Chapter 1: The weight of the cross
It was sunset over the SilverCross family estate, and twenty-six-year-old William stood before a mirror, watching the reflection of his own back. The cross-shaped birthmark rested between his shoulder blades exactly as it always had, glowing faintly in the dying light that crept through the windows. The look on his face was not vanity, and it was not pride. It was worry — not for the mark itself, but for the cause the mark represented and the family that bore it.
Outside, the estate lay snow-choked and still. New England in winter carried its own particular silence, the kind that pressed down on everything like a held breath. The SilverCross graveyard — a tradition of the family, maintaining that the souls of those lost to their cause deserved to rest in ground that pitied them — sat frozen and forgotten-looking at the edge of the property, the stones half-buried in white.
William's younger brother Eric and his sister Angela were somewhere inside, alive with the warm noise of family, the kind of domestic sound that seemed almost foreign to a household groomed since birth for supernatural warfare. They had just finished a family Christmas gathering, and for a brief hour the estate had felt like something almost normal.
William and his siblings stepped outside afterward, the cold air sharp against their faces.
"Something is coming," William said quietly. "I can sense it. Blood-soaked. Staged by the dark forces."
Eric, fierce and unsparing as he had always been, glanced sideways at his brother with a familiar mix of exasperation and affection.
"You've always been undeniably intuitive," he said. "But let us enjoy Christmas, William."
William said nothing more. But the weight on him did not lift.
