Page 41 of Chapel at Ender’s Ridge (Ender’s Calling #1)

Forgive My Transgressions

S moke curled from the silver cross on Laurie’s chest.

Decker cursed, fumbling with the clasp under the open buttons of Laurie’s shirt. The faint outline of the silver cross burned pink. Wrapping it in his handkerchief, he laid it carefully on his nightstand.

First, Laurie’s fingers twitched, as if stretching towards Decker and still pleading with him. Then his eyes, darting back and forth under his lids.

When Decker first awoke, he had been a blur of fangs and hunger and rage. There was no telling what Laurie would do when he fully woke up.

Curse, pray, blame Decker for all his transgressions? Any of them would be understandable.

The sun had long since slipped below the hills past the heavy curtains.

Red eyes snapped open.

Memories slammed into Decker with the force of a thousand boulders, narrowing like a needle-eye.

India,

blood-red ,

change,

slaughter,

No.

No slaughter.

No killing of their own.

Decker had been wrong.

The tenacity of a people willing to do what it took to survive overshadowed the bloated corpses of his memories he’d rewritten in a hundred years of being cut off from his kind.

They hadn’t slaughtered their way across India. There were survivors. Killing was saved for sport, not necessity. There was no flesh consumed, only rotten fruit gleaned from a transport. They hadn’t slaughtered emaciated people but laid them to rest with dignity after the famine took them.

Decker had slaughtered people once he left. That much he remembered and knew was true.

All those people. All that time. I’ve forgotten, I was wrong, I am a monster but—

I didn’t have to be.

Decker hit the floor, lungs crushed, gasping, splinters biting into his hands, nails in his knees, the stagnant sludge of a hundred years without his people breaking free and flaying him open.

Wrong. He’d been so wrong, only remembering what he’d convinced himself of, and not the things he’d witnessed.

Tender blood-sharing when only one member of the pack could feed, ambushing a company of soldiers for a feast, finding others like them across India .

Community and revolution he’d turned his back on with the mistake of a mother. She would have taught him. As she was taught, as he would teach Laurie.

Laurie.

Waves of pain shuddered to a halt, and Decker lay gasping on the floor, curled into himself.

I was wrong.

I was wrong, and I can begin again.

I won’t make the same mistake with him.

Bleary eyes burned, and Decker forced himself through the haze.

The bed was empty.

Porcelain crashed to the floor in heavy shards.

Laurie crouched, still as death, atop the now-empty washstand. Long fingers cracked the edge.

“Don’t be afraid,” Decker said raggedly.

The preacher’s trembling hand raised, clutching at his chest. Feral terror flashed through Laurie’s red eyes when he found no sign of his faith.

“Laurie—”

He fled from the room in a great leap. Decker grabbed at air. Framed pictures shattered down the stairs when Laurie stumbled, his shoulder skidding into the wall. He ran, leaving a trail of broken chairs in his wake.

Decker cursed.

The chapel.

Decker—selfish, desperate—hadn’t even thought of Laurie being cast out of his chapel .

Waning moonlight cast Ender’s Ridge into shades of black and quiet.

Laurie ripped at the door of the chapel. Metal snapped in two and the door swung from its broken hinge, slamming against the wall as he clawed at the edges, panting, screaming, nails and finger-flesh splitting and tearing.

His voice wasn’t his own, grated across raw vocal cords, garbled like a tainted prayer. “I can’t get in, I can’t get in, it won’t let me in —”

Bone fingertips clicked against wood.

Decker lunged and the rusted railing of the church gave way under them. They tumbled to the ground.

Sharp, newly-formed fangs snapped, but it was ill-timed. Catching him by the wrists, Decker twisted away from his teeth, forcing him down and pinning him with an arm to his throat. Dust clouded his eyes, yet they still snapped like red flames.

Laurie was more alive in death than he was in life.

Brilliant scarlet eyes blazed at him from under perfect curls of burnished mahogany, the color deepening with his rebirth. His skin, always sunburnt and dry, was now lined with young fury.

Laurie was perfect.

And he was hungry.

Laurie bucked under him, twisting in his grasp and throwing Decker aside as if he were stray boards from the chapel. Springing to his feet, his lips drew back in an animalistic snarl as his eyes met those of his new god.

“Easy.” Decker crouched, hands spread as they circled each other, master and apprentice, god and creation, the voice of reason and the achingly bitter snarl of unwanted destruction .

