Page 40 of Chapel at Ender’s Ridge (Ender’s Calling #1)

Act of God

D ecker dropped to his knees at Laurie’s side. His legs lay at unnatural angles.

He clasped his hand, as gentle as he’d ever been, cradling Laurie’s bloodless face with his other. Shallow breaths wheezed from Laurie’s caved chest, as though there was nothing holding him up inside.

“Safine!” Decker’s cry echoed through the chapel and the pigeons startled with a rush of wings. “Safi—” His voice died in his throat, choked out like the serpent now coiled around him.

She would be taking care of the doctor’s body at the river. Laurie’s eyelids twitched and fluttered until they opened to bloodshot eyes that reflected his own.

Safine. I have to get her, I have to find her, she can—

Knit together his broken bones? Cleanse his veins of the venom coursing through them? Or reform his chest so he could breathe, or—

Nothing .

No healer alive could fix him.

Laurie’s trembling lips formed and Decker leaned over him, clinging to strangled words. “My notes—”

“I don’t care about the notes,” Decker whispered. His eyes burned.

Scarlet stained Laurie’s lips and he dragged in another labored breath, shallower than the last. He tried to speak again and Decker coaxed him on with a soft brush of his thumb over the pulsing veins of his limp hand.

“You’re good—you’re a good man. I’ve seen God in you.”

Laurie said something once and now it seemed so long ago, time so insignificant, Decker struggled to bring the passage to mind.

The God who saved you from death in a fallen world, no matter the cost.

His God was gone, now. Abandoned the servant who gave his all.

There was only Decker and Laurie, and the sun streaming through the broken stained-glass window above them. Wayward hail shattered it, broke the cross from Christ’s back and left only the son of God bent under an unseen burden.

Sun reached Decker’s skin, warmth washing over him and soothing the blisters from the venom.

Is this what it is to be human again?

If they failed, if Laurie died here, was this what it would be like, basking in the warmth while he rotted with guilt he could no longer stomach?

He wanted the sun.

He wanted to live.

He wanted Laurie.

Laurie’s breath was wet. “I’m not afraid.” His voice strengthened, cleared, and his bloody eyes drifted as if seeing something invisible .

“I am,” Decker whispered. Fear had become long-lost family to him, rarely seen and never heard.

Now fear wormed into his life until he was consumed by it, could taste it like tainted blood on his tongue and hear it like the cursed calling of a life he’d long rejected.

Masquerading as human, staying out of trouble, keeping up appearances so he wouldn’t tarnish the reputation of others of his kind.

All to come to this.

“Laurie, I am afraid,” Decker whispered to his form that grew colder with each labored breath.

His entire life was built upon hatred and fear of what he could become.

What he had been before.

What he was becoming again.

Things could be different. I could be different. A Savior instead of the saved.

His preacher was right. There was no difference between them. Just two men, running in a futile attempt to escape fate.

He just didn’t think it was going to happen so soon.

Decker brushed a blistered, shaking hand over his face, cradling his cheek in his hand. “Laurie.”

Laurie hadn’t begged him. Hadn’t given him anything but an envious, steady peacefulness.

He should let him die.

Bury him in a nice grave in the old cemetery at the edge of town, with a cross headstone and a plain inscription. The rest of them might follow. They would fight, but they would follow if they all became human .

If he tried harder, lived up to his potential instead of masquerading as human, would bodies soak the ground with blood? Would Cricket have died if he listened to the growing threat under the chapel instead of being snared by the promise of someone loving him as a human?

You love me as I am, but can I?

Thomas wouldn’t have survived the curse. His body and his morals would have rejected it even if he had awoken. Cricket would have been—Cricket. Wild and free, becoming even more untethered by true immortality. He would have been dangerous, and beautiful.

Laurie, you would be radiant. You would be good, and I could teach you what I am. What I know.

A choked sound left him, caught between a laugh and a sob.

Laurie’s heart slowed.

He didn’t know the first thing about being what he was. There wasn’t time between survival and fleeing his parents for the Americas.

I can learn.

I will take care of you.

You will hate me.

Laurie would hate him, but he would be here. Hate could be reasoned with. Death could not.

Fangs prickled at his lips, and the steady, focused, cloak of his ancestors—his maker, his mother—enveloped him in warmth stronger than a thousand suns.

You will be my only. My one creation.

Laurie’s head tipped to the side when Decker slipped his arm under his neck.

His fangs sank into his neck, smooth, easy, with a millennia of instinct. Venom-bitter blood trickled down his throat. He drank past the acrid tang of the attack, the sweetened taste filling him with a peace he’d always dreamed of, longed for, ran from.

He lost himself until Laurie’s face went grey and his failing heart stuttered, the only witness being the two pigeons gone still in the rafters.

Hunger consumed him until he and Laurie were one, and preservation of his kind tapped against him, whispering enough.

