The Wages of Sin (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book Two) (9 page)

Some jerky movements were heard.

A woman shrieked.

Jonathan pulled the door opened, more of a reflex
than anything.

“You’re Thor, right?” Thor heard a male voice say
while he was receiving mediocre head from a moderately attractive
woman. He opened his eyes to see a man a little bigger than Loki
holding a knife.

He was more confused than frightened. People didn’t
typically approach him in his own house, especially people who knew
his name. By the time he put it together that this was Mr. Staple
Gun, there was a knife in his neck.

Getting your throat slit is not a pleasant
experience, and Thor never got used to it no matter how many times
it happened. He put up a hand to slow the bleeding and the fucker
stabbed him twice in the chest.

Bev screamed and stood, backing to the far end of
the room.

Thor tried to stand and face his attacker, but he
tripped over his own pants and hit the floor, still cupping his
hand over his neck.

It didn’t make sense. The wound should have clotted
over by now and the bleeding shot have stopped. Unless…

Silver.

The big fucker got down on one knee and stabbed Thor
six or seven more times in the chest. Thor was dazed and weak in
his poisoned state and couldn’t fight back.

Somewhere Bev was screaming.

And somebody else was screaming.

And everyone was running and stumbling.

Thor was only half conscious when a series of
gunshots rang out and Mr. Staple Gun collapsed on top of him.

Loki was ten seconds from finishing Vivienne off
when the screams started.

His first thought was that Thor had bared his fangs
early, maybe bitten into her face or something. But the screams
kept up for several seconds and he could hear people banging around
in the other room, knocking over furniture, and then two women were
screaming instead of one. It wasn’t Thor’s way of doing things, not
that Loki was worried.

“What happened?” asked Vivienne.

“Probably just a spider,” said Loki, still fucking
the drunk girl from behind.

“No. Bev! What happened!”

“Come on. Forget it.”

“I’m sorry. I have to check on my sister.”

She squirmed out of his grip and ran naked from the
bedroom. Loki rolled his eyes, sat on the edge of the bed and put
his pants on. After a minute there was a third woman joining in the
screams and Loki’s curiosity was piqued.

He grabbed one of the guns off his dresser and
headed for the living room.

When Jonathan jerked open the closet, Thor was on
the couch with his pants down and a big man he didn’t recognize was
stabbing him in the chest. Bev was half naked, doing nothing to
resolve the situation other than screaming. Jewel took to the same
strategy.

After he’d regained control of his body following
the shock (which took at least ten seconds), Jonathan tried to get
Jewel to run with him in the direction of the front door. She was
hysterical and paid little attention to him. He grabbed her hand
and pulled her with more force than he liked to use and she
continued to scream and stare at the man who knelt next to Thor,
plunging the knife into him over and over.

Before they could get more than a few feet, a naked
Vivienne pushed her way into the room and joined in the screaming.
There were now three screaming women—one dressed, one half-dressed,
and one not dressed—forming a triangle around a man with his pants
around his ankles who was being stabbed repeatedly in the chest.
Believe it or not, this was not the first time this had happened in
Las Vegas.

Loki came stumbling down the hall shirtless with a
semi-automatic pistol in his hand. Seeing Thor curled up on the
ground with a knife in him, he shrugged and fired the gun several
times into the aggressor’s back. The big man collapsed on top of
Thor, struggled to move for a few seconds, then died with an odd
smile on his face.

The women were screaming louder now than they had
been before the gun was brought out. Jonathan was more or less
paralyzed. With Loki now in the room and armed, he gave up on the
idea of running.

“What the fuck, Thor?” said Loki. “You forget your
nuts in your other pants?”

Thor lay there breathing hard. He didn’t
respond.

Everyone had quieted down and they were waiting for
Loki to tell them what to do.

Bev fished her cell phone out of her pants pocket.
“I’ll call 9-1-1.”

Loki shot her. Her blood drenched her sister and the
wall behind. Vivienne gave a horrible cry and ran to her big sis
and Loki shot her as well. Both were head shots. Both were down for
the count.

