Page 74 of Girl, Remembered

More bullets followed from the phantom shooter, and that phantom shooter manifested into a human being in the shape of Mia Ripley just as Ella was milliseconds away from crashing into Doyle. Doyle fired off a shot, but who or where it hit was a mystery. Edis had taken cover and, from what little Ella could catch, was still breathing.

Doyle came into her orbit. Ella could feel her body heat, and it was that moment Ella concluded that this woman was indeed made of flesh and bone. Ella’s shoulder collided Doyle’s mid-section. It felt to Ella like she was crossing some barrier that until now had been merely viewable and uncrossable. She infiltrated a realm where Lindsey could be touched, harmed, killed.

They made skin-on-skin contact.

Ella’s momentum sent them both crashing into the wall beneath the broken window. A deafening gunblast accompanied the impact. Ella felt no pain. If she lived to see sunrise, the pain would come later. Doyle folded like a doll, and so Ella targeted her priority.

She grabbed Doyle’s bony wrist. It felt like holding a snake’s neck. Ella could feel Doyle desperately trying to angle the gun in her direction, but Ella aimed it toward the roof. Three more shots rang out, summoning sawdust from above. Ella twisted. Doyle screamed and the SIG sprung free of her fingers. It hit the floorboards and skittered under the same table Ella’s Glock had disappeared beneath minutes earlier. Ella’s eardrums had gone numb with the sound of gunfire, but a new source of light suggested the front door had been breached. In Ella’s peripheral vision, she saw mass movement – three, four, five, six people, one of whom was slithering through a pool of blood. Edis had begun to crawl away, toward the table with guns beneath,

The millisecond of distraction allowed Doyle to thrust her knee into Ella’s stomach. Doyle’s blonde hair had become a mane in the humidity, and Ella was absently reminded of an enraged lion. As she bent over, clutching her stomach, Elbows to Ella’s skull followed. A bony knee smashed into her nose, and Ella felt cartilage snap and give way to a stream of blood. Ella snapped up to a standing position and drove forward with the same move that had put them both against this wall in the first place, and this time she didn’t stop at contact.

Ella got a fist into Doyle’s stomach, felt the air leave her, and used the half-second that bought to grab a handful of that tangled hair and put Doyle’s face into the wall.

Doyle didn’t fold this time. She reached out and raked her nails down the side of Ella’s neck, and Ella barely registered the sting before her own hand was closing around Doyle’s throat.

‘Ben was still alive after I shot him,’ Lindsey spat. ‘I could have called for help.’

Ella was done with questions and their subsequent answers, so she unleashed blow after blow, fist after fist, all supercharged with nine months of rage. All of it – Doyle’s victims, the games, the stalking, the taunts, the witch hunts, the threats, the disciples who’d each taken multiple victims of their own – distilled down to this one small arc of her knuckles connecting with bone. Her fists bounced off Doyle’s nose and cheeks and forehead, bloodying both components of the assault. Ella almost felt foolish that she’d somehow been victim of this scrawny, feeble creature, who was crumbling under her blows like thin glass.

‘Ripley’s dead,’ Doyle gasped. Blood bubbled at her lip. ‘Look. Look!’

Ella didn’t turn around. She hit her again.

‘Your dad,’ Doyle tried next, wheezing it out between blows, ‘I’d have killed him too.’

Ella’s knuckles found Doyle’s eye socket. She dislodged something there. Behind her, Ella could hear voices, one of which she was certain belonged to her boss. Doyle was limp against the wall, held up by Ella’s vice grip around her throat.

‘You’re going to… kill me,’ Doyle said. ‘You’re going… actually…’

Ella continued to hit her until the words stopped coming altogether. Until the face underneath her fists stopped looking like the woman who’d haunted every waking hour of the last nine months and started looking like a red-and-black abstract painting.

‘Ella! Stop!’ shouted a male voice.

She’d entered some kind of flow state. She visualized all the people Doyle had taken from this world; Julianne, Jenna, Ben, Darrell, the innocent people who died at the hands of her followers, and couldn’t stop herself from allowing her knuckles to break under the squishy mass that had become her face.

‘Dark!’

‘I’ll never… tell you… how I found them,’ Doyle breathed, barely.

‘I don’t care.’

‘You do… you know you do…’

Ella loosened her grip. Doyle’s head lolled back and forth. Her eyes fluttered. By now, Doyle’s body would be a system in failure. She’d have gone into shock after about the twentieth punch. Her nervous system would be overwhelmed past the point of registering individual pain, and would soon shut down, floor by floor. Concussive trauma, most likely, layered on top of whatever her face had absorbed. Under all that ruined tissue, Doyle’s brain was rattling around in fluid that couldn’t cushion it anymore, and her body knew it, even if the rest of her didn’t.

‘Ella.’

The voice of concern came from behind her. Ella risked a glance in its direction.

Ripley. Alive, upright, with her gun trained on two men kneeling with their hands laced behind their heads. Carving Knife and Smith & Wesson. Beside her stood Rick Vernon and Terrance Dever. Vernon had a split lip. Dever was breathing like he’d run here from the Connecticut.

They’d clearly done some hard work of their own tonight.

Gratitude pierced the fog. Whatever else this night had cost, at least it hadn’t cost her the people who’d come for her.

Then Doyle’s legs finally went.

There was no warning to it. One moment she was held up by Ella’s grip and the next she was collapsing entirely, sliding down the wall like liquid. Ella caught her without deciding to. Some reflex older than nine months of hatred, older than any of this, simply reached out and held the woman up rather than let her fall. Blood dripped onto her hands, arms, clothes.