A body could be disguised. A face could be altered. But a person's mind was much harder to fake.
Bella reached out with her senses, read the mind in front of her, and crouched down for a closer look. Castiel had only tampered with a few lives, and only for one day—but a single day meant something very different depending on the person living it.
This beggar's face had wasted away dramatically, the features pulled out of shape by whatever he'd been through. But the eyes and brows still held an unmistakable outline.
The mind, the face, and the past all matched.
He couldn't speak. But this was unmistakably Alec Trevelyan.
This is awful. Bella felt genuine sympathy.
"Alec?" she tried, keeping her voice careful.
006 inched forward another couple of shuffling crawls and nodded as hard as he could.
Bella immediately waved him back.
The smell radiating from 006 was the kind produced by a week of steeping in a dumpster. Holding her nose would have been rude—but with her sensory acuity, not holding it was its own form of suffering.
"Please don't strain yourself further—for your injuries' sake." She gave him a polite excuse. His dignity deserved that much.
She assessed the damage. All four limbs broken. His left leg torqued outward at roughly thirty degrees. Voice gone. By the standards of her old world, injuries like this were close to irreparable. But in this world—with Sadako still available to call on—she was fairly confident that requesting treatment was within her standing. This was fixable.
She glanced toward the apartment block. Bob Harris—middle-aged, harried—was waving at her from near the entrance.
She held up a hand: one moment.
"Alec, I'm going to knock you out—necessary for treatment. Nod if you understand."
006 was at his absolute limit.
He had suddenly become a broken, speechless beggar with no ability to move, no means of ending his own misery even if he'd wanted to. And now someone was telling him his body could be healed.
He nodded repeatedly, almost violently.
A precise Mind Blast put him under instantly.
Bella flagged down Bob Harris and asked him to find a way to move 006 into Sadako's apartment.
"That's..." The middle-aged manager's expression made it clear that he was very much aware of the smell. But he was a man who'd clawed his way up from nothing—bit-part actor, extra work, two solid hours face-down in the dirt playing a corpse in fake stage blood and fruit-syrup guts while flies swarmed him. He forced himself to endure it. He steeled himself, folded 006 onto a cart, and wheeled him inside with the furtive energy of a man moving contraband.
Bella thought she'd gained some distance from 006. She had not. The moment she stepped into Sadako's apartment, the smell hit her like a physical barrier.
Far worse than the beggar.
She pressed a hand over her mouth. Her heightened senses, which were usually an asset, now worked entirely against her. Flies were moving through the air in loose, drifting clouds. A dense, pervasive rot had soaked into every corner of the room.
She almost lost her breakfast.
Sadako, who had spent thirty years at the bottom of a well, appeared entirely unmoved.
Sadako pointed silently toward the bedroom. Bella steadied herself, peered in through the doorway, and found the answer.
A woman's body lay facing the wall. Several days dead—the abdomen had ruptured, the face swollen past recognition. A dark, viscous puddle had spread across the floor beneath her.
Bella retreated in a single decisive movement, cleared the room, and spent a full three minutes breathing outdoor air before she could function normally.
Under ordinary circumstances she could handle this. She had walked through battlefields. She'd killed enough in Paris to leave it awash in blood. But this was different—no warning, no gradual acclimatization, just a sealed room that had been incubating for days, hitting her oversensitive five senses all at once.
I am not going back in there. They were talking outside.
Sadako described what had happened—to her and to Diane. She chose her words carefully.
"Before, it was like I was dreaming... In the dream I was in a car accident, and then I think I lost my memory. Diane helped me look for it. In that state, she didn't even seem to go by 'Diane' — it was all very strange. Then she took me to the film set. She seemed to take my place on the production, and she..." Sadako paused there.
In the altered reality Castiel had constructed, there had been a dreamlike intimacy between her and Diane—but in the real world Sadako was a deeply traditional Japanese woman, and that part of the story went unspoken.
"And... do you know how she died?" Bella asked.
Sadako shook her head. Her feelings toward Diane were complicated. Even now, she couldn't fully decide whether she felt relief or grief.
Bob Harris filled in the gap: "I looked at the body. Self-inflicted. She put the gun in her mouth, and then—" He made a sharp gesture.
He could identify the cause of death, but the body itself was beyond his capacity to handle. That was why he'd called Bella.
Body disposal in Los Angeles was something Bella could manage. She'd had years to build influence in this city. One unknown actress reported missing—that was all it would take.
"I'll handle it," she said, and looked at Sadako. "Is there anything else you need? She was your friend, after a fashion."
The story wasn't complicated at its core—it had started with love and ended with love. Most people's love stories stayed stories. Diane's had become real, or at least a falsified version of real, because somehow Castiel had chosen her.
"Just deal with it quickly," Sadako said. Her voice was quiet but final. "And if at all possible... I don't want to stay in this apartment anymore."
Sadako's gentleness had never meant she lacked a spine. Japan's most feared onryō having no temper? Laughable.
Her rational mind quickly overcame the remnants of the falsified memory, and what she was left with was revulsion. What was any of this even for?
For two days she had been running around like someone whose mind had been replaced—led around by Diane, handed things that were hers as though they were gifts, watching the people around her seamlessly transfer their loyalty and attention to a stranger. Her apartment, her manager, the production staff who had always been there for her—all of it had orbited someone else while she stood at the edge of it, small and invisible.
Now she had it all back. And Diane was a rotting corpse.
The gap between those two facts was too absurd, too violent to fully process. All she wanted was to have nothing more to do with it.
"Understood. I'll send someone to handle it."
Bella picked up her phone.
She didn't go through Charlie's department. She didn't tap her own direct contacts. Instead, she called the Brotherhood.