Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers) Read online

  She clung to him now for life and he clung back, French-inhaling from an unfiltered cigarette with his arm around her as they stood on the rear balcony of his house. They were looking at the light on top of the Luxor casino, shining into the air like a beacon. Eva was smoking a joint. Tyr did his best to keep marijuana around as Eva seemed to do better with the sometimes unbearable abdominal pains if she was baked out of her goddamn gourd on the sweet medicinal herb.

  Tyr was perhaps equally intrigued by the change of the millenium. Not because he expected the event to change his life in any noticeable way, but because he figured himself to have been born somewhere around the year 1000, making him roughly a millennium old next year—or this year, for that matter.

  He held her tightly to him. It was a new experience for Tyr to watch a person die slowly and naturally. After a couple months of fighting the urge to drain her he had found the desire had subsided completely and he got a joy in just being with her, arm around her, wrist resting on the hip of her frail hourglass figure as it was now.

  He questioned how her death might affect him. Losing someone he loved would be something of a new experience for him. In some ways he was anxious for it happen, for the thrill of it. Emotional pain was so rare a feeling for him. There was the occasional sense of listlessness, particularly now that he was on his own, but an actual loss to death of someone who will never return was a different kind of pain, a stabbing pain rather than a sick one. Mortals ran from that pain perhaps because their lives were so dense with it already but to him it was a punch to the gut to remind him he was alive. Or something close to it, at least.

  She rested her head on his shoulder and he stroked her thinning hair, taking in the familiar view of the skyline. Casa Tyr was in the desert a few miles outside Vegas. He had acquired the house from a millionaire who enjoyed his privacy every bit as much as Tyr enjoyed stealing the property of people he murdered. There were no sounds of traffic or neighbors and there was a deck on either side, perfect for staring at the stars and basking in the intimacy of the night, or for looking from afar at the lights of Las Vegas as they were doing now.

  Eva’s house was in the city, and not a particularly good part of it. To live in Vegas was not the same as to visit and she had grown to hate the tourists, gawking at the overpriced spectacles she’d always seen from her window, stumbling around drunk and pissing in the streets, snapping photos of their spoiled children who begged through tears for Circus Circus or The Cheesecake Factory when they ought to have been in school and an hour of gym would have done them more good than all the desserts in the world. Maybe the heat was just getting to her.

  She had quit her job cocktail waitressing at the Flamingo—which apparently didn’t employ cynical, freakishly thin, terminally ill women—and she was now living on welfare checks from the federal government. The money was barely enough to afford rent on the house with her roommate, and she didn’t want to live with Aimee anymore in the first place. Aimee was a bitch, a fourteen-year-old girl in a twenty-year-old’s body whose beauty was all the work of vanity. The existence of other people was a theory that had yet to be proven to the solipsistic shit and she rarely looked away from her pocket mirror long enough to notice the world around her. The thought of Aimee being the one to come home and find Eva dead was repulsive to her. Anybody but Aimee. She wouldn’t get the satisfaction.

  Nowadays Eva spent more nights with Tyr than she did at home, and she was becoming used to his unorthodox schedule. Tyr was severely allergic to sunlight, peculiar man that he was, and had to remain cooped up in his home during daylight hours. Now and then she visited his place in the afternoon but never found him sleeping. He would read the paper, watch television, or surf the Internet, but never once had she found him asleep. He must have had insomnia. It was difficult for anyone to sleep during the day, she supposed.

  “Baby, I want to move in with you,” Eva said without warning, anally raping a comfortable silence.

  Tyr coughed on his cigarette smoke. He should have seen it coming. Almost five months they’d been seeing each other now. That was long enough to warrant a suggestion like moving in, wasn’t it? By human standards? How long is five months? What was the lifespan of these things again? Eighty years or so? That did him no good. This one was dying at nineteen, even if her driver’s license said otherwise.

  Then there was the threat of Loki, who had just arrived in town, possibly plotting to find and kill him. If Tyr’s life was in jeopardy, it put Eva’s in even greater jeopardy. If Loki found him here with Eva, she was dead. That much was for certain.

  Kicking all these thoughts around, Tyr realized after quite some time that Eva was still staring at him with tears in her eyes waiting for an answer. He thought of all the human bodies he’d burned in the incinerator out back. He wondered if there were bones or body parts he’d missed out there. By now he dreaded the thought of having to kill her if she found something.

  He hesitated. “I’m not sure that’s really the best of ideas.”

  Eva looked at the ground and a tear fell onto the rail.

  “I won’t get in the way. If there are things you have to do sometimes, work or something, I can leave you alone. You can just tell me. I just… don’t want to live at home anymore.”

  Tyr turned his gaze back to Las Vegas and stared again at the Luxor. He thought for a brief moment of the ancient Egyptians who’d built the real pyramids. This replica had been erected easily without slave-labor or thousands of mortal lives lost in its construction. Its beacon aimed upwards at the heavens visible from miles away in the night was like a middle-finger thrust at history. It stood as if to say, ‘Anything you could do, we can do better.’ In a sense it was a landmark of human development, and Tyr wondered if there was some other vampire, some former-pharaoh of a vampire, studying that casino as he was now and thinking, Kingdoms will rise and fall.

