Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers) (17 page)

He dropped to his knees in pain at the edge of the car and looked down at the tracks. Behind him, Loki was readying a second shot, but out there the little girl had a chance—at least, she did if she was as strong as he hoped she was. And if she wasn’t, well, maybe she didn’t deserve to live anyway.

Tyr leaned forward and rolled out onto the tracks, holding Eva as tightly as he could without killing her. There was a moment of profound silence when their bodies were in the air. A grown man clutching a little girl, wrapping his arms around her to keep her safe. The two of them floating through the air embracing one another. A connection of security and an unspoken love.

And then there was pain. Wood and steel, bolts ripping into flesh, hard edged objects pounding into Tyr’s flesh and bones. He tried his best to keep himself on the receiving end of all of the pounding and cutting.
I can take it. My body will heal. Don’t let the little girl get hurt. She will grow up to be something wonderful. Just help her through this one situation.

When they stopped rolling, Thor was standing over them with his Uzi in his hand.

“Come on, Brown,” Tyr begged. “Don’t let Loki force your hand. She won’t remember. Just trust me.”

Thor had killed the last passenger. His job was done. He hadn’t left the train to kill little Eva. That had been Loki’s job. Still, he wondered what the right decision was.

“Why?” Thor asked Tyr. “Why does she matter?”

“She’s strong,” Tyr answered. “She’ll grow up to be the kind of woman you long for but never find. We’re just... letting the little fish go so we can catch the big one later. When she’s a little older I want her to be mine.”

Thor laughed and put his hand out to Tyr. Tyr took it and Thor pulled him to his feet. He set Eva on the ground next to him and hugged Thor, always one to understand. He leaned down next to Eva.

“Eva. I need you to listen to me.”

She was crying and didn’t acknowledge him.

“Eva, I know you’re rattled, but I really need you to listen. Are you listening?”

She didn’t speak, but she nodded.

“Okay, Eva,” Tyr said. “You have to run. Run for those rocks over there. Just hide there. Someone will help you. It might take a long time. But someone will come. I promise. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Eva.

“Good girl. Now go.”

With that, Eva ran for cover behind the rocks in the distance. She was well out of sight by the time Loki had jumped out of the train, recovered from his roll, and run down the tracks to catch up to them.

“Where is she, Tyr?” he screamed.

“Gone,” Tyr told him. “I’m going to drain her in a few more years. When it’s worth it.”

Loki struck him, sending him flying back onto the tracks. Thor just stood and watched, letting them work out their conflict without interference as usual.

“Where the fuck is she!?”

“Do whatever you want, Loki. She’s gone. You can’t have her.”

Loki was furious. He tried to fire the shotgun into Tyr’s face out of frustration, but he was out of shells and spent a few seconds beating him with it instead. He would have persisted in finding the girl, either by scouting the area or by beating Tyr further, but morning was only a few hours away and having leapt from the train, they still had a few miles to walk before they would be safe from the daylight.

Loki didn’t speak to Tyr until they were back at the loft, at which point he tossed him into the tables and pounded on him until Tyr left the group for good. Little Eva had poisoned their brotherhood and The Great Train Robbery of 1986 had not been as great as all the hype.

That night, an anonymous call was placed to the police department stating a little girl needed help eight miles outside of Reno along the Amtrak railroad track. There had been some sort of massacre on one of the trains during which the engineer had been shot. The train had traveled at full speed into the station, colliding with another train and killing two-dozen people on top of at least seventeen murdered passengers. Somehow a little girl had escaped the train, perhaps at the will of sympathetic thieves. She suffered mild delirium and told fantastic stories of monsters attacking the passengers.

By the time a few years had passed, Eva didn’t dwell on it anymore. She had present problems and the monsters who killed her parents had never shown up in her life again. Maybe she’d just been scared. A girl her age was not meant to witness such brutality. Maybe her young mind hadn’t been able to take it. It didn’t matter. Her parents were dead and some things would never be answered. By the time she was diagnosed with cancer, The Amtrak Massacre wasn’t something she ever thought of anymore.

But true to his word, Tyr had tracked the girl down thirteen years later to kill her. At least, he had planned to. He was mistaken to have thought his desire to protect her was something that would wear off in time.

Sitting across from Eva in the living room, Loki had it all figured out.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When Tyr opened the door and came into his living room, Eva was sitting down and watching the television. As he entered, she jumped up excitedly and said, “Hey, baby. Where have you been?”

“Well, I went to pick you up, and you weren’t there and I got tied up… uh…”

Tyr’s eyes moved to the kitchen as he noticed not only that the light was on, but he could see the shadow of another person moving about within.

Eva was hugging him now. As she kissed him on the cheek, he said in a terrified voice, “Who else is here?”

“What?” asked Eva. There was suddenly a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

As the shadow drew nearer to the doorway and the figure approached, Tyr realized he already knew the answer. He wanted it to be Thor, or the Butcher, or the police, even Ofeigr himself to whom he could attempt to explain his actions and rectify his mistakes. But he knew the shadow in the kitchen, and it wasn’t the shadow of any of those people.

He grabbed tightly to Eva, ready to protect her from whatever was to come.

 
“Hello brother,” Loki said cheerily when he stepped into the room. “You didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend.”

Tyr lit a cigarette and Loki lit a cigar. They had excused themselves from Eva stating they had catching up to do, and they were now on top of the empty building Loki’s business partners had spent the last few months erecting. Thor had arrived to meet them as well, putting the three of them in the same place for the first time in over a decade.

“I can’t believe it’s taken you this long to track me down,” Tyr said.

Loki sneered. “Track you down? I never gave a shit about tracking you down. I know you. You’ve got to run off and do your own thing now and then. I respect that.”

