He saw a face, a woman’s face, gaunt the way his wife’s had been when the cancer had done its worst. Long gray hair, and a toothless smile … a smile that made him feel colder than ever before.

The lamp came down farther, and a hand slipped under the fur and took hold of his own. Now he wished to Christ that he had never prayed for company. Her fingers felt like twigs.

She said something — it sounded as if it was meant to be a comfort — in a language he could not understand.

He wanted to cry out, but he didn’t have any breath left in him. His blood felt like it had stopped in his veins. He gasped once or twice. Her hand gripped him tighter, and he died with his eyes wide open, staring into the lanternlight, and with his mouth frozen in a silent scream.

The woman repeated her words, then let go of his hand and hobbled away.

She drew the shawl around her shoulders, even though she did not feel the cold, and left the church. She did not know the old man’s name, but she knew where he had come from. She had seen the ship go down.

She had seen many ships go down … for many years.

Following the path she had long trodden, she drifted through the colony, remembering the sound of voices raised in prayer, the aroma of fresh fish roasting in the pan, the warmth of a blazing fire.

How long had it been since she had heard anything but the baying of the wolves — her kindred spirits — or felt anything warmer than the touch of that old man’s dying hand?

But what more did she deserve? She was the harbinger of death, and the terrible mercy that had spared her own life — not once, but twice — was less forgiving to others.

“You are a special child,” the monk had told her. “God has a special destiny in mind for you.”

The night he told her that, he had given her the silver cross on a gilded chain. It was encrusted with emeralds, green as a cat’s eyes, and he had had its back inscribed with a message meant only for her. “Let this be our secret,” he had said, as he put one of his broad hands, the hands that had healed her younger brother, atop her head. It was as if a healing balm were pouring over her; her eyes had closed, and her breathing had slowed, and even her left foot, the one that was misshapen and gave her such constant trouble, stopped hurting.

“I give you this blessing,” he said, “to protect you from all evil.” And then he had chanted some words in a low voice. Not for the first time, she could smell the alcohol on his breath, and she knew there were people who said vile things about him. “Nothing may harm you now,” he said, and she had not doubted it. “If you believe in my power—”

“I do, Father, I do.”

“—then you must believe, too, in the power of this cross.”

Holding the lantern aloft, she passed beyond the stockade walls, down the hillside, and into the trees. Although she did not see them, she knew that the black wolves — spirits of the unquiet dead — were keeping company with her, moving stealthily through the woods. How long had it been before she learned that they did not grow in number, nor did they die? How long before she had realized that each mysterious creature harbored a soul, a soul as lost as her own, stranded somewhere between this world and the next? Or that their fate and hers were inextricably bound?

As she approached the graveyard, her companions held back, keeping to the trees and the shadows. Her fingertips grazed the wooden gateposts, tracing and retracing the words that she had once carved there. Forgive me, they said, over and over again, but who was there to do so?

A strong wind was blowing a scrim of snow across the ground. She walked among the toppled headstones and petrified crosses but stopped when she came to the edge of the cemetery overlooking the sea. A piece of the earth had fallen away, like a rotted tooth pulled from a gum. Even now, if she could have burrowed into the ravaged ground and found her own place there, she would have done so. But as Rasputin had told her, a special destiny awaited her.

Nearly a century had passed, and in all that time she had never been entirely sure if those words had been his blessing, meant to give her strength against adversity, or a curse upon her own head, and the heads of all her family.

But whatever their intent, his words had served admirably as both.

PART TWO

Chapter 12

“We’ll be coming up on St. Peter’s Island in about ten minutes,” the pilot said, his voice crackling over Slater’s headphones; even with the phones on, the rattling of the propellers and the thrumming of the twin engines on the Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane made it hard to hear. “I just wanted to make sure you guys got a good look at the place before the light goes.” On the horizon, the sun was a copper dollar sinking below the hazy outline of eastern Siberia. “We don’t get much daylight at this time of year.”

“In Irkutsk, I had sunlamps,” Professor Kozak said into his own microphone. “Three,” he said, holding up three gloved fingers for Slater to see. “One in every room.”

Slater nodded amicably, balancing a sealed envelope on his lap. The two men were packed in shoulder to shoulder behind the pilot and copilot, and flying over the icy, teal-blue waters of the Bering Strait; below them, the Pacific and Arctic Oceans converged, and the International Date Line cut an invisible line between Little Diomede Island, which belonged to the United States, and Big Diomede, which was Russian territory. While Sergeant Groves was back in Nome, organizing the rest of the cargo and waiting to shepherd Dr. Eva Lantos on the last leg of her journey from Boston, Slater had decided to go on ahead in the first chopper, along with his borrowed Russian geologist. There was no time to lose, and he wanted them both to get a good look at the lay of the land on St. Peter’s. Many decisions, he knew, had to be made, and they had to be made fast.

It had been an arduous and complicated trip already. Slater had flown from D.C. to L.A. to Seattle before catching a flight to Anchorage, and from there hopping on a supply plane to Nome, where the two helicopters were being loaded with the mountain of equipment and provisions the expedition would require. When the first one’s cargo bay had been filled, with everything from inflatable labs to hard rubber ground mats, then securely locked down, Slater and the burly professor, who hadn’t seen each other since picking their way across a minefield in Croatia, climbed aboard.

Unlike most helicopters, the Sikorsky was designed chiefly for the transportation of heavy cargo loads — up to twenty thousand pounds — and as a result it looked a lot like a gigantic praying mantis, with a bulbous cabin dangling up front for the pilots and passengers (no more than five people at a time) and a long, slim cargo bay with an extendable crane for lowering, or lifting, supplies from great heights. Two rotors — one with six long blades mounted above the chassis, and the other propping up the tail — kept it airborne. To Slater, it felt a lot like traveling in a construction vehicle.

For many miles, they had traveled along the rugged coastline of Alaska and over vast stretches of overgrown taiga, where aspens and grasses and dense brush thrived, and barren tundra where the soil was more unforgiving. Now and then he could make out polar bears lumbering across the ice floes, or caribou herds pawing for lichen buried beneath the frost. As they passed over a swath of land extending out into the sea, Slater tapped the copilot on the shoulder and pointed down at the gabled rooflines and crooked fences of a small town.

“Cape Prince of Wales,” the copilot said. “Founded in 1778.”

“By Captain Cook,” Professor Kozak said, proud to pitch in.