The Wages of Sin (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book Two) (12 page)

It was Loki, Thor, and Heimdall in the bar, with Tyr
back at the house with his woman as usual. It had taken several
clubs and bars to find one with three attractive girls not
accompanied by men. Considering they were talking about Heimdall’s
first, it was best not to overcomplicate things.

They spotted the three girls, college students
celebrating their Christmas break, and agreed they would suffice.
When they approached, Loki did most of the talking and won them
over with stupid trivia about the meanings of names. Loki ended up
with Erin (whose name was Gaelic and meant ‘peace’), Thor ended up
with Megan (whose name was Irish and meant ‘soft and gentle’), and
Heimdall ended up with Jamie (whose name was unfortunate—too
masculine for women and too effeminate for men, not really suiting
anybody except dainty, homosexual nine-year-old boys).

“
You
are
so
smart,” Erin said to Loki when he told her that her sister
Sarah’s name meant ‘princess.’ Women often told Loki he was
so
smart.

Thor and Megan were engaged in
conversation about Nikola Tesla. Talking to college girls about
Nikola Tesla is another good strategy for getting them to sleep
with you. Nikola Tesla’s first name meant ‘victory of the people.’
He was
so
smart.

Heimdall and Jamie were drinking a lot and not
really sure what they were supposed to talk about, so they mostly
kissed and touched each other.

“I just had my tits done. Do you want to see them?”
This was a rhetorical question. In human history, one would assume,
it had probably only been met with a ‘no’ six or seven times and
always by dainty homosexual boys named Jamie. This Jamie, of
course, was not a homosexual boy, but she did have fake tits to
show to Heimdall, whose name was that of a Norse god who created
social classes. Before his name was Heimdall, it had been Jonathan,
an Israeli name that meant ‘gift from God’.

“S-sure,” Heimdall said in answer to the tit
question.

“Meet me in the bathroom in one minute.”

She got up from the table and left and thirty
seconds later Heimdall announced, “I’m gonna take a piss.”

This was unlikely, as vampires rarely pissed.
Pissing was much more of a human hobby. A vampire’s bloodstream
flowed at a steady pace instead of at a pulse and the blood
functioned differently, absorbing and converting virtually anything
ingested into positive resources for the body. What little was left
was expelled mostly through sweat and breath and any waste that
built up did so for long periods of time. They pissed only once or
twice a year.

At this point, however, it was a possibility that
Heimdall’s body had not fully adjusted to its new circumstances and
his digestive system was purging itself to begin anew. A week
later, Loki might have escorted Heimdall to the bathroom and
supervised the piss so as to be sure a clusterfuck didn’t occur,
but on this night he let it go. This is one reason why the
clusterfuck occurred.

Jamie had to stand in the doorway for a minute and
give Heimdall hand signals to guide him into the bathroom. Fucking
in the bathroom at a crowded club is not a task for amateurs. It is
easy to get caught in the act and forced to go fuck in the parking
lot instead. Thankfully, Jamie was no amateur and was able to find
the right window amid the steady flow of pissers in and out of the
stalls, as well as the bathroom itself, when Heimdall could move
undetected past the sinks and into a stall with her.

“Don’t be too loud,” she whispered to Heimdall once
they were alone. “There’s other people in here.” Actually she
wasn’t whispering so much as shouting less loudly than normal. The
volume of the music, even in the bathroom, could be described as
exorbitant.

They made out for a while next to the toilet and
Jamie screamed, “You’re sexy,” into Heimdall’s ear not quite as
loud as she would have if they were in another part of the
club.

“So are you,” Heimdall screamed back.

“Oh, I’ll show you my tits now.”

“That’d be cool.”

She was wearing a bareback dress that tied around
her neck, so it didn’t take long before it was pulled down to her
waist and her breasts were visible—or at least somewhat visible,
given the poor lighting in the club.

Incidentally, clubs are designed so that none of
your senses work very well—lights so dim you can’t see, music loud
enough you can’t hear, and a steady flow of alcohol to knock out
the other three. This creates an escape from being alive. People
who are in clubs regularly are good candidates for death.

