Dangerous Habits

Angela slipped warily through the crowded, dark club, aware that her simple, businesslike attire was attracting more attention than she wanted. It ironically stood out in the mire of dramatic gothic outfits. Victorine had to be here, she thought. Like Isabel had, Victorine fought hard to dull her psychic powers whenever she could- by drinking, primarily, or by being around crowds of emotionally charged people so that her senses were deadened by the ambient mental "noise."

How was it that John could exist so coolly, when most individuals who had any remote psychic gift were driven literally- or figuratively- out of their minds? Irritably, she shrugged the question from her mind. His presence in her life was starting to make her consider things that she once rationalized away as ridiculous, and it made her acutely uncomfortable.

He drifted behind her, eyeing their new surroundings with little interest. Behind him, she could see Chas had been distracted by a pretty, lithe girl back at the bar, and she rolled her eyes.

"I've been spending too much time in clubs," John remarked, voice almost inaudible over the din of European electronica. "Where's your friend?"

"She isn't my friend," snapped Angela, snatching a drink from a waif of a waiter who slunk by, bearing a tray laden with cocktails. "She was Isabel's friend." She downed the thing in a deep gulp, only dimly noting the fruity, alcoholic burn as it trailed down her throat. "We're only here because I think she can help."

Though the place was small, it felt like forever as they snaked their way to the private back room that Victorine used. Angela felt like people were staring at her, probably thinking she was Isabel. This was her crowd. They had no idea, she realized bitterly, that Isabel had been institutionalized again. That she had died. Everyone who knew Victorine knew she was a freak, someone who tried to kill herself at least twice a month. But that was different- Victorine was did it for a price, to tell people everything they ever wanted to know about their futures, or to contact their dead relatives. No one who came to this club was unaware of the occultist's darker tendencies. She was sincerely surprised that John didn't frequent it, but then, she supposed his forte was more demons than anything else.

The door was nondescript. If you didn't know what you were looking for, you most likely wouldn't have even noticed it, or you might have thought it was a janitor's closet. It was battered and neglected, the indigo paint peeling. She noticed the chunky door knob bore a dark, scuffed patina. Glancing up at John, she realized his face had gone taut- more studied and emotionless than usual.

"What's the matter?" she muttered, hand midway out to knock.

"Nothing," he said, cocking his head to one side. "Someone in there is giving me a rush."

Flatly, Angela asked, "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It's not a bad thing. Most people are innocuous- their energies lay low. That's all. Relax."

As she rapped on the door, she sighed. This was not her world. She didn't care if it could have been, or even if it should have been. This investigation had her feeling like she was drowning in the occult- fairy tales and ghost stories. Angels and demons.

Green eyes peered out at her, widened, and then the door swung open. In a complete contrast to the atmosphere surrounding her, the woman whom Angela assumed was Victorine- they'd met once, years ago- wore casual jeans and a tight black blouse. Bright reddish hair hung to her waist, and it was streaked with the kind of ruddy gold usually only surfers could attain from being chronically on the beach. She was shorter than Angela by an inch, and very petite. It was hard to tell they were the same age. Above her small breasts lay a tiny gold triskele studded with amethysts.

"Angela," she breathed, in a lightly French-accented voice. "I was so sorry to hear about Isabel."

She moved aside to let them pass. Angela brushed past her wordlessly, suddenly feeling a lump form in her throat. No, she wouldn't cry. This slip of a girl was part of the reason Isabel had gotten so involved with her visions.

Instead of looking at Victorine, Angela clinically studied the tiny room. A circular cedar table was the obvious centerpiece, and candles sat flickering in its center. On the walls hung colorful tapestries and antique mirrors. Resin incense smoldered in its stone holder, set in the far corner with what looked like a Catholic altar strewn with statuettes and garlands of fluffy golden flowers- marigolds. Behind the flowers sat a huge bottle of dark rum. The single small window was covered with some thick, metallic damask material that let the light of the sunset in around its edges. On the wood floor, intricate sigils were painted in black and red. Angela recognized none of them. She'd been expecting at least a pentagram. When she finally looked back, she met Victorine's obvious concern very reluctantly.

