Page 9 of Chapel at Ender’s Ridge (Ender’s Calling #1)

The town’s founder, Cleveland Ender, built a church to watch over the dead.

In a town first populated with outlaws and ill-intentioned travelers, the cemetery was well-used.

Seventy years after the birth of Ender’s Ridge, the first church was now a collapsed skeleton of timber and nails with a twisted fence marching around its corpse .

Tumbleweeds drifted against the iron gate as Decker eased it open. Rust flaked into his gloved palm as he clutched the metal, a sudden wave of nausea rolling through him as the sun beat down over his shoulders.

He never left the safety of shade without a damn good reason for inviting a splitting headache and aching bones.

Thomas Haven’s grave was a damn good reason.

White marble headstones lay tucked away in a peaceful corner of the cemetery, their simple inscriptions stark and new:

Thomas Haven

Beloved Husband

Abigail Haven

Beloved Wife

Sunset stones formed a pattern across their graves.

Undisturbed.

Their ghostly neighbors weren’t as lucky—two empty graves pitted the ground, broken open and screaming. The grave robbers struck a few days ago, if the dried clay from the bottom gave him an answer.

Decker groaned raggedly and leaned on the headstone, scrubbing his hand over his beard. Thomas wouldn’t have wanted him to spend money on frivolous things, but it seemed wrong to mark the grave of the man he loved with plain grey stone.

Fine things for fine people.

The years after the Revolutionary War dissolved into a haze of blood and survival. In the North the fur trade flourished, and the hunters became the hunted; their flimsy cabins were no match for his hunger and he gorged himself, losing his mind in his killing.

When unrest flared between the states, Decker gathered his wits about him enough to be pulled into another war—this one just beginning instead of ending. Battlefields wept with the blood of men destined to die, and for the second time in seventy-five years, purpose fueled Decker instead of hunger.

Black soldiers camped in the rear of Union war camps, and Decker joined their ranks, as there was no difference between them in the eyes of the government.

Thomas met him with a broad smile, pressing a threadbare blanket into his hands and making room in their mildewed tent.

For a sense of normalcy, Decker accepted, but in the frigid nights when he couldn’t feel the cold, he draped his blanket over Thomas and kept watch until the morning.

We have to stick together , Thomas muttered in the calm before battle, cried it over the snap of musket fire, and bellowed it from deep in his lungs when the final cannonball lodged in the sodden muck.

When Lincoln’s Proclamation declared Thomas a free man—though neither of them expected much would change apart from a handful of laws—Decker joined him instead of returning to haunt the North woods.

Freedom wouldn’t be linear for a nation that built itself on the backs of enslaved people, and a signed paper didn’t change the prejudice snarling at their heels.

From the West they heard whispers of a better life, where folks didn’t care so much, and they left for Jefferson Territory.

Isolation had a way of cracking open hearts, and the two of them talked their way across grass plains, forded rivers, and dodged towns. Campfires were always accompanied by the guitar Decker took for him from an abandoned house—another victim of war.

Strummed notes often fell flat as Thomas learned the gut strings, but by the time they reached Denver, Decker had never heard a nicer sound than his companion plucking away on a blistering summer night.

They never talked about what happened on the battlefield, how all fifty-five members of their company survived without a scratch. When Decker disappeared and returned with different, clean clothes, stronger, more alive, Thomas welcomed him with that broad smile and said he’d missed him.

Identity was another unspoken agreement between them, like their wariness with white folks and the care they took telling strangers where they were headed.

Decker found peace on the road with Thomas.

Peace in a sense of humanity he hadn’t known since he was turned.

Then they found Abigail.

Abigail was a sweet-faced woman who could cook a mean meal and wring a cow’s neck with her bare hands if she felt inclined to.

A recently freed city woman working at a boarding house, the arrival of Decker and his handsome companion with a daring smile and a guitar slung across his back quickly caught her twinkling eyes.

By the next morning Thomas had a steady job to properly propose to her.

“Did you know the ones who were stolen?”

