Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers) Read online

  This was what she wanted him to do, to care for her, to express concern, to give a shit. He knew this better than she. And as she protested, the roll of her eyes in a forced expression of frustration masked her gratitude almost flawlessly. Tyr had taken her already.

  She didn’t recognize him. No surprise there. She had been six years old the last time she’d laid eyes on him and he’d been wearing a bandanna and waving a twelve-gauge shotgun at everyone around her.

  She gave a long, deep sigh and said, “Kill me.”

  The old Tyr would have laughed. She had no idea. But he detected sincerity in her voice that drew his attention. It could have been the alcohol blending with the tears, but in this moment she truly wanted death.

  “What happened?” he asked, making it too sincere and kicking himself as soon as he heard his voice. He sounded like a sixteen-year-old boy feigning consolation to get into a classmate’s pants. I’m sorry your boyfriend cheated on you. You should get back at him by sleeping with me. Truth be told, it wasn’t far from what he was doing, but he expected better from himself. After a thousand years, one ought to know how the hell to seduce a sad girl.

  But she accepted it, having already made up her mind to give the night to him—even if it was only in a deep, buried away part of her subconscious she likely wasn’t aware of yet.

  “Liver cancer,” she said. “Six months.” Then she finished the shot of whiskey.

  Even less, Tyr’s mind quipped.

  Forty minutes later they were in the loft. Both bodies mostly naked with hands and mouths wandering hungrily, the girl’s heart rate accelerating, blood becoming warmer, rushing through her brittle body and building in pressure.

  And there was Tyr in the midst of what mortals refer to as a midlife crisis—though Tyr’s life had no middle. Like an aging human male unable to perform, he found he could not kill. Not this one. Something about her was ripping into that place inside of him where humans kept their souls. He was feeling something he’d not felt in centuries, maybe millennia. What was it? Sorrow? Pity? Sympathy? He was losing his mind or regaining it. This long stretch of time spent away from his brethren had awakened something in his view of a human being that was unsettling him instantly.

  He decided not to kill her.

  He told her to put her clothes back on. She wasn’t sober. She protested and cursed at him but his linguistic prowess took hold of the situation and she found herself thanking him and kissing him on the lips when he gave her fare for the cab. She asked if she could see him again on a better night. He told her yes. She scribbled her name on a napkin and slipped it into his breast pocket.

  Three days later, by dialing the number, Tyr broke a cardinal rule. She became the Juliet to his Romeo and the events of a thousand years clicked, worlds toppled, suns rose and set.

  If the Blood Brothers had a beginning, it might has well have been Eva.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Eva.

  So it was all about Eva.

  Tyr stared into the Butcher’s eyes, deliberating carefully before he made another sound. If the Butcher was working for Ofeigr, this was a life or death situation. The wrong words, the wrong facial expression, the wrong vocal nuance would land him in the fabled torture chambers until he croaked from starvation sometime in the next week or two. He bit his tongue and bided his time.

  In distancing himself from his brothers these last few years, Tyr had felt himself changing in a dozen ways, and there was one in particular he wished was not taking place. There was a sense of independence and self-responsibility that had never existed under Odin’s roof and certainly not under Loki’s iron fist. He was taking the wheel in a way he’d never done before and his inexperience with the new way of life disoriented him. Many nights, and especially days, he found himself distraught. The isolation had done things to his mind he had not expected or planned for. He developed a thirst for companionship, sparking a relationship with something that should have been beneath him. Like an old lonesome hag who treats her cats like children, he developed an odd affection for Eva. She was human, and well over 900 years younger than he was, but he enjoyed her company for reasons he couldn’t fully understand.

  By mortal standards their relationship was not entirely unusual, a run-of-the-mill love-affair built on lies, half-truths, and secrets. Tyr’s way of life came with certain idiosyncrasies which a human female could never be made to understand. Many nights after a romantic dinner and a goodnight kiss, Tyr would drive to a seedy bar or back alley to find some other nameless female with whom to indulge in perverse sexual acts before ripping her throat out and guzzling half her blood. If Eva ever learned of this, she would break up with him and he would murder her. From what he’d observed, this was somewhat standard fare for human relationships.

