Like this, sleeping peacefully in our bed, Thea seemed like a normal, beautiful pregnant woman. I could pretend she didn’t suffer with pain and exhaustion when she was awake. I could pretend she didn’t drink tonic after tonic: one to keep her strength, one to help with the pain, one to make her sleep better, and so on. I could pretend she would be all right in the end.

All of that was far from the freaking truth.

Since the talk with the witches almost two months ago, Thea had gradually grown weaker. She barely got out of bed now, and she barely ate. Half of what she ate, she threw up. And half of the time when she was sleeping, she woke up drenched in sweat because of her terrible nightmares.

Nightmares about our daughter—Morda taking her and raising her as her evil minion; Morda killing her in the most painful ways; Thea and I dying in this war and leaving her alone …

Nothing I did or said put Thea’s mind and heart at ease. To be honest, mine weren’t either. I had had two more months searching and following clues, and nothing brought me closer to finding a way of saving Thea. I had even visited Bagatha a couple of times—she was also searching and researching, but to no avail.

If she didn’t know how to save Thea, how would I?

But I couldn’t give up yet. We still had three months until our daughter’s birth. It was plenty of time to find a cure, a solution.

Thea moaned and turned to the side. The thin sheet slid down, revealing her big belly. A smile tugged at the corner of my lips. Thea had always been stunning, but now with her round belly and fuller breasts …. I tsked. Hell, I desired and loved her even more.

I groaned as lust traveled south, giving me a hard on. It had been a while since we had last made love, and I didn’t think it would happen again anytime soon. If I allowed my thoughts to wander, I realized that without a way of saving her, I would probably never make love to Thea again.

I could live for all eternity, but without her? What was the point?

I shook my head, pushing those thoughts away. I would find a freaking way to save her, even if I had to trade my immortality for it.

But first, I needed a drink.

Feeling defeated, I dragged my feet to the kitchen.

“Hey,” Keeran said from one of the stools at the island. He didn’t even lift his head from the pile of dusty books in front of him. I was glad to see someone here was as worried about Thea as I was.

“Hey.” I walked to the walk-in pantry and grabbed a bottle of wine from the top rack of the wine cooler, and a bottle from the bottom rack. I brought both to the island and offered one to Keeran. “Here.” He raised an eyebrow. “It’s wine.” I lifted the other bottle. “This one is blood.”

Keeran took the bottle from me, and using a bottle opener he found in one of the drawers, he opened and poured a glassful for himself. He got another glass and left it beside the bottle. “For Luana when she comes back.”

“She went out for a run again?”

He nodded. “Third time today. And when she’s not running, she’s helping me go through these books.” He gestured to the books spread out everywhere. Soon, I would have to change this house’s title from private residence to library.

I sighed. Like Keeran and Luana, I had read through all these books twice or three times. Even the books I bought last week. But besides researching ominous books and visiting museums that could contain witch things disguised as things from other cultures, I didn’t know what else to do, where else to look.

Once more feeling the weight of my failure on my shoulders, I opened the bottle and poured the blood onto a wine glass. Because of my pent up frustration, I had done more hunting than I needed this last month, so I stored some of the blood for later. It didn’t taste the same as the fresh, warm thing oozing out of a deer’s vein, but it gave me the same energy and strength.

Without warning, Thomas blinked into existence right in the middle of the kitchen. Lost in my thoughts, I wasn’t ready. My fangs elongated, and I bent my knees to attack.

“Whoa, whoa.” Thomas held up his hands. “It’s just me.”

I retreated my fangs and rolled out my shoulders. “Sorry. My head was somewhere else.”

“I know where it was,” Thomas said. “I don’t have news about that, but I have something else.”

My body tensed. “What is it?”

“I finally found Alex’s body,” he said. “It wasn’t in the castle’s rubble. The witches moved all the bodies to a mass grave in the forest behind the castle.”

“It took you two months to find it?” I snapped. He winced. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m not in a good place right now.”

