ON A LATE WINTER MIDNIGHT the babies came, two of them perfect girls, one stillborn, each wrapped in a thin veil, the true sign of the second sight.

For Elena, consciousness came and left. In her fever dream she saw a man – a Finn by his dress and manner and accent, a man with fog-white hair – standing at the foot of the bed. She saw her father bargain with this man, take his money. Moments later, the Finn left with the newborns, both children swaddled in a black woolen tekk against the cold. On the floor, near the fireplace, he left a third bundle, bloodied rags in a lifeless pile. Her maternal instincts battling her dread, Elena tried to rise from the bed, but found she could not move. She wept until her tears ran dry. She wept for the terrible knowledge that these babies, the progeny of Aleksander Savisaar, were gone. Sold in the night like so much chattel.

And hell would be known.

SHE SENSED HIM BEFORE she saw him. At dawn he filled the doorway, his shoulders spanning the jambs, his aura scarlet with rage.

Elena closed her eyes. The future raced through her like a furious river. She saw the severed heads on the gateposts at the road that led to the farm, the charred and battered skulls of her father and brother. She saw their bodies piled in the barn.

AS MORNING CRESTED THE hills to the east, Aleksander Savisaar dragged Elena outside, the blood between her legs leaving a ragged red streak in the snow. He placed her against the majestic spruce behind the house, the tree around which Elena and her brother Andres had wrapped ribbons each winter solstice since they were children.

He kissed her once, then drew his knife. The blue steel shimmered in the morning light. He smelled of vodka, venison, and new leather.

“They are mine, soothsayer, and I will find them,” he whispered. “No matter how long it takes.” He brought the edge of his razor-sharp blade to her throat. “They are my tütred, and with them I will be immortal.”

In this moment Elena Keskküla had a powerful vision. In it she saw another man, a good man who would raise her precious daughters as his own, a man who had stood in death’s garden and lived, a man who would one day, in a field of blood far away, face the devil himself.

PART ONE

ONE

EDEN FALLS, NEW YORK – FOUR YEARS LATER

On the day Michael Roman realized he would live forever, five years after the last day of his life, his entire world went pink. A pastel pink at that: pink tablecloths, pink chairs, pink flowers, pink crepe banners, even a huge pink umbrella festooned in smiling pink bunnies. There were pink cups and plates, pink forks and napkins, a plate piled high with frosted pink cupcakes.

The only thing keeping the property from a listing with Candy Land Realty was the small patch of green grass barely visible beneath the maze of aluminum folding tables and plastic chairs, grass that would surely never be the same.

Then there was that other vision of green. Departing green. The money.

How much was all this costing again?

As Michael stood behind the house, he thought about the first time he had seen it, and how perfect it seemed.

The house was a three bedroom brick colonial, with buff-colored shutters and matching pilasters, set far back from the winding road. Even for the suburbs, it was isolated, perched atop a slight hill, embraced by a stand of sycamores, shielded from both the road and neighbors by a waist-high hedgerow. Behind the house was a two-car garage, a gardening shed, a wide yard with a latticework trellis. The lot gave quickly to the woods, sloping down to meet a meandering creek, which ran toward the Hudson River. At night it became eerily silent. For Michael, having grown up in the city, the change was hard to take. At first the isolation had gotten to him; Abby too, although she would never admit it. The nearest houses were about a quarter-mile in either direction. The foliage was thick, and in summer it felt like living in a giant green cocoon. Twice over the past year, when the power had gone out in a storm, Michael felt as if he was on the moon. Since that time he had stocked up on batteries, candles, canned goods, even a pair of kerosene heaters. They could probably survive a week in the Yukon if they needed to.

“The clown will be here at one.”

Michael turned to see his wife crossing the yard, carrying a plateful of pink frosted cookies. She wore tight white jeans and a powder blue Roar Lion Roar Columbia University T-shirt, along with a pair of drugstore flip flop sandals. Somehow she still managed to look like Grace Kelly.

“Your brother’s coming?” Michael asked.

“Be nice.”

Abigail Reed Roman, thirty-one, was four years younger than her husband. Unlike Michael’s working-class childhood, she had grown up on an estate in Pound Ridge, the daughter of a world-renowned cardiac surgeon. Where Michael’s patience seemed at times to be nonexistent – his temper usually hovered at a constant 211 degrees Fahrenheit, often rising – his wife ran on an even keel. Until she was cornered. Then there were rodents in Calcutta that bowed to her ferocity. Nearly a decade as an emergency room nurse at New York Downtown Hospital will do that to you; ten years of crack heads, PCP heads, exploded lives, torn people, and broken souls.

But that was another life.

“Did you frost the cake?” Abby asked.

Shit, Michael thought. He had forgotten all about it, which was unlike him. Not only did he do most of the cooking in his small family, he was the go-to guy for all things baked. His Bienensticke had been known to make grown men weep. “I’m on it.”

While jogging back to the house, dodging pink Mylar balloons, Michael thought about this day. Since moving from the city a year earlier, they had not had that many parties. When Michael was small, his parents’ tiny apartment in Queens seemed constantly filled with friends and neighbors and relatives, along with customers from the family’s bakery, a symphony of Eastern European and Baltic languages floating over the fire escape and onto the streets of Astoria. Even in the past few years, since his meteoric rise through the district attorney’s office, he and Abby found themselves hosting at least a handful of cocktail or dinner parties for well-selected political guests every year.

Here in the suburbs, though, things had slowed down, almost to a halt. Everything seemed to revolve around the girls. Although it might not have been the best career move, Michael found he didn’t want it any other way. The day the girls came into their lives, everything changed.

Standing in the kitchen, ten minutes later, the cake frosted and decorated, Michael heard four little feet approach, stop.

“How do we look, Daddy?”

Michael spun around. When he saw his twin four-year-old daughters standing there, hand in hand, dressed in their matching white dresses – with pink ribbons, of course – his heart soared.

Charlotte and Emily. The two halves of his heart.

Maybe he would live forever.

BY NOON THE PARTY was in full cacophonous swing. Eden Falls was a small town in Crane County, near the banks of the Hudson River, about fifty miles from New York City. Situated north of Westchester County – and therefore further from Manhattan, and therefore more affordable to young families – it seemed to boast an inordinate number of children under the age of ten.

To Michael it looked like every one of them had been invited. He wondered: How many friends can four-year-old girls have, anyway? They weren’t even in school yet. Did they have their own Facebook pages? Were they Twittering? Socially networking at Chuck E Cheese?