Page 24 of Fastest Kill

"He's not dead." Serapis folded his hands on his knee, like he needed to keep them still but was struggling to. "I was, and still am, Lucius Foscari. I never lied to your family about that, Dario. I'm really your uncle, just many, many times removed."

Dario knew when people were lying. He had been trained to do it since before he learned to ride a bike. Serapis…Lucius…wasn't lying to him now.

"Okay, so who is this Agrippa to you? Is he an uncle of mine as well?" Dario asked him, wanting to keep the conversation moving while Serapis was in the mood to talk.

"Agrippa was my master. I was one of his most promising students in the fifteen-twenties, and for two decades beyond that, until we discovered what he intended to do with all of us."

Serapis spoke carefully, as if he had run this account many times in his own head and stripped it down to the essentials.

"Agrippa hadn't wanted scholars to teach. He had wanted magical fuel. His goal, worked toward over decades, had been apotheosis. He intended to do this by consuming the accumulated magical power of his students to ascend beyond what a human practitioner could naturally achieve. In short, he wanted to steal our magic and become a god," Serapis said, and Dario was glad he was keeping it to facts. He wasn't an idiot, but he wasn't Kon, who would understand the magical theory behind such a spell.

"When the other students and I finally understood what Agrippa's escalating demands for larger transfers of power actually meant, the confrontation was catastrophic. They died, and I survived because I was the strongest. The spell didn't work the way Agrippa wanted, and because he was panicking, it made him sloppy. I managed to bind Agrippa into something between death and sleep."

Frederica made a confused sound. "What? Like a Sleeping Beauty?"

"Something like that."

"So where did you stash him all this time?" she asked.

"The island monastery of San Michele, in the Venetian lagoon," Serapis continued and sipped his wine. "It is consecrated ground, where necromancy can't function. It meant he couldn't feed on the dead to sustain himself or claw his way back to wakefulness. I warded the tomb with every working I had, and I have been watching it for five hundred years and trying to keep him locked down."

"If that's true, how did he get free again?" Tore asked.

"I'm not sure. I only learned that he was when the person who was going to help me renew the spell died," Serapis replied, glancing meaningfully at Dario.

Zio Lucius had stopped coming to see us after Niccolò had died. Dario sucked in a breath to stop the emotion trying to claw its way out of his chest.

"Spit it out, Zio."

Serapis met his eyes. "The power fueling the binding was taxing and getting harder to maintain. I needed to be sure that if I died, Agrippa would stay in the ground. I was training your father to take on that role. When Niccolò died, I went to the island to replenish the binding, because I now needed more time to train someone else. Agrippa's tomb was unsealed, and his body was gone."

"Are you sure someone didn't steal it?" Tore asked, looking more curious than anything.

"I didn't know when the tomb had been disturbed because I hadn't needed to go there and replenish the magic holding him for thirty years. The binding had been tampered with, but it didn't alert me the way it should have. I should have known if the wards had weakened instantly. Instead, Agrippa woke up somehow without me knowing, and I couldn't find him. He has spent years learning about this new time and gathering power."

He nodded toward the files still spread across the table. "Imagine my surprise when I found we were working with the same thief? The records will tell me how much Agrippa has gathered in the past decades, and maybe I can figure out how to counteract it."

Tore frowned and asked, "What exactly have I been stealing all for? Some kind of vampire?"

"No. Only for a powerful sorcerer who wants to finish a project he started in fifteen thirty-five." Serapis's eyes went gentle. "You were not to know what he is. He is very old and very careful about what he allows people to know about him. It has taken me this long to learn that the name he has been using is Morosini and that he was also a client of yours. I could see his influence in the world, but couldn't lead it back to a single person's identity."

Dario shifted his weight uneasily. "You said my father knew all this, and you were teaching him. Explain that to me, because according to Leo, Niccolò died because of some fucking chaos spell of yours to kill the Aurora."

There was no hiding the pain and grief in Serapis's eyes. He wasn't anything like the confident power player who had tried to recruit Leo. He looked like he had nothing left but regret.

"Niccolò came to me and asked to be trained," Serapis said, keeping his tone firm but calm. "Not the other way. He had found enough in the Foscari library to understand roughly what I was and what I had done. He wasn't afraid of me. He was angry I hadn't told him, which I expected, and then he listened, which I did not."

He paused and stared at his wine. "He agreed to help and be trained as my apprentice. He understood the threat, and he believed the binding could be restored more permanently with a living anchor from his own generation. He chose the task willingly to be a new guardian."

Dario remembered overhearing a conversation the day before his father died. Niccolò had been in his office, and he had been talking on the phone about 'the binding' and 'the sleeper' with Zio Lucius.

It was late, and Dario had been half asleep when he went to find out where the voices were coming from.

Niccolò had seen him lurking in the doorway and had given him a hug good night, "Everything will be okay, figlio mio. Go to bed. I'll see you in the morning."

Except when Dario had dragged his teenage ass out of bed the following day, Gabriella had sent Niccolò to Naples to go to a meeting in her place.

He never came home again.