“No!” screamed Jewel.

Jonathan ran at Loki without realizing what he was
doing and fought for the gun. He’d been hearing Loki’s stories for
months and there had been no shortage of physical threats from the
man, but this was the first time he’d witnessed an act of violence
firsthand and it had an intense effect on him.

Loki pushed Jonathan away and he landed on top of
Thor and the big stranger. Jonathan looked up and cowered.

Loki aimed the gun at Jewel. “Hm. Now you I’m not
sure about.”

The knife was still buried in
Thor’s heart and Thor, semi-conscious, was pointing at it and
seemingly trying to say “
Take it.”
What he was actually trying to say was
“Take it out,”
but
Jonathan drew tremendous courage from what he thought he
heard.

“Please,” said Jewel, the way humans always do.
“Please.”

Loki stroked her hair with the barrel of the
gun.

Jonathan grabbed the hilt of the knife and ripped it
out of Thor’s chest. Thor breathed in a little and put his hand
over the wound as Jonathan stood and ran at Loki. Loki turned
around with a smile just as Jonathan buried the knife between his
shoulder blades.

Loki gasped and grabbed for it. It hurt more than it
should have, but he didn’t know why. He dropped the gun and tried
to reach around his back. He ran around flailing his arms until he
crashed through the sliding glass door and landed on the balcony
outside.

Jewel was back to screaming—seemingly her only
defense. Jonathan picked up the gun and chased Loki out onto the
balcony.

The house sat at the edge of a small cliff, and the
balcony swung out some fifty feet over a rocky gorge. Loki was
leaned up against the railing, pulling the knife out of his back,
and Jonathan was standing outside in front of him with broken glass
crunching beneath his feet and a curtain blowing in the wind
between them as Jewel watched from the living room.

Jonathan knew he had to fire, but he wasn’t sure he
could do it. He’d been in his share of barroom brawls, but aside
from the knife he’d stuck in Loki a moment ago he’d never caused
real harm to another person.

Loki got the weapon out of his back and looked down
at it. The material was already burning his hand. He let go of it
and flung it back into the living room. It landed at Jewel’s feet
and she picked it up without thinking.

“Silver.” He looked up at Jonathan. “You
sonofabitch.”

He started to advance and Jonathan pulled the
trigger automatically. Loki stopped. Jonathan fired again, and a
third time. Two in the chest, then one in the head. Then another in
the chest when Loki refused to drop. Then another.

Loki stumbled backward in the hail of gunfire until
he was leaned up against the railing and glaring at Jonathan with
violent eyes. And then—

Click.

No more bullets. A streak only lasts so long in
Vegas.

Jonathan looked down at the empty gun and Loki
grinned, and all Jonathan could think to do was give him one hard
kick. Luckily for Jonathan, his adrenaline was high enough that
this one hard kick was one hell of a hard kick.

The railing behind Loki shattered and he lost his
footing and fell over the side of the balcony. He reached out as he
fell to grab for anything he could, but there was nothing to grab
and he tumbled fifty feet onto a bed of jagged rocks that pounded
his bones and tore apart his skin.

Jonathan breathed for the first time in a minute or
two, as did Jewel. Everything became perfectly quiet. Jonathan
laughed, not at anything in particular, but because his nerves were
firing on all cylinders and the emotional sector of his brain
didn’t know how to operate. As he laughed, Jewel looked terrified
of him, and he had to force himself to stop.

He advanced slowly to the edge of the balcony to
look at the body of the man he’d killed.

“Should we call the police?” asked Jewel.

Jonathan peered over the edge into the rocky gorge
below.

No. It couldn’t be.

It didn’t make sense.

At the bottom of the gorge, Loki
was standing upright on top of a rather large boulder with blood
glowing on his skin in the moonlight. His eyes were open and he was
breathing hard. Not only was he not dead, but he didn’t much look
like he was on the
verge
of death either.

“I’m comin’ up!” he shouted. “And I’m fuckin’
pissed!”