"Thank you," she said pointedly. "This is John Constantine. He's... helping." She didn't elaborate further.

Victorine turned her attention to John, who dwarfed her by almost a foot. The two psychics were silent as they stared at each other, John down and Victorine up. His expression calmly unreadable as always, he nodded in a taciturn greeting. Angela noted that Victorine did not move to shake his hand, and wondered if what her sister had told her was true.

Isabel had mentioned once- it seemed like forever ago- that Victorine hardly ever casually touched people because they found it unsettling. The reason behind this apparently had to do with the fact that she was a healer, or had healing energy, something like that. Angela had insisted that it was all a show, maybe it was really because Victorine was a hypochondriac or something dumb- but now? Now she had no idea, which deeply irked her. Her staunch disbelief had hurt Isabel. In part, she still didn't want to believe that someone had to live with a minimum of human contact. But if Victorine was a healer, a voice in the back of her head insisted, why wouldn't she want to touch people?

"You give me a headache," Victorine informed John, good-naturedly, "which is saying something, because I'm usually hungover."

"I can imagine why," John said. His dark eyes glinted like a cat's who was about to catch a mouse, and Angela was fleetingly jealous. If she hadn't sealed herself off- atrophied her own ability- she could share what they were feeling off of each other. Maybe she could even see what they were seeing right now. Victorine, she knew, saw spirits and demons like John and Isabel, but her ability to heal human ailments allowed her to jointly sense auras. Blasphemy to the church was simply interconnected energy to her.

"I never thought John Constantine would be standing in my inner sanctum," she said thoughtfully. "You and your entourage of dead friends."

He and Angela exchanged looks. Victorine's dissonant lucidity didn't bother him, but clearly, it did annoy Angela.

"Does drinking even help?" he asked.

Victorine rolled her eyes. "Sometimes. With normal people." She gestured to Angela, green gaze bright. "With people like her. With people like you? Or me? Isabel? No. Thankfully not many of us exist." She chuckled drily.

"We all try to off ourselves. It's true."

Angela cleared her throat impatiently. "We're not here for you two to exchange battle tactics," she said, brushing her glossy auburn curls back with a shaking hand. "Victorine, I called you to see if you could help. And if you can't, I'm leaving."

Recognizing the mixed self-pity and anger in Angela's tone wasn't directed at her, Victorine nodded. "I know. I just don't understand what you think I can do," she said, in her soft voice, "If he hasn't done much- I don't know what I can do further. Myself, I don't have much of a direct line to divinities. Just humanity. Different practices. Same results."

Angela muttered, collapsing on one of the huge embroidered pillows littering the floor, "I hoped this wouldn't be a waste of time."

Frowning in thought, Victorine crossed over to the window and glanced outside to the crowded street. They were, weirdly, up on the top of a building- not in a basement- and the view of the city was starkly beautiful. Dying, orange sunlight glittered in her eyes and off of the necklace. It also illuminated the myriad of scars on her thin arms, some long and vertical, others shorter and across her wrists. Angela shuddered, thinking of her twin.

"The scars. The altar. You're a voudon," John said slowly, as though he'd been pondering something. Victorine chuckled. Angela had no idea what a voudon was.

If John was damned, and if Isabel was in hell, where the hell was Victorine going to end up? Was it different if she used her power for the peace of others? There were so many scars. Most of them were old, while a couple looked fresher, pinker. The difference could be that Victorine never truly intended to kill herself. Not like John had when he was a teenager. She meant to bring herself closer to the veil between life and death each time she let her blood flow away from her body. Otherwise, Angela concluded, she'd have to be dead by now.

"Isabel's not here," she murmured. "I know what you're thinking- she would have come to me if she was still stuck on this plane- and you're right. She and I, we were close. She would come to me. Or she would come to you." Over her shoulder, she looked shrewdly at Angela. "I didn't enhance a thing that wouldn't have ripened on its own in time. If anything, I helped her stay stable. Your luck is better with Constantine if you want to find her. You know she's probably in hell. Suicide is technically the same as murder."

"What do you mean you helped her stay stable?"