Decker was too sun-touched and lost to hear Mr. Lane’s heartbeat until he stood next to him.

Not as well as I should have .

“A ranch hand and one of the dancing girls,” Decker murmured, his gaze fixed down on the Haven’s graves. “They have no one to miss them.”

Mr. Lane eased closer, smoothing a hand over the edge of the white marble with sudden tenderness. “You knew these two, didn’t you?”

More than I wanted to.

He couldn’t tell him they worked a saloon together in Denver until the Havens saved up enough to homestead land and start a small ranch in Dakota Territory.

Or that once he’d settled in Ender’s Ridge, he sent them a letter and received nothing back—Thomas had relegated him to a relic of the past.

Decker cleared his throat. “They died of consumption. Safine couldn’t do much but make ‘em comfortable.” Their focus had been on restoring the Loose Goose; there was no time for her to learn cures for an incurable disease.

Thomas never questioned why Decker looked the same as he had years ago when he and Abigail stumbled into town, already half-dead, but maybe Thomas knew if anyone could cure their sickness, it was going to be his odd companion.

Maybe, deep down, he knew Decker helped their company, helped him survive the war.

Safine’s cures couldn’t help, and Decker could have only turned one of them. Thomas would have spent an eternity gnashing his teeth in anguish if he was remade. So, Decker bought them two headstones and laid them in an early grave.

Death was kinder than what he was .

The preacher looked as if he very much wanted to ask more questions, but—mercifully—refrained.

“Their headstones are beautiful,” he said, once again toeing the line as carefully as he’d ever been. “Some aren’t as lucky. My aunt was buried in an unmarked grave outside the city limits. There was talk of her death not being an accident and the church wouldn’t stand for it.”

Religion was words on a page with the promise of eternal damnation. One slip and the pages gaped wide, spewing fire and brimstone as if all passages could be applied instead of understanding the lesson within the book; love thy neighbor, love thy mother and thy father, judge not.

Often, he craved the faith he’d lost years ago, wandering across the new, war-torn America.

No amount of puja or dhyana could repair the rift within him.

Separation from the world he’d known dug a pit into his chest that sweet, well-meaning Thomas tried to fill.

But other gods, other rituals, other strange, stifling beliefs couldn’t begin to weave him back together.

“Your aunt likely wasn’t the first parishioner to be thrown out of her community because of a book,” Decker said.

“You hold a grudge towards faith, Decker.”

“Religion.”

Mr. Lane’s voice softened. “Why?”

Thomas had found a Bible at one of the shelled houses they passed by. Blackened at the edges, but readable. Between his knowledge and Decker’s understanding, he stumbled through the pages, and when his mind was tired, he played away the heaviness with his guitar.

“Thomas read the Bible four times over in the time I knew him.”

He read it again, and again, and again, and took each damned passage to heart until it pierced between us like the spear in the savior’s ribs.

There was no way for him to explain how a man reading the Bible came between them so thoroughly unless he bared himself to a stranger.

But something about lying further to the preacher didn’t sit well with him. “He was a zealot. And I stood in his way.”

If Decker could have read the Bible, touched the pages that touched so many, maybe he could have understood why Thomas slept with a woman he did not want, while he ignored the creature who was his companion, who protected him.

Loved him. Decker had waited for the time when Thomas realized the right path was beside him, but it had never come.

Thomas seeded and nurtured his own path with brambles that grew and choked out their love with each dismissed conversation and averted gaze until Decker could no longer recognize him through the thorns.

Bibles burned like holy fire, and the church wasn’t kind to men who had no interest in women, who drank their communion from a pulsing vein, who weren’t the color of priest’s robes.

But Mr. Lane was kind.

“I have my own struggles with the faith. That’s who my chapel is for,” he said as if he believed it.

Decker was also starting to believe it.

Sincerity softened his tone. “Maybe your chapel will be of some use to our town after all, Mr. Lane.”

As his face lit up in the soft morning light, Decker waited for him to stray from his righteous path, to slip and stumble so he could be rid of him and the uncomfortably familiar feeling stirring in his chest.