Chapter 9
Dario was moving toward the door before his brain had finished processing the voice. It was the same one that had come out of Vincenzo's mouth in Treviso when he had stared at them with someone else's eyes and told them he was not their real enemy.
Worse than that, it was achingly familiar because its owner had spent decades inside his family's house under the name Lucius Foscari, drinking their wine, attending their birthdays, and teaching them how to cheat at poker when they were still kids.
"Please, nipote, don't make me beg," Serapis added, his sigh audible through the door.
Tore's hand came down on Dario's wrist. Dario hadn't heard him move from his chair because of the screaming in his head.
"My house has always been neutral ground," Tore said quietly. "My rules. We open the door, and we hear what he has to say. We decide if anyone needs to die afterward."
Dario stared at him, trying to assess if Tore was working with him or against him. Tore's face was completely calm. He wasn't afraid of what was on the other side of that door because he had only known Serapis as a good client for a long time.
"He went over a fucking cliff," Frederica said from behind him, her gun already up. "Altun stripped his magic first. He should be dead."
"Should be, but he was sure as shit spry enough to send Vincenzo and a fucking trapped djinn after us a few weeks ago," Dario growled.
"My point is, even if we wanted to kill him right now, we probably couldn't." Frederica's hazel eyes softened. "Dario, this is my parents' house. He has no fight with them. If you start something now, he will see them as a threat, and it will put them in danger."
Dario knew that she was right, but he still hesitated.
Frederica moved between him and Tore, her father letting his arm go and moving aside.
Her hair was a mess from their impromptu wrestle, and she smelled sweet and dark like blackberries.
He didn't know if it was a shampoo or a body wash, but it was up his nose and on his clothes.
"Put the knife away, Dario. Let him say his piece and let him leave," she said. She was tall, but she still had to tilt her head to meet his eyes. They went from soft to glimmering with murderous intent. "If he fucks with us, I'll take the job for ten euros. Deal?"
As tense as he was, Dario couldn't stop his grin. "Fine, but I get to watch."
"I knew you were a pervert," she replied and grinned back.
"Oh, you have no idea, baby," he whispered, making her eyes spark with trouble. He sighed, lowered his knife, and nodded to Despina. "It's your house. Let him in if you want to."
Despina kept the Beretta at her side. Her thumb rested on the safety, and she opened the door.
"Signor Foscari, I didn't recognize you in the dark. This is a surprise," she greeted warmly.
"I doubt anyone could surprise you, Despina Alesci," Serapis said and looked past her shoulder to Dario. "Nipote, I'm glad to see you looking well."
"You got some balls on you, Zio, I'll give you that," Dario replied and folded his arms. "What do you want?"
Serapis looked smaller than Dario remembered. He was the same man physically, with brown skin, black curly hair, and silver running through his beard and at his temples.
In the years he had spent masquerading as their great-uncle, he had seemed ageless in the unsettling way that retrospectively made sense once you understood what he was.
Now he just looked tired. Not elderly, not broken, but the kind of tired that lives behind a person's eyes. He was holding a bottle of Amarone della Valpolicella, his favorite Veneto wine.
It was such an absurd detail that Dario knew about his uncle that, for a moment, he couldn't do anything except stare at it.
"I believe we need to talk," Serapis said, looking at the Alesci family. "About Alvise Morosini and what he is and about what he will do to everyone you love if we don't stop him."
Despina looked at Tore. Tore shrugged before he read the wine label and nodded.
"Come in," he said, taking the bottle. "Have you eaten? Dario made enough kofta to feed a small army."
"Thank you. I'm fine, but I could use a glass of that wine if you are opening it."
Serapis didn't look like the fierce enemy had survived having his magic stripped and going over a sea cliff. He looked like he had been traveling for a long time and was grateful to sit down, which was somehow worse.
What the fuck has happened? Dario wanted to ask his uncle before hugging him because a twisted part was worried about him.
Serapis sat where Tore indicated, in a low chair with its back to the wall, so that every person in the room was visible from it.
Tore's house, Dario reminded himself, giving a dangerous man the seat that would make him feel least threatened.
Dario remained standing, his back to the other wall. Frederica moved beside him, forming a united front while keeping herself within reach of her parents in case they needed protection.
"How did you survive the cliff?" Dario asked finally. He was not interested in small talk. "Did you use Gabriella to break your fall?"
Serapis gave him a wry smile. "Tempting as that sounds, I didn't have the chance.
She hit the water first, broke the surface, so I didn't crush myself against it.
I broke my leg and was struggling in the waves when a teenage boy spotted me.
He was night fishing when he wasn't supposed to be.
He was a good boy who didn't want his parents to know where he had been and had no interest in asking questions about where I'd come from.
He got me to shore, and we parted ways with each other's secrets. "
Dario grunted. That explained why no one had reported a man washing ashore. That fucking kid was smart. "Altun did strip you of your magic, though, right?"
"She did. She was thorough, but she always was the best of us," he said it without any apparent resentment.
"I am what I have always been, nipote. A Foscari from Venice who's older than he should be and who has access to knowledge that has kept me alive, where power alone wouldn't have.
Knowledge is never lost, and magic always returns.
Altun knows this better than anyone." He set the wine on the table beside him.
"I'm assuming you've found Morosini's name in Ettore's files by now. "
"We have. I just don't know how he fits in with you," Frederica said, her hand casually resting on the gun she had tucked into the belt of her jeans.
Serapis looked at her with a pleased expression."You are Despina's daughter. Your mother's intelligence work in the eighties was remarkable, and I can see you have inherited her famous gut instinct."
"You old charmer," Despina said, shooting him a wink. "You didn't expect me to raise an idiot, did you?"
Serapis chuckled. "Of course not. I can see why Dario likes her so much."
How the fuck would he know that? Dario's eyes narrowed.
Beside him, Frederica made an unladylike snort. "'Like' is a strong word. We are working together. Stop stalling and tell us about Morosini."
Serapis tapped his fingertips on the arm of the chair. "Alvise Morosini isn't his real name. He has used a great many over a very long life. His real name is Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim."
Dario ran the name through his memory and found fragments about a figure who appeared in academic footnotes.
"He's a Renaissance scholar. Sixteenth century, if I'm remembering correctly. He's been dead for five hundred years," Dario replied, and ignored the surprised look Frederica gave him.
That's right, I'm not just big, dumb, and pretty.
"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.