AN: This story is a cross-over fictional piece from Constantine, the movie, and Supernatural, the television series. It takes place in 2007. Although some of the history of John Constantine from Hellblazer is used, John is based on the film's version of the character rather than the comic's. Each chapter alternates between John's point-of-view and Dean's. This is my first attempt at fan-fiction and I know what an ambitious project I've set for myself (!) but I do hope that you enjoy and if you have comments or reviews, it would be wonderful to hear your thoughts.

My thanks to BlackIceWitch for the cover art for this story!

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Prologue

The sunlight, filtered to a heavy, dark gold through the thick smog, barred the floor of the apartment in wide lines through the slats of the permanent blinds that covered the windows. There was a narrow gantry, running along the outer wall just under the windows and if it hadn't been for the colour of the air, John might've opened a window and stepped out onto it.

The city throbbed and pulsed and roared around him. He could feel the vibrations of the traffic, through his bare feet on the floorboards, distinct from, yet oddly in sync with the machinery on the first floor of the building. The setting sun seemed to at once relax and energise the sprawling metropolis, as if its citizens felt that no longer being able to see the poisonous muck they lived and breathed in with the encroaching darkness, they were safe from it.

He shook his head slightly and turned around. Bare walls and bare floors caught every whisper of sound, and Albinoni's melancholy Adagio in G Minor breathed and caught on every surface, less music than companion in the emptiness of the apartment.

Two years ago, that emptiness had eaten at him, crawling into the cracks and crevices of his armour, slipping through the fissures of his mind, filling his sleeping hours with nightmares and his waking hours with a burden of guilt that he hadn't been able to escape from. It hadn't been his fault, but it'd been his responsibility, the deaths that had littered Gabriel's attempts at releasing Mammon and bringing Hell to this plane.

Now, the emptiness was just emptiness. A bed. A table. Nothing much left to tug at him with memories or guilt. A place to sleep, to eat, when he remembered to buy food. A place to think.

"What did Ray have to say about the omens he'd seen?" Angela came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her hair, the loose white t-shirt half-tucked into faded old jeans and her feet bare.

He looked at her and sighed softly. Nothing was empty when she was there.

"Thunderstorms," he said, going to the loudly complaining fridge and getting out a couple of bottles of cold water. "Anomalous earth movements. Oh yeah, and the statues of the angels in the Church of All Saints down on Ventura were bleeding from the eyes."

"We didn't get that over the wire," she objected, taking a bottle and swigging a mouthful as if the lack of police notification of the presence or absence of bloody-teared statues was a personal affront.

"Maybe the cops didn't think it was criminal?"

"Still should've called it in." She looked at him critically. "You don't want to be here, do you?"

Shaking his head, he looked out the windows again. "I have to deal with it sooner or later, right?"

"But you'd prefer later?"

He smiled. "Doesn't everyone?"

"Where do you want to start, John?" she asked, sitting on the edge of the table and pulling the towel from her hair. It was longer now, he thought as he glanced back at her, watching her dry it. Longer and curlier and wilder. She looked less like a homicide detective, more like a gypsy, with it down. Or spread across the pillows and his arms.

"Midnite," he said, reluctantly. The last parting had been on good terms, at least with the priest, but the bar's policy of neutrality was sometimes ignored by some of its patrons, at least some of the time. "Alone."

"No."

"Not arguing about this, Ange," he said, walking to her. He set the bottle on the table beside her and ran his hands up along the soft denim covering her thighs. "I have a lot of enemies in this town and most of them hang out there. I can't spare the concentration to look after you."

"When was the last time you had to look after me, John?"

He looked at her expressionlessly and she finally gave in, dropping her gaze and letting out an only slightly annoyed sigh.

"Alright, this one time," she agreed.

"This one time," he repeated mockingly. "Don't you have to work tonight?"

"On call." She leaned across the table, pulling a wide-toothed comb from her bag and running it through the tangled, dark-brown curls. "Let's go home."

He supposed it was his home, now, the steel-framed and salt-enclosed house that was jammed on the side of a hill, overlooking the city to one side and the long stretch of beach and ocean on the other. Her house. His home.

Leaving the city, after he'd handed over the Spear and restrained himself from starting anything with her, he'd spent the last two years wandering around the world. A reprieve from certain death had certain side-effects. London had been the usual hive of nasties and his old contacts had been surprised to see him, some of them so surprised they'd died from it. It was a peculiar thing that people forgot after a while that a reputation was there for a reason.

