Page 17 of Chapel at Ender’s Ridge (Ender’s Calling #1)
What the Moonlight Sees
D ecker knocked on the parsonage door when he reckoned it was nine-thirty.
Laurie answered the door flustered, yanking on a pressed black shirt. “My apologies, I didn’t know you were coming already, I would have been prepared—”
“Clock’s broke,” Decker said easily, leaning against the doorframe. He followed Laurie’s fingers over the dip of his sternum and down the trail of hair dusting his stomach as he buttoned his shirt. “Why’re you getting dressed all fancy?”
Laurie faltered, glancing up as he neatly tucked it in. “I wasn’t sure where you were taking me. Clergy have to be prepared for anything. Oh—apologies, where are my manners? Come in,” he said, holding the door.
Decker stepped through with the clear invitation.
His parsonage was little more than a box with a bed and a tacked-up wrinkled quilt in place of a door, separating it from the rest of the chapel.
His Bible lay on the single nightstand crouched next to the bed, its leather cover lovingly worn smooth, and a clean set of clothes draped neatly over the back of a rickety chair.
The machine-stitched hems wrinkled where they brushed the rotting floor.
“Watch your step…I haven’t had a chance to repair much,” Laurie said, toeing around the edge of a soft spot, as if it could break like his voice.
“The hills don’t care if you look all proper.” Decker smiled at the fastidiousness of it all.
“We’re going into the hills? I don’t have a horse.” Under the white collar Laurie fastened around his flushed neck, his throat bobbed.
“Sitara won’t mind an extra rider.” His smile grew wider at Laurie’s apprehension.
Untapped power coiled in her haunches, and she yanked against leather reins when Decker led her from the barn. The ghostly cremello mare shone in the moonlight and her snorted breaths from her delicately dished face hung in the chilled air.
Sitara’s maker chose her to be his only fledgling—as their kind could turn only one—just to lose her on the last battlefield of the last war.
The officer whipped her to the bone, and she trampled him until he became one with the bloody muck of the battlefield.
Decker hadn’t known her name when he found her, so he chose a practical one that suited her starry coat and reminded him of home.
The change affected species differently.
It manifested in Sitara with sharp, flashing teeth and steely hooves when hunger struck her, turning her to pure power, untouched by the sun.
She was vicious and beautiful, and they found a partnership in their secrecy.
Thomas never asked why Decker let her go free every night, nor why she came back streaked in blood .
One more thing left unsaid between them.
Laurie considered his offered hand. Finally, he took it and fit his boot in the stirrup, finding his seat behind the saddle.
“Horses can sense your fear, Mr. Lane.” Decker twisted to look at him over his shoulder. “Relax.”
“I’ll manage,” he said, words honed to a sharp edge.
Decker’s gaze traced over Laurie’s face in their closeness.
His lips tightened, eyes darting away.
Is it me or her making you nervous? Which beast are you more frightened of, preacher?
“You’ll fall if you don’t hold on.”
The tension coiling Laurie’s body seeped into his own when his arms hesitantly crept around his waist, tightening as Sitara danced in place and pawed sharply at the ground.
Leather reins slid through Decker’s bare palm as he released her.
Sitara snorted, her fine lines leaping into a fluid gait past the back of the chapel to the foothills. Wind whipped at her pale mane and Decker’s hair, yanking strands free from where he’d pulled half back and filling his lungs with fresh air off the mountains far in the distance.
Most nights he spent behind the bar or swindling cards as an idle pastime. Only when Sitara craved a hunt did he allow himself to give in to the night, with the brush of cool air against his skin and her near-silent hoofbeats eating up the ground.
Laurie’s breath whispered hot against Decker’s ear as he pressed against him while Sitara pinned her ears back and darted around the greyed conical stripes of a hill.
Veering off the cattle path, she dodged through fragrant sagebrush thickets and around clumps of prickly cactus hidden in the darkness .
Hares scattered, bristled white tails disappearing through scrubby bushes and under long grass that brushed the men’s boots as the foothills rose beneath them.
Sitara’s muscular hindquarters bunched under them, her hooves digging into the crumbling rock as she bounded forward and upward until scraggly pines straightened and towered over them.
Moonlight filtered onto the needle-covered ground as hills and valleys evened into a plateau.
Laurie settled against Decker’s back, but his arms were like bands of molten iron around his middle, burning through his wool coat.
