The Wages of Sin (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book Two) (14 page)

The lovers paid him no mind.
Heimdall—
Jonathan
—had spent most of his life chasing literary fame,
daydreaming about champagne galas and yachts and interviews with
award-winning journalists. This moment spent kissing a Wendy’s
employee at three in the morning had never been on his bucket list,
but he thought it damn well should have been.

Thor strolled through the courtyard of a cheap
apartment complex.

“Oh Heimdall,” he called, more for his own amusement
than anything.

If it hadn’t been for Thor’s love of the Suzuki,
finding Heimdall might have been a much longer, more painstaking
task. As it happened, six months ago the Suzuki had been stolen
outside a club. He could have bought another one, but the principle
of the thing upset him and it took two weeks for Thor to track down
the thief and teach him not to steal from vampires. Following the
incident, he’d made future thefts easier on himself by installing a
tracking bug.

Heimdall’s taking the Suzuki was a happy coincidence
and Thor was able to track its location to within a few hundred
meters, somewhere near the public library. He’d circled the area in
Lady MacBeth for a while before he spotted the bike in the parking
lot of this complex, then he’d parked his gorgeous piece of
machinery with the other junk.

He pressed his ear to a door and listened for voices
inside.

The situation looked far better than the horrific
possibilities for which he’d prepared himself. Given Heimdall’s
outburst last night, Thor was prepared for a massacre in a college
sorority or a standoff with police baffled by his survival of
multiple bullets to the head, but the complex was quiet and
peaceful and Thor could only assume Heimdall had wizened up and
pulled off a successful drain.

Hearing nothing, Thor walked away from the door and
moved on.

“Heimdall…”

He circled the courtyard, peeking in windows and
listening at doors. The son of a bitch was here somewhere.

When she arrived home early from work, Jewel’s two
female roommates said little to Heimdall before he got her in a
room by herself, since from what they’d witnessed she spent little
time with men and claimed to have lost the interest of the only one
she’d cared about, and they were glad to see her bringing anybody
at all back to the apartment. Having giggled in his face as young
women have done for generations to the unexpected male visitors of
friends, they scurried out of the apartment on platform feet,
heading into the night and leaving the lovebirds to do as they
would with the apartment.

Jewel tried to apologize for the fact that she had
been at work, to explain that she had been released from jail only
a few hours ago and not been able to find somebody to take over her
shift. She explained that she wanted to be out looking for him but
she didn’t know where to look and she couldn’t go back to that
house alone at night and she knew it was terrible to say it but she
couldn’t lose her job, and on, and on. Heimdall told her to forget
it, that if she hadn’t been at work, he never would have found
her.

“How did you get out of there?” she asked. “I felt
so bad running off when you were all alone and I told the cops, but
they wouldn’t listen to me. How did you find your way out?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Heimdall,
which wasn’t a lie but wasn’t the whole truth either. The fact was,
the few days immediately preceding his transformation were the one
part of his memory that was still hazy.

“Are they dead? The guys who kidnapped you? Are all
of them dead?”

“Let’s just avoid the subject,” said Heimdall again,
and based on the way Jewel embraced him after he said it, he
assumed it worked for one reason or another.

“I’m so glad you’re alive.”

“Me too,” said Heimdall, not really sure what the
sentence meant.

They sat on the bed and held each other for some
time before Heimdall kissed her. She didn’t make a move to resist,
and based on what he’d read about her in his diary and the letter,
he’d been afraid she might. They tasted each other in the quiet
room for some time.

“I’m sorry for the terrible things I said in that
e-mail. I didn’t realize the horrible thing you were going
through.”

“It’s okay. I just… I’ve missed you.” He kissed her
again.

In a moment the two of them were lying together on
the bed and his hand found its way inside her blouse and unlatched
her bra the way his muscle memory told him to. His instincts took
over and they ended up free of clothes and tangled in each other’s
arms.

