Corinthian’s back, hand pressed into his right scapula to steady his hand, “I did some time as a tattooist in the seventies. It’s how I met my friend, Alejando, the one you killed by the way. This is his old kit. Took me a while to find it.”
He kicks on the air compressor.
“You know, there’s a kind of primal power in the relationship between victim and murderer.” He studies the back of the nightmare’s head, the side of his face. “Enough, I think, to fuck with you. So, I’m testing it.”
Then Hob lays the first line into his captive’s perfect golden skin.
The Corinthian immediately reacts, muscles tensing, a restrained sound of discomfort catching in his throat as the inking machine lays the first rune into his back. Hob stops to wipe the blood, watches closely how Corinthian’s ribs rise and fall rapidly. Then he goes in for the second rune and his monster visibly bites down on his lip to stop from screaming. His fingers claw into the bed, his body shivering with the order not to move or fight him.
“Good boy,” Hob hushes, patting the monster’s ribs, like soothing a spooked horse.
“Go fuck yourself,” Corinthian pants, but there’s sweat dripping from his chin. “Fuck—"
“You’re being a baby about this,” Hob says, guiding the third rune into place, a constellation of seven in total. By the fourth, Hob looks up and says dubiously, “Hey, you still with me?”
The Corinthian kind of moans, not a fun moan, the kind that dying men and animals make. Then he full out screams as the fifth rune is laid into his spine, every line of muscle in his body locking with the agony. It’s not very enjoyable, so Hob puts on his headphones on to drown it out when The Corinthian really starts losing his mind, screaming like creature getting gutted. He keeps them on when The Corinthian passes out at the seventh rune.
He waits for a while.
The blood disappears. The runes do not.
“Brilliant,” he says.
He packs up the kit.
“Not doing this today,” Hob declares, “but we’ll see how that holds until next year. New millennium. New location.”
The Corinthian is sitting, fully upright for the first time since Hob caught him. Hob put more slack into the lead line at his neck and unbound his hands completely. He’s seated tailor-style in the bed, staring at his hands in his lap, the dusty sheets rucked around his hips. He keeps, occasionally, twitching involuntarily, but then goes back to staring at his empty palms.
Hob monitors this for a while, then says, “Why did you kill my friends? Why did you kill any of them?”
“Because it felt good and it’s what I’m made for.”
“No, you’re made to stay in dreams. You came here. Why?”
“Because it feels good here,” he repeats. “And killing your friend Alejandro felt great. He was nice and said he loved my hands. Eating his fucking eyes out of his skull felt great. You asked what the last thing your friends saw? I know. Do you want me to tell you what he saw?”
“Does it still?” Hob asks, ignoring all that. “Does it still feel good here?”
Hob waits for The Corinthian to go on, but he never does, so Hob locks the place up as he goes.
In the summer of 2000, Hob Gadling cuts the eyelet from the wall in the basement.
He very carefully and methodically reties the excess silver cord around The Corinthian’s chest, knotted in crossing lines under his arms, and tied off between his shoulder blades where the binding circle on his back is still clear and fresh as the day Hob put it into his skin. The Corinthian offers zero resistance through this, even when Hob pulls the cross-knotting tight to skin.
When it’s done, it’s almost like there’s a second silver tattoo across his body, a wireframe of silver around his ribs. Hob catches him touching one of the braids across his right pectoral, tracing it up to his collarbone with long, pale fingers, his face tensing with some unreadable emotion between rage and resignation.
Hob hands him a folded shirt and jeans.
The Corinthian just glares at him and suddenly he’s dressed. Tan suit, white undershirt, slacks, nice shoes, his dark glasses in a more modern style over his eyes. His shirt is exactly loose enough and the collar high enough there’s no seeing the cords tired around his ribcage.
“You could have done that the entire time?” Hob asks, putting the clothes away.
“No,” he says without elaboration.
“Okay. Well, just to cover my bases: I order you follow me and do as I command and not to act on your own unless I tell you to. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t talk at all unless I signal you’re allowed to. Don’t cause any problems or draw attention to yourself. Don’t change your appearance without my permission. Don’t try to get away from me or harm me so you can get away from me. In fact, blanket order not to harm anyone.”
The Corinthian nods mutely.
Hob tilts his head. “Do you actually like to eat or do you pretend for the sake of the hunt?”
A pause. “I’m not pretending.”
“Good to know.”
Then he scores the carving on the floor with an ax, breaking the circle.
Hob Gadling leaves the empty townhouse on the end of the row in America, leaving it empty (at last) behind him. On the way to the airport, Hob stops in a Cold Stone Creamery to get ice cream and (to not be weird) buys a second cone for the serial killer nightmare thing shaped like a person who is sitting cross-legged on a table in the outdoor dining area staring at passing traffic like it’s Broadway.
Hob hands him the extra cone and sits down on the bench-seat by the table.
“Be normal,” Hob says, irritated. “Or else.”
The Corinthian says nothing, but left un-commanded, he wordlessly consumes the single scoop of ice-cream and Hob catches it when he kind of exhales in relief.
