Page 2 of Chapel at Ender’s Ridge (Ender’s Calling #1)

Safine’s concoction worked slowly—they’d discovered the full symptoms after Cricket had snuck a drink from a cup a few months back. First exhaustion would overtake him, then dizziness and heat under his skin like the dead of summer. The stranger would have slept it off in a few days.

I’m sorry you won’t get that chance.

Decker’s thoughts slowed, lingering on the gnawing hunger in his stomach, slipping through the striped, barren hills to the west of Ender’s Ridge, down flash-flood gulches, following twisting paths where the stranger —

“Fangs, darlin’.”

Points prickled at his lip and Decker straightened, tongue smoothing over the snapped-off left canine until they slipped away. “I’ll send him on his way.”

Whiskey flowed and well-worn cards exchanged hands as the night rolled into the early hours of the morning.

The hour hand of the clock ticked incessantly against the terribly bent minute hand.

Chilled autumn wind swept through the doors and whisked in red oak leaves from across the river that crunched underfoot as the last patrons bid their goodnights.

Rotham slumped against the table, his bearded chin squashed against his thick hand. The vein in his neck thrummed and slowed.

Decker cleared his throat next to him. “Saloon’s closing, Mr. Rotham.”

He awoke with a grunt. Wobbling on his feet, he swayed towards the door, the swinging slats cracking behind him as he found his way to his horse.

“Follow the road past the old chapel, and then straight into the hills. That’ll get you to Amaretto,” Decker said as he leaned against the post of the veranda.

The sign above him spelled out the Loose Goose Saloon in poorly chiseled words; they were due for a fresh coat of lacquer before the bitter winter arrived. By the sound of the hinges in the breeze, they also needed oiling, but when business boomed, repairs got pushed aside.

Safine breezed through the door behind him as Rotham’s horse trotted down the dark street. “He won’t make it more than a mile before he tips off.”

“Lucky he’ll have us there to pick him up.” A grim smile tugged at Decker’s lips, and this time he didn’t pull back his fangs.

Safine was wrong. Rotham made it a mile and a half.

His mare wandered through the maze of wasteland aimlessly, picking her way through crumbled rock and storm-cleared gullies. She faltered at the bottom of a valley, ears swiveling and pinning. Listening.

Decker eased into a crouch at the crest of the hill.

He’d tracked them in a daze, the promise of a fresh feed luring him on, legs leaden and aching with hunger.

His body demanded the nauseating satisfaction of a fresh kill, and the sensation burrowed into him until it was a worming crawl under his skin he couldn’t refuse.

Wind curled around him and the mare’s ears flattened as she danced in place, pawing sharply at the ground.

Rotham lurched to the side and his spurs zinged along her flank.

The mare squealed and skittered forward, clouds of steam flaring from her nostrils.

Her rider hit the ground, boot still wedged in the stirrup.

Rotham swore.

Silt crumbled to powder under Decker’s footsteps which were too loud in his mind, too heavy. The world slowed, reddened around him, narrowing to the man bathed in sweat blindly wrenching at his caught leg.

The mare leapt into a gallop, dragging Rotham behind her.

Decker struck .

The mare’s haunches strained against the sudden weight of two bodies hanging off the left stirrup and she threw her bulk into a crazed escape, lunging, fighting, screaming.

Decker clawed at the ground, hooking them on a rock. A hoof sparked off stone next to his face and he snarled, curling around Rotham.

Saddle-leather flexed to a breaking point.

The stirrup snapped.

Rotham skidded to an abrupt halt, face-down, back gravel-shredded and bloody. His mare careened into the hills.

He never stood a chance.

Maybe Decker had been a gentle killer, once. His deeply ingrained need to survive now made him careless whenever he broke his self-imposed fast.

Made him vicious.

Rotham’s throat flayed open under desperate, clawed hands, and fangs sliced through slippery cartilage. Minutes drained away.

The sand of the riverbank where he finally dragged his kill reddened. Copper turned acidic in Decker’s gut, and his stomach roiled and heaved as the physical bliss of feeding escaped him.

I am vicious, I am death. I am what I hate.

He coiled protectively around the absence of hunger, the one thing that kept him sane through every feeding.

I have to do this to survive. No choice but to survive.

Decker ran his tongue over his elongated right canine and across the blunt edge of his left fang. Blood dripped from his mouth and trickled along the scars on his hands, staining them dark red.

Coyotes yipped and howled as they slunk through the edges of his pinprick vision, waiting for scraps of the man he’d just killed .

His lips parted as he tempered his breathing. Chest heaved as he sucked in the cool night air.

Decker Belmont. I am James Decker Belmont. I must survive. I have to do this to survive.