“
They look
real,” Heimdall screamed in Jamie’s ear while looking at her tits.
“Do they feel real?” This question actually meant
‘
Can I touch them?’
and really didn’t need to be asked.

“Feel them.”

Heimdall put his hands on Jamie’s breasts. They felt
like balloons full of JELL-O.

“Wow, so real,” he lied.

They made out some more. He grabbed her ass. She
touched his penis. He sucked her nipples. Yadda-yadda-yadda.

The clusterfuck took place while his mouth was on
her breast and she was stroking his hair and trying to breathe
sexily but loudly enough he could hear. As he licked the skin
around her nipple and felt and tasted the blood under her skin, he
realized the blood was what he wanted, not the body. At that point,
without thinking, he bit into her breast. Not so much the way a man
bites a woman’s breast during foreplay as the way a man bites a
chicken breast during lunch.

Jamie screamed and pushed his head away with both
hands and his teeth pulled a chunk of skin and silicone with him.
She was frantic, crying out and punching and kicking him, trying to
get past him and out of the stall door. Her cries might have been
loud enough for other pissers and shitters to hear, but the sound
would have been faint and the consensus would have been that she
saw a spider.

Jamie flailed and Heimdall wrestled with her until
he got his fangs into her shoulder at the base of her neck, just as
she got the stall door open. They fell from the stall and landed on
the floor with Heimdall on top of her, mouth around her neck, blood
running down his shirt and across her ruined fake tits. A small
audience gathered.

Three women screamed. One of them ran to get
somebody.

Anybody.

Everybody.

Civilian response time is one hell of a lot faster
than police response time, and within sixty seconds the majority of
the patrons in the club were crowding into and around the women’s
bathroom. Loki picked up on this instantly.

“Thor, see to the ladies till I get back.”

This was a code phrase. As quickly as he could, Thor
would invite the girls to get high in a back alley, kill both of
them, and bring the car around. They’d both carried guns tonight,
just in case, so this could be accomplished very quickly.

Loki left the table and pushed past the crowd,
making his way into the bathroom and finding a sight a little worse
than what he was expecting. Heimdall was perched on top of the
naked girl, biting her neck occasionally, licking and slurping her
blood, and snarling at the crowd whenever they got close. Most
people gaped and gawked, but three young men in their late twenties
rushed him, pulled him off the woman, and detained him.

Loki pulled his gun from his coat and pointed it at
Heimdall.

“Don’t move, asshole,” he said, faking a Russian
accent loud enough the crowd could hear it. “You are come back with
us for long time.” Then he talked some more in Russian.

The men holding Heimdall down exchanged glances.
Loki asked them to help as he got Heimdall to his feet, took off
his belt, and used it to tie his hands behind his back, all while
keeping the gun trained on him. He was good with his hands and came
off looking like he was no amateur at handling weapons or placing
people in restraints. He wasn’t, of course.

“I am Alik Lavrov, KGB,” he told the men. “This is
psychiatric patient. More law enforcement will be here soon; they
will tell you what to do.” Alik was a Russian name meaning ‘helper
of man.’ It was a silly name for Loki.

He ducked through the crowd again, this time on his
way out with Heimdall in tow. He told everyone he was KGB and the
man was an escaped psychiatric patient who had fled his native
Russia, that he would be brought back to the ward where he
belonged. None of the Americans understood the situation, but he
presented confidence and authority so they trusted him.

He was out of the building in a minute. Thor was
there to meet him. They put Heimdall in the back seat, got in the
car, and drove off a full twenty minutes before the police arrived,
making decent time as far as police go.

The customers showed them to the body and told them
a guy from the KGB had taken the suspect back to Russia to put him
in a mental ward. They sounded stupid, and not just because they
said it like, “Dude, it was crazy, you know? Like, he said his name
was, um, Alex something—I don’t know, something Russian—and, like,
he said he was taking the guy back to the KGB and shit. I’m like,
‘What? Seriously?’ But, you know, he sounded like he was the real
deal so I’m all, ‘What do I know,’ right?”

