Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers) (9 page)

Tyr breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t fantastic news, but it was about the best he could have hoped for. At least he wasn’t being hunted. That put one worry aside. There was still Ofeigr to think about, and if Loki were to get himself killed he hated to see Thor going down with him.

“All right,” said Tyr. “You’re right. I’m being as stupid as you are. How about this? You stay with me tonight and I’ll kill Eva before sunrise. Tomorrow night, first thing, we get the hell out of town. Leave Loki to walk this path and suffer for his own vices. What do you say?”

“He may not give a shit about you going off on your own,” said Thor with a smirk, “but if we both abandon him, he’s going to come after us. That I can guarantee.”

“He won’t find us. We can go to Africa. Loki hates Africa.”

“Everybody hates fuckin’ Africa.”

They both laughed. Tyr had to admit he wasn’t much of a fan himself.

“Does it matter to you that I’m enjoying myself?” asked Thor. “I get the feeling you are, too. Why abandon a way of life that’s working out pretty well just to spend our time running and hiding? Why not push the boundaries a little bit and just see if anybody pushes back? I haven’t felt any resistance yet and I get the impression you haven’t either.”

Tyr cursed under his breath. He didn’t like this plan. The rules of The Augury didn’t dictate a ‘three strikes’ policy. Strike one was ‘fuck you.’ If either of them were caught, he’d disappear without a trace and his Brothers would be never the wiser.

“I never should have run out on you guys,” Tyr said. “We were dumb when we were all together, but we weren’t this dumb. We’ve all managed to really fuck things up over the last few years.”

“Nobody told you to leave,” said Thor, standing up. “You’re the one who bailed.”

Tyr averted his gaze from Thor’s eyes and muttered, mostly to himself, “We should have just robbed that train back in Tombstone.”

CHAPTER TEN

The Great Train Robbery of 1986. That was what Loki called it before it took place. One might say he jinxed it.

The brothers were taking shelter in the basement of a house, having recently murdered the family who lived there. It was a quiet home in the desert near Reno, Nevada. The basement was a wide-open area from which they had cleared out most of the furniture to create a clubhouse. There was booze, a table for cards, a box of cigars, and pin-ups of Playboy centerfolds who Loki talked of draining. Of course, being that Loki was at least marginally responsible at this point, he never acted on the impulse. It seemed overly reckless to kill humans with any level of fame. Ten years from now this never would have stopped him.

The walls were lined with crossbows, spears, maces, muskets, and some other old weapons kept around mostly for decoration. Though Tyr and Loki each owned swords, they were never displayed in the room as they were the only weapons in their inventory that could easily kill a fellow vampire.

Occasionally they’d take down some of the weapons and spar in the open space in the middle of the room. It was important to Loki that they be skilled in combat should they be jumped by a rival gang of vampires, or at least that was the justification he provided for his constant yearning to mutilate his Brothers. Tyr found it a silly concept as it was very rare to even see another vampire, much less fight with one. But he sometimes joined in the fighting anyway and was able to hold his own against either of the others.

Thor had the best track record. He won a good two-thirds of the spars that he engaged in, being a particularly brutal, balls-out fighter. Loki fought much the same way, relying solely on his brute strength, and while he was by far the strongest of the three, Thor was small and much more agile. Tyr’s tactical, precise manner of fighting would have worked wonders against a band of five others but against someone like Thor who came swinging with reckless determination he was often not able to keep up.

On this day it was Thor and Loki duking it out. Loki with a mace and Thor with a flail, they pounded at each other’s immortal flesh over and over, each pulverizing the other’s face and spilling blood on the walls and floor. Tyr sat back, drinking from a glass of apple brandy and watching the others grunt and wince and scream.

By the end, Loki was on his knees and Thor had wrapped the silver chain of the flail around his neck, pulling it tight and pushing his head forward into the chain with his foot. While Loki’s body didn’t require him to breathe, the neck was a particularly sensitive area, especially to silver—a substance that tended to burn a little on contact as well as diminishing their strength and leaving them feeling weak and powerless. Much like garlic, its effects were often exaggerated in stories, but there was certainly a reaction. Thankfully these beliefs had taken a seat behind crosses, holy water, and stakes to the heart, which did jack shit unless it was the kind of Holy Water to which humans didn’t have access.

Loki tugged and grasped at the chain and tried to swing back at Thor, who forced his neck forward with even greater force into the silver chain until Loki gave up and tapped his hand repeatedly on the floor. Thor let Loki loose and he fell forward, grabbing at the marks on his neck. There were bleeding wounds all over both vampires, but they’d be gone in a minute or two.

Thor stood over Loki and looked down.

“You gotta learn to move faster, boss. Don’t think so much.”

Thor had been acting a little strangely the past few days, projecting a subtle but unmistakable hostility towards Loki. The reason behind this was something neither Loki nor Tyr had called to attention as the they could see it was insubstantial and would come to pass in time. They ignored it, never drawing the connection that the feeling had stemmed from last week when they had dropped into a theater at midnight to watch
The First Great Train Robbery.

Loki pulled himself together, pressing his hand to the floor and getting back to his feet.

“Hell of a fight, Thor. You’re getting pretty strong.” He walked to the bar and poured himself a glass of scotch. He drank it quickly, opening his throat and letting it burn as it flowed down in one long gulp.

“I’m serious,” Thor told him. “If you weren’t so hyper-analytical you’d be better at acting. It’s like they say. You talk the talk, I walk the walk.”

This didn’t ring true to Loki or Tyr. Tyr was the hyper-analytical one. Loki was a loose cannon, typically acting
too
quickly, if anything. Something was up.

