They ran until they couldn't, and then they walked.
The ridge was steeper than it looked from the town, loose rock and sage and then scattered pines, and Hassan climbed with one hand on Adam's pack strap and the other on the ground. Behind them the voices followed. They didn't come closer. They kept the same distance down the slope, patient as a man walking a dog.
"Wes," called Kurt's voice from below, easy and friendly. "Wes, buddy. Come on home."
Wes stopped on the rock. Dana took his sleeve and pulled, and he came, with his bow in his fist and his jaw locked.
Caleb climbed beside Dana, holding his ribs. Every time she slipped he caught her elbow.
Nobody had chosen a direction since the street. They went uphill because the town was downhill. Over the crest the ground fell into a narrower valley, and there was a track, two ruts pale under the moon, and they took it because the ruts were easier than the rock. Hassan looked east as he ran. The stars along the far rim had begun to thin. An hour to first light, maybe less. He had never wanted a dawn so badly, and he couldn't have said why it should matter.
The track bent round a shoulder of rock and ended against a wall.
Two hay wagons stood nose to nose across the ruts with their wheels chained. Between them was a gate of split fence rails lashed three deep, and along its foot lay a row of rough stones, whitewashed, so that in the last of the moonlight they showed like teeth. Behind it a dog began to bark, deep and steady, then another.
A lantern came up over the top rail.
"Stop there," a man said from above them. "Hands where I see them."
He stood on the bed of the left-hand wagon, short and wide, in a sheepskin coat and a flat black cap. He held the lantern out in one hand. The other held a double-barreled shotgun laid across the top rail, pointed down at them. He said a word over his shoulder and the dogs stopped.
He looked at them one at a time. Hassan. Adam. Dana. Wes. Caleb.
"From the town?"
"Running from it. They have a woman chained in a barn. They took his brother."
Josu looked past them down the track. Somewhere on the slope they had climbed, a man laughed. Then Kurt's voice again, nearer.
"Wes?"
"I know what they have," Josu said. "And you brought them to my gate."
"We didn't know there was a gate."
"Now you know." The barrels didn't move.
Behind the barricade a door banged. A second light came bobbing between the houses, and an old woman climbed the wagon's tailboard one rung at a time and stood up beside him. She was small and straight in a black dress and a man's sheepskin coat, her white hair braided round her head. She was out of breath and didn't let her face show it.
"I'm Josu. That's my mother. This is Iturri." He tipped the lantern at the whitewashed stones. "Nobody comes over this gate with boots on. Sit on the stones. Unlace. Show me your feet."
"You're joking."
"He isn't," said the old woman. "My grandmother said the shedim can borrow a face but never the feet. Sit down."
Hassan turned the word over and couldn't place it.
He went first, because somebody had to. He sat on the cold whitewash, pulled off his boots and socks, and held his bare feet up into the lantern light like a child at the doctor. Josu nodded. Adam. Dana, swearing under her breath. Wes, without a word.
"You," Josu said to Caleb.
"My ankle." Caleb smiled up at them, a beat late, and kept smiling a beat too long. "If the boot comes off I'll never get it back on. The boot's the splint."
Hassan had heard that sentence before, on the ridge, and had believed it.
Josu thumbed back both hammers. "Then take it off, or I take it off for you."
Caleb looked at the gun, then at the old woman, and sighed like a man at the end of a long shift. He sat on the stone and unlaced his left boot, slowly, almost delicately, and drew it off.
There was no foot in it.
There was a small black hoof, split down the middle, at the end of a leg too thin and the wrong gray. Adam made a sound. Dana's hand closed on Hassan's arm hard enough to hurt.
Caleb let them look. Then he put a hand to his own hairline, and his face came loose under it. It folded down off the bone like a mask nobody was holding anymore. Under it was a long gray head, smooth and narrow, with two holes where the eyes should be. The young man's face hung from its chin like a bib.
It still had Caleb's voice.
"Etxeberria. You know the agreement. These are ours. The boy answered. The boy ate at our table. Send them back down the track and go to bed."
"Or we take more of yours," it added, pleasantly. "Like the boy at the creek in April."
Josu fired one barrel down into its chest.
The blast threw it off the stone onto the track, and it lay there. Josu swung the barrels after it for the second shot, and Wes went up the wagon wheel and had them in both hands before he could fire.
"Don't. Back in town it went down every time my brother hit it. And every time, one of them walked over and hit it again, and it got up faster."
Josu stared down at him. On the track the gray thing turned its long head toward them.
"Again," it said, soft and pleading. "It hurts. Please. Somebody finish it."
Nobody moved. It lifted one hand toward Dana.
"Dana. There's a rock by your foot. You liked me. Please."
Dana backed into Hassan.
It changed its tone the way a salesman changes his pitch. "Josu. You want your boy? He's warm, Josu. He's eating. Climb down and hit me again and I'll walk you to him myself."
Josu's knuckles went white on the stock. He put a boot on the wagon's side rail.
Leah caught his sleeve. "Leave it," she said. "They don't die. Nothing we do to them matters." She held on until he took the boot back.
"What are shedim?"
She didn't answer him. She was looking at her son.
"We have peace with that town. Fifty-five years of it. These people are marked. You heard it. They go back down the track, and we say sorry for the shot, and maybe they forgive it."
"You can't. There's a kid. He's fifteen. Look at him."
Leah looked at Adam, barefoot on the frozen ground with his boots in his hands. "There was always a kid. Or a wife. Or somebody's brother. Every time." She said it like a woman reading out a debt. "And every time we sent them back, and we lived."
"Listen to her," the thing said from the track. "Josu. Just once more. For Ander."
Hassan held his son on the stones while above them mother and son argued, half in English and half in a language he didn't know. Down the slope the voices had gone quiet. Five minutes went by on the thinning stars, maybe more. Somewhere far back, on a flat roof under a wool blanket, a story stirred and wouldn't come.
"Josu, give me the gun. They go back, and in the morning. . ."
The thing on the track stopped talking.
A heat came off it, dry, like an oven door opened in a cold kitchen. The gray skin dulled from inside, the way paper browns before it catches. There was no flame. The smell of a struck match drifted over the stones. The long head darkened, then the hands, then the leg with the hoof, and the dark went all the way through. The skull split along the top with a small sound, like a log settling in a stove. In less than a minute it was a black husk curled on the track.
The dry grass between the ruts lay under it, pale and brittle from a whole autumn without rain. None of it had caught.
Dana crouched and held her palm over the husk, and pulled it back from the heat. "The grass," she said. "It's not even singed."
One of the dogs whined behind the gate.
Leah lowered the lamp. Her mouth worked before anything came out.
"They die," she said. She crossed herself. "Mother of God. They die."
Then she turned to her son. "Open it. In. All of you. Now."
Her house was one long room with a stove at the end. Two square wooden posts held up the roof beam. Josu barred the door and stood with his back against it.
Hassan sat Adam down by the stove and turned, and saw the posts in the lamplight. About the height of his hip, each one was worn into a smooth pale groove all the way round, rope-polished, the wood gone glossy the way a corral rail goes where horses have been tied for years. A coil of rope hung on a nail beside each one.
He didn't understand them. He looked at them anyway.
Leah stood at the window. She had not taken off her coat.
Outside, from far beyond the ridge, a woman's voice began to call.
"Leah. . ."
A long silence. Then the same voice from the other side of the valley, closer, the way you call a cat in at night.
"Leah!"
Leah didn't move. The third time it came from the top of the track, just outside the gate, almost kind.
"Leah."