the recipe for pesto. If her life were to continue on its present track, which, after twenty-six years of obscurity now seemed to mainly involve people trying to kill her, it would appear that acquiring a less savory skill set might be necessary. Although, she supposed, pesto-making ought to be termed more savory.
She squinted through the door. It was paned with small squares of old leaded glass that were warping and sagging in their frames. This meant that the room within shifted and wiggled, and she squirmed around trying to see. She just couldn’t quite make out what was inside the jar, and then finally she got the correct angle and was abruptly rather queasy to her stomach.
The jar held a severed human hand. It was floating in some liquid, probably formaldehyde.
A tactful little cough sounded behind her, just soft enough not to startle.
Alexia still jumped practically out of her frilly orange dress in surprise. Upon landing, she whirled around.
“Floote!”
“Good evening, madam.”
“Come look at this, Floote. They have a human hand in a jar in the middle of an empty room. Aren’t the Italians strange?”
“Yes, madam.” Floote didn’t come over, only nodded as though every house in Italy had such a thing. Alexia supposed this might be possible. Gruesome, but possible.
“But don’t you think, madam, it may be time for bed? It would not do for anyone to find us in the Inner Sanctum.”
“Oh, is that where we are?”
Floote nodded and extended a gracious arm for Alexia to precede him back up the tiny staircase.
Alexia took his advice, as there was apparently nothing else to see besides the random human body part. “Is it very common, in Italy, to keep a jar full of hand, just lying about?”
“For the Templars, madam.”
“Uh, why?”
“It is a relic, madam. Should the temple come under serious threat from the supernatural, the preceptor will break the jar and use the relic to defend the brotherhood.”
Alexia thought she might understand. She had heard of holy relics in connection with some Catholic cults. “Is it the body part of some saint?”
“They have those, too, of course, but in this case, it is an unholy relic, a weapon. The body part of a preternatural.”
Alexia shut her mouth on her next question with a snap. She was surprised she hadn’t been physically repulsed by the hand as she had been by the mummy. Then she remembered the daemon detector. She and the disembodied hand hadn’t been sharing the same air. She supposed that was why the jar had to be broken in case of emergency.
They proceeded the rest of the way to their rooms in silence, Alexia mulling over the implications of that hand and becoming more and more worried as a result.
Floote stopped Alexia before she retired. “Your father, madam, was fully cremated. I made absolutely certain.”
Alexia swallowed silently and then said fervently, “Thank you, Floote.”
He nodded once—his face, as always, impassive.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Great Scotch Egg Under the Thames
Much to Lord Maccon’s annoyance, the acquisition operation, as Professor Lyall had termed it, was taking far longer than intended. Impatient to be off after his errant wife, the Alpha was instead stalking back and forth in the drawing room of Buckingham Palace awaiting an audience with Queen Victoria.
He was still unsure as to how Lyall had, in fact, managed to keep him in London all these days. Betas, in the end, were mysterious creatures with strange powers. Powers that, when all was said and done, seemed to involve nothing more than a continued battery of civilized behavior and an excess of manners. Effective, blast him.
Professor Lyall sat on an uncomfortable couch, one stylishly clad leg crossed over the other, and watched his Alpha pace.
“I still don’t see why we had to come here, of all places.”
The Beta pushed at his spectacles. It was nearing the afternoon of his third day awake in a row, and he was beginning to experience the effects of prolonged daylight exposure. He felt drawn and tired, and all he wanted to do in the world was return to his tiny bed at Woolsey Castle and sleep the afternoon away. Instead, he was stuck dealing with an increasingly edgy Alpha. “I have said it before, and I shall say it again—you will need sundowner authorization for this, my lord.”
“Yes, but couldn’t you have come and gotten it for me afterward?”
“No, I couldn’t, and you know it. This is too complicated. Stop complaining.”
Lord Maccon stopped for the simple reason that, as usual, Lyall was correct. It