The Wages of Sin (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book Two) (10 page)

In the bushes behind the car, Tyr stood up and ran
for her instantly.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Loki shouted.
He hit Jonathan in the face and Jonathan stumbled over the sofa and
knocked over a bookshelf. “Stabbing me with silver? Shooting me?
Pushing me off cliffs?”

“You’re really a vampire,” said Jonathan, his eyes
wide as he backed into a corner. “It’s all true.”

Thor was sitting up in the middle of the room now.
His wounds had begun to heal but he was still weak, pressing his
hands against his chest and neck to hold as much blood as possible
inside.

Loki punched Jonathan again, cracking his skull and
sending him sprawling onto the floor.

“You okay, Thor? You need blood?” Loki crossed the
room to where Thor and Jonathan were lying.

“I’ll be all right.”

“You sure? We’ve got plenty of spare blood right
here.” He squeezed Jonathan’s face and lifted him to his feet.

Thor waved his hand to decline.

Loki hurled Jonathan through the sliding glass door,
through the pane of glass that hadn’t been broken in the first
crash.

“Calm down,” said Thor.

“No, I don’t think I will.”

Loki crossed the room and stepped out on the
balcony. He dragged Jonathan up by his collar. There were two large
pieces of glass still protruding from his face.

“Loki, please…” said Jonathan.

Loki pushed Jonathan out over the edge of the
balcony, still holding him by the collar so that his feet were
planted firmly on the edge and his body hanging over the side,
looking down at the rocky grave below.

“Think about this, Loki,” said Thor. “You’ll regret
it.”

Five months. Five months Loki had kept the fucker in
his house, fed him and clothed him, gave him room and board at no
cost, provided him booze and cigarettes and porno magazines. Four
months he’d treated him like royalty, and he’d asked for nothing in
return but a biography. Now he’d been stabbed, shot, and kicked off
a cliff, humiliated by a human. No, Loki didn’t need to think about
it.

Jonathan said the usual things: “I’ll do anything,”
“No one will know,” “Please.” Nothing original.

“E-mails, secret girlfriends, and literal stabbings
in the back,” said Loki. “When did I become such a poor judge of
character?”

“Loki, don’t!” shouted Thor from inside.

Loki let go.

Jonathan plummeted fifty feet onto the jagged
rocks.

“Go, go!” shouted Jewel as she climbed into the car
with a old hispanic man. She could see Tyr approaching through the
window behind the driver.

“What’s going on?” asked the driver without stepping
on the accelerator.

The driver’s side window burst and a hand came
through.

Jewel screamed.

Tyr’s fingernails cut through the skin on either
side of the hispanic man’s throat and more or less pulled it out of
his neck. He was no longer in any condition to drive. Tyr opened
the car door, pulled the man out onto the street, and reached for
Jewel, who ducked out of her door just in time.

Tyr tried to climb through the car at her and she
shut the door in his face and ran down the road away from the
vehicle. Tyr climbed out of the car and it was only a few seconds
before he had one arm around her neck and the other around her
waist.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get you back inside.”

Jewel pulled the silver knife from her pants and
stuck it in Tyr’s heart. He howled and fell to one knee.

As soon as she was free, she ran like hell, jumped
in the car, and pounded the accelerator into the floor. She was a
mile down the road before she even thought about closing the doors
or putting on her seatbelt.

Behind her, Tyr dug the knife out of his chest and
got to his feet. For the first time he could remember, he’d gone
after a human and she’d gotten the best of him.

“Well?” Loki asked when Tyr came back to the
house.

“She got away,” said Tyr. “She had a silver knife
and… I don’t know.”

“Fucking hell, Tyr. The one thing I need you to
do.”

Tyr could have brought up the fact that Jonathan
would have gotten away too had it not been for him, but it wouldn’t
have helped any.

“Where’s Jonathan?”

“Dead. Threw him off the balcony.”

“What? Why?”

“Didn’t see any reason not to.”

“Who was that woman, a vampire hunter?”

