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be any different, I suppose?”
    Lord Maccon came over to his wife and placed his hand on the back of her neck, caressing the nape with his calloused fingers. “Even you have limits, my dear wife? Who would have thought?”
    That wrested Alexia out of her maudlin humors. “Yes, thank you, darling. We must press on. Woolsey is calling. So, if Lady Kingair would like to inform us as to the nature of her visit?”
    Lady Kingair, it seemed, was a tad reluctant to do so in Lord Akeldama’s well-appointed drawing room surrounded by the expectant faces of not only her great-great-great-grandfather, but also his wife, his Beta, a very eccentric sort of vampire, that vampire’s lemon-colored drone, a sleeping child, and a fat calico cat. It was more audience than any lady of quality should have to endure when paying a social call on family.
    “Gramps, could we nae go somewhere more private?”
    Lord Maccon rolled his eyes around, as if only nownoticing the crowd. He was a werewolf, after all; he naturally acclimatized to the pack around him, even if that pack had gotten a little bizarrely dressed of late.
    “Well, what I know, my wife and Randolph know. And, unfortunately, what Alexia knows, Lord Akeldama knows. However, if you insist, we could put out the drone.” He paused while Tizzy tried to look as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, or on his trousers for that matter. “And the cat, I suppose.”
    Lady Kingair emitted an exhalation of exasperation. “Oh, verra well. To cut to the crux of it: Dubh has disappeared.”
    Lord Maccon narrowed his eyes. “That’s not like a Beta.”
    Professor Lyall looked concerned by this news. “What happened?”
    Alexia wondered if he and the Kingair Beta had ever met.
    Sidheag Maccon was clearly searching for a way of putting it that would not make her seem in the wrong. “I sent him away to investigate some small matter of interest to the pack, and we havena heard back from him.”
    “Begin at the beginning,” instructed Lord Maccon, looking resigned.
    “I sent him to Egypt.”
    “Egypt!”
    “To track down the source of the mummy.”
    Lady Maccon looked to her husband in exasperation. “Isn’t that just like one of
your
progeny? Couldn’t just let sleeping mummies lie, could she? Oh, no, had to go off, nosing about.” She rounded on her several-times-removed stepdaughter. “Did it occur to you that I exhausted myparasol’s supply of acid to destroy that blasted creature for a
very good reason
? The last thing we need is more of them entering the country! Just look at the havoc the last one caused. There was mortality simply everywhere.”
    “Oh, really, no. I dinna want to collect another one. I wanted to find out the particulars of the condition. We need to know where it came from. If there are more, they need to be controlled.”
    “And you couldn’t have simply suggested that to BUR instead of trying to manage the situation yourself?”
    “BUR’s jurisdiction is homeland only. This is a matter for the empire, and I had the feeling that
we
wolves needed tae see tae it. So I sent Dubh.”
    “And?” Lord Maccon’s expression was dark.
    “An’ he was supposed tae report in two weeks ago. He never made the aethographic transmission. Then again last week. Still naught. Then, two days past, this came through. I dinna think it’s from him. I think it’s a warning.”
    She threw a piece of paper down on the tea table before them. It was plain parchment of the kind employed by transmission specialists the empire over for recording incoming aetherograms. Only, instead of the usual abrupt sentence, one single symbol was drawn upon it: a circle atop a cross, split in two.
    Alexia had seen that symbol before, on the papyrus wrappings about a dangerous little mummy in Scotland and later hanging from a chain around the neck of a Templar. “Wonderful. The broken ankh.”
    Lord Maccon bent to examine the document more closely.
    Prudence stirred, giggling in her sleep.