AllFreeNovel
Share Us
To hell with that, Ella thought.
Tobias again, “I’m the only thing that keeps you being an agent, Mia. Without me, your life is empty.”
Ella strained to her left and lined up the best shot she could. The rest was in the hands of fate.
No, not fate. Screw fate. The outcome was in the hands of Agent Dark, the woman who’d just solved a 30-year-old murder case no one else could. The woman who took down a serial killer in two days. The crazy bitch pointing a shotgun at the number one FBI’s Most Wanted.
“Sorry Tobi, but she’s not an agent anymore,” Ella said. She squeezed the trigger, trusted herself and lived in the present, the only moment that mattered. “She’s a grandma.”
BANG.
One blast. Then another.
And another.
Two more.
BANG BANG.
Ella shot with the fury of a thousand suns, emptying slug after slug into Tobias’s torso. He ricocheted off the wall, landing face down onto the bloody floor. Five blasts from her seven-chamber KS7, one for every woman he’d killed. Then Ella threw the shotgun against the wall, smashing another stupid framed painting.
Tobias’s body lay still, not a single sign of life left in the man. Ripley lay across the altar, equally motionless.
“Mia!” she screamed. “Come back to me. Don’t you dare die on me.” Ella grabbed her partner, shook her, tried to stand her upright.
She collapsed again. Ella barely had any strength, but she managed to roll Mia onto her back. Ella grabbed her wrist and thumbed her pulse.
Nothing. No beat.
It couldn’t happen like this. There was still so much left to do, left to live for.
“No, Mia,” Ella cried. She slapped her across the face. She clasped her hands together and began pumping her chest. “You have to come back. He’s dead. It’s over. You’re retired. You can see your children. You can’t die in here, Mia.”
But Ripley lay still across the altar, unresponsive.
“Mia, you’re a soldier,” Ella screamed. “A soldier.”
A soldier.
Ella’s thoughts were hazy and inarticulate, but the word soldier lit something up in her brain. A technique. One Ripley had taught her a long time ago. Ella rushed across the destroyed room, scouring the rubble for a weapon, any weapon. She landed on a Glock pistol near the door. The one Ripley had dropped.
Ella grabbed the pistol and fired off the remaining shells into the walls, the doors, the paintings, the relics from Tobias’s past. There was something in the rush of gunfire that awoke that fighting spirit, and soldiers had used the technique on the battlefield to resurrect fallen comrades. Now with empty chambers, Ella grabbed her partner’s wrist and begged, prayed to whatever God that might be watching them that he might perform a miracle.
She froze, feeling the rush of rejuvenated life against her thumb.
“Ripley?” Ella yelled. Please, don’t be all in my head.
The reaper had his work cut out for him tonight. He would come soon and harvest new souls from the Collector’s home, but there was one life he wouldn’t be taking. Not yet. The realms of death were not strong enough to hold down Mia Ripley.
The old agent shot upright and coughed up a stream of blood. Ella grabbed her, supported her, the relief hitting her like the most powerful drug in the world.
“You were right,” Ripley said with something akin to a smile on her face.
“You’re alive. Goddamn it, you’re alive,” Ella cried. Ella pulled Ripley upright, holding her still, ensuring she was still able-bodied. “On your feet you old hag.”
Ripley hugged her partner for the second time in as many hours. Silence enveloped the room and both agents fell to the floor in exhaustion. They caught their breath, then cried, then laughed. Ella dug her phone out, then called 911.
A personal war, seventeen years in the making, was finally over. Ella was wrong about earlier. Ripley’s admiration wouldn’t take the centerpiece on her trophy wall.
