Constantine - The Novelization - Whoa is (Not)

Chaz looked at Midnite more seriously. "So - you wouldn't happen to have one of those magiccrosses lying around here, would you? Something we could take with us.""What do you know? A regular Babe Ruth," Midnite said, with just a suggestion of rolling hiseyes."'Us'?" Constantine said.Chaz nodded. "No offense, John. But I don't think sending you to save the world on your ownis the best idea."Constantine shot Chaz a dark look.Midnite chuckled."Take him along," he said. "Kill him after."Chaz grinned. It was kind of a sickly grin. But he thought it best to act as if he were sureMidnite was only kidding.SIXTEENAngela was spinning in orbit.That's how it seemed. She was held in some kind of astral reserve, in a between-place tillMammon should decide the moment had come. There were no-man's-lands between thedimensions, twilight zones of non definition between the earthly world and the astral world, andbetween the various levels of the astral world. She was bound to one of these, as Mammon kepther, in a sense, on a shelf until he should need her. Out of the reach of John Constantine.She saw Ravenscar Hospital below her, aware that the one who'd sent a powerful elemental tobring her here, Mammon, intended Ravenscar as her next destination - and she was orbiting it theway a satellite orbits the Earth, but faster, whipping around it invisibly in the air, in the world butnot in it. She felt, though, like she was on a fast circular carnival ride.She thought of many things, in a mild, nonjudgmental sort of way - she was in a detachedstate, in more ways than one. Her body was in a kind of timespace loop, her body and the finerbody within it: her soul. And here she found herself contemplating the world as if it were just aprocess with no more significance than the blossoming and dying away of a hillock of wildplants.All flesh is grass, says the Bible. So it seemed to her from here... this astral detachmentseemed to suggest that nothing human beings did mattered; they were so temporary, soephemeral. She could look psychically from her orbit, past the hospital and into the stream oftime, and see people coming and going, rising and falling, a current of humanity in the stream oftime. What seemed to be of agonizing importance to people in their mortal lives was in the longrun about as important as an inconvenient twig to a snail.She remembered agonizing over the men she'd killed. The why of it, the how. She knew nowthat her psychic talent had been struggling to emerge and that that was how it'd found an outlet.She'd sensed their murderous intent and she'd acted instinctively to stop them - and she knew nowshe'd been right to do it. In a way, she'd given the killers a kind of mercy. For they were trappedtoo.Thinking about that seemed to open another realm of perception to her: She seemed tobecome aware of others contemplating the world from outside it, as she was. They were entitiesof various kinds, malign and benign. She knew the malign ones, somehow, all too well: Thehuman beings she'd shot were just extensions of them, in a way. But the others were strange toher...Who were they? The word bodhisattva came to her, from her reading. People who'd left the