He exchanged a glance with Laurie. “I’ll make sure Elias is distracted and give you time.”
Heavy scales scraped against wood one last time before the boards quieted against Decker’s back as he braced himself next to the front door. A hush fell over the sanctuary, like quick rest lulled into peaceful sleep by the hum of Laurie’s incantations.
Five minutes. I can give you five minutes, Laurie. Talk fast.
His heart thrummed in his chest, strange, breathless. His weakened hearing strained for the sound of Elias, or the serpent being drawn away.
Decker’s hand curled around the curve of his pistol. Six shots.
Make ‘em count.
The doors shattered open in shards of crafted pews and rusted nails and Decker flinched away, bringing his arms up to shield his face. Flesh burned with specks of shrapnel despite his attempt, and he hissed, batting away tiny splinters in slow motion as his mind snapped at his body to catch up.
Flame rolled through the gaping hole and acrid smoke grasped at the edges, clogging Decker’s lungs and stinging his narrowed eyes. Angling to the side, he waited. The handle of the pistol went slick in his palm and his finger ached on the trigger.
Blackened hands raised in front of Elias Lane like a terrible saint immortalized in glass as he swept through the doors.
Five minutes.
Decker pulled the trigger.
Too slow.
His last hope clattered to the side with Elias’s strike, discharging in a shower of bullets and sparks. Laurie’s voice stuttered to a halt with the gunshots.
“Keep going!” Decker snapped. They could not stop. Not when they were so close, not when the curse clouded them like the incense rolling off Elias, and not when Elias came for him, eyes blazing with righteous fury.
Decker bared teeth that were too blunt.
The serpent he’d conjured was gone, but Elias still held power far beyond what Decker had ever witnessed in the narrow scope of his life. Elias seethed with it, the chapel holding its breath for the arrival of the next plague to twist them all into shallow forms of humans without the heart of what it meant to be truly human. Humanity was better left to those who understood their own power, cherishing time in their race against mortality.
The weight of Decker’s mortality crushed him like the soil he’d shoveled over Elias three years ago and his own, painfully human heart drummed in his head so he couldn’t think.
Elias came at him and batted his defense aside before he caught him around the throat. “Abomination,” he snarled, dragging himaround the jagged hole in the center of the chapel. The years in the grave hadn’t helped his way with words.
His nails bit into Decker’s flesh, crushing, biting until hot liquid pooled at the base of his throat. Twisting and thrashing, strangled, Decker fought. He just needed to be a distraction for Laurie.
Laurie.
The measured incantation stopped, bitten off in a sharp intake of breath, and then Laurie was there, fangs flashing in a panicked snarl. The fading strength of a fledgling was the only thread holding his new self together while Decker crumbled.
Elias hauled Decker upright at the front of the chapel and spun him, back to chest. “You made him a mockery of his faith,” he hissed in his ear.
“He saved me.” Laurie’s face went bone-white, and he advanced like cornering a wild animal, slow with the fear of being struck.
The break of his voice reached Elias and he paused, shifting behind Decker. “You care for him.”
“Yes,” Laurie said.
Decker could almost envision the sneer. He jammed his elbow back.
Human elbows were strong enough. Cracked ribs echoed through the chapel and Elias snarled, fingers digging into his throat as he threw him to the side.
“I’ll be rid of both of you.”
Bone crunched under Decker. A tearing sensation shrieked up his leg, and he grasped blindly at the pew as he bit back a cry. His leg lay at an odd angle, rippled and twisted.
Pain had been fleeting in the last hundred years. Now it devoured him, untethered, and he wavered as spots bloomed in his vision and a whine wrenched from him.
