“Why?” she called back from the kitchen. “I’m baking.” The smell of charred, sourdough bread had filled the house for hours.

There was a hammering on the front door, and Harley was crying, “Open up! For Christ’s sake, open up!”

Charlie was maneuvering his chair toward the front hall when he heard Bathsheba skip down the stairs and eagerly say, “I’ll get it! It’s Harley.” She had a thing for his younger brother; she’d once said that he looked like he could be one of those young vampires in her books.

But when she opened the door, Harley virtually slumped inside, slammed the door closed behind him, and threw the bolt. He leaned back against it, his eyes wild, his brown hair sticking out in icy spikes. His boots were dripping onto the carpets that covered the old, uneven floorboards, and his skin was even whiter than Bathsheba’s, which was saying something.

“They won’t stop!” he cried. “They won’t stop!”

“Who won’t stop?” Charlie said, the wheel of his chair snagging on the edge of a rug.

“Eddie and Russell!”

“What are you talking about? Are they here, too?”

“No, man — they’re gone!”

Gone? Whatever he really meant by that, Charlie knew that he had some very serious trouble on his hands. Bathsheba shrank back toward the staircase. “Okay, Harley, why don’t you just calm down? Come on inside and tell me what’s going on. Bathsheba, go and tell your sister to bring us some of her hot tea and that bread she’s been burning all afternoon.”

It took Harley several seconds to pry himself away from the door, and as Charlie led him back into the meeting room where he worked, he heard the clink of what sounded like glass and metal from the backpack slung over Harley’s shoulder. Was that a good sign, he wondered? It had been days since he’d heard any news from St. Peter’s Island, and while he was relieved to see that Harley was alive, it was plain as could be that he was off his rocker.

“You’re okay now,” Charlie said. “You can just sit down and relax.”

Harley went to the window first and stayed there, staring outside until the motion detectors finally turned off and the driveway went black. He yanked the curtains closed and whirled around in a panic as Rebekah came in carrying the tea and toast. Bathsheba peered in, half-concealed, from the doorway.

“Just put the tray down,” Charlie said, “and leave us alone.”

Rebekah did as she was told, but let it bang on the desktop and the tea slosh over the rims of the mugs in protest at such brusque treatment.

“That bread’s not from any store,” she said, as if someone had suggested otherwise, then slammed the pocket doors together behind her as she left.

“Drink this,” Charlie said, handing his brother a mug. “Tastes like shit, but it’s good for you.”

Harley took it, his hands shaking, and slurped some of it down. He let the backpack slip onto the floor, between his feet. Then he wolfed a couple of slabs of the toast down, too, without even bothering to slather on any of the homemade jam. Charlie studied him as if he were one of the crazy people who occasionally showed up — online or in person — at his ministry. They usually claimed that there were voices in their heads, or that they were being followed. One of the local Inuit had shown up, screaming that he was being tracked, and it turned out that he was right — he had escaped from a mental ward all the way over in Dillingham and the social workers were hot on his trail.

Harley looked just as bad, but Charlie just let him sit and sip the home-brewed tea — no complaints out of him this time — until he seemed to calm down. Just what had happened on that island? And what did he mean when he said that Eddie and Russell were gone?

“You know, you can take off your coat and stay awhile,” Charlie said.

But Harley looked like he was still too cold to take it off, and Charlie knew enough not to rush him. And it was the backpack, anyway — not the coat — that he was dying to get into.

“While you were gone, I took a little trip myself,” Charlie said by way of distraction. “To Nome.”

Apart from nervously rubbing his thigh, Harley didn’t react in any way.

“I went to see that thief Voynovich.”

Harley’s eyes flicked up from the rim of the mug.

“He told me a few things about the cross. And I’ve done some digging on my own.”

Harley was starting to focus again.

“Seems like it might be worth a helluva lot more than we thought.”

Harley snorted, like none of this mattered much anymore, and Charlie took offense.

“In case you care,” Charlie said, “it belonged to Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Tsar. And it was a gift to her from a guy named Rasputin. I figured all of that out by myself, sitting in this very room.” He waited for the news to sink in. “How about that?”

“If you ask me, you should throw the fucking thing in the ocean.”

That was not exactly the reaction that Charlie was expecting. A puddle was forming on the rug around his brother’s boots, soaking the bottom of the backpack.

“You know what?” he said. “I don’t know what you’re on, or what the hell happened to you, but I’m already sick of this routine. Are you gonna tell me what’s going on? Where are Eddie and Russell?”

Harley, finally, cracked a smile, but it wasn’t the kind of smile that would gladden any heart. To Charlie, it made him look as demented as that guy from Dillingham.

“Eddie and Russell are dead.”

“Dead?” Holy Hell, what sort of trouble had these cretins gotten themselves into?

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“Eddie fell off a cliff, and Russell got eaten by wolves.”

Charlie blew out a breath, then said, “That sounds plenty dead to me.”

Harley actually chuckled. “Yeah, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Charlie, not overly endowed with patience to begin with, was now fresh out. For all he knew, Eddie and Russell were down at the Yardarm right now, just as stoned and out of it as his brother was. Who knew what they were ingesting? Eddie’s mom was known for cooking up some pretty wicked shit. “Pick up that damn backpack,” he said, “and give it to me.”

Harley tossed the damp backpack onto Charlie’s lap.

As Charlie started to root around inside, Harley said, “I’d be careful if I were you,” but it was already too late. Charlie had pierced a finger, and pulling it out, stuck it in his mouth to stanch the bleeding.

“What have you got in here?” Charlie said, turning the satchel over and shaking it out on the rug. A hail of broken tubes and stoppers fell out, some of them bloody or smeared with melting flesh. Charlie recoiled at the mess. “Are you nuts?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Where’d you get all this crap?”

“The colony.”

“What for?”

“Just keep shaking.”

Charlie shook it again, and this time the icon fell right into his lap. The Virgin Mary, the infant Jesus … adorned with three sparkling diamonds. Charlie’s mood changed in an instant. “Holy Mother of God.”

“Damn straight.”

Charlie angled his chair to catch the light from the desk lamp better, and to see the diamonds shine.

“This is from one of the graves?”

Harley nodded.

“And there’s more where this came from?”

“I suppose so.”

What kind of answer was that? Charlie was caught between exultation and frustration. Between the emerald cross and this icon, they had struck the mother lode, but how much more had his idiot brother left in the ground? “Then we’ll have to go back.”

“Not me.”

God, give me strength, Charlie thought. If it weren’t for this wheelchair … He was searching for the right tack and trying to keep his temper, when Harley bent over double, calmly vomiting the tea and toast onto the carpets.

Oh, Christ, Rebekah was going to have a fit.

But Harley smiled dreamily, unaffected, before toppling out of the chair, unconscious, and into the pool of puke and broken vials.