  The times changed. What once was, was no longer, and what was now was soon to follow. The pyramids built in another thousand years would thrust their middle fingers at this one, and Tyr would still be there to watch and contemplate them. Eva, she’d be gone by the time summer rolled around. Maybe he could put up with having her around for a few weeks.

  Maybe. If Loki wasn’t part of the picture.

  He had to find Loki and Thor. Figure out where he stood.

  “Let me just think about it for a while,” he said. “My solitude means something to me.”

  “Same here. What mine means is that I only have a couple months left to do anything with and I’m going to die alone and isolated. I’d marry you tomorrow if you’d have me.”

  Tyr wanted to tell her everyone was to die alone and isolated; the company of others was a comfort of life, not death, and in the instant of death every being would be divided from every other and cast into the permanent damnation of nothingness. He wanted to tell her from personal experience, there is no memory after death, no sorrow, no regret. As one ceases to be, to have been loved or unloved in life is rendered as inconsequential as the past life itself.

  But none of it mattered. She wasn’t worried about the memory she’d have of her life afterward. Like all mortals, she had nothing worth remembering anyway. She was afraid only of the next month, for obvious reasons. Knowing the fruit of life was about to spoil in her hands, she wanted to squeeze all the juice from it now.

  He didn’t have words for her. He had only thoughts, as he found was too often the case. Instead of offering benign, encouraging prattle, he put his arm around her tighter and pressed their bodies together in hope that his silence would say something deeper. She tried to push away in anger at first, but when he held her there she broke and her fingers clutched his jacket, tears pouring from her eyes suddenly. He felt if he still had tear ducts, he might have cried as well.

  For the first time he could remember, Tyr felt helpless and pathetic. In all his years and for all his professed understanding of human emotion, all he had mastered was a propensity for seduction. While he could b
end the will of someone in any state to urges of debauchery, what power over the human heart did he have if he could not make this one happy?

  When he dropped Eva off at her house, Tyr had to promise he would think about letting her live with him. He wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but he wanted to keep her happy. He thought maybe he would wait until she was in even worse health and he would only have to put up with her presence there for a matter of days. It lowered the chances of having to kill her if one of his Brothers made a surprise visit.

  On his way home he stopped by the newsstand and browsed through the tabloids for anything having to do with Loki. It was twenty minutes before he found a story in a tabloid called the Las Vegas Sun, and another in a paper called The Chronicle.

  There it was. The headline in The Las Vegas Sun read ‘Who Are the Blood Brothers?’ and told a story about a gang of gun-toting vampires who had knocked over a bank in Carson City. It was a dumb move to say the least, but it was a headline on the third page of a tabloid newspaper known for quirky, outlandish stories and therefore probably wasn’t a prelude to Armageddon. The story claimed the so-called ‘Blood Brothers’ had been ‘at large’ ever since ‘The Amtrak Massacre’ in 1986.

  Right, thought Tyr, At large since 1986? You’re forgetting the building we burned down in 1894? How about all the women we murdered in fifteenth-century England? Too long ago to matter anymore? Twelve people shot yesterday in a shopping mall was a tragedy and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was one sentence in a history book. Even for mankind, time made death insubstantial.

  So what did Loki’s newfound celebrity mean? Anything? Not many humans were likely to take it seriously. Even if there hadn’t been truth to any of it, the story could just as easily have been published as the result of some imaginative and lazy journalist, so what was the harm? There probably was none. If the extent of Loki’s stardom was the occasional article in some dubious newspaper whose cover story was a sighting of Elvis Presley, The Chosen would probably be none the wiser, or simply wouldn’t care to waste their energy on such a trivial matter. This wasn’t worth Ofeigr’s time.

  Problem was, the article in The Las Vegas Sun was not the extent of Loki’s stardom. In The Chronicle, a much more reputable piece of journalism, there was a brief article about a club being built off Freemont Street. It was to be a small hangout targeted at young hipsters and was called The Chupacabra. The article contained an interview with Jack Loki, the man who had purchased the land. As though that weren’t enough, there was even a photograph of Mr. Loki published with the article.

  What the hell was Loki thinking? He knew full well this would put him on Ofeigr’s shitlist. Was he really trying to call them out of the shadows? What was his plan if The Chosen showed up at the club? Public spectacles like bank robberies were a bad idea on their own. These stories were biting the hand that fed them and rubbing salt in the proverbial wound. Loki was playing with his life as well as Thor’s.

  Tyr could bring himself to believe it for Loki, but Thor should have known better. He should have had the wherewithal to remove himself from this before things got any worse. Thor was smart. He didn’t deserve to be tortured and killed because of Loki’s stupidity.

  Thor misses you, Tyr remembered the Butcher saying. He wondered how Thor had been doing these past few years. Thor alone with Loki. That was a scary thought. They certainly weren’t pandering to the better sides of each other’s natures. Loki was losing it after all this time. From the look of it he’d given up completely on his belief in The Augury, which was a dangerous thing for someone like Loki to do.

