The night was quiet.
Leathered wings circled the chapel, dodging snowflakes and chasing the last of the late-autumn insects, and feathered wings ruffled softly in the rafters.
Laurie found Decker’s hand in the darkness, touch tracing over each knuckle and circling his wedding band. They shifted on their sides, legs tangled against each other. Impossibly close.
“It’s snowing.”
Decker mumbled a dazed response. His back ached on the hard pew, but they made no move to leave.
“Decker,” he said softly, tapping against his hand.
He cracked one eye open.
Better be good, preacher.
“I’m going to remake the chapel.” Laurie searched for words, brow furrowing. “Different, this time. A meeting house—Safine will create wards, and we’ll have somewhere safe. All of us.”
Decker’s expression softened and he leaned forward, pressing a gentle kiss to his mouth. Laurie tilted his head to the side as Decker’s lips grazed down his neck, tasting the bruising marks he’d left. “Laurie’s chapel, meeting place,” he murmured.
“And I—” Laurie nudged him away, looking at him. “I don’t want to kill.”
Even now, even through the things he’d witnessed, Laurie could only sink so far into depravity before he caught himself.
“You won’t have to. Once Safine figures out Whitton’s invention, you won’t go hungry, and until then you have me. I’ve gone too long denying myself,” Decker said carefully. It was time to live, fully. Hunting, reveling in the night instead of suffering in the day. He embraced his mundane life while quiet eagerness for the future burrowed in his chest. “If you don’t wish to hunt with me, you won’t have to. I’ll be able to feed without making kills, like you did with me.”
Someday, he would enjoy the thrill of a hunt next to Laurie. Even though the thought of feeding no longer disgusted him, relief settled at the knowledge that killing could be in his past.
Laurie made a small sound of understanding. “I don’t quite trust my strength. It’s not my place to judge who should live or die. But—” He searched for the right words. “There’s always been creatures like us.Peoplelike us. We are his creation, like I am yours. We succumb to our nature, human or otherwise, and we will be accordingly rewarded or condemned. Judgement will be passed, but itwillbe just, weighed against our heart not our nature.”
“You believe that?”
“I do.”
“And the killing I’ve done?” The senseless, entirely preventable deaths like bloody footprints behind him.
“Decker, there is good in you. You are good.”
Your faith is evergreen, even now.
“When you came here you were afraid,” Decker said. “And then you weren’t afraid of me, but you were afraid of how you felt about me. Yet you still hold your faith. Through it all.”
Laurie smoothed his hand reverently along his jaw. “When I’m with you I feel the kind of peace I’ve only felt in scripture. John—the disciple whom Jesus loved, David and Jonathan. God did not forget us,” he whispered with such devotion Decker believed him. “I was so occupied searching for what was wrong with me, I forgot to see the beauty in it all. The beauty he formed us with, knowing this is what we’d create with it. The Bible…it’s only a book.”
Only a book.
That book shaped the world as they knew it, the rise and fall of empires, conquests, and still the world carried on, nature oblivious.
There was a beauty in it all. The natural cycle of the wheel, rising and falling. Decker and Laurie both were a part of the cycle now, keeping the order of the world. There was a stark, raw, bloody beauty to it, but they’d found their place.
Their home.
“I have something for you,” Decker said. Laurie cocked his head and Decker nodded at the rectangular box he’d left at the door.
Laurie got to his feet and languidly stretched. Decker admired the moonlight illuminating soft lines, the curve of his ass, and the lift of his shoulders as he straightened them, utterly unashamed of his nakedness. Their Garden of Eden, where they could be undeniably who they were in their bones.
Laurie, in his bones, was swiftly becoming a pain in Decker’s ass. He pounced on his gift. “What is it?”
“Open it.” A smile flitted about Decker’s mouth and he sat up, stretching in place.
