Just as he knew it would be wrong of him ever to ask it.

The spell cast by the music was interrupted by a crackling burst of static, and the lights in the storefronts suddenly dimmed, then shut down altogether. The speakers on the flatbed sputtered and fizzled, and the streetlamps along Front Street blinked out one by one.

Slater could guess what was happening.

The dancers, like everyone else, stopped and looked up at the omen revealing itself in the sky. The tribal elders hummed and chanted in place, their upturned faces growing wet with tears.

A gigantic ribbon of green light, smooth and shiny as satin, was slowly unspooling … then rippling wider, like a curtain spreading itself open across a blackened stage. It was only the second time Slater had seen the aurora borealis, but he could not have conceived of a more portentous time for it.

Nika, looking delighted, jumped down from the bed of the truck and grabbed his hand.

“Don’t tell me you planned this,” he said, and she laughed.

“I wish I could take credit,” she replied, “but I’m only the mayor, not God.”

Most of the crowd stayed right where they were, but some drifted off toward the shoreline to watch the lights over the water.

Nika, like a kid at a carnival, dragged Frank toward the harbormaster’s shack, then out onto the pier. At the very end, they stood alone with the sky shimmering above them. Slater wrapped his arms around her, and she leaned back into his embrace. Together, they gazed up at the spectacle unfolding in the night, the green now joined by a flickering orange flame that spiraled like a staircase up into the heavens. Even the air seemed to crackle with the electrical energy.

“The spirits are rising,” Nika said, her dark eyes shining in the orange glow.

Across the black waters, Slater could swear that he heard the wolves on St. Peter’s Island baying at the sky.

“They’re going home.”

And he believed it. The lights were like a celestial staircase, and he could envision the old woman — Anastasia, Grand Duchess of All the Russias — climbing the steps at long last.

He could see other things, too. He could see himself remaining in this place, with Nika forever at his side, and running the medical clinic that the town so desperately needed. For too long, he had tried to save the world. Now he would concentrate on saving just this tiny, much-overlooked part of it.

When the lights went out, snuffed like a candle, and Nika turned her head in the darkness, he bent down and kissed her. All the words he’d meant to say evaporated, all his questions were answered. There was no need to speak at all.

And even the wolves, he noted, had gone silent. Apart from the cry of a hawk, soaring overhead but impossible to discern in the night sky, there was nothing but the empty and incessant howling of the wind.

Still holding his hand, Nika started back down the pier, but Slater stopped a few seconds later and said, “I just have one thing to do.”

Nika, though curious, stayed where she was as he reached into his pocket for the emerald cross and returned to the end of the dock.

The hawk, still crying, swooped past the dock, some wriggling prey clutched in its talons.

Nika saw him raise his arm, and heard a distant splash, and when he came back to her, she didn’t ask him what he’d done. She didn’t have to.

The lights in town flickered back on, and arm in arm, they walked toward home together … as the hawk settled into its perch atop the Yardarm. There, it went about devouring its hard-won meal — a tiny white mouse, with an orange stain on its back and tail.

As some readers may have noticed, certain authorial liberties have been taken with the Alaskan backdrop of this story. For instance, you won’t find on any map St. Peter’s Island, the town of Port Orlov, or a road leading directly from the northwest coast into the city of Nome. Consider the road my gift to the citizens of Alaska.

And while I’m here, I would like to take a moment to thank my indefatigable editor, Anne Groell, and my faithful agent, Cynthia Manson, for all their help with this book. As any author knows, writing a novel is a long journey, and it’s nice to have such wonderful company along the way.

For my cousin Chuck — who can talk me through pretty much any problem.

With deepest gratitude.

ROBERT MASELLO is the author of many previous works of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novels Blood and Ice and The Medusa Amulet. A native of Evanston, Illinois, he studied writing under the novelists Robert Stone and Geoffrey Wolff at Princeton, and has since taught and lectured at many leading universities. For six years, he was the visiting lecturer in literature at Claremont McKenna College. He now lives and works in Santa Monica, California.