  Tyr himself was skeptical of the beliefs these days, but regardless of any possible stretched truth within them, he understood and obeyed the rules. Whoever had written The Augury were smart. They were keeping the species in line. The less mature, the weak, the vampires who didn’t have the willpower to keep themselves together, the myth of Ofeigr was there to keep them contained, to keep them in fear so they didn’t abuse what they had. It was a system in place to keep them from becoming gluttonous, but after a thousand years of threats and never a slap on the wrist from The Chosen what was to keep them believing?

  The idea was if they disobeyed any of the laws written within The Augury, Ofeigr’s Chosen would find out about it and punish them. The thing reeked of a college freshman’s personal rendition of the Bible. It was a fairytale, and to creatures like them, alive for as long as they chose to be, the notion of an all-seeing ruler who wanted their obedience was infantile. “Mustn’t let humanity know we exist, or we’ll get coal in our stockings this year,” Loki once said.

  Still, the rules made sense. Tyr was the first to admit that. While the document itself ran wild with ridiculous tall tales, the morals rang true. They had been compiled for good reason and following them was important whether they were enforced by law or not. It was all about keeping themselves hidden. Humans were their prey and if they were made to co-exist with them, the worlds—both mortal and immortal—would enter a state of chaos. It was for this reason fledgling vampires were given guidelines that kept them from exposing themselves. They were not to speak to humans about any details of their personal lives. They were to change their names often, every thirty years or so. But what was really meant to keep them in check, and the place where Tyr lost his confidence, was the big finale: the obligatory religious apocalypse story.

  According to The Augury, a half-breed child would one day be spawned. The offspring of a vampire and a human. The child’s father would be killed and his mother would die in childbirth. The orphan would be taken to the bosom of a female vampire. The two of them, through bitter rage against their own race for the wrongs that had been done to them, would destroy all other vampires before taking their own lives, thus putting an end to the species forever. For these reasons there was a set of rules, seemingly random on first observation, that were to be strictly obeyed by all of them under penalty of torture and death by The Chosen.

  There were to be no female vampires, ever. And as their sex-drives were increased remarkably with their heightened adrenaline and testosterone, they were cautioned to avoid sex whenever possible, and to dispose of the female immediately whenever it occurred—what Loki called “the ultimate birth control.”

  Tyr’s guess was these rules were set in place to stop them from overpopulating their race and thereby keep them in the shadows for as long as possible. Presumably the system had kept them at least mostly-hidden from mankind for thousands of years. If they were to engage in the amount of intercourse they engaged in without the tactics they were using their numbers would have been extravagant, so it was lucky most of their race appeared to obey. In all their time spent breezing about the world they’d come across few vampires, never a female, and they knew nothing of any half-breed child ever having been spawned. The Blood Brothers specifically paid little attention to the rule of avoiding sex whenever possible, but they certainly put the laundry away whenever the cycle was finished.

  It was in aspects like this that a vampire such as Thor became a dangerous thing, and the precise reason a system of boundaries such as The Augury needed to exist. A child of the West, and son of a brothel-owner, Thor was what would be referred to in later years as a sex-addict. In many ways even as a human he’d been a vampire. When the brothers met him he’d been damn near the same as he was now, a 17-year-old hotheaded pretty-boy seated in a brothel and saloon in Tombstone, Arizona circa 1894.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Barkeep!!” a rowdy drunkard was banging his mug on the bar in desperate need of a refill. Belligerence to one another was a given at Al’s, but belligerence to the staff was not, and Al likely would have been personally shooing the drunkard out the door with his six-shooter if not for the man’s rapidly-expanding reputation.

  Al—along with most of the clientele—had seen the paper and was enough a part of the gossip to be aware that Buddy “Fats” McGovan, the red-bearded Irishman banging his mug on the table and swearing up a storm, had shot
Garth Gallagher a week earlier. A former town icon, everyone was aware Gallagher was tough; and so it was nobody’s intention to rile Fats.

  So there was Al, patting him on the back and submitting, trying to calm him down and assure him they were taking special care of him. And there was Fats, waving his hand in Al’s face and cussing at the barkeep between refills of lager he slopped mostly down his face. And there was Michael, son of Al, at a table in a darkened corner of the bar with whores Mindy and Mitsey on either side of him, holding two pairs of playing cards and trying to play it off as four of kind.

  And there was Tyr. And there was Loki. Tyr in his duster, black as pitch, greasy brown hair pulled back and hanging to his shoulders. Loki unshaven for a good three weeks in his off-white vest and his white leather hat fit snuggly over his head and hanging over his eyes to conceal them from the other gamblers.

  Loki loved the American West. He was one for finding enjoyment in any time period that made its way to him. Tyr struggled by comparison, sometimes barely able to let go of ways of the past as time carried them from one era to the next. Loki was always eager for what was new, from language to technology to popular culture. No matter what the times brought, Loki found himself the poster child for the era. Any time, any country, he was always surrounded by fans and praise while Tyr was always stuck wandering around upstage left. Charisma was lifeblood and to have more of it than another was to have the better life. Tyr’s envy over this was as obvious to Loki as it was satisfying.