Servant of the Blood (Everly Abbott Book 1) Read online

  Servant of the Blood

  An Everly Abbott Novel: Book One

  K.N. Banet

  Copyright © 2021 by K.N. Banet

  knbanetauthor.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  1. Chapter One

  September 16th, 2020

  2. Chapter Two

  3. Chapter Three

  4. Chapter Four

  5. Chapter Five

  6. Chapter Six

  7. Chapter Seven

  8. Chapter Eight

  9. Chapter Nine

  10. Chapter Ten

  11. Chapter Eleven

  12. Chapter Twelve

  13. Chapter Thirteen

  14. Chapter Fourteen

  15. Chapter Fifteen

  16. Chapter Sixteen

  17. Chapter Seventeen

  18. Chapter Eighteen

  19. Chapter Nineteen

  20. Chapter Twenty

  21. Chapter Twenty-One

  22. Chapter Twenty-Two

  23. Chapter Twenty-Three

  24. Chapter Twenty-Four

  Alexius

  25. Chapter Twenty-Five

  26. Chapter Twenty-Six

  27. Chapter Twenty-Seven

  28. Chapter Twenty-Eight

  29. Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Alexius

  30. Chapter Thirty

  31. Chapter Thirty-One

  32. Chapter Thirty-Two

  33. Chapter Thirty-Three

  34. Chapter Thirty-Four

  35. Chapter Thirty-Five

  Alexius

  36. Chapter Thirty-Six

  Dear Reader,

  The Tribunal Archives

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by K.N. Banet

  Chapter One

  September 16th, 2020

  Before the crack of dawn, I woke up to someone banging on my door. I rolled over, groaning.

  “Go away.” There was no reason for this. It was too early for visitors, and I never had visitors.

  “Everly Abbott, if you make us late to work, I will skin you alive,” my mother screamed from the other side of the door—not my front door. No, she was at my bedroom door.

  How did you even get into my condo?

  I pushed up, frowning.

  She probably bribed the maintenance guy again. Some days, I wish we didn’t live in the same building.

  “Let’s go!” she called in a sing-song voice, and I didn’t trust the sickly-sweet way she said it. I narrowed my eyes on the door, then glanced at the clock. It was only five in the morning. “You don’t have a car right now, and we made a deal. If you want to ride with me, we’re riding at my time.”

  Most days, I wish we didn’t live in the same building.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I groaned, kicking away my blankets. I slept in the frigid cold for some reason. It meant my room and most of my condo wasn’t fit for humans. I liked it that cold, and while it helped me sleep, it was awful getting out of bed in the morning.

  I sighed heavily and got up, yawning as I stumbled my way into my bathroom, ignoring the cold tile under my feet as it tried to give me frostbite. I tried not to look at myself in the mirror, knowing I would have hideous bags under my eyes. That was the least of my problems.

  Luckily, I knew I could take my time getting ready, no matter what my mom was screaming about in my kitchen. She liked to get to work an hour early. It was five in the morning, and she wanted to be there between six-thirty and seven. Neither of us needed to be there until eight. My mother was, for lack of a better word, a workaholic.

  I turned on the water to a temperature close to lava and got in. Taking my time, I let the water wake me up. I put on a bit of makeup to cover the deep purple bags under my eyes and was done with my hair by five forty-five. I tried to drag my feet but really, there was no point. I had to leave my room if I wanted to grab my bag or a protein shake to start the day. I wandered out slowly, yawning again. A shower and a pot of coffee would not be enough to wake me up this morning.

  “What time did you get to sleep?” my mom asked as I met her in the living room. My two-bedroom, two-bath condo had an open floor plan. The living room and dining room were right next to each other, and the kitchen overlooked both of them. She was in the living room, but I knew what she was looking at.

  “Um…two?” I answered, not remembering very well. “It’s a new build—”

  “You’re twenty-seven. You know better than to stay up late playing with computers,” she said, giving me a stern stare.

  “I’m replacing my office PC. It’s important for work,” I countered. The idea of heading in to work gave me chills, so I changed tactics quickly. “Also, I’m twenty-seven. What I do in my free time isn’t anyone’s business. I’m awake now. We can go, so you won’t be late.” I waved her to the front door, grabbing my keys on the way. It was six in the morning by the time we got into her car.

  “You and your computers,” she mumbled.

  “I have a degree in computer science, and I like using it.”

  “A business degree would have been nice. Maybe an MBA or even better, a Ph.D. You could have been a doctor.” She looked wistfully out the front window as we pulled out of the parking garage. “But no…your father gave you a computer and let you take it apart. It was all downhill from there.”

  “Dad was pretty great.” Dismantling that first computer was one of my fondest memories. I learned young that computers were better than people. There was something satisfying about taking apart an intricate piece of equipment, learning what all the parts did, then putting it back together better than before. I could probably do it with my eyes closed. And it was all thanks to him indulging my curiosity. My mom had always joked if it wasn’t for that computer, I probably would have become a mechanic.