“Isn’t it dangerous to be out here at night?” He shifted like he was trying to catch a glimpse of light from the twin towns far below them.
The lingering prejudice in Laurie’s question––branded into him from the moment he came out West—wasn’t lost on him.
The cold air became spiced with pine as Decker brushed a low-hanging bough away from them and ducked over the horn of the creaking saddle. “The Lakota are in more danger from you.”
He’d accompanied Safine many times to meet with their pejuta wacasa, Three Hawks, to trade news and supplies for his knowledge and cures and doing what they could for their ongoing battle on sacred land.
The battle had been raging for more than sixty years, since amorite was discovered and the hills were taken over; Decker knew it would never end. Only evolve.
Laurie was shame-silent behind him, and Decker twisted in the saddle to catch a glimpse of him. “They’re wary of townsfolk. Their doctor’s the only one who’ll talk to Safine. Showed her everything she knows about the plants here. ”
“Then I have him to thank for how quickly my hand healed,” Laurie said, and his touch drifted from Decker’s coat, no longer buried in wool, but splayed across his middle.
Laurie’s hand burned through thin cotton, drawing flame through Decker’s stomach, and he dug his heels in. Sitara broke into a trot, knocking away Laurie’s touch.
Let’s get this over with.
Pines thinned and a sheer wall jutted from the center of the plateau. Sitara balked and pinned her ears at the fallen boulders at the base, her lip curled back from long, curved canines. Swinging his leg over her neck, Decker dropped lightly to the ground.
Scattered tree limbs gave way to the towering wall, stars blacked out high above. Red shot through jagged rock like streaks of lightning, faintly pulsing, rushing, like it was the heart of the hills.
Some said Ender’s Blessing intertwined with the cliff of amorite and the veins snaking through the hills.
Cleveland Ender—part of the three snubbed members of the Lewis and Clark expedition and founder of Ender’s Ridge—would have pompously declared he’d manufactured the Blessing instead of exploiting a natural resource.
But he was gone, wiped from history by his rivals except for a few journals wedged in the back of the hotel.
Once Ridgewater sprang up to support the steady stream of miners heading to the amorite mines of Amaretto, Ender’s Ridge was forgotten by most, only remembered by outlaws and drifters of the supernatural variety.
They cobbled the town together until Ender’s Calling pulled in more of their own, shopkeepers, barbers, blacksmiths, until the town boomed.
Then Elias Lane had arrived .
Blackened logs against the cliff rustled and a mouse scurried towards them. Sitara snipped her teeth at it as Laurie landed unsteadily on his feet, bracing one hand against her hide.
He craned his neck upwards to where the rock face disappeared into the darkness high above. “What does this have to do with the disappearance of my uncle?”
“Everything.” Tying the reins loosely to the saddle, Decker set Sitara free.
The sparse underbrush sprang back from her passing, light hoof steps disappearing from earshot.
“Elias was pleasant when I first met him. I had my reservations—as did the others—but when he did nothing but sit in the rotted church and join us for a drink once a week, we let our guard down.”
Laurie eyed him warily, as if unsure he wanted the truth after all.
Decker chose his words carefully.
You can’t know everything. You would ruin us.
“We never found the ones that went missing. The livery’s companion, the couple who ran the hotel, a little girl from the bank. Her family moved away after—back East.”
“Was my uncle the last of the missing?” Laurie’s brows furrowed, his arms wrapping around himself as the wind hushed through the pines and cast barbed shadows across his face.
“He had a hand in it. Somehow. Safine was almost one of them,” Decker said softly.
“Safine didn’t come home one night; I tracked her here, lashed to a burning pyre.
Elias told her she was meant to be an offering.
Maybe the hills are cursed and he lost his mind, or maybe it was already lost when he came here. ”
Decker could still smell burned flesh .
His teeth had grit so hard they nearly cracked as he dragged her from the pyre and beat away the flames with his hands. The scars circling his arms matched those on her legs, her hands.
Laurie paled, face as white as the moon arcing above them. “He burned them? All of them?”
Decker shifted one of the charred logs at his feet and the mouse squeaked and scampered away, tiny heart pattering.
“I searched for my neighbor's bodies, their bones. There was nothing left, but their disappearance couldn’t have been a coincidence. I missed my chance, and Elias was gone by the time I pulled Safine from the flames.”