Tyr shook his head in gentle disbelief. What about the impaling? Did he respect that too? And what about Eva? When was the fury coming?

“She’s almost my type,” Loki mused. “’Cept for the fuckin’ cancer, you know? Takes away that healthy girl glow. You know the way healthy girls glow? Chicks with cancer look more like a muted fart.”

Thor laughed quietly at Loki’s insensitivity. Tyr didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t about to start a fight with Loki over a few course words about his girlfriend. If talking shit about her was Loki’s way of allowing Tyr to be his own person while still feeling like he was asserting his dominance, Tyr was ready to accept that.

 
“She didn’t really look like that when I met her,” he said. “I’ve kind of watched it happen.”

Loki couldn’t hold back anymore. He grabbed Tyr and put him in a brotherly chokehold, smiling as he did it. Tyr was ready to fight back, thinking the two were finally about to settle their score, before he recognized it as a playful gesture of affection and discovered maybe there was no score to settle after all.

While Loki held him in a headlock, Thor punched him a few times in the spirit of horsing around with a sibling. Without even a minor confrontation, the three of them were instantly Brothers again, as though there had never been an ounce of bad blood between them.

“My crazy bastard brother,” Loki said struggling to breathe through his laughter. “He keeps her around and watches her suffer for months.”

Tyr forced a laugh.

“You always were the shittier gambler, Tyr,” Loki was still laughing his ass off, bellowing that car horn as loud as ever. “Back on that train you were about ready to kill me over her, talkin’ about how fuckin’ perfect she was going to be when she grew up and she’s not even gonna fuckin’ grow up at all! She looks like a fuckin’ crack whore!”

“Calm down, man. Calm down,” said Thor.

“It’s all right,” Tyr told him. “Don’t worry.”

 
“When are you going to kill her?” Loki asked, suddenly very serious.

“Soon,” said Tyr, a little surprised at how true the statement sounded when it came out of him. “Probably tonight.”

“Couldn’t be a bad idea; she’s not getting any hotter,” Loki said, laughing at his own words again. Then there was a long pause before he stopped laughing and said, “So I can only assume based on the circumstances that you’re just as skeptical of The Augury as I am.”

This was the exact kind of talk Tyr didn’t want to hear from Loki. He didn’t want to answer this truthfully, to say he thought that The Augury was only a system to keep fools like Loki in check. But he couldn’t very well say he believed every word and expect Loki to go along with him.

“I believe there is an Ofeigr,” he said, “and I believe he understands what is foolhardy and what is acceptable given the state of the world at the time. And I think we can make our own choices as long as we’re not prostituting our culture.”

Loki took a long drag off his cigar.

“So if I said I didn’t believe a word of it and I thought prostituting our culture would turn us into kings, you would disagree with me?”

Tyr sighed. It was nice to know Loki wasn’t going to kill him, but it would have been too much to expect him not to be Loki.

 
“Take it easy, Tyr. You’re such a pussy,” said Thor.

“No,” said Loki, “I actually happen to agree with most of what you just said. I don’t know about an Ofeigr, but The Chosen… I think they’re out there.”

“You do?” asked Thor.

Tyr breathed a sigh of relief. There was still some level of fear left in Loki’s mind. Loki without fear to restrain him was a scary thought.

“Are you trying to draw them out of the dark? Is that it? Because I honestly believe whether they’re out there or not, that’s the worst thing you could possibly do.”

“No. I didn’t even give a shit about them until last night, but we’ll get to that. Tyr, your girlfriend tells me you’re trying to open a bar. You should let me set you up with some journalists.”

Tyr gave an agitated smile. “I read that article. I think it’s a really stupid idea.”

“I’m just broadening my horizons. I haven’t gotten to run a business in a long time. It’ll be fun. And as long as we don’t dip into the patrons from our own club very often, who’s gonna pay attention?”

“The Chupacabra?” said Tyr, with a ‘what are you, fucking stupid?’ vibe to his voice.

Loki laughed, “That’s just a little inside thing for my sake. I want to laugh every time I come in to work.”

Loki and Thor giggled. Tyr turned to the edge of the rooftop and looked at the city of Las Vegas, smoking his cigarette in silence.

“The Chosen are talking about me,” Loki said suddenly. “Maybe not
me
, maybe
us
, I don’t know. But they like the idea of my club. I guess they have something they want to use it for. God told me to build an ark, Tyr. I’m gonna build a goddamn ark.”

Tyr shook his head.

“Tell me you’re not that stupid, Loki. If you actually believe what you’re saying, if you actually heard this from someone, then that person is trying to get you killed. When have you ever let somebody bluff you? Don’t start now.”

Loki laughed, projecting short bursts of cigar smoke from his mouth. “Come on, Tyr. In this day and age I could suck a news anchor’s blood during a live broadcast and the people would call it a marketing ploy. And even that’s not what I’m doing. I’m building a club. If The Chosen have a problem with it, do you really think they’re just going to kill us all on general principle? It will be a slap on the wrist, and then I’ll burn down the club and buy you a Coke, but for now I’m giving it a shot.”

Loki had a point. Tyr didn’t like to admit it, but the way Loki talked about this didn’t make it sound half as dangerous as he had chalked it up to be. How could The Chosen murder a vampire a thousand years old over something as minuscule as a legitimate business? As long as he didn’t parade himself as a vampire in front of the humans it seemed unlikely real trouble would arise. The Chosen had to be beings with a bit of compassion and understanding for their own species, didn’t they? He just hoped, for Loki’s sake, that The Chosen were real, and that they’d bite back gently when he inevitably crossed a line.