Martin stood back from them, wary for some reason he couldn't interpret. An almost primitive distrust. He thought the first settlers must have felt the same.

Nothing like this existed here, as far as he knew. Formations like these were found mainly in Western Europe, with some in Asia and Africa. The few standing stones left by Native American tribes were smaller, never this smooth or deliberately formed. And never left in circular henges.

These stones did not belong here.

He tried to picture crossing thousands of miles of open sea, surviving raging storms, cholera, dysentery, typhus and finally drowning, only to come to rest on this faraway shore and discover these pagan enigmas, these black idols to pre-Christian deities on a shore they did not belong.

What would the survivors have thought of them? What would they have asked of their God?

"Sheila..." he began. He wanted to warn her. Of what, he had no clue.

"They look so smooth," she said, reaching out to touch one with her fingertips. Flattening her palm against it.

A massive wave thundered against the ferry. He startled but Sheila didn't even flinch. She was staring at the stone. Enraptured. With her other hand she traced its contours. Gently, like a lover's warm, yielding touch.

"You need to feel this, Martin."

She didn't take her eyes off the stone.

A prickle ran up his spine at the thought of touching them. "I'm okay here, thanks."

Sheila closed her eyes, both hands flat against the stone. Her hips began to sway, as if to music.

"What are you doing?"

She ignored him, tossing her wet hair over her shoulder, come loose from its ribbon. Her hips snapped left to right, left to right.

Martin turned away from her. She was trying to entice him, to draw him into the stones. Using her sexuality, their shared history, as bait.

He thought of the last time he tried to initiate sex, how she callously rejected his advances. He was drunk and she'd been stone sober. He'd shown up at her door uninvited. No idea how he managed to weasel his way into her apartment but he remembered her consoling him.

He was crying—he couldn't even remember what he was crying over. Sheila soothed him, smoothing his hair, making soft shushing noises that jostled his head against her breasts. He leaned up and kissed her. Love was always his distraction of choice—she knew that as well as he did. From pain. From sadness, loneliness and fear. Childhood trauma. Abandonment. She kissed back.

Then the sudden slap. The sharp sting in his cheekbone sobered him like a bucket of ice water. He slinked off, hurt and embarrassed. Sheila apologizing, anger still bright in her eyes.

He had a black eye for a week after that. Told Qurban he'd gotten in a drunken fistfight. What could he say? That he'd looked for solace from an ex-girlfriend and she beat him up?

Her body twisted like a snake within the circle, palms still pressed flat against the tallest stone, eyes half-closed as if in ecstasy. He looked beyond her, to the trees at the edge of the beach where a narrow, uncultivated trail seemed to cut through the underbrush. Likely a deer path.