“It’s okay,” he said, sounding disappointed. “I understand. I was frustrated, too. But I think the witches put some sort of spell around the castle that prevents ghosts from coming inside? I don’t know what it is, but I feel like I’m gonna be ripped into smoke and disintegrate whenever I go near the castle. That’s why it took me so long to find out the bodies had been moved. Then, I had to find out where they had been buried.”

I held his gaze. “I’m thankful for your help.”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

Keeran looked up at me. “What’s the plan?”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “I think I’m going to this mass grave.”

Keeran stood. “I’m going with you.”

“Me too,” Thomas said.

I glanced to the stairs and listened. From her slow, steady breathing and heartbeat, Thea was still sleeping. And Luana was still out. Until she came back, I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving Thea alone.

So, I went after her. I tracked Luana’s scent and later heard her rapid breathing as she ran through the woods. She sensed me approaching and stopped. In her wolf form, she turned to me.

“I’m going out with Keeran and Thomas,” I said. “Can you stay at the house with Thea until we come back?”

She nodded her head once, then ran toward the house. And I met Keeran and Thomas on the way. Keeran thought about trying teleporting again, but since he was out for days last time he did that, he used magic to increase his speed. Still, he wasn’t as fast as a vampire, and it took us hours to arrive at the mass grave Thomas had found.

In the dark, I could see the shapes of the trees and a small hill in a clearing. But once Keeran illuminated the place with a red flame on his palm, I could see the hill was moved dirt. This large mount was the mass grave.

And we were now about to dig it up to find Alex’s body.

Hell.

Keeran slapped his hands and the flame blinked out, then reappeared in several spots around the clearing, illuminating the mass grave. He stared at the dirt in front of us. “I can try to locate Alex’s body, but I’m not sure how it’ll go.”

Accordingly to Thea, Keeran was powerful, but he still lacked training. Most of the time, he didn’t know the spell he could perform. In the past few months, Thea had been trying to teach him all she could, but since she wasn’t able to show him anything other than telling him the theory, his training was lacking. Still, he often surprised us with his abilities.

“I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to try,” I said, hopeful. That would save time and strength.

“By any chance, you don’t have anything from him?”

I thought for a minute, but I had never wanted anything Alex had, and I hadn’t taken anything from the castle when we fled. “No.”

“I can try go to the castle and search his chambers,” Thomas said.

“Didn’t you say you were having issues getting into the castle?” I asked. “Besides, would you be able to grab whatever you found?” I asked.

Thomas’s face fell. “Not for long.”

“Then I would have to sneak in there. That would take a long time.”

“Not to mention too risky,” Keeran said. “It’s unlikely you can sneak in a half-destroyed castle full of witches and werewolves. Besides, who says this Alex’s chambers are intact? Maybe a witch moved in and his things were gone.”

Hell. “Then you just try the spell however you can perform it. If you find him or not, we begin digging soon.”

As expected, the spell didn’t work. Under closed eyes and gritted teeth, Keeran searched and searched. There were moments when he thought he was nearing Alex’s body, but then the energy snapped and he lost it again.

Meanwhile, we were wasting time.

Before Keeran gave up on the spell, I was already digging.

Two hours later, I was chest deep in turned dirt and lost limbs. The dirt and the dead didn’t bother me much when compared to the smell. With my enhanced senses, the rotten smell of decomposing flesh revolved my stomach every two seconds.

Keeran joined me, and he had to run away from the site twice to throw up. I guessed he wasn’t used to seeing so many bodies—and touching them.

Meanwhile, Thomas hovered over the site, trying to get glimpses of the bodies emerging from the ground in case we missed something.

Every corpse I found, I pulled out, so I could make sure it wasn’t who I was looking for. Most of the bodies here had already started decomposing, and the faces were deformed or half-missing. I hoped I could recognize Alex.

I lost count when I moved fifty bodies and nothing. We kept going, but the hope that we would find Alex here was slowly fading.

Sighing, I stepped back—and tripped on a corpse. I bent down to pull the body out of my way. The back was turned to me, and all I could see was blood and dirt over the messy, brown hair and the white shirt. The moment I grabbed the shoulders, I knew. My eyes widened, and I suddenly could make out his mangled body—his hair, his wide shoulder.

