The Wages of Sin (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book Two) (16 page)

Among them was a young Viking man called Ragnar with
few characteristics more likable than herpes, the kind of man more
interested in torture or rape than in meeting new people. Marching
with a group of four friends near a farm village, he whispered to
them in Old Norse something that translates roughly to, “I want to
get my fuck on. Let’s go get us some English pussy.”

“Fuckin’ ay. I haven’t shot my wad in weeks,” came
the reply, though in Old Norse it sounded slightly more proper and
far more frightening.

Ragnar and his friends broke off from the group and
found their way to the streets of the nearby village. They picked a
house, more or less at random, and broke in. There were three
generations of a serf family in the house, and Ragnar and his group
slaughtered the children and the men and took turns raping the
women before they killed them as well. Ragnar even forced himself
on the fifty-year-old grandmother of the house while two of the
others held her down.

An hour later they had caught up with their group
and their march for York continued as if nothing had happened, the
brutal crime against a family just an aside in their lives, a few
fun minutes to laugh and speak lecherously about on the boat ride
home.

This was the nature of Vikings.

When the Vikings killed Eleanor, Tyr was watching
through the window and the only reason Ragnar and his goons were
allowed to live was because of Odin. Had Odin not been there to
hold Tyr back, spears and axes and fangs would have spilled blood
all night until Eleanor and her family stood over the bodies of
five Viking men. Then, more than likely she would have pointed at
Tyr and screamed ‘Demon!’ and his legend would haunt the village
for years to follow.

Tyr could have lived with that turn of events. It
would have given Eleanor the closure he wished he could give her
when it came to their relationship, and though it wouldn’t end in a
positive light, at least her life with her family would go on
happily. But that sappy story of bloodshed didn’t happen. Instead,
a far less pleasant one took place.

Tyr and Odin were just arriving at the house when
Ragnar kicked open the door. Leaving his spear outside, he drew his
axe and shouted at the family in Old Norse, of which neither Tyr
nor Odin spoke much, but threats sound roughly the same in all
languages.

As Tyr rushed to defend Eleanor and her family, Odin
caught up to him and pulled him to the ground. They rolled and
landed in the grass some fifty meters from the house.

“We have to save her!” shouted Tyr.

“It’s not our place. The world of humans is their
own. This is between them, no matter how painful it is for us.”

Tyr struggled to get up and run, to break free from
Odin’s hold. “I will not stand idly and let these beasts do as they
wish—”

“If you go in there, if the Norse don’t kill you,
you’ll expose us to the family and we’ll have to kill them
ourselves.”

Tyr went limp. “You wouldn’t. She would keep our
secret.”

“I would! This is our relationship to the world. We
only watch. We’re predators in the human world, not saviors, and we
must never try to be.”

“We can help them, Father. We can pull them quietly
to the shadows and fight them in hiding. Or we can draw them out,
lure them to the woods.”

“We will do nothing. We will watch humans behave as
humans do. And that will be all.”

The expression of surrender found its way to Tyr’s
face and Odin released his hold. They stood together and moved
toward the house, this time at a reserved pace with their heads
hung.

For the better part of an hour they watched Ragnar
and his boys stick axes in the chests and necks of children and
women and men. And when Eleanor’s youngest, her sixteen-year-old
son, managed to slice open Ragnar’s face with a knife he took from
the kitchen, Ragnar castrated him with his axe and stepped on his
neck until he stopped breathing.

One woman of each generation was left alive at
first; Eleanor, her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter. The
Vikings took turns on the women and every so often Tyr made a move
to stop them and Odin held him back. When all the men had taken
turns with all the women they cared to take turns with, they
brought the axes down on their necks.

They mimicked the Old English cries of “No,” and
“Please,” and “Save us,” which they did not understand. They
laughed and slapped each other’s backs and said “Dude, that shit
was legit” in Old Norse.

