Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers) (14 page)

He tugged his lips away and fell onto his back, rolling on the floor in pleasure and ecstasy. His breaths came deep, strong, and fast and he tried to calm his nerves and wind down from this climax. He tried to regain his composure, to relax and breathe.

But he didn’t have to breathe.

All the same, his impulses and his instinct seemed to want to. And if Tyr said it was important, then it was just as well.

The whiskey spilling forth from the keg had lacquered the floor of the whole cellar. It was Tyr’s idea to spill more of it and they spent the next twenty minutes clearing out the bar, emptying kegs, throwing bottles, and soaking every inch of the furniture. They danced and chanted old Irish drinking songs and Loki downed more liquor than he threw but there was more than enough to be wasteful.

When every inch of the bar was marinated in ethanol and the smell was nauseating and intoxicating they stepped out onto the balcony and lit their cigars.

“Do you have any recollection of your mortal life?” Tyr asked Thor, who was already far more aware than he had been half an hour ago.

Thor shook his head no. It wasn’t entirely true but any memories were too dim to be put into words so he left it at this.

“Well you worked with your dad,” Tyr told him, striking a match and lighting the tip of his stogie. “He runs a brothel. Competes with this one. That guy in there you drained, the dog, he ran this place. With it out of the way, your father can be a rich man and it seems to me, maybe he deserves it. Now I can’t say for sure what manner a person he is and neither can you, I guess, but it’s really all the same either way.”

Tyr struck another match and set the rest of the matchbook ablaze with it.

“For Loki and me to keep up appearances, this building has to burn. You, you’re gonna have to stay in the shadows for a little while and maybe change your appearance. Pretty shortly we’ll be getting out of Tombstone and you’ll never look back on any of this. So all I’m asking really is this: shall I set this building on fire, or would you like to do the honors?”
 

Thor hadn’t much recollection of his father or the man he had been, but destruction came naturally. He took the matchbook from Tyr’s hand, lit his own cigar, and said, “I christen this bar The Firewood Saloon.”

He tossed the matchbook through the window. The three of them watched, firelight on their faces as the flames explored the den, riding the rapids in the alcohol down the stairs, tearing the curtains, spraying forth sparks from the wiring on the lamps. In minutes the place was a crematorium.

Even Loki or Tyr couldn’t be certain how much danger fire was to them. No doubt they could be killed if obliterated to ash, but such was not likely to happen by accident. Nevertheless, they didn’t like its presence any closer than a few feet away. Much like bullets or blades, even when it was doing no permanent harm to their bodies, it hurt like a bitch. So when the flames had licked every room and started in on making love to the brothel as a whole, it was time to go.

Thor followed without fear when his newfound Brothers leapt from the balcony and landed softly on the boardwalk below. They walked casually into the night as the first members of a crowd were beginning to gather.

And with the torch that was Cherrywood, the night in Tombstone glowed brighter than it ever had before. People from all over town came out of their houses and pointed and gaped as the walls and the roof tumbled down. Some of them rushed with buckets of water and tried vainly to stop the burning, while others stood dumbly as humans are want to do.

The boys watched from a perch in the shadows at the end of the street, smiling as it toppled upon itself, no doubt charring the bodies inside so no one would ever learn what really happened there that night. And as he watched the crowd of onlookers grow larger, and larger, and larger; it was a source of disappointment for Loki that he couldn’t join them and throw his arms around perfect strangers as he sang songs and danced in the light of The Firewood Saloon.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Usually when Tyr pulled up to Eva’s house, she would be sitting on the front porch and waiting for him eagerly. If not, she would come running out to the car before he could even shut the engine off. On this night, there was no such luck. He spent a few minutes sitting in the car and waiting before he shut it off and went to the front door.

He didn’t have a good feeling about this. He had expected tonight she would be more excited than ever to see him here, arriving to take her away for good this time. But no. Here he was knocking at the front door for the first time in weeks.

It wasn’t Eva who answered the door, either. It was Aimee.

“Oh, hi Tyr,” she said.

“Hi. Is Eva here?”

“No, she left like fifteen minutes ago. We had kind of a fight.”

Of course. That made sense. She had been impatient already to get back to Tyr’s loving arms and her bitch roommate had exacerbated the situation by being a bitch.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Tyr said, pretending not to think she was a bitch. “So she took a cab then?”

“I don’t know.”

She did. That was the logical explanation. A rare moment of Tyr’s life when he had the chance to be romantic, to sweep a girl off her feet with love instead of lust, and Aimee the bitch had ruined it. That’s what happened.

“Shit. Um… All right. I guess I’ll head back home then.”

“Sorry.”

Tyr started to turn back to his car when a thought occurred. He might have let it go, but under the circumstances it felt like the right thing to do.

“Aimee,” he said, getting excited already. “This might sound a bit weird, but… can I buy you a drink?”

Tyr ripped open the flesh on Aimee’s throat at the moment of orgasm, deliberately making the gash a lot larger than it needed to be. He had carefully plotted to face her back to his front at the height of sex with both of them on their knees. It was difficult to achieve this position in her Honda but vampires were quite flexible and, thankfully, so was Aimee.

This way when he tore open her neck, less of the blood sprayed onto him—as he was wearing a shirt he particularly liked and had been too lazy to take off. This position also gave the added bonus of having the blood spray up to soak everything in front of her. It was interesting to watch the facial expressions humans made when looking at an object being drenched in blood that belonged in their bodies. There was a wholesome humor to it.