Swallowing back the last taste, he fought the sick, heavy feeling of his limbs.

Feeding should have made him sharper, faster, better.

Instead, the kill immobilized him once he regained his senses and backed away from that deep pit of whispering temptation.

A twisted side-effect of his creation, he was sure, but he couldn’t afford to feed any more frequently.

He’d indulged, once, and hadn’t been able to stop himself. The trail of bodies still followed him.

He would drench the doors of Ender’s Ridge in curtains of blood if he fed any more frequently.

Safine. Fog cleared from his mind, scattered by the thought of her. She’d be waiting for him—wisely keeping her distance until it was safe.

“Safine.” He hardly recognized his voice. Never did afterwards. Wouldn’t recognize himself in the cracked mirror above his bed when he returned to the Goose , although he knew what he looked like now after he drank his fill. Eyes burning deep mahogany, skin rich and brown.

Decker tipped his head back and took another deep breath, eyes closing. His mouth was sticky. Bile rose in his throat.

Heavy hoofbeats dug into the ground to the right of him and Safine emerged on a heavy blue roan with a stubborn streak matching her owner’s.

“You in your right mind now? ”

He swallowed hard, drinking in the wind slipping through the willows over the deep river. “Close as I can be.”

The saddle creaked as she swung off and caught her footing. “Easy?” She glanced over her shoulder while she unbuckled her saddlebags.

His breathing steadied as his voice did. “Horse spooked. Went down fine.” Decker didn’t know if it was better or worse when they fought back.

Gold glinted dully in his hand as he slid the wedding band off of Rotham’s cold finger. A wedding date was etched inside of the band in dainty script.

Maybe his wife would heave a sigh of relief when he never sent a letter saying he struck a vein of amorite upstate—or maybe she would wait, anxiously pacing threadbare rugs as he was never heard from again.

Neither future lessened the ache burrowing deeper with each kill. In another hundred years Decker would be a hollow shell, echoing with the countless cries of the damned.

Regret was absent for only one kill in his lifetime. Elias Lane was the reason Decker wanted to believe in Hell.

Safine’s sharpened blades made efficient work of the corpse—hair, toes, fingers, brain, heart—and she packed each of them away with the same irreverence as plucking flowers from their roots.

Decker stood at the riverbank.

Humans went missing monthly in Ender’s Ridge. Some strayed too close to the river, a flash of muddy green scales and the lash of a forked tongue being the last thing they ever saw, and some dropped with exhaustion at the dance hall and never left .

No one ever came looking for them.

Some of their own went missing, and no investigation was ever opened—lawmen didn’t come to Ender’s Ridge, and the creatures there mostly kept to themselves.

Ender’s Blessing kept them safe, staved off the law, but Decker remembered.

The face of each person Decker killed forced itself into his mind like a smoking brand wrenched onto a cow hide, violent and barbaric and necessary.

The brand slipped with Safine’s reappearance at his side, delicately wiping her hands off, and he forced himself back to Decker Belmont, barkeep at the Loose Goose saloon.

Rotham’s head lolled to the side as Decker nudged him into the hungry edge of the river. The current tugged at his feet like it wanted him to join the corpses lining its bed.

Under cover of darkness the water gleamed a deep burnished maroon he’d never seen before, as if Earth herself taunted him and turned her own veins to blood.

Safine—never fazed, back-to-business Safine—swung into the saddle and urged her mare to follow in the gouged hoofprints of the runaway horse. She’d find the riderless mare and bring her back to the livery to be sold as she always did.

Decker took the back way home, a blur of staggered steps and looming hills. Ender’s Ridge hid his fangs, but the Blessing could not hide the evidence of their bloody destruction, so he kept to the shadows.

The door to his bedroom rattled shut behind him. His body begged him to rest and process the sudden assault of food.

Feverishly, he splashed water into the basin, scrubbing his hands raw, drowning out his gasping breaths with gulps of whiskey that didn’t burn, but still washed away the oily taste of Rotham.

Liquor mingled with reddened water in the white basin when he retched.

Faintly, he caught the sound of a heartbeat next door through his ragged mind—Safine must have returned.

But the barn was silent.

Safine had headed into the hills, away from home. Even he couldn’t have returned so quickly from capturing the stray horse.

Decker grasped the edges of his nightstand, the room tilting and narrowing to the single, hushed heartbeat, like the body the heart belonged to was hopelessly trying to calm it.

Through the sliver of nailed-shut velvet curtains, an oil lamp in the window of the abandoned chapel diffused a gentle glow into the alley between them.

The erratic heartbeat Decker had never heard before whispered in his head long after he collapsed into bed.