Chapter 26
Forgive My Transgressions
Smoke 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.
