The smoke danced about, filled with shapes, ghostly wisps too ephemeral to touch. Through his tears he could make out other shapes, blurred but more solid than the phantoms of smoke and ash.

They probably weren’t real, he thought. Why should the ghosts of his family linger when he felt no sorrow or grief?

His tears weren’t for them. Like the ghosts that surrounded him, the had been summoned by the smoke. Numb and alone, he watched while the bodies of his mother and father, brothers and sister burned with an intensity that cracked bone and turned flesh to ash.

And then without conscious thought he moved. The heat from the pyre poured into him a white-hot agony that finally stirred an emotion from his numb senses. Something dark and terrible awoke in his soul and pulled him forward.

They were leaving him, going where he could not. His soul keened in harmony with the roar of the flames. They called to him, beckoning him to step inside the fire and join his family in one last embrace. Unthinking, uncaring, he moved toward the flames and oblivion.

A month from the rite of passage that will mark his transition from boy to man, young Jan is given a man's task, to journey to the nearby village of Miller's Down and settle his father's debt with the blacksmith. But what was supposed to be a simple thing quickly turns into a dark and terrifying struggle for survival as Jan learns what it really takes to be a man in a world where death stalks the living with the frightening power of the Beckoning, turning the dead into creatures imbued an erotic beauty and irresistible allure.

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