Chapter One: Morning Prayers to No One
The blessed silver bullet hit Antanas in the chest just as he finished transmuting the last handful of poisoned earth.
No—that wasn't right. He caught the temporal echo and let it fade, the Time sight showing him what would happen in... seventeen minutes? Maybe eighteen. Hard to tell when Time showed him only fragments, like peering through cracked glass, but soon enough.
He pressed his palm back into the soil, feeling the wrongness beneath his fingers. Two centuries of ritual murder had left its mark here—bone fragments crushed to powder, iron from blood oxidized into rust, calcium deposits where bodies had dissolved into mineral memory. The earth reeked of death to anyone with the sense to smell it.
To his neighbors, it was just good farmland. Blessed by Žemyna, they said. The Earth Mother's favor upon her faithful servant. The Wickhams to the east, the Kazlauskas family to the west—all of them saw fertility where he saw corruption.
If only you knew your Earth Mother never existed.
Antanas closed his eyes and pushed. Not with his hands—those just helped him focus. He pushed with will made manifest, reality bending because he demanded it. The bone calcium shifted its crystalline structure, becoming plant-available nutrients. The death-poisoned iron transmuted to beneficial minerals. Handful by handful, he transformed Abigail Thorn's legacy of murder into something that could nurture life.
Around him, the morning mist rose like breath from a corpse. Fitting, given what lay beneath.
A tremor through the death-current made him pause. Eight living souls moving through his outer fields, their life-patterns stark against the background radiation of old murder. Their leader burned with righteous certainty—that particular flavor of faith that came from believing you served a higher purpose.
Stanisław, he thought without surprise. Finally came to finish it.
The old soldier still wore his conscience like his Union coat—proud and visible to all. Different war than Antanas's, different cause. Stanisław had fought to free men. Antanas had fought to take land. Both had found horrors that prayers couldn't answer.
The blessed silver those men carried disrupted the death-current like acid in water. He could feel their cold iron weapons, forged with prayers and quenched in holy water. Tools for killing the old monsters—hedge wizards who thought they channeled gods, blood witches who believed they commanded demons.
Against someone who'd learned reality had no gods to channel and no demons to command? Useless as prayers to empty sky.
"Papa?"
Antanas didn't flinch, though Vaidila's voice had come from directly behind him. The boy moved quietly for thirteen—a useful skill in a household where dawn prayers weren't supposed to be interrupted.
"Your mother wants you," his son said. "The pancakes are ready. The good ones, with apple sauce."
Bulviniai blynai. Rūta always made his favorites when she sensed trouble coming. Woman had a nose for violence like a hound for blood, though she'd never admit it.
"Tell her I'll be there soon." Antanas kept working, transmuting another handful of corruption. "I must finish the morning observances."
He felt Vaidila hesitate. The boy wanted to ask about the ritual—probably wondering why his father's "prayers to the ancestors" looked so different from what Elder Domas taught. But something in Antanas's tone warned him off.
"Should I... should I prepare the cellar?" Vaidila asked instead. "Like last time?"
Smart boy. Last time had been three years ago—drunk railroad workers who thought Lithuanian witches might have gold hidden away. They'd spent two hours in the root cellar, singing harvest songs while Antanas dealt with the intrusion.
"Yes," Antanas said. "Take your mother and sister down after breakfast. Practice the Third Chant—all seven verses."
"All seven?" A hint of excitement crept into Vaidila's voice. "But Elder Domas says I'm not ready for the final verse. The one that calls the ancestors to witness."
The final verse. Antanas remembered mastering it at fifteen, the pride he'd felt when ghostly whispers had seemed to answer. Now he knew better—just the death-current responding to structured sound waves, creating auditory hallucinations in those with minimal sensitivity.
"Elder Domas is cautious," Antanas said carefully. "But you have the blood. The ancestors will come if you call them properly."
A lie wrapped in a lie wrapped in bitter truth. The ancestors wouldn't come because ancestors didn't exist—just patterns in the death-current, echoes of ending moments frozen in metaphysical amber. But the boy would hear something, and that would keep him in the cellar, focused on empty ritual instead of real danger.
"I won't disappoint you, Papa." Vaidila's footsteps retreated toward the house, quick with purpose.
You already don't, Antanas thought. You believe. That's more than I can do.
He rose from his crouch, knees protesting. The transmutation was barely a third done, but it would have to wait. In seventeen minutes—no, sixteen now—Stanisław Sipowicz would call him out. Challenge him in the name of God and righteousness and all the other beautiful lies men told themselves.
And Antanas would kill him. Not from hate. Not from anger. Simply because Stanisław would force the issue, and Antanas had moved beyond the reach of blessed silver and holy water. Twenty-seven years since Mexico City, since the moment in that Aztec temple when he'd reached for Perkūnas and found only himself. Twenty-seven years of knowing the truth.
He walked toward the oak that marked his eastern boundary, each step measured. Red surveyor flags dotted the ground near its roots—the railroad men had been through again, marking their proposed route straight through the Old Grove. Progress, they called it. The future of commerce. They had no idea what slept beneath those ancient trees.
The oak's trunk was massive, scarred by centuries. Its roots drank from soil poisoned by two hundred years of Abigail Thorn's murders. Once, Antanas had believed it sacred to Perkūnas, the thunder god. He'd left offerings in the hollow of its trunk, sung storm-songs to wake the divine presence within.
Now he saw only efficient design—carbon structures arranged to maximize nutrient absorption from death-enriched soil. Beautiful in its simplicity. Empty of everything else.
