Page 36 of Chapel at Ender’s Ridge (Ender’s Calling #1)

Sister Inez stabbed one of the wooden rosary beads in front of her with a long, thick needle and knotted it into place. Wordlessly, she unthreaded the waxed cord. Buttons rasped as she rolled her sleeves up to her elbows.

Willa cocked her head.

A slight smile tugged at Sister Inez’s lips. When she threw open the storeroom door and swooped in, her habit snapping behind her, she had the look of a vulture descending to feast on carrion.

Safine’s boots fell to the floor with a solid thump.

How long could she punish him? How long until she looked at him like a friend instead of a stranger, met with a barbed tongue and anger?

“We’ll figure it out, Safi. We won’t lose anyone else.”

She didn’t look at him. Just stared at the closed door to the back room before she poured Willa a black coffee and settled next to her, idly rolling a jar of the thick, brown liquid from Whitton’s between white-knuckle hands. Her lip rouge was faded, bitten away through the hours.

She hadn’t let her nerves eat into her composure for years; now she was raw, bleeding, like the man behind the door.

Decker ached to repair his mistakes, to plead with her like he was in the Garden at the foot of God.

Unsaid words and avoided looks stretched him thin until he was bursting at the seams .

Decker couldn’t bear the eye of the storm any longer, and he retreated upstairs, taking the hall to his room in quick strides.

Laurie's eyes were nearly as bloodshot as Whitton’s when he looked up from crumpled stacks of paper and pencil nubs scattered across Decker’s bed like piles of ammunition.

His shoulders slumped at Decker’s expression.

Decker soaked his face and neck with the stale water from his wash basin and breathed through the droplets, wishing they could wash away the mounting fear of life never returning to how it was.

“We haven’t—” Decker said, faltering before he scrubbed the towel over his face and returned it to the hook in his wall.

“Safine and I haven’t—fought. Willa and I both thought if we could capture Whitton and make him answer for what he’s done, if we could stop all this, maybe it would help.

Revenge can’t bring back Cricket, but maybe it will bring back Safine,” he said.

Laurie’s heartbeat scattered as he joined Decker, their shoulders brushing. “The loss is still new, Decker,” he said, pity clinging to the furrow of his brow. “Give her time. She’s not alone, and she’ll understand someday.”

What about me, preacher?

Decker’s tongue was tacky, catching his words like a fly in a web.

“Her hate for me is justified.” He knew how he sounded.

Indistinguishable from a drunkard slumped across the table, but when he started, the words spilled out like a broken dam.

“The person I have made a home with— my home , that I’ve never had to run from or be afraid in—blames me, and she’s right; I should have seen it all.

I should have noticed what was happening.

I was just too goddamn distracted—” Decker caught himself and his nails bit into his palms.

Cricket’ s death, the plagues, his nature, wasn’t Laurie’s fault. None of this was.

Decker’s voice held by a thread. “The only person who has loved me as I am, will not speak to me.”

When he finally met Laurie’s eyes, all he noticed was the slight flash of compassion always present before he bared his soul.

“Not the only person,” Laurie said softly.

Hand brushed Decker’s at their sides, knuckles to knuckles.

He angled like a knife, lacing their fingers together and covering their union with his other hand.

“The night will always fall again, and we will be here, helping each other. Loving each other. Neighbors,” he said, barely a whisper of breath across his parted lips.

I want you to speak the truth, Laurie Lane. I want to be loved by you, as neighbors, as friends, as partners. Whatever you will give me will always be enough.

“Neighbors.” Decker’s hand squeezed his and they stood, chest to chest, breaths mingling until he could almost imagine how he would taste.

If this was over— when this was over—Safine would not forgive him.

And Laurie would forget him, unless God was on their side, but with every strange happening, Decker feared there was something darker than God himself haunting their town.

He would add Laurie to the long list of regrets etching his history.

Next to his parents, who he’d left, selfishly, in a famine-stricken country. Forgiveness had come too late for them, even if he could find it in his heart. He would never be able to find them even if he wanted to—and if he did, what was there to say?

Answers sprang to mind like they'd been waiting years for this .

He would tell them about Safine, about their partnership and the saloon. How she’d been good to him, and how he treasured his time with her knowing, one day, their wedding rings would be buried with her.

He would tell them about Laurie. How conviction-struck he was about fixing the chapel, and how he’d tried to make Ender’s Ridge his home, and the people his neighbors, even though he was surrounded by death.

He would tell them how Laurie made him feel like there was a God, for Laurie must be made of the divine.

He would tell them about Thomas, how he was a good man, and he would tell them about Cricket, how they’d both been good men, and he’d buried them both because he was a coward and he could never do what they had done.

He would tell them how they’d failed to save Ender’s Ridge, because a divine man of God distracted him until the rest of them were reduced to humanity.

Decker would feel the sun on his face again if they couldn’t break the plagues—taste the sweetness of the air until the people of Ridgewater couldn’t forget what monsters lay in wait across the river.

Humanity would be the beginning of him and the end of all of them.

Their iron will couldn’t protect them this time.

“Neighbors,” Decker said again. This time it tasted bitter, like the lie of a lover.

Laurie squeezed his hands tightly, like it was the last time.

“I—” He stumbled over his words and his heart rattled in the room between them like a caged bird.

“I—I’ve made some progress,” he rushed, ducking past Decker to the bed.

Spreading his notes on his lap, he nodded towards the space next to him. “Maybe you can see something I can’t. ”

A ghost of a smile hovered on his mouth, and Decker wished he would have kissed him and tempted the ghost to resurrect.

The bed dipped as Decker sat next to him. “Show me.”

“These words,” he said, his hands skimming across the neat lines, “are very similar to the Latin word for disease. And this, in the first passage, is only one letter off from the Latin word for blood. I think this is it, I think this is what was used. It wasn’t God, only Dr. Whitton.

” Relief colored his voice, as if he thought God caring about them enough to smite them had been an actual concern.

“If there’s a curse, there has to be a reversal. There has to be.”

Decker settled papers in his lap on top of his last penny novel and took a pencil from Laurie’s pocket. “You translate, I’ll write?”

Laurie smiled, and this time there was nothing ghostly about it.

As his pencil flew over the paper and Laurie leaned against him when he grew weary, the sky lightened outside.

If we fail, you, Laurie Lane, will never be one of my regrets.