He'd picked up information and some useful tools along the way, and some hints that things were not as quiet as they seemed. Whispering rumours of a high-level demon out on this plane had been hard to track down.

He watched her combing through the dark skeins, her hair almost dry when she'd finished. Angela wasn't pretty, exactly. Her features were strong and vivid in a square face that held more determination than delicacy. A wide, full-lipped mouth. Black, winged brows. Bright green eyes, lined with thick black lashes. She was … riveting, he decided critically. Arresting. Stronger than he was, in most respects, though the feminine softness was there, just very well-hidden.

"I need you."

She looked at him in surprise, her hand lifting to the side of his face. No more surprised than he was, he thought dazedly, wondering where the hell that'd come from. It was the truth, but he'd never admitted it. Till now.

He leaned close, his breath mingling with hers, lids dropping as their mouths touched and broke apart, and touched again. She could ignite him with a look, sometimes. Most of the time. But touching her was different, a vortex of physical desire and emotional need that he tried hard not to analyse.

She looked up at him, eyes wide and pupils dilated as he drew back slightly.

"Home. Now."

"Yeah."

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"Dispatch, one-eighty-seven, 1157 Sunset, requesting backup and call the CO, over."

The scanner crackled between every transmission and John felt Angela's back tense under his hand.

"Roger, Kilo-Three-Four, backup on its way."

"Another murder."

"I have to get going," Angela said, her body sliding up his as she sat up and pushed her hair back from her face, the silken friction sending threads of heat down to his groin. He pushed the feelings aside, watching her swing her legs off the bed and stand up, rolling onto his side and getting out of the bed as well.

Glancing over her shoulder at him, Angela's mouth quirked up to one side. "You can't come to the crime scene."

He shook his head, knowing all too well her feelings about civilians on murder scenes. "There's a church on Sunset, 1155. Too close for coincidence."

In the closet a dozen pairs of tailored, plain black pants hung along with a dozen clean white shirts. The soft black overcoat was definitely overkill for the LA heat but he couldn't get out of the habit of wearing it. The Pacific breeze that blew the smog back most nights made it bearable. Funny how most his business was night-time work.

"John."

Looking up as he tied the laces of his polished black shoes, he saw the frown.

"What?"

"Don't – don't do anything stupid, okay?"

It hadn't been what she'd wanted to say, feeling amusement flicker through the thought. Neither of them was great at expressing themselves, not out loud, not to the other. "I'll try not to."

"I'll see you down there," she said shortly, as irritated by her own lack of clarity as the amusement she'd clearly seen in him, he decided, watching her leave.

Getting back to his feet and straightening up, he looked at himself in the mirror. Tall, broad-shouldered and still lean from the cancer's depredations on his body, crow-black hair still kept short, the black and white ensemble made him look like a low-level wise-guy.

The face that stared back at him was undoubtedly his, narrow and pale, the high cheekbones jutting out, dark eyes watchful and a five o'clock shadow over the planes of his cheeks and jawline, but he barely recognised it. It was missing the bruising and hollows that he'd become accustomed to, back in the four-pack days.

New life. Second chance. He grimaced at his reflection. Same old shit, for the most part. Ellie had told him that the demon that had gotten out had been one of the Fallen. Azazel.

Not just a half-breed. Not even just any full-blood demon. Just a fucking archdemon with powers that made the rest of the full-bloods look like school kids.

She'd had no idea where it was, other than the continent. The half-breed succubus had been terrified, hiding it behind a façade of bluff and bluster, but he knew she wasn't hanging out in the Carpathians for fun. She was hiding, along with most of the half-breed populations of the Americas, on the first plane or boat out of the US as fast and as far as they could go.

Rumours, she'd told him, before she'd vanished. Rumours of armies and a building conflict in Hell between the archdemon and the first-made.

Good times.

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The usual complete and utter cluster-fuck, John thought, looking around the smashed and heaped piles of debris that was all that remained of the interior of the church.

He'd called Angela and she'd confirmed that the body the ME's boys had scraped off the floor of the nightclub down the street was that of Father Rory McAllister, late of the Church of St Mary's Ascension, 1155 Sunset Boulevard. Looking around, he could see clearly, in his mind's eye, where the demons had entered and chased the sixty-eight year old priest around his church, driving him out onto the street and pulling him apart in front of the horrified eyes of the patrons of the Molt Inc club.