They gathered their axes and their shields and left
the house, where they collected their spears. Then they laughed
like naughty eighteen-year-olds—which was exactly what they
were—and they rushed to catch up with their brethren.

Tyr thought of going after them when they left, but
he rushed into the house with Odin instead. The storm having
passed, the only sounds that remained in the home were of death
rattles and a screaming infant, and the boys rushed between bodies
looking for survivors.

Eleanor was dead and not coming back, in fact her
head was removed completely from her body and had been kicked
across the room. Her body was stripped naked beside the bodies of
the other women who’d gotten the worst of it and they were as dead
as she.

Other than the unharmed infant, whom the Brothers
ignored for the time being, the only survivor was a ten-year-old
boy, the son of Eleanor’s eldest daughter. He’d been struck in the
side with an axe and his eyes were glassy in the throes of death,
but he was breathing and seemed vaguely conscious of Tyr’s presence
when Tyr knelt over him.

“Black roses,” said the boy, perhaps stuck in an old
memory. “They had black roses.”

And then he died.

The infant was a girl, and so the Brothers left her
on the steps of the church. A boy they might have raised to become
one of them, but the Augury made perfectly clear that this was not
an option with the female gender. Left there on the steps, the baby
would be found in a few hours and looked after, even if the
murdered family should go unnoticed for a few days. She wailed as
they carried her through town and she wailed in front of the church
and Tyr thought she’d wail all night and he didn’t blame her.

Better than ever he understood his place was no
longer in the mortal world. This was mortal life, subtle and
ignorant and over too quickly. And if he gave it value in his mind
it would only cause him pain. That was all he felt now—rage and
grief and pain, all over humans behaving as humans do. Humans being
human. Killing and raping. As they do. As they have done. As they
will do.

Part of him cried out for revenge, but the prospect
was hopeless. Marching with thousands of other soldiers, it would
be a miracle to find those particular Vikings again. The tale of
Eleanor was over. And it ended with chilling words that ran through
Tyr’s head night after night for days.

“Black roses. They had black roses.”

Tyr didn’t feel like killing English women anymore.
When a few days had gone by and his thirst was getting to be too
much, he didn’t want to return to the village and take some poor
woman out of her house and do to her what the Vikings had done to
Eleanor. The memory was too recent. The beheadings. The rapes. The
black roses.

He thought he’d rather starve than kill another
innocent woman out of that village, but he didn’t have to starve.
The coast was barely five miles away, and that was the direction
from which the Vikings had come. He couldn’t bear the guilt of
killing an English serf, but by God he could cope with having
killed a Viking soldier. He could enjoy it, even.

He brought his sword and a bow and set out walking
and found the dragonboats as soon as he got to shore. Dozens of
them. Two men from each ship stayed behind to ensure no harm came
to it. The ships were all beached close together, so the Vikings
standing guard were a small army. They paced the shoreline in front
of their respective boats, and some sat on the gunwales and smoked
pipes and sharpened their spears. They’d built a fire on the beach
where they were cooking some animal or another and they were eating
and laughing and making foul jokes about the English as soldiers
will do in wartime.

Tyr stayed back at the tree line and watched for
some time. He was forty meters off, but couldn’t get closer without
risking being seen. He readied an arrow and drew back the string of
his bow, doing his best to take aim at the crowd gathered around
the fire.

The arrow struck a Viking boy in the neck, a boy in
his late teens who’d come to England hoping to make his first kill
and who instead earned the ultimate Viking honor of dying in
battle. Before he’d hit the ground a few Viking soldiers had stood
up and begun running for the trees with their spears in hand. In a
few seconds, after the rest of them had processed what was
happening, a large portion of the group ran with them.

“Stop! Wait!” shouted an older Viking man. “They’re
trying to draw us out, to attack our ships.” He selected five
soldiers to look for the archer on top of the five or so who had
already taken it upon themselves. The rest of the men stayed back
and hoped not to be hit with arrows.

The woods were dark and the search was hopeless.
They yelled for the archer and swung their weapons at shapes they
thought might have been him.

