March 10, 1877. The road smelled of dust and heat even though snow fretted the ridges beyond the trees. Lucas Marrow rode with his shoulders hunched against a wind that carried the last of winter's bite and the first of spring's mud. The mare's flanks steamed. He kept his cap low, eyes on the rutted track, the cabin's thin plume of smoke a pale promise through the pines.
He'd been summoned—an easy word for summons done with a bottle and a grin. The note had been short: Martin says come break bread. Midnight. Cabin on the ridge. Lucas could have guessed what the invitation meant. Men like Martin didn't send for a man without wanting something. Still, Lucas had ridden. Curiosity was its own kind of habit.
The cabin sat tight among black pines, a squat thing of rough-hewn logs and a sagging porch. Snow clung to its roof like lint. Lucas dismounted, cinched the mare, and let the horse nibble at bitter hay while he crossed the threshold. The door creaked; voices cut off. Light spilled out, warm and mean.
Inside, the room smelled of smoke, spilled whiskey, and bodies pressed too close. A stove hissed in the corner. A kerosene lamp swung from a beam. Two sisters sat near the hearth—fingers white around each other's hands, mouths swollen with stifled sobs. Their dresses were torn at the hems and stained; one clung to the other like she'd been trying to hold something small and fragile that refused to be held.
They weren't the only ones watching them. Four men lounged across the table, as if the women were part of the furniture. One was Martin—broad-shouldered, jaw always set like he'd swallowed a stone. Another was Jory, a lean-faced man who seemed younger than his hands, chewing tobacco and smirking. The third, named Hollis, had crow's feet that looked old from too many nights awake. The fourth, Bram, favored the corner with fingers that never stopped fidgeting at the butt of a pistol.
They straightened as Lucas stepped over the threshold. Conversation paused on the taste of something worse than whiskey.
"Thought you might not show," Martin said, voice soft as oil. He rose as if the room had become a stage.
Lucas kept his hat on. The room turned colder. "You sent for me." He let the statement finish itself and watched each face under the lamp.
Martin smiled the sort of smile that was an order. "We're just—having ourselves some company. Ain't nothing wrong with that, is there? They're pretty. Ain't they, boys?"
Jory laughed like a dog that had found a bone. Hollis shrugged and kept his gaze on the stove. Bram shifted, the pistol's outline a promise under his coat.
Lucas heard the catch in the sisters' breath. He took a single step forward and the room tightened, like a fist closing.
"Martin," Lucas said. The name had weight. "This ain't right."
Martin's smile went thin. "Mind your own business, Marrow. You ride in with that look like you're the law. You're not the law." He leaned close to the nearest sister—too close—and Lucas moved without thinking.
He grabbed Martin by the shoulder. The old instinct in his hands woke: quick, accurate, a grip made of long roads and bad nights. Martin shoved back. The smaller men laughed.
Before Lucas could do more, two hands caught his arms from behind. Hollis and Bram—quiet, efficient—had slipped up behind the doorway. "Easy now," Hollis murmured, voice rough.
"Easy?" Lucas hissed. "You're hurting them."
"Relax," Bram said. "We're only playing." Bram's smile allowed no room for argument.
Martin shoved a finger under Lucas's jaw. "You gonna make trouble? You gonna run to the sheriff? Show me, Lucas. Try it." He slapped Lucas across the ribs, flat and hard.
Lucas folded, breath knocked from him. He spat blood and tasted iron. His eyes found the sisters—one clutched her sister's sleeve so tight her knuckles shone white. The other's lip trembled.
"You son of a—" Lucas pushed up, surged, but hands pinned him harder. Humiliation flared like a coal. He felt the old animal inside him mount, ears flatten, the precise, practiced rage that made men into bad teeth and bent spines.
"I'll see you in court, Martin," he said, words made of ice.
"Court?" Jory mocked. "You think the sheriff'll listen? Out here, proof goes where coins go." He spat, the word coins a laugh.
Martin laughed, then reached—reached for the sister the same way a man reaches for something owed him. He wanted to close the distance, to take what he fancied. Lucas saw the motion and it was all muscle—old habit collided with a new, sudden hard intention.
He drove his knee upward. Pain exploded in his gut where Martin's fist connected. He bent, coughed, felt the warm pressure of blood in his mouth. His vision tunneled for a second, and something in him snapped loose.
