Page 35 of Chapel at Ender’s Ridge (Ender’s Calling #1)

Doctor’s Orders

D ecker hissed as a gunshot snapped through the church, and he bounded up the steps. Wood cracked as he burst into the sanctuary.

Willa slumped back against the doors, her flintlock smoking in her hands. “Don’t worry none, I only got his leg.” Pale, cracked lips split into an exhausted smile.

She was stubborn, half-dead, and had alerted the town they were there. Decker still smiled.

“You were supposed to stay back with the others.”

“ Resting ,” Laurie added, edging away from the fallen form.

“I wasn’t gonna let you have all the fun. Besides,” she walked down the aisle, unsteadily grasping at the pews, “the last time I saw the doctor in church he tried to shoot me, so it was only fitting I return the favor.”

Whitton clutched his leg on the ground as the boards stained a nasty black. He glared up at them. Unveiled, the candlelight revealed his sins.

The doctor’s face contorted in shades of white and brown and black, patched together and drooping at the corners like he’d stood too close to a fire and melted. Sunken eyes, one nearly black and one cloudy blue, roved like they wanted to return to who they belonged.

The buckets of entrails smelled better than he did. When his shriveled lips parted, his putrid breath gust out in a slow, graveled taunt. “Every time I found a girl that looked like you I made her beg.”

Willa bared her teeth in a sickly smile and yanked the handkerchief from her throat. “I made Grace beg too.”

Whitton glowered.

Heaving Whitton to his feet, Decker yanked his arms behind him and lashed his wrists with his belt. Willa stuffed her sweat-streaked handkerchief in his mouth and Whitton’s words garbled into sullen silence.

“Don’t think anyone’s going to miss him, but let’s get the hell out of here before Father comes nosing around,” Decker said.

Willa followed them out of the church, bracing herself with Laurie’s help. “Find anything else with the old bastard?”

“We hope,” Laurie murmured. “If I can decipher it when we return.”

“You got a good education. You’ll work it out.” She winced and braced herself against her horse’s side when they reached the alley.

Safine’s mare turned baleful eyes on them and pinned her ears as they lashed Whitton to the saddle. Willa looped the lead rope in her palm and hefted herself into her own saddle, spine bowed and heels jammed low in the stirrups to keep her balance.

Laurie easily swung up behind Decker, adjusting his book-stuffed bag.

“She shouldn’t have come. She’s still recovering,” Laurie murmured as Willa slumped over. She tied herself down like Whitton, a blanket looped around her waist and knotted to the pommel.

“She’ll make it. All of us will.”

Hail littered the ground on the other side of the snaking river.

Sitara’s riders clung to her as she picked her way up the slippery bank through lumps of ice as large as Laurie’s hand.

The sun had crested the horizon long ago and the day had been eaten away with finding a shallow place to ford with the three horses.

Exhaustion threatened Decker and he’d let Laurie take the reins, huddled away from the deadly sun under a thick blanket Laurie had procured from his carpetbag.

Should be feeling more poorly than this.

Worry gnawed at him, and when Sitara reached solid ground, Laurie cautiously urged her into a gallop as they raced towards Ender’s Ridge with Willa close behind. Striped hills churned to mud under them, spattering their faces with silty brown.

The steeple split the sunlight at the edge of town, standing proud. The gnarled skeleton of the tree next to it bent raggedly after a lightning strike. Glass and wood crunched under hooves; shingles wrenched away in the storm and hurled across the street.

Ender’s Ridge was quiet.

Deathly so.

The heavy doors of the Goose were drawn and barred and the veranda sagged heavily.

Laurie’s chapel had seen the worst of it, and he made a small, defeated sound as they pulled their horses to a trembling stop.

The roof had more holes than not, and the cross lay askew the front steps.

Chipped paint aside, the building was in one piece.

Laurie slipped to the ground and picked up the cross that had fallen from the roof”s peak, brushing away mud and slush. He propped it against the doors. “Nothing is unfixable,” he murmured.

Sounds like you’re convincing yourself, not me, preacher.

Decker landed heavily on his feet, ducking under the shade of the bowed veranda roof. “You repaired it once, we’ll do it again.”

Laurie turned hopeful eyes to him. “We?”

“Neighbors, Laurie,” he said before going to check on the others—and Safine.

The knot in his stomach slipped when she rounded the corner of the Goose like she’d been waiting for them.

Lip-rouged mouth curved into a smile.

Decker almost returned it.

Then Safine brushed past him to free Willa from the saddle, steadying her as she slipped down.

