The Wages of Sin (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book Two) (6 page)

“It is not our place to ask such questions. We are
children, all of us. This is the wisdom of vampires older and wiser
than we.”

“You mean to alter our lives based on the writings
in a book handed to you by a stranger?”

“Do you disagree? Are your eyes not opened as are
mine?”

“I only know what I’ve experienced. As long as I’ve
lived, I’ve lived as I do now, and no Chosen vampire nor an Ofeigr
nor anything else has expressed disapproval. If this Ofeigr were so
powerful, why are we hearing about Him from some polite missionary
and not being scolded by His minions.”

“Harold, do you agree with John?” said Odin to Tyr.
“Do you find these texts preposterous?”

“I do not, though neither do I see the harm in
polite discourse if it is done under the guise of a human. As long
as she does not see me for what I am—”

“You cannot choose the passages in which you see
truth. Either it is the code by which members of our species must
live, or it is a book and nothing more. You cannot see it as both.
Would you agree it was written by greater vampires?”

Tyr and Loki begrudgingly replied in the
affirmative.

“Then from this night forth we will minimize our
interaction with mankind. The three of us shall live according to
this book.”

Tyr and Eleanor never spoke again, though one month
a year he watched her in the night. He listened in on her activity
in the bedroom, read her diary while she slept, sat outside her
window if she ate a late supper with her family and imagined
himself at the table with them, enjoying their company and
participating in conversation.

A few times, Odin followed Tyr to make sure the
trips were as innocent as Tyr claimed them to be, and he became
satisfied that they were. Gradually it came to be that Odin and Tyr
would visit Eleanor together, and on a few occasions Loki even
joined.

They never said goodbye to one another, and she even
wrote in her diary from time to time wondering what had become of
him. It took strain not to have one last conversation, to give her
closure, to let her know he wouldn’t be coming back, but he never
succumbed to the temptation. Eleanor was Tyr’s introduction to
solitude, to viewing the world of humanity from outside. As she
grew old and her children married and had children of their own, he
stood outside her window and watched.

She lived an emotional life, ignorant of almost
anything beyond her village. Tyr’s life was the opposite, full of
culture and knowledge but devoid of emotional connection. Eleanor’s
curse was that she had to imagine the larger life she’d missed.
Tyr’s curse was that he could clearly see the smaller life he’d
missed. Once again, the difference between education and
experience.

CHAPTER
NINE

“You’re amazing,” said Eva, so quietly and slurred
together she might have been talking in her sleep. “I’ve never met
anyone from medieval England.”

“Y-yeah. That seems likely,” said Tyr.

She’d become gradually less coherent as he told her
the story. It was late, by Eva’s standards, and these days she was
tired regardless of the time. Add to that the fact that she was
whacked out on pain killers and it was understandable she’d have
trouble following a story.

She’d run out of medication a few days prior and,
afraid of taking her to the doctor, Tyr had drained some old people
and stolen their drugs for her. He never told her where the drugs
came from, of course. She was still uncomfortable with the idea of
killing people.

“Tyr…” she said, and he leaned in close to her. “Are
there werewolves too?”

He laughed. “No.”

“Good. I hate them.”

He didn’t want to press his luck and he could tell
she was sick of hearing from him, but he had a question he wanted
to ask again, one he’d asked a hundred times in the last three
days. The way she’d looked at him during the story, with eyes of
wonder and a warm smile, it seemed time to ask it once more.

“Eva.”

“Mm.”

“Can you forgive me?”

“For what?”

“For being a vampire? And trying to kill you?”

“Yeah,” she said from a dream. “It’s whatever.”

Tyr felt himself smile, even though he was fairly
certain she didn’t know what she was saying.

“Really?” he asked. “You forgive me?”

“I forgive you.”

He leaned down and kissed her lips and she kissed
back weakly. It floored him how much three short words from a human
could mean.

CHAPTER
TEN

Go.

Fuck ‘em.