Is this what Amma saw in him? Brilliance to last a millennia, power and grace in an almost-human body. This was right. She had been right. His cattle, bones; himself, little more. He would have been another death of the famine.

Love could never be reasoned with.

A laugh wheezed from Laurie, bitter and mocking. “I am forsaken. Drinking—” something passed through his eyes, a flicker of himself. “Drinking blood as my only survival?” Muscles coiled under him and he lunged again.

Decker yanked Laurie to his chest with both wrists caught between them.

Laurie bristled like a cornered wild animal. “I was not meant for this,” he gritted out.

Goddamnit preacher, save it for later.

Pain and hunger and exhaustion lethally honed Decker’s voice. “You’re right, you were meant for pining after men you can’t have and crying over your Bible until it made my ears bleed.”

“And this has made it worse,” Laurie snarled, struggling against his grip as his breath came hard and fast. “I could have stayed away; I could have hid my shame for a lifetime—”

There you are. The blood is a side effect and your afflictions are your illness.

“Wanting a man is the least of your worries, preacher,” Decker said.

Laurie’s struggling waned, and he went limp. Eyes flickered to a watery teak brown. “It won’t let me in. I can’t—I can’t get in,” he choked out, splinter-and-bone fingertips clutching at him.

“I know,” Decker said softly. His grip on Laurie’s wrists loosened, and he leaned in, lips brushing Laurie’s forehead. “I’m sorry.”

“I can’t,” Laurie said. “I can’t,” he said again, his whisper harsh against him.

Teeth like white-hot metal plunged into Decker’s neck before he ripped away, cutting into the night. Decker staggered against the chapel, clutching the four points of his neck where Laurie so carefully removed his fangs before he fled.

His fledgling was on the hunt.

Sitara thundered through the moonlit hills, red nostrils blown wide, intent on finding the scent of the shirt Decker thrust to her nose.

A fledgling on the run, his moral code at odds with instinct—Decker had been there himself, leaving behind a trail of bodies.

Laurie wouldn’t forgive himself for murder and didn’t possess the stubbornness that had kept Decker alive all these years.

Elias was in these hills, unless he’d skulked away to his old ally in Silver Creek; he’d discover him gone, and Decker only hoped his isolation didn’t make him more dangerous. Safine, too, was in these hills, meeting with Three Hawks for ritual herbs.

A hungry fledgling wouldn’t recognize their prey at first glance.

Faster, Sitara.

He pressed in his heels and she squealed, her neck snaking low to the ground. Veering right, she bolted up a hill where she stood trembling, bathed in moonlight, her head cocking from side to side. Listening.

Decker strained his hearing. Coyotes, slinking from their dens, the near-silent brush of an owl winging overhead, ruffling feathers from grouse under the brush.

There.

Footsteps. Lengthy, hurried, darting.

Tracking .

Decker swore and Sitara charged ahead. Laurie could be hunting anyone. A single ranch hand riding to his next job, a family traveling west, a lost child far from Amaretto.

Bent low over Sitara’s neck, eyes narrowed against the wind, he focused over the pounding thud of her hooves, and she scented the air, snorting, squealing, teeth gnashing at a rabbit that leapt in front of her.

The rabbit’s spine crunched between her teeth and she skidded to a halt, shaking the carcass like a dog. Ignoring Decker’s gentle heels in her side and the quiet urge to move on, she crushed it into a pulp of bloody fur, her muzzle stained red.

The mangled rabbit dropped to the ground and her ears pricked forward, swiveling, searching. A guttural huff rolled out of her chest and she stalked forward, picking through the rock without a sound.

Sitara heard something he couldn’t.

He finally caught the through the wind.

Scattered hoofbeats.

Frenzied.

The horse burst over the crest of the hill, stirrups from her empty saddle thudding against her belly as she galloped past .

Sitara wheeled, screaming and fighting against the reins at the prospect of a larger hunt. Decker reined her in, spinning in a circle. On a normal night, the snap of her teeth at his leg would have resulted in a sweat-soaked run until she was content—now, he nudged her nose away with his boot.

Riderless horse. No Laurie.

He’d found prey.

Decker clapped his heels to Sitara’s sides and she bolted down the trail of disturbed rock and sand the runaway left behind. Hoofprints gouged holes in the packed sand, across a trickling stream and down a striped gully.

Sitara tensed under him when he pulled her to a halt.

Not the time to be troublesome.

Decker deepened his seat before she threw her head and bucked. No hunt, no free rein to run. He deserved the violent attempts to dislodge him, but goddamn, not right now.