Decker dragged in a breath, trance-like.

Home. This is home. We are home.

Guttural chanting in a language more ancient than Laurie’s God trickled from Decker’s lips, weaving together the fabric of his only creation in a ritual that was never taught, but engraved on the bones of every creature like them at their turning.

This is right.

Sunlight streamed through the window, bathing him in red until he was covered in it. Baptized, and born again.

Decker gathered Laurie into his arms and stood in the ruins of the chapel at Ender’s Ridge.

A foreign god looked down upon him. He didn’t think Laurie’s God accepted bargains, but if he had a soul to bargain with, he would have laid it on the altar.

He didn’t have anything to give. No offerings, no praise. Laurie would have done it correctly. He would have known the right, proper things to say.

But Laurie was too cold to pray.

If his God wanted to smite him down for turning one of his humble servants to a creature of the night, Decker could bear it .

But when he laid the broken body of Lawrence Lane on his bed, it was with the steadfast, terrible knowledge that saving him had been a mindlessly selfish act. Laurie should never wake; he would have preferred it to this.

Decker smoothed venom-slick, limp waves away from Laurie’s forehead. The memories of his own turning were so faded he could have performed the ritual incorrectly and he would never know until it was too late. A day passed before he awoke; would Laurie be the same?

My fledgling. My neighbor. My friend.

Elias Lane was alive.

When he should have been rotting where Decker buried him, he was alive, and he was gone. The cursed serpent became ash and twisted metal, prone in the place where Elias should have remained.

What uncle would attack his family?

Faint chatter wafted down the street into the saloon.

What mother could curse her own son?

Safine and the others were back, cheerful and steeped in victory. There must have been no other deaths besides Whitton. If he didn’t wake up, Laurie’s name would be scrawled beside him.

What person could turn his friend into something so horrible?

Not horrible.

Radiant.

You, Laurie, will be radiant .

Decker wept.

Shined boots took stairs two at a time, and then Safine was next to him, questions spilling out of her, battering the fog clutched at his mind. The chapel destroyed, floor gone, Laurie dead—

No.

Not dead. Never dead. Not Laurie.

Laurie’s body lay between them like no-man’s land, broken from war.

Turning, not dead. He’s not dead. Elias isn’t dead. Elias caused the plagues.

Safine spoke, but he didn’t hear. He listened for Laurie’s heart under crushed ribs.

Silence.

Decker strained for a whisper of blood through veins; his eyes searched for movement in his hands. He ached for change in the quiet.

Willa rested her hand on his shoulder. She, too, was silent. Her faith, steadfast as it was, didn’t extend to Laurie.

Sister Inez’s rosary was harsh against the pale death of Laurie’s skin as she began praying.

“He’s not dead . ” Decker’s voice rasped from his throat. He’d screamed for Safine longer than he remembered.

“Decker.” Sympathy was a tone he’d rarely heard from Safine; still, there it was, bittersweet.

Wordless, Decker tilted Laurie’s head to the side. Four fang marks left faint pink scars in his skin .

She paled. “What happened at the chapel?”

“Elias.”

Questions snapped at him, battering his senses, blooming pain behind his eyes, and Decker clutched at his head, muffling the shrieking. “He brought the plagues, I let him go, I couldn’t let Laurie go—”

Distantly, he registered Sister Inez pausing her last rites. She twined her rosary around one slender, brown finger. “Will he wake?”

“I don’t—” panic gripped his throat. “I don’t know, I tried to remember, I can’t remember—”

“A lifetime of sucking blood and getting sunburnt.” Willa crossed her arms over her chest. “I reckon I’d take the other option.”

Anger sparked, hot and sharp, Decker’s mind clearing for a single moment. “Laurie didn’t have a choice.”

“Because you didn’t give him one.”

Safine pursed bitten lips and looked away. Willa only raised an eyebrow, her challenging words lingering between them.

“Did you give Grace a choice when you took her and ran?” he said lowly.

She’d been dazed and medicated when Willa slung her over the back of her horse and deserted the wedding to a man she didn’t want.

“She would’ve rather died than stayed with him,” Willa bit out.

“I am a selfish man, is that what you want to hear?” Decker trembled, his voice rising. “I am a selfish man, and I would do it again to save him. I am selfish but no more than you—”

“Enough,” Willa said, and the rest of Decker’s words died in his throat. She twisted the wedding band on her finger. “If he doesn’t wake up from this, we’re done.”

“His notes—” God , he couldn’t remember. “His notes are at his chapel.” Decker grazed his thumb over grey, dry skin.

Safine cleared her throat. She didn’t reach for him, or brush shoulders with the easy closeness they’d become accustomed to.

Decker didn’t want her to. Her understanding was enough.

“We’ll get what we need before Elias comes back. Stay with him,” she said softly.

Life moved on, desperation nipping at their heels, and Decker kept vigil with Laurie.