He wrenched free—fingers clawing at fabric, shaking off arms—and his hand found cold steel. The revolver came up, practiced and sure. Martin's face was a mask of surprise and then fury as the muzzle whispered. Lucas didn't hesitate.
The first shot hammered the room. Martin pitched back as if the world had split beneath him. Blood matted his beard. He fell with a sound that was more animal than man.
"Get him!" Jory roared. The room turned. One of them fired. Pain lanced Lucas through the stomach, hot and immediate; the marrow of him seemed to lose its anchor. He tasted copper. He answered with another shot—clean, precise. A head snapped back. A scream bled into the floorboards and died.
Bram lunged, and Lucas fired into the dark. Bram's body crumpled like a sack. Hollis barreled forward; Lucas, half-doubled with pain, caught his shoulder and shoved. The lantern swung. The sisters screamed once, then stilled as if afraid the sound might summon more trouble than it could handle.
Lucas staggered to the door, every breath a knife. The world shivered; his legs wanted to fold. He stumbled out into the night, the cabin's warmth becoming a dull, distant glow. The mare waited, patient and careful. He threw a leg over and pulled hard. Mercy bolted down the track and into the flank of trees, hooves churning up mud and half-frozen snow.
Behind him, Martin's voice—thin with pain and something worse—followed. "You'll pay for that, Marrow! You rotten—" Men ran, swearing and cursing into the dark. The pines swallowed their voices.
Lucas rode blind with pain blooming in his belly, warmth spreading across his shirt. He kept the mare moving because movement made the world keep turning. He kept his hat low and his jaw locked.
The ground broke away beneath him and the forest opened to a drop that fell into white teeth of stone. He pushed Mercy faster, heart a raw drum. Behind him, the shouts grew nearer. Men with picks and hate, with broken teeth and new fury. The track angled into a cliffside trail—narrow and treacherous—and the moonbulge over the mountains showed where the path thinned.
A laugh rolled out through the pines, close and wet. Lucas glanced back. Martin stood on the ridge, half-limping, one eye leaking dark red. He held himself straight and spat into the night like he'd declared the finishing of a game.
"No one runs," Martin called, voice hollow with triumph. "Nowhere to run, Marrow."
Lucas urged Mercy. The trail hugged the cliff. The horse's hooves slipped on ice and mud. The world lurched. One misstep, and the drop below promised a handful of broken bones and a soft fall into the ravine.
A shot cracked. Pain blew through Lucas's leg like a brand. He pitched; Mercy stumbled. The edge rushed up with a sudden, awful clarity—the world pivoting toward empty air. For a second the sky was all he could see: black, insane and cold.
Then the ground left him.
He fell, the world a blur of needles and pine. He tumbled, limbs asking the wrong questions, bones jarred and useless. He hit with a sound that ended in white. Snow and rock and the high keening of wind crowded his ears.
Above, the men leaned on the lip of the cliff, breathing ragged, spitting and laughing like children who had burned their hands and found it amusing. "He's done," Hollis said. "No way he lives that."
Bram whistled low, teeth shiny with blood. "Good show. Let's go home." They laughed and retreated into the trees, boots sinking, voices thin as tethers.
Lucas lay on his back between snow and stone and looked up. Circling above him, black against the bruise of sky, a flock of ravens spiraled like a wheel. They watched with black heads cocked and beaks that glittered like knives. They waited with a patience that made his chest ache with something like shame and something like relief.
His breaths came ragged and shallow. He thought of nothing and then of everything—of the long roads that had led him here, of the sister's hands in his memory, of promises he'd kept and promises he'd broken. His vision bled at the edges. Shapes thinned. The cold crept in.
Something warm and then cold pressed beneath his shirt. He lifted a shaking hand and felt it—an incision of heat and then cool, a line that grew under his fingers like ink sinking into skin. It traced the hollow of his throat, curved like the quill of a feather, and at its base, numerals, small and bright, formed as if written in a different light: I
Lucas blinked, tried to laugh, thought the sound came out like a small animal. He turned his head and saw movement at the treeline—figures he could not name. Men—not men—draped in skins, faces painted, spears leaning on shoulders. At the back, something taller, draped in beadwork and feathers, a man with eyes like river stones. A shaman.
The light in his sighting dimmed, the world unstitched. The ravens wheeled once more and then folded to the sky as if their business here had ended.
Lucas's last clear thought before black swallowed him was not of vengeance or escape, but of that mark and the number that burned on his chest—the first of something—and the sound of wings beating far away.