Chapter 15
Sins Laid Bare
Decker dreamt.
Pain shot through his gut until he trembled, and chills shuddered through him under a mound of woolen blankets. He faded in and out, frantic and hazy.
Rocks lashed to his chest pinned him to the bottom of the river where hands reached for him, bloated and rotting and foul. Nathan leered at him, lurching down the alley. He left strips of stitched skin in his bloody footprints. Flowers bloomed, spring bloodroot, and Safine tore them to pieces. Sap stained her hands and burrowed under her nails.
Nightmares blurred, faded, overshadowed by sickly pleasant dreams.
Laurie, with gentle, warm hands, tucked sun-soaked blankets around him.
Cricket clouded the room with cigarette smoke and curled up on his bed, snores rumbling into Decker’s ear.
Decker didn’t think the fading sliver of light through the drapes was a dream. Nor was Laurie, slumped in his chair in the corner.
Laurie, who jolted awake at the first creak of the bed and made his head ache as he hovered over him.
“Thank God, you’re finally awake.” Dark circles ringed Laurie’s eyes, and he wore the same clothes. Half-buttoned flaps of his shirt framed his silver crucifix.
Decker tasted copper, but when he raised a hand to his head there were only clean strands of hair. No blood, no evidence of what happened days ago. Relief crept in enough to relax him, until he struggled upright with another thought. “Sitara? She wasn’t well—”
“Lay down.” Laurie moved to press his shoulders back to the bed but then stopped short, hand coming to rest on the curved headboard. “Safine and her medicine helped. One of Lee’s horses didn’t make it, but she did.”
This time, when Decker sat up and eased against the headboard to inspect himself, Laurie didn’t stop him, only stepped back. The slash across his cheek had healed—along with his chest—in ridges of light brown.
No need to sew him back together like Nathan.
“You stayed,” Decker said.
Laurie picked at his fingernails, looking anywhere but at him. “If it wasn’t for you, I think I would have been killed. The least I could do was stay.”
Decker gave a pained, wry smile. The saloon was quiet below him, and he couldn’t seek out the steady murmur of Safine’s heartbeat. “What did they tell you?” he asked softly.
“Willa mentioned a Dr. Whitton. She’s convinced he’s the reason he was sewn up. After they…took care of him, she and Safine left.” Laurie spoke like he was balancing on the chapel’s peak, testing his footing.
Took care of him. A decent burial foran indecent man?
Despite his betrayal, Nathan had been his neighbor once.
More than a neighbor.
Nathan deserved to rest, free from the change that he’d never quite accepted. Decker should have been with the others, helping them bury him. Sometimes sickness took hold after feeding, but it’d never been like this, where he dreamt and thrashed in pools of bloody sweat. Just one more oddity to add to the passing weeks.
If Laurie had been balancing at the chapel’s peak with his inquisitiveness, now he was in danger of tipping over the edge with the way he hovered in the corner and worried at the edge of his lip.
“You’re bursting at the seams with your questions, Mr. Lane,” Decker murmured, shifting the quilt to the side as he stood.
“Laurie,” he said. “You called me Laurie last night. We’re past formalities.” He sounded pleading, but Decker didn’t need convincing despite the arch of his brow.
He rummaged through his dresser drawers for a fresh shirt. “Questions, Laurie.”
“The night you took me to the plateau. I wasn’t seeing things. You had…these teeth.”
“You were quite sane. With your perception of me, at least.”
Laurie apparently wasn’t in the mood for insinuations. “Are you a demon?”