  But by immortal standards what they were doing was beyond taboo. It was the equivalent of an elderly human male with AIDS who pursues an interracial relationship with a six-year-old mentally-handicapped schoolboy. It was something no member of his species would defend, and if word got to the wrong people he would be killed for it. The humans populated their own species, and his kind kept out of sight except to feed. That was the rule.

  “Who’s the girl?” The Butcher repeated, still perfectly patient, knowing Tyr was sweating more profusely with each passing moment. Tyr had nothing. He was surprised he wasn’t dead already.

  “She’s… my concern,” he said finally. “Not yours.” It wasn’t much, but it was the best he could come up with.

  The Butcher smiled, but never laughed. “Don’t worry, Tyr. I’m not going to kill her. But I’d be sure you’re ready to let her die, preferably by your own hand and soon. You’re being a little careless, I think. Maybe there’s a little of Loki rubbing off on you.”

  Tyr’s insides flinched. Loki? For someone who was nearly a perfect stranger to the Brothers, this Butcher sure had his information straight.

  “What do you know about us?” Tyr asked. He was still trying to mask the sick feeling in his gut but by now it was perfectly obvious.

  “I know Loki’s out of his mind these last few years. He’s gonna get himself into a lot of trouble. He’s gonna be all over the news because he’s running around robbing banks and taunting the media with notes.”

  Tyr was unaware of this. Loki’s ways had always been careless but taunting with notes was a stretch even for him.

  “No, he’s not,” he said in shock.

  “You haven’t seen this ‘Blood Brothers’ shit in the media? Some tabloid journalist coined it and everybody’s eating it up. Tabloids even say it was a gang of vampiric brothers. You guys can all do whatever the hell you want; God knows everybody gets away with screwing and killing and stealing; but when you start sending shit to the media to gain celebrity—damn. If there is an Ofeigr… well, there’s not going to be a Loki for a whole lot longer.”

  Tyr suddenly had the distinct feeling he and his Brothers were all on their last legs. If The Chosen or any group that resembled them was really out there, whether the Butcher represented them or not, the ice they were walking on was thin to say the least.

  They never should have killed Odin. Maybe there were problems when he was around, but things certainly wouldn’t be going this direction if he’d still been alive. He had held them together. The image played out in Tyr’s head of Loki swinging his claymore and lobbing off their father’s head. He saw the head slip off the neck, already decaying as it rolled toward him and landed at his feet.

  Loki, the bastard. With Odin dead there was no one left to restrain him. With each passing era he tested the waters a little deeper, bent the rules a little harder. But sending notes to the media? Even Loki couldn’t be that irresponsible, could he?

  Tyr sighed and rubbed his face.

  “I left them, you know. I saw this coming. I didn’t think it was coming this hard and this fast, but I knew it was spoiling and I left.”

  “Yeah, I know. Thor misses you. I had a nice conversation with him the other n
ight.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

  “No, I guess I haven’t. Why am I here? Maybe shooting up those Italian brothers made me think of another group of brothers heading down a dangerous road. Maybe I’m just getting lonely and thought you were somebody I’d be able to carry a conversation with. Maybe I believe our world isn’t going to last much longer and I wanted to make my peace. Or maybe I was just in the neighborhood.

  “I didn’t come here for any one reason, Tyr. You’ve been around a few hundred years, right? You’ve been living on your own, what, ten or twenty? You know as well as I do it’s lonely out there. So maybe it’s just lack of affection driving me here tonight. You see, I’ve been watching my own species from the shadows same as I have humans most of my life and from time to time a connection is nice.

