You’re not alone, his voice whispered in my head. I wish I could say or do something to make you feel better, but I’m afraid I can’t.

“No,” I said. “Not unless you can erase the last ten minutes or so from reality.”

I would if I could, he assured me.

“I know.”

I stood there a little while longer, staring at myself in the mirror, trying not to think. But there’s only so long I could get away with that.

When I finally managed to shake off the worst of my shock, I slipped out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, averting my eyes so that I couldn’t see into the dining room where the hand still sat on the floor like some discarded movie prop. An image flashed into my mind of those fingers uncurling, beginning to drag themselves across the floor toward me.

Can you tell I was a bit spooked?

One thing was for sure: it wasn’t Adam who’d sent me that package. Right after the Maguire exorcism, I’d gotten a series of death threats on my answering machine. I hadn’t received one in at least a week, and it sure looked like my admirer had decided to raise the stakes. Like I didn’t have enough other problems in my life at the moment.

Instead of calling 911, which I suppose is the proper protocol at times like this, I decided to call Adam himself. I don’t suppose this scare tactic was in his official jurisdiction, but he had enough status within the department to get away with occasionally stepping on other people’s toes. Besides, with his name on the package, he definitely qualified as an interested party.

He was on duty today, which meant I had to call his office to reach him. Never fun. The staff at the Special Forces office seemed to have been hired specifically for their unpleasant personalities. The first time I called, I got put on hold and then dropped after listening to elevator music for about five minutes. Elevator music is about as soothing to me as nails on a blackboard, and in my present state of mind it had me practically climbing the walls.

The next time I called, I was put through to Adam’s voice mail even though I specifically requested not to be. The third time I called, I ranted like a lunatic, claiming it was a matter of life and death that I reach Adam immediately. I’m not sure the guy who answered the phone actually believed me, but maybe he was just sick of answering my calls. Whatever the reason, he transferred my call.

The call must have gone to Adam’s work cell phone—a number he had never given me, though I was pretty sure Dom had it. Hmm, maybe next time I needed to reach Adam at work, I should call Dom instead of the damn office.

I swear I could actually feel Adam’s annoyance at my call through the phone. “I’m in the middle of something,” he said curtly. “Unless—”

“I just received a severed hand in the mail.”

That shut him up in a hurry. He was quiet for a moment, then I heard him mutter something, the sound muffled. I think he was holding his hand over the phone.

When he spoke to me again, there was a lot less background noise. I guess he’d moved to somewhere more private. “I’m on my way to interrogate a suspect,” he told me. “I can’t get away just now.”

“Don’t you have flunkies to do that kind of thing?” I think there was an edge of hysteria in my voice.

Adam sighed. “Sorry. Not this time. You need to call 911.”

“The return address on the package is yours.”

“Fuck,” Adam said after a moment of shocked silence.

“Yeah, that about sums it up.”

Another long silence. “All right. I’ll see what I can do about getting free to come over. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Thanks.”

Adam was never big on saying hello or good-bye, so he just hung up.

There was nothing I could do now but wait. Shivering in a phantom chill, I fluffed up the pillows on my bed and made a nice backrest out of them. Then I sat and tried my hardest not to think.

It took Adam more than an hour to get to my place. Lugh did his best to keep me calm while I waited, but I was seriously rattled, and I was lucky I didn’t spend the whole hour bent over the toilet. I was so creeped out that when the front desk called to announce that Adam had arrived, I jumped so high I almost hit my head on the ceiling.

I was glad he was finally here. But my front door was locked, which meant I had to walk by … it… on my way to let Adam in. Feeling like a little girl in a haunted house, I held a hand up to my eyes to shield my vision. I didn’t even take my usual precautions to confirm the identity of my visitor. Luckily, it really was Adam, and not some homicidal maniac out to kill me.

“Where—” he started to ask, but I just pointed in the general direction, still trying not to look.

He nodded briskly and took a couple of steps toward the dining room. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him take in the scene and frown.

“I see you took good care of the evidence,” he said dryly as he pulled on some gloves.

“When I first opened it, I thought it was rubber,” I said, and my voice hardly sounded like my own. I liked to think of myself as a tough chick, but I wasn’t feeling so tough right now.

Adam must have finally noticed what bad shape I was in. He gestured to the living room. “Why don’t you go sit down? You look like you’re about to pass out.”

I’d have liked to argue with him, but I was afraid he was right. I made my way rather unsteadily toward the couch. Adam squatted to examine the hand, his body thankfully hiding it from view. I was pretty sure that was deliberate, and I felt absurdly grateful to him. He studied it in silence for what felt like forever, looking at it from every angle without touching it.

“It’s embalmed,” he informed me. “And from the looks of it, I’d say it was already embalmed when it was cut off.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, still feeling the chill that had descended on me the moment I’d realized what was in the package.

“Don’t you need a lab tech or something to make a determination like that?”

He glanced at me over his shoulder. “I’ve been a cop for fourteen years, and I’ve seen a lot of corpses. I can make an educated guess, though yeah, the lab guys will have to confirm it. I’m thinking there’s a funeral parlor somewhere that’s misplaced a hand.”

That was better than thinking someone had been killed specifically for the purpose of sending me this love note. But I still wasn’t exactly basking in relaxation.

“I’m going to have to call in a team,” Adam said.

“This bubble wrap should hold a print nicely, though if this is from the same guy who’s been leaving you the phone messages, I doubt he’d be so accommodating as to leave prints.”

I doubted it, too. My anonymous caller used some kind of voice-altering device when he called, and he seemed to be quite a pro. I couldn’t even say for sure whether it was a man or a woman, though I had automatically assumed man. I’m not sure why.

“Um, Adam?”

“Yeah?”

“If you call in a team, how am I supposed to explain that I didn’t call the police about the death threats?” I’d talked it over with Adam when I’d first started getting the threats, and he’d agreed with me that there wouldn’t be much the police could do. He’d also agreed with me that I was better off keeping a low profile as far as the police were concerned. There’d been a lot of seriously bad shit happening around me in the last couple of months, and more police attention was not something I needed.

“Tell them the truth: that you didn’t think there was anything they could do about the calls.” Adam covered up the hand with the sheet of tissue paper, then tore off his rubber gloves and came to sit on the love seat next to the couch.

“This isn’t something I can sweep under the rug for you,” he said. “We need to figure out who that hand belongs to and confirm my guess that the victim was already dead and embalmed before the hand was severed. Otherwise, we could have an actual murder here.”