She pushed him down and climbed on top, her nails in
his chest as she moved her body and rolled her eyes back in her
head and panted.

He ran his hands up her body and felt her sweat
running down the creases between his fingers. The warmth of her
skin. The blood just beneath it.

He wanted it. The blood. He wanted to bite into her
and taste it again, like he had the woman last night. But he
couldn’t. Not Jewel.

Could he?

He leaned up and put is mouth on her neck as she
continued to move. He felt his canines protruding. The pulse of her
jugular vein.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

He did everything he could not to bite down. To
taste without drinking. He pressed his mouth down hard, his lips
and tongue against her carotid artery. He felt the heat from it.
The beat against his lips.

And then he couldn’t help himself anymore. His body
would hold back no longer. He gritted his teeth and the flesh took
over. He gasped.

“Oh Christ,” she said. “Did you come in me?”

He nodded.

“Jon. God damn it. Without a condom? You could have
warned me.”

She got up and went to the bathroom to rinse
everything out with water, as though it would do any good. She
couldn’t afford to be pregnant and neither could he. Even if they
were normal it would have been a problem, but pregnancy was a
potential health risk for a diabetic and an enormous health risk
when the baby was half vampire.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

“So you’re going to kill me?” Eva asked when Loki
entered her room. “For all your time together and the Brotherhood
you two talk about, you’re so unlike him.”

“He’s unlike himself lately, more human than does
him any good. But he is like me. Normally he is.”

“Maybe he can grow and you can’t.”

Loki laughed and took a seat at the foot of the bed.
“You know what amazes me about humans? Your capacity to forgive. I
think you’re better at it than I am and I’ve been around a long
time. What is it you see in him that makes up for the monster?”

“What do you see in yourself that makes up for the
monster?”

“Well, my perspective is different—I’m a higher
being. Humans are… tiny, insignificant little things here to
nourish me, like chickens are for you. But from your perspective,
Tyr’s a killer, just like me. And ever since you’ve been together
he’s been screwing and killing every woman he could get his hands
on. From where I’m standing, that’s his nature. But from where
you’re standing, how are you able to accept that? How do you allow
yourself to love someone who killed your parents?” Her face went
blank and her spirit broke the way he knew it would. He gave a
little laugh. “Oh. You didn’t know that part.”

“It was you…”

“It was the three of us. But if memory serves, he
fired the shot that hit Daddy’s head. I wondered why you let that
go; now I know. See, that’s the other way humans impress me—their
capacity for self-delusion.”

“But… He saved me. He saved me from… you and
Thor.”

“That’s probably true too. These wonderful years of
cancer and poverty might never have been yours without him. But,
well… I don’t know how well you remember the Great Train Robbery,
but what actually happened was this: We rounded up all the
passengers and took them to the back car, but you eluded us. You
were hidden away. And Tyr was the one who found you. Everything
didn’t go to hell until he brought you back to the baggage car with
the rest of us, and it was our little quarrel over you that got
everybody killed.

“Like I said, I don’t make apologies for what I am
and I have no delusions about my morality from a human
perspective—and especially from the perspective of a human like
you. Without me, your parents and all those other passengers would
still be alive today—I’ll grant that. But it’s also true that if
Tyr had just left you where he’d found you, if he came back and
said ‘Looks good, guys. There’s nobody else in the train,’ well…
then you’d be dying under the care of Mommy and Daddy today instead
of locked up in a house with a bunch of goddamn vampires.”

“You’re lying to me. I don’t believe you. You’re
trying to break me.”

“No, I’m not lying to you. I’m being one hundred
percent honest. And as far as breaking you is concerned, I’m not
worried about it. You can believe me, or you can exercise that
self-delusion I was marveling at and it doesn’t make a difference
from my perspective. Whether I kill you now or the cancer does it
next week, you’re in the same place you’d be if we left you on that
train and let it crash into the station. And Tyr will get over you.
He’s had crushes before—maybe not this extreme, but crushes
nonetheless—and when the girls die he’s always back to robbing
trains and seducing showgirls a few weeks later. All I’m interested
in is understanding your species. You’re interesting to me.”