Tyr, on the other hand, could see fine. Every few
minutes he came up behind another soldier and stabbed him through
the heart. He did this repeatedly until all but one of the soldiers
were dead, and he disarmed the last one and stood in front of
him.

“I am surrender,” the Viking said in an attempt at
English.

Tyr smiled a mouthful of fangs and the Viking
shouted a Nordic word that meant “monster” before Tyr bit into his
neck and drank until the Viking’s pulse stopped completely.

Having fed, he could have turned and gone. The walk
home would take at least two hours and the sun would be rising in
five. But he’d come all the way here and the killing was masking
the pain he’d felt since Eleanor’s death, so he stepped out of the
woods and fired a second arrow into the Viking camp.

This cycle repeated several times, Tyr killing
roughly ten by sword and one by arrow in groups as the number of
Viking soldiers steadily fell. When there were only two dozen
soldiers or so remaining, they rushed the woods, shouting and
swinging their weapons, some of them carrying torches they’d taken
from the fire. Some stood back to back and Tyr fired arrows at
their heads from the dark. Some spun in circles as they walked and
he let them see his face just before he cut their throats.

He gathered their torches, and when only one Viking
soldier was left wandering in the dark, he stopped hunting and let
the man see what happened next. He took the torches to the camp and
placed the first one in a dragonboat and kicked the boat out to
sea. Then he did the same thing with a second boat and a third and
a fourth.

In twenty minutes, when the confused Viking soldier
came out of the woods and back to the beach, there were lights on
the ocean. The ships were burning—some far out at sea, some washed
up on the shore. At least ten of their ships were pillars of flame
reflected by the ocean’s water.

“No!” screamed the Viking warrior and with his spear
in front of him he ran at Tyr, at the one man who had
singlehandedly executed all the friends who had held this post with
him, who was now in the process of setting fire to the thirty boats
they’d been asked to protect, the transportation home for a good
1,500 of his countrymen.

Tyr parried the spear with his sword and grabbed the
Viking’s neck in his right hand.

“What are you?” he asked. “You come to our country,
kill our children, rape our women, for what? Power? Property?
Recreation? I slay you now and burn your ships for a reason your
culture should understand. For sport.”

“We’re here on orders, most of us,” said the
terrified Viking in surprisingly strong English. “We’re not here to
cause harm, not by our own desire. We’re here because our leaders
have taken arms against your leaders. We’re small people like you,
dying for the greed of greater men. Please spare me.”

Tyr growled. He took away the Viking’s weapons and
threw them into a ship. Then he dropped a torch in the ship and
sent it to sea.

The Viking fell on his knees and sobbed. He watched
Tyr gather more torches from the fire and drop them into the
remaining boats, going about business until only a few more sat
onshore.

Maybe that’s what I’ll do,
Tyr thought.
Maybe I’ll
find all the camps where these bastards have housed their ships,
destroy every last one of the damned things, trap them here in my
country and spend the next few years hunting them. Why not? It’ll
give me something to do with eternity. Maybe I’ll even go to their
country and keep the job going. Maybe as long as their people last,
I can—

He stopped in front of one of the last few
dragonships, a torch in his hand. He stopped breathing or thinking
and stood in shock. He dropped the torch in the ocean instead of
into the boat.

He looked into the distance in the vague direction
of Eleanor’s home, lost in memory. Then he rushed to the Viking who
was kneeling on the sand in front of him and took away his shield.
It was an unremarkable shield, wooden, with sections of black and
red like four squares off a checkerboard.

But the Viking who killed Eleanor, the one who’d led
the massacre of her family, he’d had a different shield. There was
an emblem on it he’d painted himself. The same emblem that was on
the dragonboat sitting here on the shore. The boat had been given a
name, and it was painted on the side in Nordic, and Tyr thought he
might have understood the language well enough to figure it out on
his own, but the drawing was enough to make it clear
regardless.