  “He was,” she agreed, smiling sadly. “It’ll be fifteen years this December.”

  “Are we doing a memorial for him?” We had one every year for the first five years. Then, we did another at ten years. Fifteen seemed like a big deal.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered, frowning deeply. Every year, her wrinkles got a little more noticeable, but this year was worse, or the frown made it seem that way. “With everything going on at work…” Shaking her head, she turned into the coffee place just down the street from our building.

  I didn’t want to think about work until coffee.

  “Yeah, I get it,” I mumbled, curling my arms around myself.

  We went to the drive-through. I got a breakfast sandwich, needing something to go in my stomach with the coffee. My mom could drink coffee straight into her empty stomach and never said anything about it. It was too rough on me, and I didn’t like my stomach growling hours before lunch.

  We were silent for the rest of the morning drive. It took thirty minutes for us to get to our place of employment. Mom and I worked together, but thankfully, we were in different areas most of the time. She was the Head of Household, managing all the moving parts of the estate. The maids and footmen looked to her for direction for their schedules and their paychecks. She had two assistants—one who lived on-site—which let her liv
e off the estate and take time off. I was one of the few souls in the IT department.

  We left Portland—not the cool Portland in Oregon—and I watched as we passed the trees. Maine was a pretty place to live, the only place I had ever really lived. I was born and raised in Portland, Maine. The only time I had left was to go to college and get my degree, and I hadn’t gone far. I went home every weekend instead of making friends and partying like my classmates.

  We turned onto a road that didn’t exist on any maps, near Sebago Lake, and into the Steep Falls Wildlife Management Area. I was pretty sure decades of bribery and magic had hidden it for so long, but I could only make guesses. No one had ever really told me how they hid the beautiful mansion they called home. The mansion looked like it belonged somewhere like Newport, hailing from the Gilded Age of American wealth. It was opulent, expansive, and beautiful. It had pillars, nude statues, and a paved drive that would allow thirty or more cars to park in the front. It stuck out like a sore thumb, tucked among the trees, with only a small stone wall all the way around denoting a property line.

  “Keep your head down,” my mother whispered.

  I looked at the sky. The sun was already up. It had been for nearly thirty minutes.

  “They’re asleep,” I said, shrugging. “No—”

  “The weak ones are. The powerful ones will still wander the halls.”

  I snorted. “What powerful ones? We’ve been riding together for two weeks now. You warn me about them every morning. I’ve worked here since I was twenty-three, and you’ve worked here since before I was born. The strong ones are gone. They’ve been gone for months. Everyone in that place is asleep or about to be asleep. They’re all down within an hour of the sun coming up. We both know it. I know we’re all on edge, but…” I shook my head. “I’m only scared when the sun goes down.”

  She gave me a look that told me she believed I was an idiot.

  “I’d quit this job if I could,” I said as she pulled around the mansion to the small staff parking area. Only the people who lived in the mansion could park in the garage. “But neither of us can quit.”

  It was the sad reality of our situation. Sure, the pay was great. At twenty-seven, I owned a paid-off condo in Portland, and my mom was more than stable. The only reason she owned a condo and not a nice house was she claimed it was too big and empty for her. I didn’t pry because I understood. Without me, my brother, or Dad, it would be lonely to live in a big house.

  I got out of the car when she didn’t say anything. She knew we couldn’t leave, even if we wanted to. That was the worst part. We had loved our jobs for a long time. Things had only gotten bad recently. Even looking at the mansion I worked in made my chest tighten with grief, knowing things would never be the same—couldn’t be the same.

  “Everly!” someone called. I turned with a grin to see a coworker walking across the pavement to me. I hooked my hair back behind my ear and hoped I looked remotely nice today. I hadn’t expected him.

  “Hey, Kaleb,” I greeted, leaning on my mom’s car.

  Kaleb was a good guy, three years older than me, and had an eye for debugging I couldn’t match. I was a hardware girl. He loved playing in lines of code. We could both manage either, but we had our preferences. I couldn’t ignore that he was hot. As computers and other geeky things became more mainstream, cuter boys started entering the industry. I reaped that benefit as I smiled at him like a fool.

  Sadly, he didn’t seem very excited to see me. Normally, we’d flirt a little and joke around, but the look in his green eyes wasn’t a good one—not this morning.

  “What happened?” I asked softly, flicking my eyes to the mansion as my mother got out of the car. He wasn’t on shift today, but he was on duty last night. There was a rotation with an IT person on call at night. If Kaleb was here, then something went wrong the night before. Something the rest of us would have to finish cleaning up.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, coming around to stand with us.

  “There was another kill last night,” he explained, running a hand through his black hair. “I had to come in and wipe the security footage. Been here about four hours already, trying to make sure everything was gone, and nothing could be traced back to us.”

  “Oh, no,” my mom said, shaking her head in dismay. “Who…who did it?”

