Chapter 1: The Hollow Man

The body lay on the Victorian tiles of King's Cross Station platform, surrounded by the morning rush hour crowd that flowed around it like water around a stone. PC Peter Grant crouched beside the corpse, careful not to disturb the scene, and felt that familiar tingle at the base of his skull that meant magic had been here.

"What do you think, Peter?" Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale stood behind him, immaculate in his tailored three-piece suit despite the early hour. To the casual observer, he looked like any other senior officer—distinguished, authoritative, competent. Only Peter knew that the man was over a century old and the last officially sanctioned wizard in England.

"Definitely vestigia," Peter said, using the Latin term his mentor had taught him for magical traces. "But it's..." He paused, trying to find the right words. Most magical signatures felt organized, purposeful—like classical music made visible. This felt like someone had taken a symphony and fed it through a wood chipper. "It's chaotic. Violent. Not like anything I've encountered before."

The victim was a middle-aged businessman, his expensive suit rumpled but intact, briefcase still clutched in one hand. Thomas Hartwell, according to his wallet. Married, father of two, senior partner at a prestigious law firm. On paper, he had everything to live for.

"No obvious cause of death," Dr. Abdul Walid had told them when he'd arrived from UCH to examine the body. "No trauma, no signs of poisoning, cardiac event, or stroke. But look at his face."

Peter had looked. The man's features were slack, empty—not the peaceful emptiness of natural death, but something far more disturbing. It was as if someone had reached inside and scooped out everything that made Thomas Hartwell human, leaving only a biological shell behind.

"Witnesses?" Nightingale inquired.

"Three people saw him collapse," Peter consulted his notebook. "A barista from the coffee stand, a commuter heading to work, and a maintenance worker. All say the same thing—he just stopped walking, stood perfectly still for about thirty seconds, then collapsed. But here's the odd bit." Peter flipped a page. "When I interviewed them, they all used almost identical phrasing to describe his expression just before he fell. 'Like all the hope had gone out of the world.'"

Nightingale's eyebrows rose fractionally—for him, a dramatic display of surprise. "Interesting. And the magical signature?"

Peter stood, brushing dust from his uniform trousers. "That's what's bothering me. It feels... familiar somehow. Not the pattern itself, but the underlying structure. Like I've encountered this type of working before, but corrupted."

They walked back toward their car, a pristine Jaguar Mark II that Nightingale maintained with the same meticulous care he applied to everything else in his life. The Folly—their headquarters and the Metropolitan Police's supernatural crimes unit of exactly two and a half people—awaited their return.

"There's something else," Peter said as they settled into the Jag's leather seats. "I found traces of what looked like scrying residue in the surrounding area. Someone was watching when this happened."

"Remote observation?" Nightingale started the engine with practiced precision. "That suggests premeditation rather than a random supernatural event."

Peter nodded. "And there's one more thing. When I was examining the vestigia more closely, I caught fragments of something. A name, maybe, or a place. Newcastle."

The effect on Nightingale was immediate and subtle—a slight tightening around the eyes, fingers gripping the steering wheel just a fraction tighter. In anyone else, it would have been barely noticeable. Peter had learned to read his mentor's micro-expressions like a sailor reads weather.

"Newcastle," Nightingale repeated carefully. "That's... concerning."

"You know something about Newcastle and magic?"

"I know that certain names are whispered in the darker corners of the occult community. Names associated with that city." Nightingale pulled into traffic with his usual unflappable skill. "If this death is connected to what I think it might be, we may need to consult with someone I'd rather avoid."

"Who?"

"A man named John Constantine."

---

Four hundred miles north, in a grimy pub that had seen better decades, John Constantine sat in a booth that had been old when he was young. The Lamb's Head wasn't the sort of establishment that attracted tourists—the kind of place where the beer was flat, the carpet sticky, and nobody asked too many questions about why a man might drink alone at eleven in the morning.

Constantine's weathered hands cradled a whisky that had seen more additives than a chemistry lab, but he wasn't drinking. Instead, he stared into the amber liquid as if it held answers to questions he was afraid to ask. His trademark tan trench coat hung over the back of his chair, cigarette smoke curling around his face like incense at a particularly grim mass.

He'd felt it that morning—a ripple in the supernatural fabric, like someone dropping a stone into still water. Something was stirring, something that made his skin crawl and his cigarette taste like ash. In his line of work, that usually meant one of three things: imminent death, imminent damnation, or both.

The scrying bowl sat on the scarred wooden table before him, filled with water from the Tyne and his own blood. Not much—Constantine was many things, but wasteful with his life force wasn't one of them. Just enough to open his third eye and peer into the shadows that normal people were blessed to ignore.

He whispered the incantation under his breath, words in a language that predated the Romans by millennia. The water began to swirl, forming patterns that hurt to look at directly. Images flickered in its depths: a London train station, a man collapsing, and underneath it all, a familiar signature that made Constantine's blood run cold.

"Bollocks," he muttered, and reached for his cigarettes with hands that shook just slightly. "Not now. Not fucking now."

The vision deepened, showing him threads of power that led back toward Newcastle like veins of poison in the earth. He followed them deeper, pushing his consciousness along paths that human minds weren't meant to travel, until—

The water exploded into steam as a face materialized in its depths—a young girl with dark hair and accusing eyes, her features twisted by decades of torment. Astra Logue, the girl he'd failed to save all those years ago, stared at him with an expression of infinite sadness and rage.

"John," her voice whispered from the dissipating steam, though her lips didn't move. "John, it's beginning again."

The pub's lights flickered and died, plunging the room into darkness. When they stuttered back to life a moment later, the scrying bowl lay in shards across the table, and Constantine's hands were bleeding from where he'd gripped the fragments.

"Fuck," he breathed, staring at the destruction. Around the pub, the few other patrons continued their conversations as if nothing had happened—a small blessing of Constantine's wards, protecting the innocent from witnessing things that would drive them mad.

But there was no protection from memory. Astra's face lingered in his vision, superimposed over the grimy reality of the pub. The girl who'd died because of his arrogance, his desperate need to prove himself the cleverest bastard in the room. The girl whose soul had been dragged into Hell while he stood helpless, paralyzed by the magnitude of his failure.

If she was reaching out to him now, it meant the past was coming home to roost. And in Constantine's experience, that never ended well for anyone involved.

He pulled out his mobile—a battered piece of technology that had somehow survived more supernatural encounters than its warranty covered—and scrolled through his contacts. There were people he could call, favors he could collect, but something told him this was bigger than his usual network of ghosts, demons, and fellow practitioners could handle.

The morning's events were connected, he was certain of that much. The death in London, Astra's warning, the growing darkness he'd felt pressing against the edges of his consciousness—it all pointed toward something he'd hoped never to face again.

Constantine lit another cigarette with hands steadier than they had any right to be, and prepared to make a phone call he'd rather avoid. Because if he was right about what was coming, he was going to need help. And in his experience, the cavalry rarely came charging over the hill unless someone was willing to ask for it.

Even if it meant swallowing his considerable pride and admitting that John Constantine, master of the dark arts and survivor of more supernatural disasters than any sane person should, might actually need the help of London's answer to Merlin and his eager young apprentice.

The game was beginning again, whether he liked it or not.