Hennessy had been the best at this, he thought, not for the first time as he turned away from the aisle and walked back out through the front doors to the street. Sonofabitch had been able to sift through anything and find him those leads. Sonofabitch had had a severe problem with the booze and he'd known it. He never should've made him take the protective pendant off, taken it away from him. At the time, he hadn't thought – yeah, well, he hadn't thought of much other than his own dying back then.

On the street, the air was moving, the night wind picking up the trash along the gutters and blowing it through the legs of the crowd that had gathered along the fluttering yellow edges of the taped-off scene. He lifted his head as a scent stood out from the city's malodorous taint … acrid and sharp, like fried metal, it slipped between the nauseating smell of greasy food from the diner across the road and the belching diesel fumes of the city bus pulling away from the kerb … there and gone. John looked up, but there was nothing to see along the uneven battlements of the low-rise buildings that lined this section of Sunset.

They were here, though. He could feel them. Chitinous claws and rancid breath. Hiding in the crowds or the shadows between the streetlights. Watching and waiting.

The click of heels on the pavement dragged his attention back and he turned to see Angela walking toward him, her head bowed as she spoke in a low voice to someone on the phone. She lifted her gaze to him, finishing the call and pushing the phone back into her pocket.

"I got two impressions," she told him without preamble. "One from the doorway next to where – most – of the body was left, the other from a witness."

"And?"

"Evil," she said simply. "Malicious and greedy on the surface, but something else underneath that, some sense of desperation."

He looked down the street. "Mooks."

"What?"

"Grunts," he elaborated, turning back to her. "They were looking for something. The church is in pieces. Must have followed the priest here when they couldn't find whatever it was."

"I checked with Central and Rampart," she continued, looking back over her shoulder at the activity as the nightclub patrons were searched and released. "Four churches, in the last week, either desecrated or destroyed. Two of the clergy were killed, but they weren't tagged as homicides because they were killed by falling debris when the churches were hit."

"They're not," John said absently, rubbing a fingertip along his brow. "Deliberate murders, I mean. Just collateral damage. They're looking for something."

"Are you going to see Midnite now?"

"Yeah," he said, looking back at her. "How long will this take you?"

Angela let out a gusting huff of air. "Four hours, maybe five."

"I'll see in the morning then."

"Looks like."

He watched her turn away, pulling her phone out again and dialling as she ducked under the tape and said something to the flatfoot next to it.

Four churches. In the central downtown area of the city. What the hell were they after, he wondered uneasily? Turning abruptly, he retraced his steps to the '52 Thunderbird he'd inherited from an old enemy a year ago. The Triumph bike was nothing like the streamlined modern motorcycles. It was chunky and solid and heavy and uncompromisingly painted in a near-solid black. Uneconomical by other bike standards, it still beat the hell out of running a car, and he couldn't be tempted to take anyone else along on it. As usual, it started at once, and the roar made most of the crowd standing in the road look around.

Midnite's was at the other of Sunset, in the cramped and ambiguous neighbourhood between the boulevard and the freeway, crammed by an industrial chemical warehouse on one side and a chop shop on the other. There were a lot of legends surrounding the one-time witch doctor, legends of immortality and curses, of speaking to the dead and to demons and brokering deals with angels. Some of them were undoubtedly true. John knew from bitter experience that Midnite was almost impossible to kill. He'd had a gun, once, that could've done it. It, along with a number of things, had gone up in a suspicious storage fire last year before he'd left the country.

Easing the bike alongside the black-painted wall of the club, he turned off the engine and swung his leg over, walking unhurriedly to the nondescript, iron-plated door that sat flush to the alley.

"Password?" The voice inside was unfamiliar and John frowned slightly. The card the door-keeper held was clear in his mind, but not from the old set the club had used before.

"Guy with ten swords sticking out of him," he called out softly. Through the door he heard the sound of the bolts withdrawing, clunking steadily down the frame.

At the end of the hall, a set of iron steps led down to the bar and Rolando stood by the velvet cord, grinning at him as he approached.

"John, shit, man, long time."

"He in?"

"In the back, yeah." The bouncer jerked his head toward the door. "Where you been?"

"Bulgaria," John told him, walking past and into the club.

It hadn't changed. Black walls, black lights in some parts of the room, dimmed red and blue in others. Stopping by the end of the long, polished ebony bar, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the different light levels, his gaze moving curiously over the clientele.

Everyone was welcome at Midnite's, provided they followed the rules. The rules were simple. The place was completely neutral. He saw the polished, hard skin of a vampire under the black light by the stage, luminescent and glowing; at a booth along the far wall, under the old-fashioned coloured glass lampshades a group with inhumanly perfect features sat, the lamplight glittering on hair of platinum and raven-black and titian-red. They thought they blended in so well, he thought derisively but they didn't. Even to the general population, they stood out.

