Page 88 of Girl, Haunted

Vincent Marrow. Cassius Auctor. The ghost-man with a multiple names but only one face. He'd got his finale after all, but not the one he'd wanted. No legacy, no legend. Just another monster turned to smoke

Ella sagged against her partner. Let her forehead drop to his shoulder as the adrenaline drained away. It was over. Done. The yawning chasm of Vincent Marrow's madness – it could rest now. Sink back into the shadows where it belonged.

‘He’s gone,’ Redmond wheezed. ‘Nothing we can do about it now.’

But the words didn't compute. Didn't make a lick of sense. Because all Ella could see was Marrow. That skeletal framesilhouetted against the flames. Dancing his last goddamn dance. Never seeing punishment for the grief he’d caused.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

Ella's mind flashed back to that moment in the courtroom when she'd locked eyes with Austin Creed after he'd been given his death sentence. That smug bastard, so sure he'd won, that he'd gotten the last laugh.

No. She wouldn't let another monster slip through her fingers, wouldn't let them dictate the terms of their own demise. Creed might have hopped his way to the needle, but Marrow wouldn't get that chance.

‘Not tonight,’ Ella said.

And so she jumped to her feet and bolted. Ignored Redmond, ignored Luca, ignored logic and reason and every ounce of self-preservation hardwired into her DNA. She hit the barn doors at thirty miles an hour and dove headfirst into hell.

Heat slammed into her. A solid wall of pure, unadulterated agony. It seared her lungs, blistered her skin. But Ella didn't feel a damn thing. Couldn't afford to. Thick, choking smoke turned the air into a noxious poison, and melted plastic dripped down from above. The barn – or what remained of it – was painted in shades of black and red. Visibility dropped to ten percent, but it didn't matter. Because Ella was a hunter, and hunters didn't need sight or smell or touch to find a body.

As she stumbled through the inferno, she was vaguely aware of beams crashing from above. Of props melting into twisted approximations of humanity. The stench of burning flesh and synthetic materials assaulted her nostrils, but amongst the man-made wreckage was something real.

And there, sprawled in the center of this discount hell, lay the charred husk of Vincent Marrow.

He looked more like a burnt offering than a man, skin blackened and peeling, clothes seared into the flesh. Butsomehow, impossibly, Ella could still see the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

Somewhere in the distance, she could hear Luca’s voice screaming for her. But she didn't hesitate. Didn't let herself think about the insanity of what she was doing. She lunged towards Marrow's burning form, flames still licking at his clothes and skin. Ella tore off her jacket and threw it over his torso, smothering some of the fire.

The heat seared her hands as she wrapped her arms around his blistered body, but she gritted her teeth against the pain and heaved with everything she had. He was lighter than she expected, hollowed out by the flames, but the scorching heat and devouring smoke turned every step into a marathon.

The fire assaulted her from every angle, but pain was an old friend; the drug that pushed her past mortal boundaries. She dragged Marrow inch by inch towards the door where Luca was waiting. He rushed in with the assist and helped drag Marrow over the threshold and into the blessed relief of the night.

Ella gulped down clean air and collapsed beside the killer’s twitching body.

‘Medics are coming,’ Redmond called out. He closed in, knelt down to Marrow and felt for a pulse. ‘Son of a bitch is alive.’

‘Cuff him. Make sure,’ Luca shouted. While she’d been in the inferno, he’d found the strength to rise to his feet. He grabbed Ella by the shoulder. ‘Ell, what the hell did you go back in there for? You could have burned to death.’

Ella propped herself up on her elbows then waved him off. Yes, she most certainly was burned, but burns healed. Guilt didn’t.

They watched as Marrow Farm gave a final, shuddering groan and collapsed in on itself. The whoosh of displaced air stirred the hairs on Ella's arms as a gout of flame and embersspiraled into the night sky. A Viking's funeral for a house of a thousand ghosts.

She knew there would be no saving this place. No scrubbing away the taint of Vincent Marrow's poisoned mind.

‘I already got one person killed this week,’ she said. ‘I’ll be damned if I’m making it two.’

But maybe that was okay. Maybe some things were meant to burn, meant to be purged in the crucible of fire. The ghosts would linger, as they always did, but they'd be quieter now.

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

Ella sat on a tree stump and stared at the smoldering ruins of Vincent Marrow’s farm-turned-wonderland.The firefighters had doused the blaze and paramedics had treated her burns – first-degree, by some miracle – and slathered her skin with a cooling cream that smelled faintly of menthol. But she wasn’t about to complain, not when she’d walked through an inferno and lived to talk about it.

A shadow fell across her, and she looked up to see Luca looming. His pretty face was tarnished with bruises, cuts and a few bursts of inflamed skin. His forearms were glowing red and wrapped in something like Saran wrap. ‘How’s the patient?’ he asked.

Ella flexed her fingers, feeling the pull of tender skin. ‘Never mind me. What’s the damage with you?’

‘Second-degree on my forearms. A couple of patches on my neck. Legs are fine, somehow.’

‘How’s it feel?’

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