"Magic and miracles aren't free."
— John Constantine, allegedly
Jude was glad the exorcism had been an item.
Not a spell. Not a borrowed invocation. An item—a one-time purchase with a defined cost, a defined effect, and no ongoing relationship with whoever had made it.
Magic in this world had owners. Every source of power belonged to something—or someone. Demons. Higher beings. Entities with names that worked better as titles than as words. Learning to use magic wasn't gaining power. It was learning to borrow it, and the lenders were not running a charity.
They charged fees.
Sometimes minor: a day's good fortune, a specific memory, a few years off one end of your life.
Sometimes not minor: your destiny. Your soul. Your firstborn. Your teammates, if the mage needed something paid in a hurry.
That last part was the one Jude thought about most.
The holy key had used consecrated power for its exact intended purpose—Heaven's jurisdiction, a professional fit, no outstanding balance. Clean transaction, no residual connection. No entity with his name in a ledger somewhere.
He'd keep it that way.
Items were safer. One-time purchase. No strings. No entity with a long memory and a claim on something that mattered.
He stopped for groceries on the way home, pulled up outside Drake's building, and parked on the street.
He'd spent one asset point earlier to check the system's parking map. The result had been that everywhere within several blocks was a valid parking space. Which was a strange answer, but the system hadn't misled him yet, and he'd decided not to examine it further.
"God above." Drake was climbing out of a taxi a few spots back. "You're actually alive."
"The car's completely normal now." Jude locked the door. "No drama."
Drake circled the sedan slowly, checking the paint, crouching to look at the undercarriage. "Doesn't look as cursed as Johnny said."
The taxi driver—who had, at Drake's request, followed them the whole way back from the lot—took one look at the car up close, muttered something sharp and unprintable, and hit the gas. He was halfway down the block before Jude finished locking up.
Because the driver knew the car.
No plates yet. Fresh grey paint. But the frame was the frame, and word had moved fast that morning. That was the Death Car—Gotham's most documented mobile catastrophe, nine casualties across seven separate owners, known in every chop shop and accident report in the East End.
And this particular lunatic was parking it on a public street like it was a normal Tuesday.
Not my problem, the driver thought, accelerating through a yellow light.
Jude watched the taxi disappear. "What was his rush?"
"Early fare," Drake said. "Probably."
Inside, Camilla was at the table with the television going.
"—once again, the Gotham Police Department has arrested numerous gang members. According to Commissioner Gordon, this operation was assisted by the masked vigilante known as Batman."
The anchor's tone carried the specific weight of manufactured concern—the kind of concerned voice that had been calibrated in a recording studio by someone whose owner had very clear interests.
"To date, Batman has participated in the arrest of dozens—perhaps hundreds—of criminals. This raises an important question: does the GCPD require the assistance of a masked outlaw to carry out its basic functions? Must this city rely on a vigilante who operates outside the law and employs violence as his primary tool?"
The camera cut to file footage. Batman's silhouette on a rooftop. A row of criminals in hospital beds, various limbs in casts.
"While Commissioner Gordon maintains that Batman represents no threat, the evidence tells a different story. Not one individual has entered GCPD custody after a Batman encounter without sustaining significant injury. Broken bones. Fractured ribs. Severe trauma. District Attorney Harvey Dent's position on the vigilante remains characteristically ambiguous. One must ask: has Gotham's judicial apparatus been quietly shaped—or even controlled—by a hidden actor operating entirely outside the law?"
Drake snorted. "That paper's owned by the Falcone family."
Camilla looked up. "Is it?"
"Listen to the framing." He dropped onto the couch. "Mice complaining about the exterminator. They talk about fairness, rule of law, respect for human dignity—and they're mouthpieces for men who have their people beaten into hospitals. Gotham's had maybe three honest prosecutors in the last decade. This newspaper went after every single one of them."
"I'll assume," Jude said, hanging his coat by the door, "you're talking about the newspaper."
"Obviously."
"So you support Batman."
"I support not taking my political analysis from Falcone's PR department." Drake shook his head. "Either way, it's not my city. I won't be here much longer."
"True." Jude sat down. "When you leave, I'll renew the lease."
"Why rent?" Drake turned to look at him. "With what you're making now, you could buy something small in Otisburg. Better neighborhood."
"Absolutely not." The answer came immediately, no deliberation. "If I find work in another city, I'm gone the same day I get the offer. Buying property in Gotham is throwing money into a hole. One year here ages you more than a decade anywhere else." He paused. "And who controls real estate in this city? People I have no interest in knowing."
Drake opened his mouth. Closed it.
He couldn't argue. He'd lived it. Gotham's daily atmosphere wasn't difficult to describe—it was a warzone with better restaurants. Any building could be rubble tomorrow from a bomb, a supervillain with a grudge, or a gang dispute that escalated past all reasonable containment. Property here was owned by people you couldn't afford to cross. The people who bought were mostly the ones who'd run out of options for leaving.
"Jude." Camilla's voice. "Where did you get that cross?"
He touched it through his shirt. "Picked it up with the car today. Liked the look."
She was staring at it with an expression that wasn't quite curiosity and wasn't quite recognition. Something more like attentiveness. She'd spent years ill, praying through all of it, and she was the kind of person whose faith had been tested and had held. Whatever the cross radiated, she was picking it up.
Jude shifted the subject before it got complicated. "Drake, why haven't you bought Camilla a cross necklace?"
"Don't." Drake didn't look up from his phone.
"The church gave me a blessed one years ago," Camilla said. "I lost it."
"She just likes jewelry," Drake added.
Camilla's eyebrow went up a fraction. "Do you have a problem with that?"
"No." The correction came fast. "I'll get you one this afternoon. A good one."
"Take the car," Jude said, tossing the keys.
Drake looked at them like they had done something to him personally. Then he set them on the coffee table.
"I'll walk," he said. "It's fine. Good weather."
It was overcast and forty degrees outside.
Several blocks away, three men were working the East End's street parking.
One of them stopped.
"Leon." He pointed at the grey sedan on the corner. "Look at that. Fresh paint, no plates. Nobody around. Easy."
Leon looked at the car.
Then Leon looked away from the car and kept walking.
"That's the Death Car."
"The what?"
"The Falcone Death Car. Johnny the dealer moved it this morning—word's been going around since lunch. Nine people death. You want to take it back to him as a gift?" He didn't slow down. "Be my guest."
The first man had already backed up two steps. "You're serious."
"We're going around." Leon went around. "That thing can stay parked there until the street floods."
The group gave the sedan a wide berth and moved on down the block.
In Gotham, when you go out, you need a reputation.
Sometimes the best security system money can't buy is being known as the person who drives the Death Car.
The system hadn't been wrong about the parking.