  “Besides, if you believe The Augury like I do and if you read the Bible like I do, you know there’s not a whole lot of time left; you know there can’t be a whole lot of time left. We’ve got to find ways to kill that time because, Tyr, think how goddamn long we’ve been around for already and if we miss the big finale then it’s all wasted, isn’t it? Shit, how much longer could it be?”

  By the time he finished talking, the Butcher was leaning forward with an excited smile on his face. There was exasperation behind the smile, but from what Tyr could gather, he was only exasperated that the world was not yet in ruins.

  The sun was nearly up by now and they made their way into the cellar and talked through the day. Tyr told wild tales from his past and the Butcher chimed in occasionally with preposterous pseudo-prophetic spewings about the impending apocalypse. In his mind the world was to end at the turn of the millennium. Needless to say, it didn’t happen.

  The Butcher left at dusk, stating he had more bad people to kill. As they stepped out of the house he told Tyr, “Have fun with your girlfriend,” and then he winked. It seemed the former Reverend truly wanted Hell to break loose on Earth.

  “I never caught your name,” Tyr said as the Butcher left.

  “Neither did I,” the Butcher replied. And as he started to disappear into the night, he quickly turned as though having an afterthought, but the statement that came out of him was the one he’d come here to make.

  “By the way,” he said. “I don’t know if this means anything to you, but Loki and Thor just checked into the Excalibur last night.”

  And with only a brief, condescending wave, he was gone.

  “Are they coming for me?” Tyr shouted into the night, but no reply came back.

  Whose side was this son of a bitch on? Tyr couldn’t say whether he was being warned or baited or used in some other fashion he couldn’t even grasp. He sat against the side of his house, lit a cigarette, and watched the Butcher’s silhouette disappear into the distance. What an odd creature he was. What an odd and frustrating creature.

  And without a name. Tyr believed that much. After all this time with nobody to speak to, of course he’d forgotten who he used to be. Besides, he was someone else now and if he’d never ascribed a new handle, he didn’t have one. He was a nameless assassin hunting criminals in the night. He was nobody, which was why they would never catch him.

  But Tyr gave him a name, down the road. He was just as important to their story as the rest of them, and he deserved a name to fit in alongside the Brothers. To Tyr, he would be Baldur. Because it would be his death that set into motion Ragnarok.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At The Tournament of Kings in the Excalibur Casino on the Las Vegas Strip, there was only one member of the audience old enough to remember the real jousts of medieval England. Actors dressed as knights and sorcerers rode horses, clashed swords, and staged grand spectacles of battle and death. While Loki enjoyed it and gave it a positive review, the fact was he was a fan of the theater in general and enjoyed pretty much anything he ever saw. Shakespearean plays, be they present-day imitations or the premiere of Othello—which had been one of his favorites—or even a gory B movie of the 1980’s that butchered the mythology of vampires was always entertaining to Loki.

  A man on a horse put a jousting stick into a swordsman standing on foot. The stick broke and the man on the ground made a full back flip before he struck the soil. Loki pounded his fist on the table in front of him and roared with laughter.

  Thor, sitting next to him, asked, “How does it compare?”

  “Compare to what?” Loki spoke loudly over the crowd’s cheers.

  “The real deal! You must have seen your share of this, right?”

  “Who gives a shit? It was funny back then and this is funny now. I already saw the old shit. I like seeing things that are new.”

  The crowd roared again. A sorcerer was shooting a stream of fire from his hand, probably through some sort of flamethrower concealed in his sleeve. Loki hooted and banged his stein against the table.

  “But it’s an imitation of the old,” said Thor. “You mean to tell me you never miss any of the stuff they’re trying to recreate?”

  Loki took a moment to remember—something he didn’t much care to spend time doing. On a battlefield, there were Vikings swinging axes into young men and raping English women. A carriage was rolled over and three men were dragged out and their heads were lobbed off. In a stadium show, two men knocked each other off of their horses, one was impaled and the other—declared the winner—suffered cracked ribs and died after five days of suffering. In a scripted play a woman performed unsimulated oral sex on a man in front of a raving audience. Shit, how could one compare? Entertainment was entertainment.

