Seasons of Mist: in which the dead return

[keepgodwaiting]

Look, I have to run. There's a whole can of worms opened up here, and no one else seems to be doing anything about it. I'm doing what I can ...

But the dead are coming back, little brother. The dead are coming back.

It's December. London is done up in fairy lights and tinsel, a winter wonderland -- as long as you look up, of course. If you look down, it's slush and salt, and people trying not to freeze to death in doorways, and discarded beer cans in the gutters. Though these last are hardly seasonal, of course. They just hit different at Christmas.

In her warm flat in the center of the city, Johanna Constantine has a dream that she hasn't had in months.

It doesn't go like it normally does.

Normally in this dream, Astra runs into the room clutching her father's book, and Jo turns to yell for her to get out, and the distraction lets something come snaking out of the door in the air to rip her and Astra off their feet. That's what happened, as far as Jo remembers. At any rate, it's how she's replayed it night after night for years.

But this time, Astra doesn't come in. Jo screams the Latin and Enochian at the mouth of Hell, her throat burning with sulfur -- and to her shock, the thing shuts. She drops to the floor, panting, blue-black afterimages dancing over her vision. In the dream, she feels cold. Freezing.

All of a sudden, she hears a silence behind her that frightens her so badly she wakes up in a sweat.

It's December. Frost traces the corners of her window, and it flashes blue and white as a police car goes past outside. When she checks her phone, it's 3:33 in the morning. The witching hour.

Something feels very, very wrong.

The earth will reveal her bloodshed
and will no longer conceal her slain.

It takes her a couple of days to work it out. The calls start coming in the next day, first from Ric, then Nige, then fucking Watford, which is how she knows things are getting dire. Ghosts, apparently -- ghosts by the dozens, but not just people's dear old grans.

Well, actually, dear old gran had been quite helpful, in her way.

Well. Actually. At least one of them was dear old gran, apparently, but dear old gran had been somewhere a good deal hotter and bloodier than her kids had expected.

Dear old gran had been quite helpful, in the end, as Constantine snarled for her to "go back where you bloody belong, will you?" Gran screeched back that she belonged right where she was, thank you, and there was nowhere to go now that the Devil had been defeated and God had let her out of Hell, and then she'd thrown a full pot of scalding tea at Constantine, and at that point Constantine reckoned her usual methods weren't going to be effective.

The dead are back. Some of them ephemeral, many of them physical. And the signs of infernal incursion on Earth are all over the place, too. Something has happened in Hell. Constantine doubts that the Devil has actually been defeated, but something has happened. And she's pretty sure that, like the man said, Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

Going to be a bit of a problem, that.

She should probably call on some people.