“Here,” I shouted as I jumped out of the hole, with the body in my arms. I laid the body on the ground and turned it around.

I sucked in a sharp breath. It was Alex all right, but he had hundreds of open, festered wounds, and dirt in his mouth. I closed my eyes for a moment, disgusted by this scene. One thing was to touch and move the body of a person I didn’t know. Not that it was all right, but it was easier. Even though I hadn’t liked him and we didn’t get along, I hadn’t wished such a terrible fate for him. Yes, I had killed the vampire, but if I had a choice, he would have received a proper burial.

Like every dead person here. I didn’t care if they were my enemies and had tried to kill me. No one deserved to be thrown in a ditch and left to rot.

If I ever regained control of DuMoir Castle, I would arrange for a proper burial for all the dead in here. That was a promise.

“Where’s the amulet?” Thomas asked and my mind returned to the task at hand.

I knelt beside the body and opened his ripped shirt. And there it was. Lord Reynard’s thick, silver cross, lying on his chest as if it had been waiting for me.

I reached out, wrapped my fingers around it, tugged … and it didn’t come off. I tugged again, with more force, but the necklace and the pendant didn’t move half an inch.

“What the hell?” I asked, trying it again.

“What’s happening?” Thomas asked. “Why can’t you take it?”

Keeran knelt on the other side of the body. “Remember what Lord Reynard said. To retrieve the amulet, you’ll have to make a great sacrifice.”

My inside went cold. “Yes. He said I would have to reveal a truth.” At the moment, when Lord Reynard had told me that, I hadn’t connected the dots. I thought the truth would be to apologize to Alex’s dead body for having killed him. Something like that.

But now that we were here and the necklace wasn’t moving, I realized what I had to do. What I had to say.

I looked at Thomas.

“What is it?” he asked. So innocent. So lost. And it was all because of me.

I opened my mouth, but the words caught in my dry throat.

“Drake?” Keeran asked. “What’s the problem?”

I didn’t take my eyes from the boy I had raised. He had to know the truth. He had to hear it from me. Not only because revealing this sad truth would give me the Blood Amulet, but because he needed it to be set free. He needed to hear it to find peace.

I stuffed my chest and blurted it out, “I was the one who killed your parents.”

Thomas’s eyes bulged. “But … but you saved me.”

I shook my head. “It was one of the few times I was lost in bloodlust. I couldn’t control myself. I had no idea what I was doing. Until you hugged my leg. You were so little for an eight-year-old boy, and you were so scared. You hadn’t even seen what I had done to your parents. But the moment you laid your little hands on my leg, I woke up from the daze. I can’t even begin to explain how shameful and guilty I felt.” He would never know how it hurt me. In the beginning, I could barely look at him without hurting. “But I knew what I could do to try to find forgiveness. I snatched you before Prince Dorian and Albert could find you and made you my blood slave. Though, I never considered you that. To me, you were always my little brother.”

Thomas just stared at me, frozen in the air.

“Thomas?” Keeran asked, voice low. “Are you okay?”

Thomas’s brows slammed down. “Okay? Am I okay? I just found out I was raised by the monster who killed my parents.” He gasped. “The monster who got me killed.”

I stood. “Thomas, that’s not—”

“Shut up!” he shouted. “I hate you. No, hate isn’t a strong enough word for what I’m feeling right now.” He clenched his fists. “I never want to see you again, in this life or the next.”

Just like that, Thomas disappeared.

I stared at the spot where he had stood for some time, but that wouldn’t bring him back. He had vanished from sight, but now that he knew the truth behind his parents’ death, he would be able to move on to the next world.

A long breath escaped through my gritted teeth and I knelt down beside Alex’s body.

“I’m sorry,” Keeran said.

“Not more than I am,” I whispered.

“What are you gonna do now?”

What was I going to do about Thomas? I had no idea. As far as I knew, he was already gone from this world. Besides feeling incredibly sad about losing him forever, and the festering guilt and shame that would certainly never leave me, I was relieved to have finally told him the truth.

I hoped he really found peace now.

Miserable, I reached for the necklace, and this time when I closed my hand around and pulled, it came easily. “I’m gonna take this home and get ready for a war.”