The police would put in calls to the KGB and ask if
a guy named Alex detained a cannibal in a club in Las Vegas and
brought him back to Russia to put him in a mental ward. They would
sound equally stupid.

Two other dead women would be found shot to death in
a back alley, their wallets and jewelry stolen. Had they been alive
to tell their side of the story, they would have been key witnesses
since they shared a table with the alleged KGB agent. They were the
only ones in the club who could have told the police he was not
Russian—that he was, in fact, Jack Loki.

But they weren’t alive to tell their side of the
story. They had been killed in a mugging, or maybe in a calculated
assassination of some sort given the friend they were traveling
with had been the one killed by the cannibal in the bathroom. What
it all added up to no one could say, and the police would never
exert much effort finding out. The biggest piece of information
they got was that the assailants were Russians, and so the Brothers
would never be accused of anything.

The incident would, however, have one negative
repercussion for the Brothers, though they would not think much of
it at the time, and that was that it would serve as reason to get
more stories of vampires into the newspapers. Many of the witnesses
said things like, “Man, it was like a fucking vampire, dude. Like,
it was crazy shit,” and this would be enough to earn Heimdall the
moniker of ‘The Vegas Vampire’, or just ‘the vampire’ for some
time. It was the kind of absurd real-life story that got national
news coverage just for being weird. National news coverage was a
bad thing if you were a vampire, and a worse thing if you
associated with vampires who dated women.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

When you are a nineteen-year-old with terminal
cancer in the final stretch of your life, when you’ve had your
family killed before your eyes by vampires as a child, when you’ve
devoted yourself to a man and come to discover he has been seducing
and killing other women for a thousand years and throughout your
relationship, when this same man has tried to kill you and then
begged your forgiveness and you have conceded, when you are in a
state of perpetual fatigue and nausea as your final days count down
and this beautiful vampire stands at your bed and watches you
sleep, it is only natural to find life strange, to question whether
your memory is accurate or if you’re losing you’re mind, to become
exhausted.

“We have to go,” said Tyr when he came into her room
one night.

“What?”

“We can’t stay here anymore. It’s time to go. Can
you walk?”

“Why do we have to go?”

“It’s stupid. Loki wants me to kill you. He thinks
you’re a bad influence on me.”

Eva laughed. “I’m so innocent compared to you.”

“He hates that. To vampires, innocence is like meth.
He thinks you’re getting me hooked.”

“I don’t want to go. I just want to lie here with
you.”

“We can’t do that, Eva. He insists I kill you and if
I don’t, he will. It’s not safe for us here.” This is a powerful
statement and convinces most humans to do practically anything. But
for a dying woman with a vampire for a boyfriend, there is a
disconnect from reality, since all women with vampires for
boyfriends are dying in some form or another.

“I’m sick of being scared. Let’s just lie here till
he comes—”

“No.”

“—and then you can drink my blood. It’s okay with
me, now that I know. I’ve accepted it—”

“We don’t have time for this shit.”

“—I’m ready. I don’t mind. I don’t have anything
else I need to do. I don’t want to run anymore.”

“It isn’t going to happen.”

“Tyr. I’d like to die by your hand. Cancer is ugly.
When you get to Heaven and people ask what happened, who wants to
say cancer? I want to say I died in love. I died in the arms of a
beautiful vampire. It’s extravagant, romantic even.”

“It’s more common than you think. Pack your shit and
let’s go. It’s less than a week till the millennium and I’m going
to make sure you see it.”

“I don’t care about that anymore. That feels
silly.”

The statement that came to mind was ‘Everything that
matters is silly,’ but it sounded like it belonged on a postcard
with a picture of a cat wearing people clothes and Tyr couldn’t say
it. Instead he said, “Eva, I’ll make this easy. Loki and I have
been on thin ice for a long time and as of tonight we’re through.
I’m leaving. If you’re still my girl, I’d really like you to come
with me, but I can’t make that choice for you.”