Thor had to believe the thought had been in his head
for a while now. Ever since he’d let himself acknowledge it, it
seemed the only thing to do.

Or take control.

Burn the club down.

Kill Eva.

But it wasn’t his business. He owed Loki and Tyr
everything he had, and he was a child by comparison. He’d been the
peacekeeper this long. There was no sense in trying to take charge
now. Besides, Loki was easy to predict when it came to contesting
dominance.

So go.

Leave town.

Tonight.

He was sitting at a table in the corner of Liquid
Skin, surrounded by the kind of young person who skips car payments
to buy tattoos. He’d come in telling himself he was looking for a
drain, but he wasn’t paying much attention to any of the girls who
surrounded him. He was busy arguing with the devil on his
shoulder.

‘I can’t go tonight. It’s after one. The sun will be
up in a few hours.’

‘You could get a hotel and you know it.’

‘What’s the rush? Nobody’s going to cut our heads
off between now and tomorrow night.’

‘It could happen. Loki’s been advertising the grand
opening. There could have been Chosen in that club tonight.’

He pinched the bridge of his nose. He was probably
being paranoid but he had to acknowledge the outside chance. And if
there was a reckoning coming, it was probably best to go now. If he
went back and destroyed the club and then went home and killed Eva,
maybe he could save all of them, but more than likely it would be
an overreaction and succeed only in provoking the wrath of his
Brothers.

But if he got a hotel tonight, caught a flight
tomorrow…

He started to stand up.

“Doug,” said a familiar voice.

Thor looked up. It was Clyde, one of the bartenders
he’d met a few times. He sat back down at his table.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, Clyde. Just thinking.”

“Okay. Okay. Say, do you know a real big fella in a
trench coat who might be looking for you?”

“Not that I can think of…”

“Big angry guy, talks real quiet, threatens people
with a carpet stapler.”

“Not ringing any bells.”

“You’d remember.”

“He was here?”

“Couple hours ago. I think he’s looking for a girl
you went home with.”

Shit. Those weren’t words Thor liked to hear. Being
a suspect in any disappearance meant dealing with human authority
figures and that was a pain to say the least.

“Is he a cop?”

“Eh, maybe. Don’t think so though, ‘cause of the
carpet stapler.”

“Ah. Right. Carpet stapler. Who is he then?”

“Don’t know. But he’s pretty serious about talking
to you.”

Sometimes a pneumatic stapler is
used as a carpet stapler, though the two aren’t technically the
same thing, no matter what Clyde might have said or thought. Carpet
staplers are typically small devices carpenters operate by swinging
them into the floor with a lot of force. They go
bap!
Some people use
electric ones, which are a little scarier. They go
zik-zik-zik
, pretty much
as fast as you want them to. But the pneumatic stapler, that big
Co2-powered bastard Horace swings around, it’s the only one that
goes
CLACK!

As a general rule, pneumatic staplers are powered by
a hose that compresses air, but Horace’s stapler ran on the kind of
cartridges you use in paintball guns. Probably he didn’t buy it
like that. Probably he made the damn thing himself or borrowed it
from a homicidal friend who was an amateur engineer.

“A girl named Samantha. Comes here often. Hasn’t
been around the last week or so. What do you know about her?”
Horace asked Clyde when he walked into the club two hours
earlier.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Point me to somebody who’s here more often than
you.”

“Hey dude,” some idiot a couple seats down shouted,
holding up an empty shot glass.

“Look, pal,” Clyde said to Horace. “Buy a drink or
go home. I’ve got a lot of customers to serve.”

As he poured a shot of Buffalo
Trace for the bro, there was a
CLACK!
next to Clyde’s hand and he
jumped back to see a staple an inch long with its two spikes barely
sticking into the marble countertop.

“I’m not here to bother anybody,” said Horace. “I’m
just trying to track somebody down.”

Clyde drank the shot he’d poured for Mr.
Awesome.

“I don’t know who she is, the girl you’re looking
for,” said Clyde, giving Horace a little more attention than he had
a moment ago.

