“Aefre. Don’t, my love,” he pleads with me.
“If you don’t tell me and I go down there and if it’s… you know what, there is going to be Hell to pay.”
“It’s not that. I told you it’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
He shakes his head, so I turn to the dungeon door and place my hand on it.
He sighs and runs his hand through his hair in agitation.
I break through the wards and pull open the door. A very loud, pain-filled howl of anguish echoes up the steps, followed by a clatter against the iron bars of a cell.
I step back, horrified. “What have you done?” I ask him.
“Not mine, Aefre. Yours,” he says, so sad my heart nearly breaks.
“Mine? What do you mean mine?” I hiss at him.
“He is one of yours, Aefre.”
My mouth drops open in shock. “No. No. I only have two living charges. You know that.”
“No, my sweet. You have three.”
“No!” I say again. “No! That’s not possible. I would know! I would have known if one of them were still alive and here. I would have sensed them.”
“He was behind the wards. You wouldn’t have known.” He pauses for the longest time and then says quietly, “Did you never think about what happened to the man you sired in Nagyvárad?”
“Gustav? I don’t know, I never thought about it. I assumed he was dead as I never heard from him again after I got back,” I say, dread creeping over me.
I gulp as Cole stares at me in disbelief, and Sebastian looks away, not wanting to catch my eye. I slump down the wall and close my eyes. Cole tries to come closer, but I hold my hand up for him to remain where he is. I have to see if this is the truth. I have to do something that I haven’t wanted to do since I got my Powers six months ago but should have. I was afraid to see it. I didn’t want to see all the loss I had caused. I concentrate and flick through the records in my head and bring up my own list of charges. I saw it briefly when the download occurred at the old Council buildings in Milan, but I pushed it to the side and kept it buried. I find it and I draw in a deep breath. I peek at it in my mind’s eye and I see Evoric at the top. Status: Murdered. I see the next and the next, all murdered. I skip to the bottom, just to stop all the pain and see Devon and Cole there, Status: Alive. It calms me and I look for Gustav’s name. I find it fairly close to the bottom. Status: Alive.
It’s true.
“Explain,” I croak.
“After about twelve years had passed since I saw you that day, I wanted to find you. I needed to see you again. I had heard no more about you in Nagyvárad and I assumed you had Shifted and moved on to a quieter life. I went back to the castle where I last saw you, but found it was abandoned. The villagers were terrified of the place, said it was haunted by the spirits of those who had…” he clears his throat, “…died there. I went anyway and discovered the dungeons had been locked off with wards. Romani magick. I knew then it had something to do with Lance. I summoned Dmitri to help unlock the wards as he had Romani of his own and that is when we found him. The humans were long since dead but the Vampire you sired…he was still alive. Starved and insane, a feral creature that was beyond repair,” he says and pauses to see my reaction.
I stare at him in horror, speechless.
He continues, “I had him brought here, tried for centuries to fix him after we found you, but it was too late. The damage of being new and away from you and of being starved and isolated was too much for him to come back from.”
I shake my head. “No,” I say, the tears falling freely. “No, please, no.” I slump further down the wall to the floor, not able to complete a coherent thought.
“I’m sorry, my love. It was just another punishment from Lance,” he says, crouching next to me.
“Why didn’t you just end him? Put him out of his misery?”
“The Romani who broke the wards warned me of the link. The link with Blood Magick. I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t take the chance that ending him would also end you. He hasn’t been mistreated, Aefre. I have given him the best life I could under the circumstances. I have never stopped trying to bring him back. But he is dangerous.”
“All this time? All this time you had him here and you didn’t tell me? I lived here with him locked up in the dungeon for over two hundred and fifty years and you didn’t tell me?” I’m getting hysterical now. “Why? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“To protect you,” he says simply. “You were in no fit shape after we found you. Over a dozen years it took for you to come back from what he did to you. You were my priority. When you did come back you were still so fragile for so long, I couldn’t risk a relapse. It was done and I didn’t want you taking on the burden and guilt that it would have brought.”
“I have to go down there. I have to see him,” I say, holding out my hand for Cole to help me up.
“I don’t think you should. He won’t know who you are, and you can’t talk to him. He has lost all of his humanity, Aefre. He can’t Shift back.”