Vance Homestead, Texas
The rooster crowed late that morning.A spring storm had rolled through the night before, turning the dirt roads to thick mud and leaving the whole of Vance Homesteadcloaked in low fog. Out at the edge of the timberline, past St. Jude’s chapel and the busted rail crossing, the Vance Homestead stood quietly beneath gray skies, stoic and timeworn as ever.
But the land was uneasy.
Behind the barn, a crude symbol had been carved into the wall—twisted and unfamiliar. Tracks, far too large to be a coyote and too narrow for a man, led into the woods behind the cattle pen. A fourth fencepost was down, and this time the barbed wire had been cut.
Chris Vance, a man of few words and even fewer fears, stood at the edge of the yard with his Winchester resting against his shoulder. His jaw was tight. He'd seen enough in the war to know when something wasn’t natural. This? This felt like something older than bullets.
“I want those cattle counted again,” he barked toward the two ranch hands who were rolling out fencing tools from the barn.
Eli “Dusty” McCrae, a scrappy kid with more tobacco than sense, spit into the mud and muttered, “Hell, they were all there last night.”
Reuben Holloway, quiet and wide as a barn door, simply nodded and climbed onto his mule.
Olivia Vance appeared on the porch, her hands trembling as she adjusted her shawl against the wind.
Back in town, the day's rhythm had just begun. At the Liberty Saloon, the piano man was already nursing his morning whiskey, and at the Liberty Hill General Store, Mrs. Marston gossiped about devil-worshipers in the woods—her third time this month.
Sheriff Wallace Grady leaned back in his chair in the jailhouse, reading a telegram that had arrived just before dawn: “Stock gone. Northern Ridge. No sign of wolves. Eyes in trees.” No name signed. Just a mark: Crossed.
He exhaled slowly. Trouble had been brewing like a slow boil. Now it was spilling.
Back at the Vance Ranch, a distant moo echoed from the trees. Then silence.
Chris lowered the rifle and turned to Olivia.
“Tell Grady to bring every man who’s willing. We ain't losing this ranch to superstition. If there’s something in those woods...”
He glanced at Dusty, who had gone pale, staring off toward the darkened timberline.
“...it’s about to find out what kind of hell it just walked into.”