At first light, what was left of Caleb lay curled on the track at the foot of the gate, just outside the stones.
It was black all the way through, the way a coal is black, as if it had burned from the inside out without a flame. The long gray head had gone to char and split along the top. The rain shell lay over it unburnt, and the jeans, and the one brown boot still laced to the top. The dry grass under it wasn't even singed. The frost was still on it.
The smell was dry and hot, like the inside of an oven that has just been switched off.
Wes stood over it with his bow unstrung in his hand. "Every time Kurt put it down, one of them hit it again," he said. "And then Kurt hit it again too. If he'd stopped at once. If he'd just stopped." He looked back up the track toward the ridge. "Nobody saw him come out of that smokehouse. Nobody saw him dead either." He didn't finish.
Hassan crouched beside it. He put out his hand and didn't touch it. The air above the black shape was warmer than the air around it.
"What burns like that?" Dana said behind him. "Nothing burns like that."
On the roof of Teta's house, under the wool blanket, nine years old, Hassan heard the answer before he knew he was remembering it.
"Allah made the angels from light," Teta said, "and the jinn from smokeless fire, and us from clay. That's why they burn, my soul, when they die. The fire takes back what it lent them."
Behind them the bell began. A single bronze voice, three strokes and a rest, three and a rest, three and a rest, then nine together, rolling over the creek and coming back off the ridge. Hassan went down to the water, washed for prayer in a cold that burned his wrists, and prayed the dawn prayer facing the notch in the high ridge while the sky went gray behind it. Adam sat on a rock with a blanket over his shoulders and watched him the whole time.
They talked at Leah's kitchen table, over bread and goat cheese and black coffee, with the stove ticking. On a nail by the door hung a string of beads: thirty-three of olive wood, worn pale, with a faded green tassel. Hassan's father had counted Allah's praises on beads like that after every prayer. Hassan looked at them twice and said nothing.
"Shedim," he said. "Where does that word come from?"
"My grandmother," said Leah. "She was a Jew from Bayonne. She married into Iturri when she was young and never went home. She kept her own prayers on Friday nights and went to Mass with us on Sunday, and nobody here said a word about either." She broke a piece of bread and didn't eat it. "In seventy-one, the first time the town came to the stones, she was ninety-seven. She walked out with her stick, looked at them once, and said shedim. She said they couldn't die. She said feet at the stones, inside by the bell, never answer, never strike twice, eat nothing of theirs."
"And people listened to a ninety-seven-year-old?"
"They said she'd lost her mind. They did what she said because it was cheaper than arguing with her." Leah turned her cup a quarter turn. "I was twenty-three. I believed her."
"Never strike twice," Hassan said.
"One blow lays them down, she said. The second stands them up again, stronger, so never give it." Leah looked toward the gate. "That same winter my uncle hit one at these stones with a fence post. His son hit it again to be sure. It got up and walked home. After that nobody waited to see what one blow did. We kept away from them, and we took lying down for all it did."
"And the bell?"
"The Angelus. Dawn, noon and dusk. It was always ours. My mother married out, to Elko, and I married back in, to Mikel Etxeberria. I married into a Catholic village and I keep its ways." She shrugged. "She only said be inside when it rings."
Hassan put his hands round the cup for the heat.
"Where I come from we'd say jinn," he said. "They're another creation, like us. We're made from clay. They're made from smokeless fire."
"Like a genie," said Josu's wife from the stove. She hadn't sat down all morning.
"Not like that. They live in empty places. Deserts, ruins, the mountains where nobody goes. In my grandmother's stories some of them had hooves, whatever face they wore." He looked out of the window toward the stones. "That's why it burned. There was fire in it the whole time. When it died the fire took back what it had lent."
Nobody laughed.
"My people call to prayer at dawn and at dusk," he said. "You ring a bell and pray at dawn and at dusk. Maybe that's why they've never had you."
Leah looked at her coffee for a long time.
"That's not why," she said.
She told them about the agreement the way she'd told them the rules, as if counting on her fingers. The town left Iturri alone. Iturri never took in anyone the town had marked. That was all. The men had made it at the stones that first winter, with a woman from the town who did the talking. Her grandmother had told them not to speak to it at all. She was dead by the spring, and the agreement had lasted since nineteen seventy-one. In all that time, people had come over the ridge in the night, and Iturri had sent them back down it.
"How many?"
"Nine," said Leah. "I buried two of our own who tried to let one in. The town came for them in the night, and I didn't open the door." She held Dana's eyes. "I'm not asking you to forgive it. I'm telling you what it was."
Dana stood up so fast her chair went over. She walked to the window and stood with her back to the room.
"Theo walked to the creek because he heard my voice," she said to the glass. "Where would you have sent him?"
Nobody answered. In the doorway one of the white dogs scratched itself, thumping its leg on the boards.
Adam put his fork down.
"It said I answered," he said. "It said I ate." His ears had gone red and he was looking at his plate. "I did. The first night she called my name in the trees and I said yeah, who's there. And I ate the cornbread. While you were upstairs praying." He looked up at his father. "It's me. That's why they want us back. It's my fault."
Hassan reached across the table and put his hand flat on his son's head, the way his own father used to. Adam didn't pull away.
Josu came in from the sheep in the middle of the morning, and Dana showed him the photographs.
She hadn't meant to. She was going through the supper pictures herself, looking for Theo. She found him halfway down the long table, smiling into the camera with stew on his fingers, and she sat looking at that one a long time with her thumb over his mouth. Then she swiped on, and Josu leaned over her shoulder to see. Hassan saw him stop breathing.
At the far end of the table sat a tall young man with black hair and a little silver pendant at his throat, a cross with curled arms like a pinwheel.
"That's Jake," Dana said. "He met us in the street when we came in. He told us everybody was up at the high field."
"Ander," Josu said.
His wife dropped a pan.
"That's my son. That's his lauburu, I gave it to him at his confirmation." Josu took the phone out of Dana's hand and held it close to his face. "Jake. He told you Jake. He's alive, Ama. He's sitting at their table."
Leah looked at the screen and then at Hassan, and Hassan saw that she was waiting for him to say something.
He thought about Theo eating stew with his fingers. He thought about a man in Marit's barn walking past the door eight days after he was taken, smiling a smile that wasn't his. He didn't say it. Not at that table. Not yet.
Leah stood up.
"We broke it," she said. "Last night. We killed one of theirs at our own stones." She looked out of the window at the black shape by the gate. "There's no agreement anymore. They'll come for the children."
Josu was already at the wall, lifting down the long-handled axe.
"Not before I bring mine home."