Moonlight filtered onto the needle-covered ground as hills and valleys evened into a plateau.
Laurie settled against Decker’s back, but his arms were like bands of molten iron around his middle, burning through his wool coat.
“Isn’t it dangerous to be out here at night?” He shifted like he was trying to catch a glimpse of light from the twin towns far below them.
The lingering prejudice in Laurie’s question––branded into him from the moment he came out West—wasn’t lost on him.
The cold air became spiced with pine as Decker brushed a low-hanging bough away from them and ducked over the horn of the creaking saddle. “The Lakota are in more danger from you.”
He’d accompanied Safine many times to meet with their pejuta wacasa, Three Hawks, to trade news and supplies for his knowledge and cures and doing what they could for their ongoing battle on sacred land. The battle had been raging for more than sixty years, since amorite was discovered and the hills were taken over; Decker knew it would never end. Only evolve.
Laurie was shame-silent behind him, and Decker twisted in the saddle to catch a glimpse of him. “They’re wary of townsfolk. Their doctor’s the only one who’ll talk to Safine. Showed her everything she knows about the plants here.”
“Then I have him to thank for how quickly my hand healed,” Laurie said, and his touch drifted from Decker’s coat, no longer buried in wool, but splayed across his middle.
Laurie’s hand burned through thin cotton, drawing flame through Decker’s stomach, and he dug his heels in. Sitara broke into a trot, knocking away Laurie’s touch.
Let’s get this over with.
Pines thinned and a sheer wall jutted from the center of the plateau. Sitara balked and pinned her ears at the fallen boulders at the base, her lip curled back from long, curved canines. Swinging his leg over her neck, Decker dropped lightly to the ground.
Scattered tree limbs gave way to the towering wall, stars blacked out high above. Red shot through jagged rock like streaks of lightning, faintly pulsing, rushing, like it was the heart of the hills.
Some said Ender’s Blessing intertwined with the cliff of amorite and the veins snaking through the hills. Cleveland Ender—part of the three snubbed members of the Lewis and Clark expedition and founder of Ender’s Ridge—would have pompously declared he’d manufactured the Blessing instead of exploiting a natural resource. But he was gone, wiped from history by his rivals except for a few journals wedged in the back of the hotel.
Once Ridgewater sprang up to support the steady stream of miners heading to the amorite mines of Amaretto, Ender’s Ridge was forgotten by most, only remembered by outlaws and drifters of the supernatural variety. They cobbled the town together until Ender’s Calling pulled in more of their own, shopkeepers, barbers, blacksmiths, until the town boomed.
Then Elias Lane had arrived.
Blackened logs against the cliff rustled and a mouse scurried towards them. Sitara snipped her teeth at it as Laurie landed unsteadily on his feet, bracing one hand against her hide.
He craned his neck upwards to where the rock face disappeared into the darkness high above. “What does this have to do with the disappearance of my uncle?”
“Everything.” Tying the reins loosely to the saddle, Decker set Sitara free. The sparse underbrush sprang back from her passing, light hoof steps disappearing from earshot. “Elias was pleasant when I first met him. I had my reservations—as did the others—but when he did nothing but sit in the rotted church and join us for a drink once a week, we let our guard down.”
Laurie eyed him warily, as if unsure he wanted the truth after all.
Decker chose his words carefully.
You can’t know everything. You would ruin us.
“We never found the ones that went missing. The livery’s companion, the couple who ran the hotel, a little girl from the bank. Her family moved away after—back East.”
“Was my uncle the last of the missing?” Laurie’s brows furrowed, his arms wrapping around himself as the wind hushed through the pines and cast barbed shadows across his face.
“He had a hand in it. Somehow. Safine was almost one of them,” Decker said softly. “Safine didn’t come home one night; I tracked her here, lashed to a burning pyre. Elias told her she was meant to be an offering. Maybe the hills are cursed and he lost his mind, or maybe it was already lost when he came here.”
Decker could still smell burned flesh.
His teeth had grit so hard they nearly cracked as he dragged her from the pyre and beat away the flames with his hands. The scars circling his arms matched those on her legs, her hands.
Laurie paled, face as white as the moon arcing above them. “He burned them? All of them?”
Decker shifted one of the charred logs at his feet and the mouse squeaked and scampered away, tiny heart pattering. “I searched for my neighbor's bodies, their bones. There was nothing left, but their disappearance couldn’t have been a coincidence. I missed my chance, and Elias was gone by the time I pulled Safine from the flames.”
Laurie looked as if he didn’t want to believe it, but there was a flicker of doubt in his face as he glanced towards the destroyed pyre. Three logs still stacked neatly on the outer edge, untouched from the flames. “Did you find him?”
A squeal echoed in the distance—Sitara, on the hunt. The same way Decker hunted Elias when Safine recovered. Ruthless and enduring, until he’d caught his single misstep.