“No, Tyr. That woman was not a vampire hunter—you
don’t get that satisfaction. This enormous fucker here…” Loki
kicked Horace, “who broke in and stabbed Thor fifteen times with a
silver knife, may perhaps have been a vampire hunter, but the
petite bitch who got the drop on you was a writer’s
girlfriend.”

“So what happened? Why are we killing our friends
and running around in a panic like a bunch of fledglings? Why are
Jonathan and his girlfriend in a room with two dead women to begin
with?”

“Forget it, Tyr. It’s complicated. If the woman got
away, then there are cops coming and we have a lot of cleaning up
to do. We’ve got two dead women and one giant fucker on the floor,
another body out back, a cancer patient upstairs—all this shit
needs to be dealt with.”

“There’s a dead Mexican in the bushes out front
too.”

“Jesus Christ. We’re talking about police response
time to a multiple homicide. That’s no more than an hour or so. We
have to move fast.” Loki stepped out on the balcony and looked into
the gorge. “I’m thinking we could use some extra help.”

Thor shook his head. He’d seen this coming.

Jewel drove for miles without experiencing a
decrease in heart rate. She could barely operate the vehicle. She
was jetting down the road at a hundred miles an hour, sliding
around corners, nicking a signpost every mile or two and killing
small woodland creatures by the dozen. By the time she was within
the city limits, she was still driving in the manner that
identifies a person to Vegas police as a tourist operating a stolen
car while under the influence of alcohol, methamphetamine, and oral
sex. She was pulled over by three cruisers on the outskirts, not
having realized she’d been in a high speed pursuit for the last
four minutes.

“Hands where I can see them!” shouted an officer who
was pointing a gun at her—the second gun she’d had pointed at her
in the last hour.

She stuck her hands out the broken driver’s side
window.

Two of the cops ran to her car with their guns in
her face. They grabbed her hands, dragged her down, and pushed her
into the asphalt, shouting things like “Outta the fuckin’ car!” and
“On the fuckin’ ground!”

“He tried to kill me. Somebody tried to kill me,”
Jewel kept saying through tears, but nobody was paying much
attention. This was mostly because she’d been driving ninety-five
miles per hour in a thirty-five mile an hour zone. The fact that
she was black did not help.

She was handcuffed and shoved into the back of a
squad car, screaming all the while about a man trying to kill her,
two women who had been shot, a man getting stabbed, another man who
had fallen off a balcony, the usual shit.

She’d been in the car half an hour and they were
halfway back to the station before an officer even acknowledged
that she was talking.

“Shut the fuck up,” was all he said.

Loki, Tyr, and Thor had leapt from the balcony and
were standing around Jonathan’s body. Loki had a knife in his hand
and was kneeling over Jonathan’s chest.

“I want to go on record as saying I don’t like this
idea,” said Tyr.

“You and I don’t like any of each other’s ideas
these days. How about you, Thor? Any objections?”

Thor said nothing. The truth was he hated this. He
was set on the idea of running out on everybody, especially now
that the situation with Horace was resolved. He would have spoken
up, but fifteen minutes ago when there had been a silver knife in
his chest and Loki was ignoring the issue, Jonathan had been the
one to pull it out. Without Jonathan, it would have been second
death for sure. He owed Jonathan his life. If he came back, though,
he wouldn’t come back as Jonathan. He’d be somebody else. He’d
inhabit the same body, but his past would be erased from his mind.
In that regard, Thor wondered if his decision really mattered—if it
was even possible to give Jonathan anything he might have owed him.
But that was just making excuses, trying to get out of paying a
life debt.

“I’m for it,” he said finally.

“
Really?
Why?”

“I’m for it,” he said again.

“Well, that’s a two-thirds majority, not that I need
it,” said Loki.

He slit his own wrist and let it bleed onto the
blade until the steel was drenched in red, than he stuck the knife
in Jonathan’s heart.

Jonathan’s eyes opened. He gasped for breath and
pushed back away from his new Brothers.

“Heimdall,” said Loki.

Heimdall. The Norse god who killed Loki at Ragnarok.
Who Loki killed right back. Tyr’s and Thor’s eyes went to Loki.

“Your name is Heimdall,” he said again.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

The cops arrived at the Brothers’ house an hour
before sunrise, two and a half hours after the shooting had taken
place. This is roughly what is to be expected.

