The Wages of Sin (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book Two)

A Blood Brothers Novel

Greg Sisco

SmashWords Edition

Copyright 2013 by Greg Sisco. All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are
the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or
locales is entirely coincidental.

www.GregSisco.com

Thanks to Cody Sims
(
www.CodysStuff.com
) for his
help in composing the cover image.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

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About the Author

CHAPTER
ONE

There is a subtle humor in the way a human begs.
Once you’ve heard it enough times and from enough people, you have
to laugh at the inherent similarities.

Begging, at least by human
standards, is an act characterized by an emphatic overuse of the
word
please
, the
repetition of words and phrases as though they carry more weight on
second or third use, and an abundance of promises no person could
be expected to keep.

Demonstrated by a nineteen-year-old girl named
Samantha, begging sounds like this:

“Please. Oh God, please, I don’t wanna die. I don’t
wanna die, oh God. I know this isn’t you who wants this. I know
it’s your boss. You can tell him you killed me and he’ll never
know, and I’ll just go away. I’ll move away and he’ll never know
you let me go, okay? He’ll never know. Please. I swear I’ll never
tell anyone. I’ll never mention any of this to anybody. I’ll
pretend it never happened. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll give you
anything. I’ll do anything. Just please don’t kill me. Please.
Please don’t kill me…”

This particular knee-slapper of a speech was
delivered to Thor on a mid-December night in 1999. Samantha had
recently become an involuntary resident in the building, one of the
drains the Blood Brothers kept on stowaway. There were three rooms
in the little palace where Loki and Thor lived that locked from the
outside and didn’t have windows, and Thor did his best to keep the
inhabitants of these rooms at home.

The prisoners were kept in preparation for lazy
nights when Loki and Thor felt like staying in. One could not be
expected to go hungry out of a disinterest in leaving the house, so
the girls were there if they were needed. But more than anything,
they were there to make use of the rooms. The house was so big,
after all.

It was also a hobby of Thor’s, and good practice for
manipulating the emotions of humans, to attempt to keep a person
happy in circumstances where it was exceedingly difficult to do so.
For this reason, whenever they had a home like this one with space
to keep stowaways, Thor tended to them often. He composed them
beautiful meals of filet mignon, kindai maguro, Hot Pockets, or
anything else they requested. He brought them expensive wines and
extravagant cigarettes. Somedays he played them songs on his guitar
or kicked their asses at Risk. He considered them pets, and pets
were not worth having were they not given the proper attention.

Each of their rooms contained a shower complete with
various soaps and gels, a toilet, a refrigerator stocked with cola
and snacks, a minibar, a queen-sized bed, a leather couch, a big
screen television, a stereo with CDs handpicked by Thor, a
treadmill jokingly referred to as an exercise wheel, an electric
toothbrush, and various sets of comfortable clothing including silk
pajamas and a bathrobe if they just felt like lounging around.

Thor told them they were part of an experiment and
they wouldn’t be kept too long. He would bring them any movie,
album, book, video game, or toy that they requested. It was a sort
of bourgeois prison cell for sorry chaps and chapettes—mostly
chapettes—to live out their days in a quiet, blissful solitude made
bearable by mind-numbing entertainment and alcohol before the
shadow of death closed in. Most of them gave up begging after a
week or two and chose to endure, trying their best to enjoy
captivity. Even those convinced they were condemned to die here
would eventually accept and find themselves playing The Legend of
Zelda until their time ran out.

Really, the bourgeois prison was how humans lived
anyway.

Samantha had only been here four days and was still
in the agitated phase. She would never make it past this phase
because her room was to be cleared for the arrival of a special
guest tonight.

“Listen,” Thor said forcefully, clamping a hand over
her mouth. “I’m going to help you, but you have to shut up. My boss
is going to hurt you if you stay, but if you keep quiet and do what
I tell you, I can get you out of here.”

Thor believed obedience from humans was gained with
a precise balance of comfort and fear. Too much comfort made them
afraid to take a chance, and too much fear made them stupid and
unpredictable. That said, in an ideal environment the scale always
tipped in the direction of fear.

Samantha counted her options. She knew she didn’t
want to stay here. The question was whether to trust Thor as her
guide or to make a break for safety on her own. She had seen Thor’s
boss a few times and the man was a beast. Thor was sincere, even
compassionate.

“I’m going to take my hand off your mouth, and when
I do you’re going to stop screaming. If you keep panicking you’ll
get yourself killed and me scolded. When I take my hand away, you
don’t say another word until we’re out of the house,
understood?”

Samantha nodded. She decided to
take her chances with Thor. The house was a maze and she didn’t
know how many others might have been lurking all over. She had to
cross her fingers Thor and his boss weren’t pulling some sort
of
Good Captor Bad Captor
thing. In the true spirit of Las Vegas, she was
gambling with her life now, putting her neck on a roulette
wheel.