"I siphoned a lot of the depression away," she said, choosing her words carefully, "the anxiety. Her being in that asylum didn't do her any good."

Tears welled stubbornly in Angela's eyes. "We're not here to find Isabel. I-"

"You're here to guilt trip me," Victorine finished, not unkindly, but with heavy sarcasm. "Really, I'm better than dealing with demons or half-breed angels, what with their wings popping out everywhere and smacking people in the face on the astral plane. Why not blame a human who had nothing to do with it. I mean, you betrayed your own sister. You used to see too, and you told her you couldn't."

Angela changed the subject, awkwardly aware of John's presence as he languidly stood against the wall behind her. "Why do you do it? It's macabre," she said quickly, indicating the scarring.

Making an indistinct noise, John said, "It's not that simple, Angela."

"Power takes a trade-off," Victorine said slowly. "It's not like I enjoy major blood loss. It's the altered state that helps you do whatever you need to be doing. Holding hands with death is the only way to get some things done. For me, anyway."

"That makes no sense," Angela retorted. She glared at John, who steadily stared back.

Victorine pursed her lips. She was, in her way, as direct as Angela could be. "I guess for the same reason you don't. To stay sane. I think it's another of my penalties for fucking up the precious Biblical balance. Humans aren't supposed to see the dead. Or anything much else. And they certainly aren't allowed to heal the way I do. God doesn't like competition."

She paused, meeting Angela's chagrin with an unashamed frankness. "I leased the room in this club because being around crowds of the living drives away crowds of the dead. The owner knows that. There are more of them than demons. More of them than angels. It's like having a whole city's worth of voices crammed into your head. I've been committed before. You think Isabel was the only one? My mother thought I was schizophrenic."

"The medievals had witch hunts," John said, laconically, "We have institutions."

"Pretty much, yeah," Victorine agreed.

A strong bass beat filtered in through the thin walls, thudding like a heart. Angela swallowed back her frustrated remarks. That sounded a lot like how Isabel had felt before she'd gone away, she admitted. Victorine offered her a hand up and Angela stared at it. "I thought..." she started, trailing off.

Victorine's smile became twisted. "I won't be touching you long enough to do much. But if you've got a headache or the sniffles, I promise they'll go away. I want to convince you I'm not crazy. Plus, it's kind of cool." This close, she smelled of cigarettes and expensive bourbon. Somewhere above all of that floated the scent of a Chanel perfume. She wore little makeup except for some blush and lipstick, and had an oddly golden undertone for someone who spent so much time inside. There were shadows under her big eyes, though.

The detective in her had to know. She could almost feel John's curiosity taking on a tangible edge, and maybe she asked because she wanted to prove to him she wasn't as scared as he thought she was. Victorine smirked knowingly. Something about the simple eloquence of the gesture made Angela curious to understand how she could see. Taking a deep breath, she took Victorine's small hand in hers.

And the instant sensation was like being electrified, shot through with static. Something jarring must have resonated for John, because although neither woman had cried out, he took a halting step towards them and caught himself as he broke into jagged coughs. Nothing was putting Angela in danger, she knew, but her entire world had changed. The physical surroundings were still present, but a layer like the negative of a film had fallen over everything. Flesh was stark white, while everything else was shades of black and grey or violet. On this negative, shadowy figures paced back and forth- a few were distinct, while others were blurry. The brightness of the candles had reached a white-hot shimmer.

Angela looked to Victorine for explanation, and was startled to see that like the flames, she shimmered irresistibly. She sparkled with a vivid jade green that shifted into silver. Looking over to John, Angela saw that he glittered too, only with a red that was tinged with the same silver. It came to her that there was something unstable about his aura- it was ringed in black- which would make sense if he was as sick as the doctors claimed. Her other hand radiated a lavender color as she passed it in front of her eyes, like a druggie trying to make sure it was still attached.

"Is this how you always see?" she wanted to know. Linked as they were, she could also sense Victorine's emotions. Towards herself, she felt only a dim, aching pity. Victorine was far more intrigued by John than by her.