Eva held back tears. She turned her head toward the
wall and said, “I hate you, Loki. More than I’ve ever hated
anything.”

Loki laughed. “I get that a lot.”

“Just kill me. If that’s what you’re here to do,
then do it. Otherwise leave me the fuck alone.”

“I get no joy from killing without sex, and I don’t
think you and I are likely to get it on, so you don’t have to worry
about death coming from me. It’ll be the cancer that gets you.” He
stood up. “But I do have a present to give you, and it comes with a
story, so I’ll get this out of the way before I go.

“I’m not sure how educated you are, but if you’re
not a complete idiot you’ve probably heard of Eva Braun. You and
Miss Braun have more in common than a first name. You were both
romantically linked to men who killed by the thousands. Your beau
is Tyr. Hers was a fellow by the name of Adolph Hitler, who I call
Addie.

“Now Miss Braun wasn’t a real political girl and she
didn’t necessarily agree with everything Addie did, but she stood
by him because she loved him. And much like Tyr, Addie didn’t
commit to the relationship as much as the lovely Miss Braun might
have liked—I’m assuming this much when it comes to you, because
Tyr’s supposed to kill anybody he fucks and it wouldn’t be like him
to break that rule, so in my mind there had to be a point when you
wanted it and he wouldn’t give it to you. Am I right?”

Eva said nothing. She made like she wasn’t
listening, but she couldn’t help it.

“Well, in a lot of ways Miss Braun wasn’t happy with
her life. She tried to kill herself more than once, because Addie’s
love was all she ever wanted out of life but he kept her hidden
away. You see, he knew his power was seductive and he wanted all
the women of Germany eye-fucking him everywhere he went, the same
way all the women of the world quite literally fuck Tyr everywhere
he goes.

“In her case, she had family around, at least—you
can’t really relate on that note—but you both felt like you drew
the shit-stained spoon when it came to life. Once again, I’m
assuming you feel that way because—well, because you did.

“The last few days of the lovely Miss Braun’s life,
I imagine, were bittersweet. The Red Army was closing in and she
and Addie were in the capital and outside forces were inevitably
getting ready to break up that sweet relationship the way the Big C
is getting ready to break up yours. So, in the last few hours they
were alive, Addie made her Mrs. Hitler. And they went up to their
marital bed and the next day at breakfast, boom! Addie puts a gun
to the side of his head the way Tyr did tonight when he ran off
with you.

“
And Eva Hitler,
formerly Eva Braun—just
before
all this, I’d imagine, if
Hitler was half the man I think he was—she took a kill-pill. A
cyanide capsule.” Loki held up a pea-sized capsule and set it on
the bedside table. “Now in your case, Tyr’s already more or less
shot himself—he didn’t have the compassion Hitler had to wait till
you were out of the picture. But whether you want to wait it out
and die by the hand of your god or whether you want to take matters
into your own hands, that’s a decision I leave up to you. Bite into
that bad boy and you’re brain dead in a couple minutes. In my mind,
that beats capture by the proverbial Red Army. But, Miss Braun, I
leave your fate up to you.”

Loki spun on his heels and left the room.

Eva looked away from the pill. She let the barriers
in her eyes break and the tears finally came. She hated to give
Loki any credit at all, but the memories had come back as he was
talking. Tyr had killed her dad right in front of her when she was
six years old. He’d helped to massacre every person on that train.
He’d saved her life, but did it matter? The best thing about her
sad, pathetic life had been a man who’d murdered and stolen and
ruined the lives of new families and friends every night for a
thousand years, a man who was out killing and fucking while she lay
dying in a room and struggling to stay alive to be with him, a man
who’d murdered her parents and lied about it to spare himself.

It was true. She’d been Eva Braun. And all of a
sudden she was Eva Braun without the delusional love.

CHAPTER
TWENTY