  “Claire,” he answered, swallowing.

  I cursed, hitting my hand on the top of my mom’s car in frustration. Claire was one of the more unstable residents of the mansion, one of the new ones I didn’t know well.

  “And?” My mom was going to get a brief about this from the rest of the staff later, but she always liked to hear this sort of news from multiple staff members.

  “It was a hiker,” he bit out. “Someone who was staying here in Steep Falls.”

  I looked at my mother, who shook her head in anger, her lips pursing.

  “That’s too close,” she said softly, looking at the mansion. “One hiker isn’t bad, though. If it’s the only one, we should be safe.”

  It. As if the hiker hadn’t been human. We had resorted to calling the dead by anything except something that made them real. We never said anything plainly anymore. We had to dance around the truth. It was a kill, as if a bobcat was just getting a snack, when in reality, we all knew it was a murder. We knew people didn’t have to die. Yet they were dying, and all we could do was detach ourselves from it and hope we could sleep at night.

  “Who did the body dump?” I asked morbidly. It wasn’t the first time I had to ask, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last.

  “They did,” he answered, jerking his head to mean those who were already asleep.

  “Good. They made the mess, so they can clean it up,” I snapped, glaring at the windows. No one slept on the top two floors, most on the bottom floor or in the basement levels, but I could still glare.

  “Let’s go inside and get to work,” my mother ordered, forcing us to drop the topic. She headed inside, leaving Kaleb and me at her car.

  “You know, I used to like working for vampires,” he said, aiming for casual.

  “Me, too,” I mumbled, heading in after my mother. “I’ll do a look through everything to make sure you got all the evidence.” Whatever flirting I had wanted to do with Kaleb was dead on my tongue.

  Cleaning up after a murder had the tendency to ruin the mood.

  2

  Chapter Two

  Kaleb walked with me, shadowing me as we went up to our office. Mansions normally had bedrooms on the top floors, but this was built for its inhabitants. They needed sealed rooms, so no light got in, and the ability to hide if the mansion was raided. The top floors were for humans who could tolerate the exposure. IT was on the very top floor, stuck in a corner, and mostly ignored.

  “Show me what you got through so far,” I ordered, crossing my arms as I let Kaleb take his seat.

  “I’m nearly certain I got everything. From his entrance into the mansion, every public room he entered, and the clean-up. The kill happened off-screen in Claire’s bedroom.”

  “At least we don’t have to watch it,” I mumbled. Over the last four months, there had been fifteen deaths in the mansion and four off the grounds in Portland's surrounding towns. I had to watch nine of them on camera while cleaning up and wasn’t sure I had the stomach to deal with another. Not this morning, not when the kill count was reaching twenty.

  “Send me the timestamps, and I’ll make the patch footage, so no one realizes there was a cut.” We were overcautious. When dealing with vampires—who most of the world didn’t know about—you had to be extra careful. The world knew enough about supernatural creatures with the werewolves, the fae, and the witches all being confirmed and public to different degrees. No one wanted to be the idiot who exposed the vampires.

  “You got it,” he said, smiling as he started compiling an email. “So, how long are you stuck riding with your mom?”

  “I was supposed to get my car back a week ago,” I said, rollin
g my eyes. “But it’s always the same story. The part needed to be ordered. We got it overnight. Oh, the part is moving slow. Gasp, the part is defective, and we need to order a different one. We’ll order this one with overnight shipping, too, and hope it arrives soon. I haven’t gotten a call in two days, so…” I shook my head in annoyance. “I’m hoping to hear from them today. If I don’t, I’m taking my car to another shop.”

  “That fucking blows.”

  I turned my computer on and yawned as I sat down. I had finished my morning coffee in the car, and I needed a second one. With nothing important in my email, I went about my morning routine, clicking through social media and doom scrolling. Thirty minutes later, a white cup was put on my desk right as my email dinged.

  “Coffee and the timestamps,” Kaleb said with a yawn. “Do you mind if I head out?”

  “Go get some sleep. I’ll keep things under control until everyone else gets here.” Taking the coffee with one hand, I opened the email with the other. This was by far the most tedious work I did here.

  “Stay out of trouble, boss lady,” he called as he grabbed his coat and walked out.

  Boss lady. I wish they would stop calling me that.

  I stared at the door wistfully, wondering why Kaleb insisted on calling me that nickname. I wasn’t the boss of anything. I purposefully set up the IT department of the mansion to be a collection of equals, coming together with our own talents to make it the best it could be. We were a unit. I had come back from college with a degree the vampires hadn’t thought was useful, and they had the right to be a little upset with my choice because they paid for it. I had strived to prove them wrong, making sure everything ran smoothly. We were in the digital age, and they had to catch up. Once the old ones understood the security implications, they had been excited. I hired four other people, retrained two people who were already on staff, then hired another two. Kaleb had been one I hired. He’d taken to calling me boss lady on his second day, and it stuck.