"Saint Carta Monastery?" Bella had never heard the name. Romania she knew—Weyland-Yutani had oil fields out here.
She eyed the angel warily. "Nice vessel this time. Not the old cowboy anymore. Speaking of which, do you even remember the last one? The old man's mind is gone. He's still lying in a hospital bed. And do you know who's paying those medical bills? I'll tell you who—me."
She had no interest in getting involved in the war between angels and demons, but these people snatching someone off her turf? That was a different matter entirely.
Castiel stared at her, unblinking. "It was a voluntary offering by the faithful. We forced no one."
"Ha. 'Voluntarily.' That sounds lovely." Bella laughed. You never explain what being a vessel actually costs, and then you hide behind 'voluntary service' to dodge accountability?
From where she stood, angels were less honest than demons.
She carefully parsed the angelic trace she'd been tracking. It didn't match Castiel's. The other angel's trail ended right here. Logically, Miss Harmon should be somewhere nearby.
She looked toward the monastery, less than a hundred meters away in a straight line.
There was nothing holy about the place. Not even a whisper of sacred energy. One glance was enough to send words like sinister, terrifying, evil, and profane rising unbidden to the surface of her mind.
The church atop Silent Hill at least had crows perched on its steeple. This monastery had nothing. Beyond herself and the angel beside her, she couldn't sense a single living thing inside its walls.
For reasons she couldn't quite articulate, the sight of this kind of building always made Bella's mind jump straight to AT4 rockets, a Gatling Bodhisattva, and other assorted heavy ordnance.
"My friend seems to have been brought in there by one of your angels. The place gives me a bad feeling. Do you know what's going on inside?" she asked.
"No." The angel's reply was as terse as it got. He started walking toward the entrance.
Bella stepped into his path.
She had no intention of charging headlong into enemy territory for a fight. A sorcerer didn't fear combat, but she certainly wouldn't go in unprepared. "You don't know, and you're still going to rush in?"
"It is the Lord's command."
Bella looked him up and down, then lowered her voice. "I'll be frank—I don't think you're much stronger than I am. Not long ago I met a six-winged angel who'd been captured by humans. That one seemed far more powerful than you, and I doubt even he could get an audience with God. With your rank, you think you can actually meet Him?"
On a question like that, Castiel didn't dare bluff. He had no choice but to correct himself. "It is my superiors' orders."
Bella smiled, a silent, knowing thing. "There we go. Don't keep trying to cow me with the Almighty's name. I scare so easily..."
She considered for a moment. "Seems like someone's trying to lure me in there. And you've got your own mission. If we team up, whatever evil is hiding in that monastery won't be able to stop us... So—are we going in or not?"
Ten minutes later, Bella and the angel Castiel arrived in a nearby town.
She wanted to gather some intelligence first. If Miss Harmon hadn't gone into the monastery, there was no reason for Bella to go storming in to play exorcist.
After a brief exchange, Bella realized that Castiel's thought process was astonishingly simple: receive mission, locate target, defeat target, report back, done. The angel operated like a machine.
Castiel wasn't bad at heart, and his strength was roughly on par with hers, so she didn't mind saying a few extra words.
"Look, I actually wanted to bring this up last time, but you left too fast. I have to say it now—you wanting to understand humans? That's great. But your methods are way too rough."
Castiel furrowed his brow, visibly confused.
They were walking through the streets of the small Romanian town.
Europe wasn't all rolling in wealth. There were poor places too, and this town was one of them. Every building in sight looked like it had been built in the 1980s. The townspeople's faces were grim.
Bella listened to their conversations.
Nightmares. Livestock dying for no reason. Rats, mosquitoes, flies—all gone. Everything pointed to something deeply wrong here.
"Here, take this. Copy what I do. You don't have to say a word—just watch how we humans handle this kind of situation." Bella casually handed Castiel an FBI badge.
As for whether the FBI had jurisdiction in Romania—don't ask. The answer was always "world police."
Bella found the local police chief and flashed her credentials. "We're tracking a terrorist. Have any strangers shown up around here recently?"
The police chief was a bushy-bearded man in his fifties. He gave the two of them an odd look, clearly wondering whether the FBI actually had this kind of cross-border authority. Part of him wanted to refuse, but in the end, the path of least resistance won out. He examined Bella's badge carefully, gave a slow nod, then turned to inspect Castiel's.
The angel produced his badge, mimicking Bella's gesture to perfection. The movement was flawless. His expression was so deadly serious it bordered on majestic.
There was just one problem.
Bella tilted her head for a look and felt her teeth ache. Buddy, you're holding it upside down.
She snatched the badge and flipped it right side up. Under the police chief's questioning stare, she offered an awkward laugh. "He's new."
After the hiccup, the police chief began recounting the strange events that had recently befallen the town.
It started with birds passing through the area suddenly dropping dead. Then livestock began dying en masse. Now, in the past two days, townspeople had started going missing.
"Is someone conducting some kind of biochemical experiment out here?" The police chief was clearly worried sick—otherwise he'd never have wasted breath on two supposed FBI agents.
Bella answered in her most official tone: "We'll need to investigate further."
After repeated questioning, it seemed Miss Harmon had not appeared in the town itself. Bella pointed toward the northwest. "What's the situation with that monastery over there? My informant mentioned some unusual individuals seen around the area."
The police chief looked surprised. "You mean Saint Carta Monastery? There's nothing there but a group of devout nuns. No terrorists."
"Although..." He thought for a moment. "About a year ago, during the alien invasion, some aliens and NATO jets got into a dogfight around here. Wreckage fell onto the monastery grounds. You don't think terrorists got hold of that debris..."
Bella cut off his speculation. "We'll look into it."
Between the police chief, the townspeople who regularly delivered food to the nuns, and several hunters who worked the forest behind the monastery, Bella and Castiel pieced together what had happened.
"A demon is sealed inside that monastery." Castiel's expression was grave. "The war you humans waged broke the seal on the main hall. The nuns sacrificed their own lives to hold it, but now the demon is on the verge of breaking free."