Chapter 20
No Matter the Cost
Scandalous.
Decker smiled and joined him, naked body slipping through the water. Laurie’s good, preacher-kind eyes never wandered.
Working the tie out of his hair, Decker carefully loosened the tangles. Their legs touched under the surface.
Emboldened and unmoving, Laurie’s curiosity got the better of him. “How were you turned?”
Deals. Their dance around each other survived off deals and promises, and tonight was no different. If that’s how he wanted it, then he would have to offer as well.
“I’ll tell you if you tell me the truth of why you left seminary.”
Laurie ran his hand over his face, rinsing away the speckles of mud. “You already know.”
“I want to hear you say it. Your side of the story,” Decker said softly.
Laurie made himself even smaller, knees pulling to his chest. “Alright.”
“Alright.” The story dried up in Decker’s throat and he cleared it and uncorked his flask. “There was a famine,” he said, the pinchof hunger settling in his gut a now-familiar feeling, “and our village near Kalikata was one of the first. Disease weakened us, and drought withered our crops.”
The East India Company ignored the cycles they’d survived on for hundreds of years, and demanded more, more, more until the villagers were sacks of bone.
Decker had almost forgotten the taste of spices ground into a paste with the last of the rice, the humility of dragging fingers along a bowl to gather the last drop of food when there wouldn’t be more tomorrow, rib-bones digging into his own when he wrapped himself around the frail form of his mother.
Decker swallowed. “We were dying. There were twenty-two of us left when he came one night with his coven.” He recalled the man’s deep brown skin, glowing in the torchlight like he’d swallowed the sun, and his teeth, too sharp when he smiled. At the time he thought it was the effects of starvation chasing his mind. “He was…” Decker’s gaze lingered on the droplets of water clinging to Laurie’s parted lips, “one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen. He gave us a choice. Follow him and be forever changed or die.” A wry grin tilted his mouth. “Like your god.”
Laurie managed a faint, pained smile. He took one of the washcloths and soap from the edge of the tub, the sharp scent of lye at odds with the lavish room. “Like my God, there's more to his story, isn’t there?”
“He promised deliverance from foreign rule and an end to their suffering. They all accepted. Most of the parents decided for the children. Whole families, signing their execution warrant.”
“Did you have siblings?”
“No. My mother had complications before me. I was the first and last for them.”
“They were protective of you.”
“To the highest degree.” There wasn’t any hesitation. They were the first to step forward, and he clutched his father’s emaciated arm as the stranger’s fangs sank into Abba’s throat. The change took days, each new fledgling turning another in an endless cycle. The stranger to his father, father to his neighbor, neighbor to his mother. She was the last of them.
“You weren’t turned then.” Laurie’s brows furrowed.
Would it have been easier if I was? Would it have made a difference?
Decker had dredged through the fog of that night a thousand times and still wondered what would have become of him if he agreed to be turned. Amma and Abba had begged him. Their forever child, even though he was a man.
Decker took the bar of soap and the second cloth Laurie nudged towards him, leaving a thin film of bubbles across his chest. “I thought the stranger was going to kill me for refusing what he called thegift.I saw what it did to the others, the pain, the thirst. Instead, I became an unwilling companion.”
Memories of the time blurred, as if his mind had a tendency to protect him, even when he scraped through every detail with ripped nails. Decker didn’t know how others of his kind didn’t go mad—decades of his own memories were fractured, shadowed. Another two hundred years and he wouldn’t remember the ache of his mother’s betrayal in his gut or recall the gentle softness of Laurie.
“I was dragged along with the coven and fed with scraps in already starving villages. When those became scarce, he turned to…other methods to keep me alive, or risk losing the two most powerful members of his coven.” Decker scrubbed the soap over his damp hair and sank into the tub, tipping his head back before emerging. “After they drank their fill, nothing could be wasted.”
Laurie’s washcloth slipped into the water with a small splash, his body gone still and mouth tight.
Decker’s lips tilted in a crooked smile. “At least he was kind enough to build me a fire.”
“How many times?” Laurie’s lips thinned as if he was chewing at the inside of them.