  “I got my fill of it all while it was there,” Loki said. “It’s all one giant story. I want to see how it progresses. Who the hell wants to rewind the movie before it’s over? You’ll start to see something soon, Thor, if you haven’t seen it already. Nothing ends. Ever. It just ages and develops. People used to kill each other in coliseums for entertainment; today they do it in underground street-fighting rings. You want to see two people hack each other to death with swords, I guarantee you there’s a place in Asia we can find it. Nothing ever goes away entirely. And you mark my words, when the human race dies off, which I give a good forty years easy, it will transition into something equally interesting with just enough of a human element left behind that anyone who misses the old days is a fool. The world turns. The world will always turn.”

  What was it George Carlin had said on the stage of the MGM Grand the night before? ‘When you’re born into the world you’re given a ticket to the freak show, and in America you get a front row seat’? Ha. George had it nailed, Loki thought. He might have appreciated to see it as Loki saw it, watching everything spiral downward for a thousand years and laughing like he’d always laughed at the actors on the stage. Loki had placed himself in the audience of the play that was the world, and the comedy of watching the foolish, ignorant humans blissfully circling the drain excited him now as much as it always had.

  When the show was over, Loki and Thor made their way out into the Nevada air. Loki was dressed modestly—which by his standards meant he was wearing tailor-made thousand-dollar pin striped Hugo Boss slacks with a fitted black Armani dress shirt and gold chain with a cross he’d turned upside down to piss off Christians. Stepping out of the hypothermic air conditioning, he threw his head back in comfort as he was hit by the dry, hundred-degree November air. How he loved this city!

  A man wearing a ‘strippers direct to you’ T-shirt was on the street corner handing out business cards plastered with the faces of hookers soliciting their business as freely as they had a hundred years ago even now in a city that outlawed it. Drunk teenagers were stumbling out of a casino after spending a little money on a fake ID and losing a lot of money because of it. A limo was passing in front of them from which another drunken young thing was standing up through the sunroof and flashing traffic not because it served her any purpose, but because society said it was something crude to do. A dealer across the street was walking the sidewalk, mumbli
ng the names of drugs to passersby to persuade them to turn around, and a homeless man with a bottle of Jack Daniels passed him by and tried vainly to walk in a straight line along the white painted stripe of a crosswalk. A city of showgirls, junkies, rebels, outcasts, plastic surgery, big business, whores, fame, murder, and money; it was the picture of present and future humanity. Loki thought if America meant front row seats to the freak show, then Las Vegas was front and center with New York and L.A. on either side. ‘The Entertainment Capital of the World.’ ‘Sin City.’ He ran his thumb along the upside down cross on his neck. What a fucking species! Entertainment was sin.

  He threw a quick glance Thor’s way, “You know what the only thing I hate about this city is?”

  Thor waited a moment for Loki to answer, though he’d heard the punch line in the past every time they arrived in town. They ended up saying it together:

  “How do you pick just one fucking drain?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The cancer was cholangio-something-or-other. The details were it was a rare cancer of the bile ducts on the inside of the liver. The important details were you get diagnosed with it and die horribly pretty soon after. Eva’s body was fighting it well, but it was killing her all the same. No one ever said anything to imply she had a chance of survival, and she had accepted that she did not.

  By the time they discovered the sickness, it had spread like shit hitting a fan. There was no hope of removing it from her body. Now her eyes were yellow with jaundice and she’d lost most of her weight, but still she managed to walk, talk with Tyr, and occasionally muster up a laugh. She had surprised the doctors with the fight she was putting up and while they told her December, she told herself March. She wanted to witness the change of the millennium before she passed. Being an orphan, the fight she put forth was fought with love for Tyr—who had told her his immortal name and gotten an odd facial expression in return.