Rotham’s throat flayed open under desperate, clawed hands, and fangs sliced through slippery cartilage. Minutes drained away.
The sand of the riverbank where he finally dragged his kill reddened. Copper turned acidic in Decker’s gut, and his stomach roiled and heaved as the physical bliss of feeding escaped him.
I am vicious, I am death. I am what I hate.
He coiled protectively around the absence of hunger, the one thing that kept him sane through every feeding.
I have to do this to survive. No choice but to survive.
Decker ran his tongue over his elongated right canine and across the blunt edge of his left fang. Blood dripped from his mouth and trickled along the scars on his hands, staining them dark red.
Coyotes yipped and howled as they slunk through the edges of his pinprick vision, waiting for scraps of the man he’d just killed.
His lips parted as he tempered his breathing. Chest heaved as he sucked in the cool night air.
Decker Belmont. I am James Decker Belmont. I must survive. I have to do this to survive.
Swallowing back the last taste, he fought the sick, heavy feeling of his limbs. Feeding should have made him sharper, faster, better. Instead, the kill immobilized him once he regained his senses and backed away from that deep pit of whispering temptation. A twisted side-effect of his creation, he was sure, but he couldn’t afford to feed any more frequently. He’d indulged, once, and hadn’t been able to stop himself. The trail of bodies still followed him.
He would drench the doors of Ender’s Ridge in curtains of blood if he fed any more frequently.
Safine.Fog cleared from his mind, scattered by the thought of her. She’d be waiting for him—wisely keeping her distance until it was safe.
“Safine.” He hardly recognized his voice. Never did afterwards. Wouldn’t recognize himself in the cracked mirror above his bed when he returned to theGoose, although he knew what he looked like now after he drank his fill. Eyes burning deep mahogany, skin rich and brown.
Decker tipped his head back and took another deep breath, eyes closing. His mouth was sticky. Bile rose in his throat.
Heavy hoofbeats dug into the ground to the right of him and Safine emerged on a heavy blue roan with a stubborn streak matching her owner’s.
“You in your right mind now?”
He swallowed hard, drinking in the wind slipping through the willows over the deep river. “Close as I can be.”
The saddle creaked as she swung off and caught her footing. “Easy?” She glanced over her shoulder while she unbuckled her saddlebags.
His breathing steadied as his voice did. “Horse spooked. Went down fine.” Decker didn’t know if it was better or worse when they fought back.
Gold glinted dully in his hand as he slid the wedding band off of Rotham’s cold finger. A wedding date was etched inside of the band in dainty script.
Maybe his wife would heave a sigh of relief when he never sent a letter saying he struck a vein of amorite upstate—or maybe she would wait, anxiously pacing threadbare rugs as he was never heard from again.
Neither future lessened the ache burrowing deeper with each kill. In another hundred years Decker would be a hollow shell, echoing with the countless cries of the damned.
Regret was absent for only one kill in his lifetime. Elias Lane was the reason Decker wanted to believe in Hell.
Safine’s sharpened blades made efficient work of the corpse—hair, toes, fingers, brain, heart—and she packed each of them away with the same irreverence as plucking flowers from their roots.
Decker stood at the riverbank.
Humans went missing monthly in Ender’s Ridge. Some strayed too close to the river, a flash of muddy green scales and the lash of a forked tongue being the last thing they ever saw, and some dropped with exhaustion at the dance hall and never left.
No one ever came looking for them.
Some of their own went missing, and no investigation was ever opened—lawmen didn’t come to Ender’s Ridge, and the creatures there mostly kept to themselves.
Ender’s Blessing kept them safe, staved off the law, but Decker remembered.
The face of each person Decker killed forced itself into his mind like a smoking brand wrenched onto a cow hide, violent and barbaric and necessary.