He pressed his palm against the bark and extended his senses one more time. Not searching for threats—he knew exactly where the hunters crept. Instead, he reached out through the ley lines that spider-webbed beneath New England, following the death-current as it connected to greater flows.
Show me, he thought to no one. Show me another like me.
Every morning for thirteen years, the same ritual. The same desperate hope. The same silence.
Nothing. Same as always.
He knew they existed. The Mysterium letters spoke of dozens in Boston alone, a proper Consilium with rules and hierarchies. But knowing and feeling were different things. Out here in rural Thornwood, he might as well be the last mage on Earth.
Enough self-pity, he told himself. You have killing to do.
"Papa!" Marytė's voice carried across the field, high and sweet. "Mama says the pancakes will get cold! She says to tell you she made extra apple sauce!"
Despite everything, Antanas smiled. Eight years old and already learning to manage the men in her life through strategic reminders about food. Rūta was teaching her well.
"Coming, little bird!"
He took one last look at his domain. The wheat stood in perfect rows where he'd transmuted the soil, too uniform to be natural. The death-mist clung to hollows where corruption still waited for his touch. And somewhere in those trees, eight men prepared to die for their faith.
Your god isn't listening, he thought toward Stanisław. Neither are mine.
Time to eat breakfast with his family. Time to pretend the prayers mattered and the amulets held power. Time to be the man they needed him to be, not the thing he'd become.
After all, even transcendent beings needed potato pancakes.
The door closed behind him with the solid thunk of Baltic oak. He'd shaped it himself, made it dense as iron, carved it with traditional protective runes that did absolutely nothing. The real protection came from the Space ward he'd woven into its substance—reality itself bent to refuse entry to violence.
But his family needed to believe the symbols mattered. Everyone needed to believe in something.
Inside, warmth and the smell of frying potatoes. Rūta stood at the stove, grey hair pinned back, movements efficient as always. She didn't look at him as he entered, but her shoulders relaxed a fraction. Through the window, smoke rose from the Kazlauskas chimney a quarter-mile west—their own morning routines underway.
"Fifteen minutes," she said quietly, flipping a pancake. "Maybe less."
He'd never asked how she knew these things. Some talents didn't need Awakening to function.
"Time enough," he said, sitting at the table. "Where's—"
"Cellar." She set a plate before him, pancakes piled high. "Vaidila told me. The children are eating down there, practicing their songs."
Good. He caught her hand as she turned away, felt the calluses from thirty years of farm life.
"Rūta..."
"I know." She squeezed his fingers once, then pulled away. "Do what you must. But come back to us."
I always do, he thought. That's the problem.
He ate mechanically, each bite ash in his mouth. Outside, death crept closer on righteous feet. Inside, his wife hummed a protection song—one of the few rituals that actually worked, though not for the reasons she believed. Her focused will and absolute faith created a minor ward, barely supernatural but real enough.
Seven minutes now. Maybe six.
"The Wickham boy stopped by yesterday," Rūta said, scrubbing a pan. "Says their chickens haven't laid in a week. Wants to know if you'll look at them."
Normal conversation while killers surrounded their home. Twenty years of marriage had taught them this dance.
"After," he said. "Tell him after."
"And the railroad men? They sent another letter about surveying the eastern tract."
"They can survey hell."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh. "I'll phrase it more politely."
"Tell them what I told them last month. The Old Grove is sacred to our people. Some things shouldn't be measured and mapped."
"The Saturday wagon to Havensport—should I tell Kazlauskas you'll be joining him for market?"
"After," he said. "Tell him after."
Four minutes. He could feel Stanisław's team taking final positions—four to the north, three to the west, Stanisław himself approaching the front door. The boy Karol hanging back by the tree line, young enough to still be uncertain.
Good, Antanas thought. Uncertainty might keep you alive.
He pushed back from the table, leaving half the pancakes untouched. Rūta would fuss about that later, if there was a later. He walked to the door, paused with his hand on the carved handle.
"The children know the songs?" he asked. "All the words, all the gestures?"
"Every verse." Rūta dried her hands on her apron, not looking at him. "They won't come up until you call."
"Good."
He opened the door and stepped out to meet his fate. Or rather, to deliver Stanisław's.
The morning sun had burned off most of the mist, leaving his fields bare under autumn light. October in Massachusetts—the wheat shouldn't be this tall, this golden. But then, Thornwood's soil followed different rules. Beautiful. Perfect. Built on a foundation of death and lies.
Just like everything else in Thornwood.
Stanisław Sipowicz stood twenty feet away, blessed silver revolver steady in his weathered hand. His Union blue coat hung loose on his frame—the war had ended eight years ago, but soldiers never stopped being soldiers. Behind him, his men spread in a half-circle, weapons trained. They looked like what they were—veterans fighting a war they'd already lost.
"Antanas Petrauskas," Stanisław's voice carried the weight of ceremonial formula. "By the authority vested in me by Almighty God and the brotherhood of the Red Knives, I name you apostate and abomination. Surrender yourself for judgment, or face divine justice."
Divine justice, Antanas thought. From a god who doesn't exist, delivered by a man who doesn't understand.
The hunter's faith rang in every word. Antanas envied him that certainty.
He spread his empty hands, the gesture both surrender and mockery.
"Hello, Stanisław," he said in English, then switched to Polish. "Have you come to pray with me? I was just thinking how empty the morning prayers feel without someone who truly believes."
The hunter's jaw tightened. Good. Anger made men stupid, and Stanisław would need every disadvantage he could get.
The blessed silver bullet would come in three seconds. Two. One.
Stanisław pulled the trigger.