"Of course not," Victorine answered. "I can turn it on and off, if you will. I always see the figures though. But they just look like... slightly transparent real people. They're walking corpses, essentially, stuck in purgatory. It's much prettier like this, trust me, but it's much harder to maintain."

She relinquished her grip on Angela's hand and everything went back into sharp focus. Angela felt weirdly happy- like she'd just gone for a run on a gorgeous, sunny day, and her mouth fell open when she couldn't find anything to say. John saved her by observing, "You put some of yourself into Angela to do that. Right?"

Her sardonic smile was back. "Right. Any of us can do it."

"If I did that, the other person could die of shock," he said, no trace of anger in his voice. "It's why I perform exorcisms so well. Humans need that sort of shock to pull their asses out of it."

Victorine's eyebrow arched, and she said, "Yeah, and you have those sigils. That's part of it. I'm a little different. Our methodologies are different. I would not have those things tattooed onto me."

John looked mildly interested that the medium had been able to sense his tattoos. But Angela suspected that inwardly, as anyone else would be, he was taken aback. He crossed his arms.

"Don't be dense," she continued, "You must know she saw you before she jumped. Angela found you that way- more or less. We're enough of an attraction to the other side. I wouldn't want permanent sigils to get more attention."

Angela leaned against one of the curio cabinets. She'd never told John exactly how she knew to go to him. That Isabel had said "Constantine" on that haunting, horrible security tape.

"Isabel," he said.

"Yeah. And anyway, they reek of power." She crossed the room to stand before him. "But you're dying, hero. Your lungs are rotting from the inside." She rested her hand lightly, like a butterfly, on his chest. Impassively, he tolerated it for a minute or so. Brushing her hand aside- gently, by his standards- he reached into his coat pocket for a cigarette and lit it nonchalantly.

At least, Angela thought, he was polite enough not to blow the smoke in Victorine's face. Amused, she said, "That's a good idea, isn't it."

"Don't voodoo priestesses use tobacco too?" he said, from around the cigarette, provoking Angela into laughing derisively. He waved a hand at the altar.

"Oh yeah," Victorine said breezily. "But I don't have lung cancer. I don't smoke it. I burn it. I suppose I could smoke it. Weed's no better for you."

Before Angela could say she was ready to lend most of what John believed in some credence- but she drew the line at voodoo- the door flew open and Chas burst into the room. His face was white under the dirty newspaper boy hat, and he looked like he might vomit. John took a long drag, and exhaled deeply. "What's up, kid? One of those girls out there try to kiss you? This is Chas, by the way," he said to Victorine.

"No!" he spluttered. "You'd better get out here, John. Or, or-" he looked around wildly, and he settled on Victorine. "You. You're Victorine, right?" She raised her eyebrows, and Chas threw his hands up. "Hey," he said. "I just figure, this is your place. And if you're like Midnite- you're mighty territorial. There are half breeds out there on that dance floor, and- anyway."

"Not really," she confessed. "Papa Midnite's a little neurotic. Swearing an oath of neutrality doesn't always mean you're that strict. I swing to the good side too often. What's up? There shouldn't be any trouble; they all know the rules here. And if the owner hears about this... well, he'll be pissed. And he's taken no oath." She toyed with the necklace at her throat.

Chas gulped, and when he spoke, his voice shook. "A soldier demon. Another one. John, this is bad, isn't it? That's twice in like a week, but it never should happen." His brown eyes were desperate, and all three adults in the room had to remind themselves that he was, aside from being much younger, much less exposed to occult forces than even Angela was. Angela glanced over at Victorine, whose face was inscrutable. In one swift movement, she unclasped her necklace and passed it over to the cop.

"Is now the time to be exchanging jewelry?"

"No, but you're the only one who has no defenses. I don't need the thing jumping into you as soon as we've gotten it out of someone else. If they have any sense, everyone's run off by now," she said crisply, "except for, of course, the possessed person. Who probably is writhing around on the floor or hanging on the ceiling. The usual." She wrenched one of the mirrors off its hook on the wall and thrust it at John, who took it approvingly. He put out his cigarette and left it in the urn on the altar.

"What thing?" Angela demanded.

They entered the main club, which had gone eerily silent and empty.