She was rightfully angry. He should have done more, tried harder. Been less distracted, and maybe Cricket would be here. Decker’s typical, rational thoughts did nothing to dull the biting edge.

Safine’s grin took on a nasty edge at the sight of Whitton trussed across the back of the other saddle. “You got him.”

“Had some help.” Willa caught Decker’s eye, and he nodded at her .

Without her, they might have caught him—silently, without gunshots—but her pride would never have let her rest.

This would be the end of the strange happenings of Ender’s Ridge.

Soon, things would go back to normal. They had to. He couldn’t bear the thought of life if they didn’t. And if normal included Laurie forgetting him?

Not now.

He didn’t have the stomach to think of it.

Sister Inez appeared, her habit curling around Willa as she slipped a tender arm around her waist. “Foolish thing,” she said, but it wasn’t without affection.

Decker met her searching eyes and returned her slight smile. Without her insistence, there would be no hope.

Now, hope charged the air like crackling thunder before a storm as they dragged Whitton into the Goose , wedged makeshift scaffolding under the sagging porch, jostled each other behind the bar.

Coffee steamed in faded cups and Decker sighed with contentment at the first familiar taste of oak-aged whiskey.

Even Sister Inez’s spirits lifted, and she leisurely sipped a cup of sarsaparilla as Safine and Decker knotted rough ropes around each of Whitton’s rotting limbs.

He hadn’t spoken a word since they’d left Silver Creek and charged into the night as the first doors burst open to investigate Willa’s shot.

Tightening the last loop around an emaciated wrist, Decker pulled up a chair next to Laurie who was elbow-deep in the sea of books strewn across the table .

“Think these’ll have the answers?” Safine crooked her elbow across Sister Inez’s shoulders and swirled her coffee in her cup.

“If they don’t, maybe he will.” Whitton’s bloodshot eyes met Decker’s, but he made no move to yank at his bonds. He sat perfectly still, like he’d accepted his fate. Between Decker and Willa, he wouldn’t be leaving alive, information or not.

“The next plague is locusts,” Laurie murmured, his brows permanently drawn together as he selected a few books, piling them in his arms. “We may have a day or two.”

“Might be sooner than we think,” Decker said. The air had turned arid and blistering in the brief time they’d been back, and he feared it was the first harbinger of the seventh plague to strike.

Safine barked a laugh. “Hail didn’t do much, but good thing we knew about it or we would’ve had to dig more graves. I guess we did free up some space when we buried Cricket in Amaretto.” Safine sipped at her coffee and the room went cold and silent.

Laurie snatched up the last journal, balancing it as he headed to the quiet upstairs.

Sister Inez cupped a handful of wooden beads and rummaged in her pockets for waxed thread.

Decker stood. “Willa, you feel well enough to interrogate Doctor Whitton?”

“I sure can.” She pushed herself off the table, weak but determined, and joined him in the back room as he shut the door behind them.

Decker yanked him to the middle of the room and Whitton’s head snapped to the side. The chair wobbled to a halt.

What good are threats to a man that carved himself to pieces for a hundred years?

Drool leaked from the corners of his slackened mouth as Decker pulled the gag away. “Shall we begin, Doctor?”

Decker’s old friend took the reins, and he gladly gave them.

Not a word fell from Whitton, even after the floor splintered under his boot from Willa’s shot, dark blood mingling with crust from his leg wound. Time escaped them, the sun long gone.

As the day wore on, numbness took them all. Decker’s head fogged, only kept sane by Willa.

The doctor was more blood than man when they stopped.

Willa swore and jammed her heel on his leaking, destroyed foot, grinding down until bone crunched. He didn’t twitch, head hanging. “Bastard isn’t going to be of any help. God can hear his confession, if he’ll listen,” she growled. Bloody boot prints left a trail into the main room of the saloon.

Decker joined the center table with the rest of them. Sighing, he scrubbed his hands over his face and through his beard.

Sister Inez glanced up, a nearly-finished wooden rosary coiled in front of her. A small leather tassel replaced the cross at the end. “Have you any luck?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say luck like Cricket’s.” Safine looked over the tips of her boots propped on the table, a book balanced across her knees. “Pretty fucking shit, right, Decker?”

Please, not now. Let us go back to how it was. How we were .

Decker couldn’t stomach his refusal of Laurie—their mutual agreement—and her constant twisting of the knife, driven so deep in him he thought he’d never be able to dislodge it.

“Shit,” he finally said. “He won’t talk.”

“And I’m all out,” Willa muttered.