“I’ll say it again,” said Horace, “Point me in the
direction of someone who knows the customers better than you.”

“Dude, seriously!” shouted Brother Dudeman with the
empty shot glass.

“He does,” said Clyde, pointing to the belligerent
prick. “He’s here all the time.”

It wasn’t exactly true. The kid was there on a
semi-regular basis, but he mostly hung around with a couple of his
dude-bro buddies and got rejected by loose women for being a
dumb-shit. It was a busy night though, and sending Big Bastard
after Dumb Bastard solved two problems at once, at least for the
time being.

Horace took the kid into the bathroom to talk to him
and a few minutes later the kid came out grabbing his thighs with
bloody hands. Apparently he’d been at least vaguely familiar with
the girl in question and remembered seeing her with another
customer, because the big guy came back to the bar and put the
staple gun down.

“If you didn’t call the cops, he will, so I’ll make
this quick,” he said. “A blonde-haired kid, early twenties, comes
in pretty regularly, always leaves with a pretty girl, sometimes
two or three. He’s got to attract some attention. You know
him?”

“Yeah. Sure.” Clyde probably would have lied about
this if it weren’t true.

“I’m writing my phone number on this napkin. Next
time he comes in you call me and I’ll come have a chat with him.
And this probably goes without saying but don’t give my number to
the cops or I’ll come back and staple your balls to the inside of
your asshole.”

“Okay. That sounds good. Will do.”

Well that did it then. Thor wasn’t leaving town. Not
tonight.

If the guy was a cop—though cops didn’t use staple
guns on civilians in public very often anymore—it meant he was
dedicated to finding Thor and there was probably no way out except
to kill him, leave town, and find a new alias (Doug sucked
anyway).

If, on the other hand, the staple-gunman was not a
cop, it probably meant he was even more dedicated to finding Thor
than a cop would have been. That probably meant asking around until
he found somebody who said, “Oh, Doug? Yeah, I’ve seen him hanging
around with Jack Loki from the papers.” And that meant he’d try to
pull his staple gun shenanigans on Loki and Loki would kill him and
all his loved ones. It wasn’t a big problem, really, but leaving
Loki to clean up his mess was trashy behavior. He was leaving town
so as not to have to clean up Loki’s, after all.

He told Clyde as soon as Horace got in touch to pass
on a message: he’d be here every night at 10:00 PM until they’d had
a chance to talk. If he’d been paying better attention, Thor might
have noticed the way Clyde was trying incessantly to engage him in
conversation and avoid letting him leave, but his mind was
preoccupied and he ended up leaving, not noticing that Clyde was
rubbing his fingernails together fast enough to burn himself.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

Just before he’d approached Thor, when Clyde had
made the call from the house phone, Horace told him to keep Thor
busy and he’d be there in fifteen minutes. Clyde didn’t have
anything against Thor, but it was a habit of his to avoid staples
to the testicles whenever possible and that was his primary concern
at the moment.

His instructions were to keep Thor talking, not to
let him leave, and not to tell him Horace was on his way. While it
really should have been a given that it wasn’t a good idea to
mention Horace at all, Clyde wasn’t great at following orders from
brutes who were threatening physical violence (and probably
shouldn’t have been a bartender in the first place, for this
reason).

“Where is he?” Horace asked when he came into the
club, about three minutes after Thor left. “Which one is he?”

“I couldn’t… He left.”

“He left? When?”

“Few minutes ago. I offered him a drink on the
house, but he said he had to go. I didn’t know what to tell
him.”

“Did you get his phone number?”

“I… did not.”

“
Are
you
trying
to get stapled?”

“No. No, I’m really not. I don’t even have my ears
pierced. I… I don’t want…”

“So what are you telling me? He was here for a few
minutes. You offered him a free drink. He left. Did he take a girl
home?”

“No. But he said he’d be back to talk to you
tomorrow.”

“
What do you
mean
‘to talk to
me?’
”

“He said he’d come back every night at ten until he
saw you.”