Unraveling Mordecai by Marisa Maichel (types of ebook readers txt) 📕

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I fell out of the chair and banged my head against a bookshelf. I shook it off and stumbled forward.
That scream sounded like Mother’s.
I started to run down the steps, tripping over my pajama bottoms and landing on my butt in the process, and crawled forward. I stood up and quickly pulled up my pajama bottoms as high as they would go, then headed toward Sabine’s room, where I’d heard the scream.
Mother was standing in the doorway, shaking. I looked past her and saw a body of a vampire that I did not recognize. From the smell, he’d been there for some time. He was hanging from a noose in the ceiling. Luckily, Sabine was at school.
I searched for a pair of scissors and stood on Sabine’s bed and started cutting him down. He started to wheeze and cough as I worked. The poor dude was still alive. I wondered what the point was. Hanging vampires hurts us, but doesn’t kill us. We don’t need air to live, and breaking the hyoid bone does nothing.
I finished cutting the sucker down, and Mother shouted, “Don’t look, Sarah!”
Too late. Sarah stifled a scream and gasped instead.
The vampire began to twitch, and I ordered Mother and Sarah to stay back. Chirag was so fired after this.
I put the vampire on the bed in one of the spare rooms and called Ethan and Uncle Soren. Father was unfortunately away to settle an estate dispute, and Grandfather was still sick and needed Louis or Uncle Soren to watch him if the worst were to happen.
Ethan was there in minutes with his medical kit and Uncle Soren sent Louis in his stead. The vampire slowly began to wake up.
“Hello, I’m Ethan,” Ethan said. “What’s your name?”
“L-Lee.”
“Lee, do you remember what happened?”
“I was going to meet a guy for business, and then…” Lee winced.
“It’s all right, Lee,” Ethan said, squeezing his hand. “I’m here. I’m here.”
Lee closed his eyes and clutched his head with his free hand.
“I remember…I remember someone…someone on the High Council. Bram Sterling, maybe? I had a business transaction with him…” His eyes widened and he looked at me. “Please, don’t kill me. I needed the money!”
“No one is going to kill you,” Ethan assured him. “Not while I’m here. Tell me, what did Bram Sterling want?”
“Information. Several…several of the royal guards are spies for the Council. They think that this time is too modern to continued to have a royal family. They would rather have a democratic rule.”
“It already sort of is,” I pointed out, and Louis shushed me.
“Bram has convinced the rest of the vampire world that the Emerson and Nicolai families are going to tear the race apart and cause a massive war. I’m a hacker. I hacked into Mordecai and Soren’s computers to find what information I could. There’s also some other spies, but I don’t know their names. Bram put a tracker in their left arms to track their movements.”
“Satira,” I breathed. “She touched her arm when you hit her, Mom.”
“You remember that?” Sarah quipped. Mother shushed her.
“What else do you know?” Louis demanded.
“That’s it! I swear! Please, don’t kill me!”
“Shhh, it’s all right,” Ethan soothed him, and I wondered at his odd behavior. He leaned down and smelled Lee, and I realized that he was attracted to the strange vampire. Feeling sick to my stomach, I sat on the chair, and Sarah stood beside me. She kneeled down and kissed my hand.
“It will be okay,” she assured me. “We’ll get this sorted out. We always have. We’ve always gotten through the worst.”
How could she be so positive? This was bad. Really bad. The Council had powers the royal family didn’t have-the power to outvote laws, create new ones, amend or get rid of old ones, and they had a bigger variety of members than we had. Of course, we could create new laws and get rid of old ones, too, but we couldn’t outvote the Council. We’d been so concerned about Grandfather, we had become lax in our ruling of the vampire world and keeping the Council in check.
Sarah sat up and kissed me. I felt sick. I wrapped my arms around her.
“Louis and Soren will take care of it,” Sarah told me. “Want to play Mortal Kombat?”
“Not now,” I replied. “I need to think.”
She nodded and kissed me.

By the afternoon, Chirag had disappeared, and more guards were surrounding the house. I didn’t know all their names, but Chris was here, and so was Toby. I took a potion for dreamless sleep, and took a nice, long nap. Sarah cuddled with me the whole time.
By tomorrow morning, she was purring and muttering. I thought she was feeling frisky, so I turned around and faced her, then realized she was still asleep. A serene smile made her look like a sleeping angel. I pecked her nose and pulled her in. My tall, muscular body protecting her small, curvy, pregnant one. A male protecting his female. Keeping her safe.
“Reese,” she muttered. “I love you. Reese.”
I kissed her softly. “Wake up, honey,” I cooed. She continued purring, then whined, and her smile disappeared.
“No, no…Mike…no…”
“Babe, it’s okay,” I said. “Mike can’t hurt you anymore. I’ll protect you.”
“Ba…baby…Reese…Jamie…no…no, not him!”
“Sarah, wake up!” I licked her cheek in a desperate attempt to wake her up. I was afraid to shake her-I could break her neck that way.