The Brothers had been sitting eagerly by the door
for some time now, since it would have been a dangerous situation
if police were to arrive during daylight hours.

“How are you doing today?” asked Officer Edward
Halleron. He was a young guy with an almost profoundly low level of
charm, but he had two other officers with him who somehow managed
to look even less interesting.

“Not too bad,” said Loki. “What can I do for you,
officer?”

“We brought a drunk driver in a few hours ago,
really rattled, who claims there was a shooting at this address, a
few people killed.”

“What?” Loki looked convincingly baffled. “No, there
hasn’t been any kind of excitement at all, other than—oh, you know
what? We set off some fireworks last night. Maybe that could have
been what he heard.”

“Who said it was a man?”

“Oh, I don’t… I just assumed,” said Loki. He had
strategically used the word ‘he’ to sound as ignorant as possible.
Cops liked ignorance.

“You mind if we come in and take a look around?”
asked Halleron.

“Sure, absolutely,” said Loki. They’d come in either
way. Refusal only meant wasting precious night while they waited
for a warrant.

Once the police were in the living room, Tyr and
Thor stumbled in wearing pajamas as though they’d gotten out of bed
when the police knocked. They’d hidden Heimdall away in the
bourgeois prison after cleaning the place up, aiming to minimize
his interaction with the police.

“How many people are in the house?”

The sixty-four thousand dollar question.

“Uh… four—no. Five,” said Loki.

“You three and two more?”

“
Yeah, our other
roommate and
his
girlfriend.” He gave Tyr a pissed off
look.

“You mind having the others come in here,
please?”

“
I… If
it’s
really
a must. I mean, she’s got a bad stomach bug and we just got
him to bed. He had way too much to drink. They’re really off to a
miserable Christmas so far…”

Halleron sighed, almost gave in. It was easy for
Loki to see. “I really have to insist.”

But Loki had to insist as well. Eva couldn’t be
expected to answer questions in a way that benefited the charade,
and ugly questions about cancer, why she wasn’t under hospice care,
and God knows what else could have put the police there an extra
hour and forced the Brothers to kill them when the sun presented
itself. That meant reinforcements, which meant a hostage situation
to bide time until nightfall, and that didn’t bode well for
anybody.

Heimdall was slightly less of a risk, but a vampire
that young around humans was unpredictable. If he got the scent of
blood and drained one of these officers, once again, Merry fucking
Christmas.

Loki groaned. “I mean, it’s gonna be a real chore
for them to…” Halleron looked guilty, so Loki switched gears. “Eh,
I understand. Todd, will you help Eva down here, and…” he sighed,
“wake Jon up, I guess.”

“You know what? That’s all right,” said Halleron the
way Loki knew he would. “I trust you guys.”

“Oh, thanks. We really appreciate it. Really.”

“Hey, it’s Christmas, right?”

Loki turned to Tyr and Thor. “You guys hear anything
a few hours ago that could have been a shooting?”

They shrugged and shook their heads, imitating
stupid humans.

One of the cops was standing at the sliding glass
door, which was now covered in trash bags and hidden behind
curtains. “Broke your window?”

Loki groaned. “Supposed to have it replaced. Dust
storm came through and cracked the shit out of it. Guy comes out
here yesterday to replace the glass, bashes out the old stuff, then
it turns out he brought the wrong sized plates. They don’t work on
Christmas so now I’m stuck with a busted door all weekend.”

“Pain in the ass,” said Officer Halleron.

“Yeah, but they’re gonna replace it for free now, so
that’s something.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“Yeah, you gotta be optimistic.”

Sitting on a bed in the bourgeois prison, Heimdall
was thumbing through a strange book he’d found hidden in a desk
drawer. It was leather-bound and not much bigger than pocket-sized
with long passages scribbled in vaguely familiar handwriting. The
story it told of a man arriving in Las Vegas with his girlfriend
was vaguely familiar as well.

When he got to the parts about a car accident and a
kidnapping and two enigmatic men named Loki and Thor, he realized
why it was familiar. He flipped back to the inside cover.