“The fuck are you building to, Thor?” Loki asked with a smile. “Do you want something from me?”

“I’m just saying that if I were in charge, we’d get more shit done. We wouldn’t talk about things and never get around to them. Train robbery, anyone?”

Tyr laughed. Loki rolled his eyes.

“Hey, Tyr and I robbed trains before you were around. I’ve been on train robberies. You just had the shitty luck of being born at the end of the era. Nobody robs trains anymore.”

The room fell silent. An idea was quietly formulating in all of their minds.

“Security’s better these days,” Tyr said. “And they don’t ship to Fort Knox or anything anymore. I don’t know what you would take.”

“Passenger train,” Thor said instantly.

Loki and Tyr looked at one another and smiles appeared on their faces.

“Commence the plans,” shouted Loki. “Tonight we commit The Great Train Robbery of 1986!”

The Great Train Robbery of 1986 was not as great in outcome as it had been in their imaginations, and by the next morning Loki was throwing Tyr across the clubhouse and knocking over the table.

“You call yourself a vampire?” He shouted as Tyr flailed his body around, overwhelmed with fear and fury, trying to defend himself as he was sent sprawling across the room.

Thor was motionless in a corner, watching the quarrel with a disturbing lack of emotion.

“There was no need for it, Loki! She was six years old!”

Tyr broke a bottle out of the air with his hand as Loki lobbed it at him.

“There’s no need for any of them, damn it!” Loki was irate, tossing furniture and breaking appliances as he ranted and screamed. “We are gods! You are God! God kills indiscriminately! Thou wouldst let her suffer juvenescence, come into her being, develop to her prime, and pluck her from the Earth when she is ripe for all its givings; yet thou wouldst refuse feeding on the seed from which thy victuals bloom? Pronounce it fiendish to spare these fucks the barbarism of their youth and yet rejoice in slaying them at an age of wisdom with merit to offer their world? What the fuck is wrong with thee?”

It was characteristic of Loki and Tyr to sometimes slip out of character in times of rage or loss of self-control. When they became excessively angry, the times did not register and vocabularies from different periods would blend together, usually leaving Middle English as the front-runner as it was what they had spent most of their time speaking.

“Thy throne hath tainted thy head, Loki!” Tyr shouted. “Thou art a fool! Thy ways have become dysig and thou art shunning The Augury!”

“Shunning it?” Loki kicked a chair across the room. “The times are changing and the world changes with them! The Augury itself hath become dysig and thou hast stooped to its level and become a coward, you fuck!”

“Oh, fuck you, Loki. You use The Augury as a weapon to do your bidding and disregard whatever passages don’t suit your needs.”

Tyr stormed toward the door. There was still an hour or so before sunrise. He could find another place to stay today. At sunset he could leave town and wait for this to blow over.

Loki grabbed him from behind and hurled him to the floor.

“Let’s not forget who’s led us this far.”

“And for what reason am I to call thee master? That you came to me and used my device to kill our true master? I built this house as much you!”

Tyr got to his feet and pulled a spear from the wall, which he swung in Loki’s direction. Loki grabbed his mace from the floor and narrowed his eyes.

“Are you sure you want to play it this way?”

Tyr swung again, gashing Loki’s side but not doing any real damage. Loki rushed him, getting in close and rendering the spear useless before striking Tyr’s head and sending him reeling to the floor. He loomed over his kid Brother, pummeling his skull with the mace, cracking at the bone and tearing apart the skin so blood was pooling already beneath his head.

Tyr raised his spear vertically to parry a blow from the mace, angling it downward so it struck the floor. As he did this, he kicked one of Loki’s feet out of place and dropped him to one knee. Loki’s knee hit the floor just as Tyr brought up his free hand and clutched Loki’s neck. He pulled him down, pressing his foot into Loki’s stomach and forcing him upward, propelling him into a somersault to land on his back inverted to Loki. Each took a moment to get to his feet.

Loki raced at Tyr again and Tyr raised his spear in a bid to stick it in Loki’s chest. Loki struck the spear with his mace, once again getting in close to Tyr and readying his backhanded swing. Tyr caught this blow with his free hand and pounded his foot into Loki’s stomach, dislodging the weapon from his hand. This time it was Tyr who swung with the mace, striking the side of Loki’s head and sending him stumbling into the wall of the bar.

As Loki turned to face Tyr, Tyr drove the spear through his stomach, out his back, and into the wall, sticking him there in intense, bristling pain.

Loki cursed and screamed, pulling vainly in his weakened state at the silver shaft protruding from his torso. Tyr looked down at the mace in his other hand. For a moment he envisioned himself raising the weapon and striking repeatedly until he knocked Loki’s head off his body and resolved the dispute permanently, but before he had time to follow through with the fantasy Thor put his hand on the mace.

“That’s enough,” he said, using his other hand to pry open Tyr’s fingers and slip the mace away from him. “Do what you will, but leave him alone.”

There was a profound silence. Tyr and Thor looked into each other’s eyes without the slightest indication of judgment from either of them. Loki just watched wide-eyed and with gritted teeth, displaying an overflow of emotion.

But nothing happened. Tyr looked up at Loki one last time, then turned to face the door, not looking back at the Brother he was in the process of disowning or the one who had just stopped him from murdering the former. He reached the door and walked out, shutting it behind him.

A moment after he was gone, Thor pulled the spear out of Loki’s chest and handed him a drink.

For thirteen years, the only two Blood Brothers who were siblings by birth had not spoken or stood in a room together. But that was about to change.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

While Tyr and Thor were still confabulating atop the scale model of the Eiffel tower across the street, Loki was arriving back at his suite with an actress on his arm.