After the fourth exorcism, the Russell couple was stopped by a middle-aged man who'd traveled a long way. Faced with the man's desperate pleas, Mark Russell agreed to help him deal with the ghosts in his house.
"Thank you for coming to help. Honestly, I didn't even know who to turn to. I'm just an electrician—I'm not home a lot of the time. My kids are terrified. Carolyn mentioned you two, and—oh, God! I never imagined something like this could actually happen. Our whole family are devout churchgoers. Oh, God..."
The anxious homeowner rambled at length, his words tumbling over each other incoherently. The man was clearly panicking, his thoughts a tangled mess.
As a covert organization, Monarch routinely provided its members with fabricated identification.
Fake driver's licenses, fake FBI credentials—all part of the job. The Russells had them too.
They would never use their real identities for this kind of work. University professors moonlighting as exorcists? The whole thing was absurd no matter how you looked at it.
Their current cover names had changed from the Russells to the Warrens—Ed Warren and Lorraine Warren, respectively.
Today, the couple had come to exorcise this family's home.
The moment Emma Russell stepped out of the car, she sensed something unusual—as though someone were driving needles into her skull.
She had some reservations about her husband's insistence on coming here. But the homeowner's plea had been heartfelt: the man, his wife, and their five children were living inside a haunted house, and the danger was real. They were an ordinary family with no savings. Buying this house had wiped them out, and asking them to move now simply wasn't realistic.
The Russells brought the caution of scientists to the task, conducting their customary background research before arriving.
A witch had once lived in this house. Legend held that she sacrificed her own newborn to a demon from Hell, then hanged herself from a tree outside.
The Russells didn't believe in witches or demons. But they'd done this five times now—old hat by the second round—and they'd compiled some theories about why ghosts formed. Electromagnetic fields, light refraction—the couple was still trying to explain the supernatural with their scientific knowledge.
The Russells followed their established routine: arranged their equipment, then settled in to wait for nightfall.
...
"What? They went out on their own?"
Bella had already lined up another case for the Russells—a ghost trapped inside an oil painting. Burning the painting would resolve the whole thing, and she estimated that one more job like this would finally burn out Emma Russell's Spirit Vision for good.
But when she went to deliver the assignment, she discovered the couple had gone off to exorcise a house on their own. A phone call to Mark Russell gave her the general picture.
The cases she'd been feeding them were all in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio—deliberately avoiding anything local to the Russells' home state of Massachusetts.
And what was Massachusetts famous for? In occult circles, the answer was the Salem witch trials. Official records stated that over two hundred people had been accused of witchcraft, nineteen hanged, and one crushed to death under stones. The actual death toll was ten times the official count.
Those Salem witches had been mediocre at best. Strictly speaking, they were even weaker than Victor's Romani mother.
And where did American magic originate? Africa.
A Voodoo slave named Tituba had taught the sorcery of the African Arawak people to American colonists—specifically, to the white witches of Salem.
It sounded ridiculous, but three hundred years ago on the American continent, the classification of magic was brutally simple: magic practiced by white people was called white magic, and magic practiced by Black people was called black magic. Both traditions traced back to the same source.
This strain of sorcery imported from Africa couldn't hold a candle to Kamar-Taj—but that was from Bella's perspective. To ordinary people, it remained genuinely mysterious and unsettling.
Hearing that the Russells' destination involved Salem witchcraft gave Bella some pause, but when she learned the reported phenomena were limited to children's blankets being pulled at night, hands clapping inside a wardrobe, and someone playing hide-and-seek after dark, she decided the situation wasn't serious and let it go.
Her graduate coursework was demanding. Behavioral science, zoology, paleobiology, climatology—she was reading through all of it.
As her biology studies deepened, she developed some new insights into the traditional school of transmutation. Kamar-Taj didn't encourage the study of transmutation—it was notoriously difficult to learn, riddled with unpredictable variables, and frankly useless in modern society even after you mastered it.
Bella, however, saw value in the fundamentals. She didn't need to transform herself—she could transform her enemies. Polymorph—turning enemies into sheep, for instance. Just imagining it felt magnificent.
Mastering animal anatomy was also a prerequisite for attempting sixth-circle Disintegrate. Reducing a target to its component molecules required at least knowing what the target was. The precision of a surgeon wasn't necessary, but going in completely blind and slinging spells with her eyes closed certainly wouldn't work.
Bella studied with fierce dedication, often losing track of time while reading and taking notes. By the time she learned that Dr. Serizawa had gone looking for the Russells and then gone missing himself, two full days had already passed.
If I lose my advisor, how am I supposed to graduate?
Realizing the situation might be worse than she'd thought, Bella rushed to Massachusetts. It took little effort to find the locally infamous haunted house.
"Professor? Mr. Russell? Anyone? Mrs. Russell?"
Bella pushed open the door and found the interior empty. If not for the several cars parked out front, she'd have thought the place was abandoned.
A ball was suddenly thrown out of a room to her right, striking the floor with a rhythmic thud, thud, thud.
"Boring." She ignored the ball and swept her surroundings with Eagle Vision, leaving no corner unchecked.
The house had sat vacant for close to ten years. Locals wouldn't venture within a hundred meters of it. Only out-of-towners—clueless types who saw the low price and figured they were getting a steal—would buy a house like this.
Strictly speaking, Charlie and his family purchasing the Murder House back in the day had looked equally foolish to the people of Los Angeles.
This house was considerably smaller than Bella's family home—just two floors, roughly six or seven rooms.
The place had undergone some basic renovations, though the current owner clearly didn't have much money. Many walls were only half-painted. Belongings from the previous owner hadn't been fully cleared out. Everything inside was gray and dusty, utterly devoid of life.