Constantine - The Novelization - Whoa is (Not)

through a conference room, right through the middle of a table-Constantine was running hard to keep up, shouting her name, leaping over debris, vaultingpieces of table, lunging through smashed - open walls, never quite catching up with her.Whenever she struck something, he could see the invisible shape that was dragging her, as ittook the impacts on itself. An air elemental, maybe, slaved to Mammon? Some kind of manshapedcreature, but big. He could only make out an outline.He heard her terrified yell: "Const-"Crash, as she was pulled out through the side of the building."-antine!"And then she was yanked bodily out into the air twenty stories above the street, paper andpieces of shattered furniture sucked by the slipstream out after her.Constantine leapt over a wrecked desk, and came wheezing up to the hole in the side of thebuilding. Metal braces and glass fragments lined the hole, the edges prolapsed outward; flamesflickered up around the edges of the gap.He was looking out of the big hole in the final wall, feeling the wind wash over him; coughingfrom the smoke and not caring.He just stood there, one hand on a broken section of wall; gasping, blinking down at the debrisscattered across the top of a low building far beneath. No sign of Angela's body.No sign of Angela at all.FOURTEENChaz's taxi pulled up beside Constantine as he was standing on the corner, smoking a LuckyStrike and gazing blearily at the hole in the side of the BZR building, twenty stories up.Constantine watched the cops milling around on the roof of the building, at the firefighterspeering out of the gap, speculating - and a long way from the truth. All of it bathed in the red andblue whirling lights of emergency vehicles down below.But no one had found Angela's body. No one's body had been found."Jeez," Chaz said, looking up at the smoking hole in the building, then down at the debrisbelow. "That you?"Constantine considered. In a way it was his doing. Obliquely. He'd forced them to do it thehard way."Yeah," he said, pausing to cough and blow a gray plume of smoke at the sky. "I guess so.""Ever hear the word subtle?" Chaz asked. Constantine shrugged, flicked his cigarette into thegutter, and climbed into the cab. Wondering as he got in if Angela was already dead.But if she were, he reflected, there'd be a hell of a lot more chaos going down than one hole ina skyscraper.He started to close the cab's back door after him and someone grabbed it, held it open. LAPDDetective Xavier bent over to stare in at him."Constantine..."