Thor took his hand off her mouth and held it out for
her to take, showing her his best calming expression. She stared
into his face, his blonde hair hanging in a comma over his forehead
and pointing down into his glamorous blue eyes. She took a breath,
reached out, and put her hand in his.

No more bets.

Thor put his finger to his lips to indicate silence
once more before he led her out of the room. He hammed up his
performance, pressing his back to walls and peeking around corners
every time he pulled her into another room. At one point he walked
from a hallway into a living room, pretended to see something
startling, and tugged her back into the hall at full force before
pulling her into a room and hiding in a corner with one arm
steadying her and the other fastened on her mouth.

“Don’t make a sound,” he told her, laughing on the
inside. He held her there for the better part of five minutes
before he got bored with it and thought he might be chewing the
scenery.

I’d like to thank the Academy. And Satan.

It took him ten minutes to get her to the garage.
They reached his Suzuki crotch-rocket and he whispered, “Help me
wheel this away from the house before we start it.”

She gladly took one handlebar and the two of them
crept cautiously along the dirt path outside the house. Stupid shit
like this sold a performance.

He had to more or less put the act to bed when they
got to the street and he fired up the bike. He could feel her on
the seat behind him, hugging him and pressing her head to his back
like a child.

Protect me, Thor. Save me.

He was a romantic movie hero. What a gas.

He fantasized about crashing the bike into a
guardrail and sending the two of them flying from the top of a
bridge into a rocky river. It would have been funny, but there was
no intimacy in it. They rode until they reached a shack on the edge
of the desert.

The place was a plywood tent of hammered-together
boards that gave way to fifty square feet of living space filled
mostly by a bed of unwashed blankets that looked like a horse had
given birth on them. Thor had occasional campfires here with
outdoorsy drains, and he might have liked to grab some marshmallows
and a two-liter of Coke on the way, but even he didn’t have the
charm to pull that off without breaking character.

Sliding the kickstand into the sand, he climbed off
the bike and put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re safe now. You
can let it out. Scream if you have to.”

She buried her eyes in his leather jacket.
Indistinct sounds somewhere between sobs, screams, and laughter
were coming from her mouth, muffled by his chest. He put his hand
on the back of her head and pressed her there, stroking her hair
like he was Clark Gable or some fucking thing.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re okay now.”

She thanked him a thousand times without moving her
head from his chest. This was comfort like she had never felt.

“I can’t stay,” he said, “They’ll look for me.” He
climbed back onto the bike and waited for her to stop him. She took
the bait.

“Wait. Don’t leave me here.” She was a helpless
damsel in distress. There were tears streaming down her face and
Thor took a moment to congratulate himself on the wonderful
villain-in-the-making he’d created. The traitorous bastard of a
courageous hero. The horseman of the apocalypse in shining
armor.

He sighed and stepped off the bike. He put his arm
around her and showed her the inside of his shack. There was less
than nothing to see.

“Try to get some sleep. I’ll come back in the
morning, after sunrise.” He felt weird saying this. “I’ll get you
on a plane somewhere. Just wait for me.”

“Why did you help me?” She held onto his jacket and
looked up to his eyes.

Thor gave a sigh and a dramatic pause before he
answered. He wished he had tear ducts to sell the sickening
melodrama he was about to let loose.

“You remind me of my wife. I couldn’t help her, but…
I couldn’t watch her die again.”

Now it was her turn to hold him. This poor brute.
This confused and wonderful hero. This beautiful, beautiful man.
She wanted him to hold her safely here forever. She knew—or thought
she did—that despite his unsavory present, the result of the hell
through which life had dragged him, at some point Thor’s wife had
been a lucky woman. There was someone so caring and true just
beneath his surface. This blond-haired, blue-eyed angel had bruises
on his wings.

Thor went for broke. “I’m so sorry. You don’t know
how hard it is. This life. I… I want out. You don’t know what it’s
like to wake up every day and know you’re hurting people, Tara.
It’s horrible.”

“My name is Samantha,” she told him, but she was
pretty sure she knew who Tara was. He confirmed it for her.

“Sorry. My wife.” He breathed unsteadily, like a
human trying to bury the memories of a painful past in a shitty
movie from a Nicholas Sparks novel. “I should go. I don’t… I…”

The character he was playing lost control and kissed
Samantha. He grabbed her thick, brown hair and tilted her head back
so her mouth could meet his and he could gently taste her lips with
his tongue the way he wanted her to think he had his wife so many
times in the past. She didn’t make a move to resist. She could see
the good in him. She wanted to help him forget his pain. As they
kissed, he slid his hand from her back and up the curve of her hip,
along her belly and up to her chest. His fingers tightened around
her breast for an ephemeral moment before he ripped his hand away.
He cursed and called himself an idiot. This is what humans did
after a kiss on stage and on screen. It spelled romance for some
reason.