What Bella intended now was to force a contract and drag this creature aboard the ship.
As more and more memories fused into the ghost nun's psyche, the entity's fury continued to ebb. Fully converting a Demon of Solomon was impossible—even the Blood of Jesus hadn't managed that—and thirty-odd nuns' souls weren't going to finish the job either.
But Bella had other tricks.
She called to Miss Harmon. "Recite your scripture!"
"Which passage?"
"Whichever you want!"
Miss Harmon was genuinely devout. She dropped to her knees and began reciting.
The accumulated memories of all those nuns began to influence the ghost nun's consciousness. The moment her will wavered—the moment some part of her wanted to kneel alongside Miss Harmon and pray—Bella struck.
Two marks representing the Flying Dutchman branded themselves into the ghost nun's psyche. A black vortex yawned open behind Jason. From the other side, the Snake Eyes clan fired a barrage of lasso lines, and together with Jason, they hauled the ghost nun toward the swirling portal.
The looming loss of freedom shocked the ghost nun back to lucidity. She thrashed wildly. The pride of a Demon of Solomon would not allow her to surrender.
But against Bella—who'd been scheming and preparing behind the scenes—she was outmatched.
The ghost ship's pull on her was immense. The Snake Eyes clan and Jason hauled from inside while Bella pushed from behind.
By the time Castiel returned with a special vessel containing a single drop of the Blood of Jesus, the ghost nun had already been swallowed by the black vortex, vanishing entirely from the Material Plane.
What just happened? This wasn't part of the deal.
Bella was so spent she nearly collapsed. Her psionic reserves were almost empty. Miss Harmon hurried to steady her.
The ghost nun was, after all, a titled Demon of Solomon. In terms of rank alone, she was now the most powerful subordinate Bella had ever recruited, bar none.
Once aboard, the ghost nun's full suite of abilities fed back through the ship's systems.
Demonic talents, the nuns' holy attributes—she had both, a walking paradox of light and dark.
The ghost nun possessed a formidable array of powers: evil aura, teleportation, Mirror Image, summoning hell serpents. And thanks to absorbing all those pious nuns' souls, she could even heal—though only undead and demons. On living humans, the results were pure snake oil: treat one, lose one.
These abilities were a perfect fit for the Flying Dutchman. Bella appointed the ghost nun as the ship's chaplain.
The next time Bella encountered an enemy with an absurdly deep health bar, she could have Jason share damage with the target, then stab Jason on the left while the ghost nun healed him on the right—saving enormous amounts of corpse-run time. The tactical playbook had just gotten a whole lot richer.
"I should return and report." Castiel bid Bella farewell. The Blood of Jesus was an enormous prize, and he didn't want to linger a second longer than necessary.
"Goodbye, Cas."
"Goodbye, Bella."
After seeing off the angel and his precious cargo, Bella didn't leave.
With the ghost nun gone, the pall of evil over the monastery was dissipating rapidly.
Bella coughed once and fixed her gaze on an apparently empty spot nearby. "You're the one who brought Miss Harmon here, aren't you? Castiel's gone. Are you still not coming out? Your holy aura can't fool me—a seraph imprisoned by humans for years. Zachariah."
A middle-aged man in a crisp suit materialized from thin air. Slightly balding, his face carrying a certain oily quality. He clapped slowly, as if applauding Bella's exceptional perception.
"You're right—I was indeed imprisoned by humans for many years. But it was the Lord's will. I was merely walking the path He ordained for us."
Bella addressed him in a tone more suited to chatting with a neighbor. "So where are you off to walk next?"
Zachariah pointed at Miss Harmon. "The Lord has told me that this abomination—this thing that should not exist—must be destroyed."
Miss Harmon went white. The pressure of facing a seraph head-on was crushing.
"I don't think you can destroy her. You're just a seraph." Bella moved Miss Harmon behind her.
The bald angel smiled. "And I don't think you can stop me. You're just a mortal."
Bella produced the Eye of Agamotto, which she'd kept tucked inside her collar. The pale green Time Stone cast a soft halo against the porcelain skin of her neck. She'd borrowed it from Kamar-Taj specifically before coming to Romania.
The Ancient One had seemed to know she would come. She'd handed over the artifact without a single question.
Bella hadn't used the Time Stone against the ghost nun, but now she brandished it openly, the threat unmistakable.
Zachariah's expression soured. Not even the archangels could withstand the Time Stone, let alone him.
His voice turned cold. "Mortal, your arrogance is beyond measure. You're like a child playing with a weapon you can't possibly control. With your abilities, you're no match for me. You're not the Ancient One."
Bella didn't flinch. "Of course I'm not my teacher. But I can still throw you into temporal turbulence—time worms love unique life forms like you."
She gripped the Time Stone. "One thing you said was right: I'm not exactly practiced with this artifact. I've only used it about three hundred times, give or take. Pretty rough technique. Want to find out?"
The bald angel's face darkened like a thundercloud, but he didn't move an inch. She knew she'd won.
Castiel was simply naive. This one, though, was a textbook bully. The moment he'd seen Thor charging at him with an axe, he'd bolted faster than a rabbit. It wasn't Thor he feared—it was Odin.
"I'm warning you. Don't come near me again, and don't even think about using me the way you did this time." Bella gave a sharp hmph, then opened a portal and took Miss Harmon back to Clone Island.
Bella pressed her advantage while she had it. Using the Time Stone, she ran over a dozen projections with the Time Stone to find the optimal approach, then spent three days resurrecting Shaw.
Separating Shaw from Pika proved agonizing. After careful deliberation, Bella used Mind Schism on Shaw's psyche.
The spell extracted a massive volume of memory fragments entangled with Pika. In the end, Shaw walked out of the incubation chamber alive. The cost was severe: her emotional cognition had become profoundly blunted—in a word, zero feelings. Her childhood and young-adult memories were more than half gone.
Her language functions had deteriorated worst of all.
With the iron self-control of an elite operative, she could manage slow, deliberate speech under normal circumstances. But in a crisis, the only words that came out were: "Take me home." "Take me home?" "Take me home!"
Shaw knew Root was her lover, but what love was—that, she would need to rediscover.
She knew Bella was a friend, but what friends were for—that too required fresh contemplation.
The resurrection wasn't a complete success, but at least she was alive.