Aimee was a worse person than he had realized. He expected he would have to put forth a lot of convincing to get her out of her clothes, given she knew her terminally ill roommate was head over heels in love with him. But after five drinks, Aimee offered to suck him off in the parking lot before he had even had the chance to turn his charm up to eleven.

Initially he had taken her out tonight because he thought Eva would have wanted it that way, but when he killed her he felt he was doing it as much for himself as he was for her. The type of girl so easily willing to betray a friend whose circumstances were already as unfortunate as Eva’s was the type of person who Tyr felt he was doing a service to the world in killing. Of course, this didn’t stop him from thoroughly enjoying the pleasures of her nether-regions beforehand.
 

After taking a moment to come down from the euphoria, he had to dispose of the body. It was annoying to know Eva was at his house and he couldn’t use the incinerator tonight, but he reminded himself it wouldn’t be long now until everything went back to how it had been. For the moment, he would have to make due using the world to dispose of bodies. Really, what was the difference? He’d had a thousand years to master this art.

He placed her body in the driver’s seat and didn’t bother with the seatbelt, then he fired up the ignition and took a deep breath. This was an uncomfortable way to get rid of a person, but it was a simple and effective one.

Shifting his weight from the passenger’s side of the car, he stepped on the accelerator and picked up speed, blaring down the road at a hazardous pace. He reached over with his left hand to steer, keeping the car centered in their own lane until they reached ninety miles per hour—more than enough to kill a human.

At this point he swung the wheels of the car first a little to one side, then fully to the other. As the tires slid and the car lost traction, he slammed his foot down on the brake pedal and locked the wheels in place. When the car faced perpendicular to the street on which they were traveling, the wheels binding it to the road caught the asphalt and the momentum swung the car upward and into a roll. Tyr and Aimee were now the passengers of a crashing vehicle driven by a woman whose blood-alcohol level was well over the legal limit. Quite frankly, she should not have been driving and it was lucky her mistake had led to her own demise and not the demise of some innocent stranger.

Tyr pressed his hands to the roof and door of the car, holding himself snugly in place while being careful not to exert so much force as to bend the vehicle in suspicious ways.

When the car stopped rolling, he climbed out swiftly. He was pleased to see it had not yet burst into flames and his shirt had sustained little damage aside from a few droplets of blood that had spattered onto his chest during the roll.

Damn,
he thought,
should have thought of that when I ripped her throat open so far.
 
That’ll teach me.

He put the shirt in his mouth and did his best to suck the little spots of blood out of it as he walked back to his house.

It was a happy moment, in spite of the shirt.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“What’s in the box?” Loki asked Eva when they arrived back at Tyr’s house.

Tyr wasn’t home. She and Loki had taken a seat in the parlor. She was drinking a glass of water and Loki a glass of wine. The box was sitting on a coffee table between them.

“Oh, just a few things I wasn’t ready to part with yet.” She moved the box into her lap and fidgeted with its contents. “A couple notebooks of stuff I wrote when I was younger, my diary, some pictures of my parents. You know.”

“Family’s important,” said Loki, casually pushing the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go. “You haven’t got family, you haven’t got anything.”

“Um… Yeah,” said Eva, grief in her voice.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Loki, having gotten the exact reaction he expected. “Family’s not a happy story for you?”

Eva sighed. “It’s okay. I uh… I just don’t really have any family anymore.”

“Oh. Oh, wow, I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s fine. Really. I didn’t even really get to know them.”

Loki was grinning to himself, having more or less confirmed his suspicions.

“Do you mind if I ask what happened?”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of a sad story. Maybe it should wait for another time.”

“I don’t mind,” Loki said sincerely, coming off far more compassionate than he was or ever had been. “I’d like to hear it.”

Eva choked out the words Loki had been waiting for, “Do you know what The Amtrak Massacre was?”

Of course Loki knew what it was. He led the damn thing.
 

“I’ve read about it,” he said, hating not to give himself the credit he deserved. “They were on the train?”

“So was I,” said Eva. “I was the only survivor.”

Loki nodded and rubbed her back. Bingo. Everything was just as he thought it was. She was the girl. The survivor. The lucky bitch didn’t know it, but she had Tyr to thank for that.

“Commence the plans,” Loki had said. And a few hours later they were standing on a ridge in the Nevada desert outside Reno, overlooking the countryside where a train track ran across the flat, open sand.

There were lights from the train out in the distance, and the low, mechanical churning of the engine could just barely be heard moving toward them. The three of them were smoking cigars and Loki was whistling the theme from
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
as they waited.

They were dressed like cowboys, just for kicks, and they wrapped bandannas around their faces from the nose down like they had done a lifetime ago. It seemed to add to the theatrics of a bunch of psychotic men stealing money from helpless bastards riding through the desert for pleasure. It was mostly rich folks who rode trains these days. Loki was wearing white leathers like he had back in the day, though they’d all long since discarded their garments of the past. It was more trouble than it was worth to hang on to stuff like that. Tyr, likewise, was dressed in his usual black and Thor had gone with brown so the three could remain individuals and indicate each other in front of the passengers—‘Hey Brown, throw me that gun’, ‘Check out the tits on this one, Black’, etc.

The train loomed closer, the volume of the churning metal heightening with their anticipation. And when the train was finally in view, they threw back the kickstands on their motorcycles and roared their Harley Davidsons, racing down the ridge and into the desert to chase down the beast.