Vampire and werewolf and nephilim, mutants and witches and cambion, all of them were drawn here eventually, the lesser deities and the old ones and shape-shifters, familiars, faery and practitioners of a thousand types of magic and sorcery, from the purest white to the depthless black. They couldn't help it, he knew. In every incarnation, in any incarnation those with a drop of human blood couldn't help the need to be with others of their kind, or at the very least, others who knew of their kind.

"John, I thought you weren't coming back."

He turned his head, the purple-tinged ebony skin of the man beside him gleaming under the bar's silver-hued overhead lights.

"I changed my mind," he said, pivoting to lean on the bar as he studied his companion.

Papa Midnite had been a witch doctor, deep in the Congo, at some distant time in the past. He'd become a houdoun in the late eighteen-hundreds, and had settled for a while in New York city, running a profitable gun-running business and tending to his growing flock of believers. That'd fallen apart when the city had been taken over by the Italians and later the Chinese, he'd told Constantine several years before, over a couple of bottles of rare blended whiskey.

Now, he operated a wide but very discreet criminal business from the back room of the bar, listened to the patrons he'd cultivated in the name of neutrality, and collected rare and unusual objet of interest, all with a single focus on power.

"Come back," Midnite said congenially. "I just opened a case."

In a good mood, for a change, John thought, following the magically cleared path the man opened as he strolled across the crowded floor. He caught glimpses of faces, some familiar, some not. Demons and angels could not manifest in their own constructions on this plane. It was not forbidden for them to possess any meatsuit that consented, however. For an angel, consent had to be spoken, freely and willingly offered. For a demon, the consent could be subconscious, an underlying desire to be punished or ridden or tortured would serve as well as an overt 'yes'.

It'd never failed to depress him as to how many people had those underlying subconscious feelings, driven by guilt or despair, amped up by drugs and alcohol or anything that would let them escape their current misery. As if being possessed was going to help that.

The room was large, several seating areas set a comfortable distance from the table that fronted a curved leather booth, serving as the houdoun's desk. The décor was startling, antiques mixed with pop art. Around the walls, four doors, identical to the one they'd entered through, were spaced evenly.

"The Fallen was killed," Midnite said as he slid into the booth behind the table and extracted a thin, brown cigarillo from a slim gold cigarette case. He looked up at John, dark eyes sparkling with sudden amusement as he offered the case to John. John smiled back.

"How?"

"I do not have the details of that feat, my friend," the houdoun said, the flame of the lighter outlining his features in gold for a moment. "But a Gate was opened. Last week."

John stared at him disbelievingly. "Tell me you didn't just tell me that a Gate to Hell was opened."

Midnite's full lips curved up to one side. "The information I have is that between three and six hundred demons were released."

"Well …" John leaned back in his chair, his gaze fixed on Midnite's face. "That certainly explains the vandalised churches and the dead fucking priests, doesn't it?"

"There are more coming to this city every day." Midnite ground out the cigarillo and looked through the curling grey tendrils of smoke at him. "What happened to the Ace?"

John's mouth thinned as he looked away. "It was destroyed. Fire in my storage unit."

"Jesus, John, you have to learn to take better care of things."

"Yeah." He looked back at the houdoun. "What would demons be looking for here?"

"I don't know," Midnite said, drawing another cigarillo from the case and lighting it. "I thought you were sleeping with that psychic?"

"She's not that kind of psychic," John said, keeping his voice and face expressionless.

"A pity," Midnite said easily, tilting his head to one side. "You need a fast-track, John."

"Tell me about it," he growled, pushing back his chair. "What are the half-breeds saying?"

"You know I can't divulge a confidentiality."

"Your rules are going to fuck you and everyone on this planet one day," John snapped at him as he turned on his heel for the door.

"My rules are the only reason I hear these things at all, John," Midnite called after him. "Stay in touch."

"I'll be around."

He walked out of the room and through the club without pausing, unaware that he was clearing a path almost as effectively as Midnite had done, his brow furrowed as he tried to think of anyone else he could squeeze who might have some information.

Angela was that kind of psychic, he thought, the knowledge trapping him against his feelings. Or she would be, in time. She was … inexperienced right now, as unwilling to develop her talent as he was to ask it of her. He wondered bleakly if there was going to be a choice in that.

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