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

The walls around the bourgeois prison were
sound-proofed to mask the cries of the people inside. Naturally,
the reverse was also true and all the sounds throughout the rest of
the house were muted from the inside.

For this reason, Tyr never heard the loud music or
the laughter downstairs, nor did he hear Vivienne shouting
lascivious statements at the top of her lungs, nor the horrific
screams of three women witnessing a knifing.

Tyr heard nothing until a series of gunshots rang
out.

“What’s going on?” Eva asked him, still half asleep
as he stood up from the bed.

“I’m sure it’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

Eva obeyed, choosing sleep over adventure the way
her species often did.

Tyr opened the bedroom door, closed it gently behind
him, then rushed downstairs.

In the living room, Thor was collapsed on the floor
and a young black woman was standing alone in the middle of the
room. The sliding glass door was broken and the curtains were
blowing out onto the balcony. Somewhere out in the night, Loki was
shouting in anger.

“Run!” Jonathan’s voice called from outside.

“What’s going on?” Tyr asked from the top of the
staircase, directing the question more at Thor than the woman he’d
never met.

The woman turned around, screamed, and ran for the
front door. Tyr started after her.

“Tyr!” came a voice from behind him. Jonathan was
standing there, pointing a gun at his chest. For a moment Tyr
debated whether to run after the woman or detain Jonathan.

He started to run in the direction of the woman and
Jonathan made a run for the side door of the house. Now two people
were escaping in opposite directions.

Tyr hesitated before going after Jonathan. The woman
was a stranger to him and he couldn’t speak for what she might have
witnessed, but he knew Jonathan had been in the house for months
and had plenty of dirt on all of them. It seemed a safe bet that he
should be the priority.

Before he had made it a hundred feet, Tyr had
tackled Jonathan and dragged him back into the living room where he
was met by Loki, who was dressed in torn slacks and covered in
blood.

“Where’s Jewel?” asked Loki.

Tyr paused.

“The woman!”

“She went out the front.”

“Get her.”

Tyr pushed Jonathan into Loki’s hands and headed
outside. He ran several hundred feet down the dirt road outside and
along the highway in the direction of Vegas, scanning for her in
both directions as he ran. When he reached the point where the road
to town forked, he came to a stop.

She could have gone either way, and there was no
movement in either direction as far as he could see. There was a
chance she’d already flagged down a car and was on her way to town,
but more likely she was hiding in the bushes somewhere. He walked
back toward the house, listening for breathing or movement. He
heard nothing.

He stepped to the side of the road, ducked behind
some bushes, and waited quietly, expecting to see her step out of
hiding at any moment.

Jewel had, in fact, ducked behind some bushes some
one hundred feet away on the opposite side of the road. She could
see Tyr there, hiding and waiting, and she didn’t think she had it
in her to make any move at all until he’d given up and gone
home.

At the same time, she had half a mind to go back.
She hadn’t seen Jonathan come out of the house. She still figured
Loki for human, and humans are harmless after taking multiple
gunshot wounds and falling fifty feet, and since Thor had been
stabbed a dozen times, Tyr was her only threat as far as she could
see.

She looked down at her hand. At some point, without
realizing it, she had picked up the knife that had been used to
stab her captors. She was armed, and she didn’t think the man out
here with her had a weapon, so if she rushed him…

No. Fuck that. He was a lot bigger than she was, and
quite probably a professional criminal. It was a safe assumption it
wouldn’t be the first time he’d had a knife pointed at him. The
odds of something going wrong felt high.

As she sat weighing her options, a pair of
headlights appeared in the distance, moving down the road toward
her. She knew Tyr was watching them too, and it would have been a
stupid move to enlist the help of the driver. At the same time,
though, she feared the passing lights would illuminate the area
where she was hiding and alert Tyr to her presence, a possibility
even more dangerous than flagging down the vehicle.

As the car came close, she tucked the blade of the
knife into the back of her jeans so as not to appear threatening
and ran out into the road waving her arms at the driver. The car
slowed.