“Mike, no! No! Stop! I don’t want this!”
Tears filled her eyes.
“Sarah! It’s me!”
She opened her eyes and rubbed them. “Reese?” She closed her eyes for a second, her brow furrowing. “Reese!” She hugged me tightly. “It happened again, Reese. I was having a nice dream…a sex dream…and then it got…dark…and there was Nales….” She began to cry.
“It’s okay, baby,” I said. “He’s not here. He can’t hurt you anymore. I’ll keep you safe.” I licked her eyes and kissed her soft pink lips.
“I’m worried, Reese,” she said. “I know I didn’t show it yesterday, but I was terrified when that guy was found. They know where we live. We can’t trust anyone except family, and some of our family we can’t even trust. I don’t trust Satira. You know she showed up the other day when you were at the music store, looking at guitars? She wanted me to go with her, but Mom, your mom, I mean, told me to stay where I was and told Satira to fuck off.
“Your mom told me all about her. Apparently, your mom’s side comes from a long line of witches and warlocks, and your mom abandoned witchcraft for Catholicism because it was more modern and made sense. She didn’t want to practice the dark arts, like Satira wanted her to. Satira started yelling at her, accusing her of abandoning her family and leaving us. Your mom accused her of causing all those miscarriages and stillborns she had when she was, well, not yet a vampire. Satira said something in Greek, and she mentioned Baba Yaga. Your mom looked like she’d been smacked, and then she started screaming at her in Greek. Then Satira sort of smirked and then turned around and left.”
I thought about David. He’d shown up the same day as Satira. I found that a bit, well, odd. Now Lee was here, claiming he had hacked into our computers for Bram Sterling, who was Head of the Vampire Council. I knew Bram hated us. Heck, he’d even canceled our credit cards without us knowing about it.
I knew that Uncle Soren and Bram had never gotten along in particular. Bram thought my uncle was too gruff and rough and strict, and Uncle Soren thought that Bram was, well, sort of evil. There had been a few incidents where Bram had taken things too far-killed a prisoner who didn’t deserve to be killed or who had information we needed, killing humans for fun, and even his ex-wife had accused him of being abusive to her.
You have to understand, even though time and things change, a lot of vampires don’t value human life as much as we do. They are seen as weak and inferior; a parasite, even. Vampires and humans have never really gotten along. We’ve slaughtered them, and they’ve killed some of us. Even today, there are Vampire Hunters who specifically go after vampires who attack humans or are a leech on society.
There are new laws surrounding this, but of course, the Hunters don’t follow vampire laws, only their own laws. Each vampire death must be recorded and a reason must be given for the vampire’s death. Even vampires kill each other sometimes, over territory, food, and mates.
The laws are very clear around these things. That’s why we are here; to settle disputes and enforce the laws, even if we break them occasionally.
The Council is here to keep us in check and to rule in our stead if we are not able to. That’s what they were supposed to be doing while Uncle Soren, Grandfather, and Louis were in America to help Grandfather recover from stress and depression. Now, apparently, they wanted us gone. Not cool.
“Sorry, little buddy,” Louis said, coming into the room. “I’m going to have to call Slutty Scorpia.”
I groaned.
“Who’s Slutty Scorpia?” Sarah asked, looking both concerned and curious.
“She’s a hacker,” Louis said, grinning. “She’s also a little bit crazy about little buddy here.”
“Do not call Slutty Scorpia,” I said. “Louis, I’m begging you.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“She locked me in a closet until I said I loved her! She stole my underwear and my hairbrush! She liked smelling my shoes!”
“How come I’ve never heard of her?” Sarah asked. If she were a color, she would be a tiny bit green. She was getting jealous, which amused me.
“I can’t stand her,” I said. “She cut up my shirts, she chased me around the garden, she even yanked my earring out of my ear and I had to have surgery to fix it. She’s crazy as hell.”
“All you had to do was say yes to one date,” Louis said, grinning.
“If I’d done that, she would have never stopped chasing me! I finally got her to back off by complaining to Father, and he told her to leave me alone.”
She nuzzled against me and kissed my neck.
“You’re mine,” she said.
“Jealous?” I teased.
“A little,” she admitted.
“No need to be. You’re the one carrying my baby.” I put my hand on her stomach and grinned. She just clung to me, her legs around my waist, her arms locked around my neck. She laid her head against my chest, purring. I purred, too, my chest rumbling with love and pleasure as she claimed me.
We stayed like that for a long time, just cuddling, while Louis quietly left the room to make the unfortunate call to my old enemy, Scorpia Garden.
I first met Scorpia when we were both ten. She was an orphan who’d been adopted by our guard, Raz. He was a powerful guard, if a bit strict and uncaring. Any emotion he showed was toward Scorpia, whom he saw as a daughter, seeing as he was the one who had found her at the castle entrance and took her in. A heartbreaking note was left from