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

by Greg Sisco

  “She lives here,” said Loki. “You ought to know that. You lived here with her.”

  “This bitch? Never.”

  Jewel looked hurt and furious. Vivienne looked at Jonathan like he was the biggest prick she’d ever met, as though she had the faintest idea who any of these people were or what was going on.

  Loki giggled. “He’s trying to upset you so you’ll leave the table. He thinks it’s safer for you that way.”

  “Hm. I see. So you’re the perceptive type.”

  “I am, as a matter of fact. How sweet of you to notice.”

  “You can just see through everybody,” said Vivienne affectionately. Loki was sick of her already.

  “Just go, Jewel,” said Jonathan.

  “I’m not afraid of vampires.”

  “So few of you are. That’s your tragedy.”

  “How do you know each other?” asked Jewel.

  “He’s writing a book about me. Or did you already know that?” Loki looked back and forth between them.

  Jewel didn’t answer.

  “E-mail,” said Loki. He grinned a little. “Vivienne, go get us a shot of something, will you?”

  Vivienne stood up with a smile and left the table.

  “So what do I have to expect?” Loki asked the two of them. “Cops? Friends with guns? Camera crews? Crosses? Garlic? Holy water? What have you got?”

  Jewel shifted in her seat. She found she suddenly believed every word Jonathan had written and would have felt awful for the things she’d written back were she not absolutely terrified.

  “There’s nothing, is there? You thought of notifying somebody but you decided you were big and strong enough to handle it on your own and now that you’re here you’re not so sure. And Jonathan over here knows you’re not. He wishes you’d just get up and run, but that’s not going to happen. You’re too frightened to do it, and with good reason.”

  “Let her go, Loki. We don’t even talk anymore. As long as you’ve got me, she’ll keep quiet.”

  “I don’t think she will. I think you earned yourself a cellmate. I bet you write better when you’re writing for two lives instead of one.”

  “Let me go,” said Jewel quietly. “I won’t talk.”

  “You will though. I’m good at gauging that sort of thing.” He was. And she would have.

  “If you touch me I’ll scream,” said Jewel. This was something humans said to scare other humans who were afraid of attention. Its effects were stronger on men who had killed fewer than sixty thousand people.

  “I won’t touch you. You just come with us when we leave and I’ll never even have to get within six inches of you.”

  “Run, Jewel. Just run.”

  Loki laughed. “Don’t listen to this joker. He’s talking crazy.”

  About that time Vivienne came back to the table with four shot-glasses full of something or other.

  “What did I miss?” she asked.

  “I think we’re all getting ready to head back to my place,” said Loki. “Aren’t we?”

  Jonathan and Jewel said nothing.

  “Can I come?” asked Vivienne.

  “Of course you may,” said Loki. “Let’s drink a toast to new friends and get the hell out of here.”

  And though Vivienne was the only one of the five who knew what they were drinking, nobody drank quite as eagerly as Jonathan.

  Thor arrived back at The Chupacabra as Loki and Jonathan were coming out the door with Vivienne and a cute black woman.

  “Heading out?” asked Thor, doing his best to hide his intent to ditch his Brothers and leave town as soon as the big guy with the staple gun was dead.

  “Yeah we’re beat,” said Loki. “Hey, this is Jewel. Turns out Jonathan’s had a girlfriend all this time none of us knew about.”

  “That so?”

  Jesus. Things kept getting worse.

  “Jewel, this is Thor,” said Loki. “He’s the nice one.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she said unconvincingly. Jonathan had his arms wrapped around her and she was cowering against his chest. He kept whispering in her ear, telling her to run, but she wouldn’t do it.

  “Vivienne, honey, there you are. You disappeared in there. I couldn’t find you,” said some girl out front who had similarly blonde hair cut shorter than Vivienne’s and sharper edges on her face. “I should take you home. It’s really late. Mom’ll be upset.”

  “I’m gonna go home with him,” said Vivienne.

  “No you’re not,” said the sharp-faced girl. “I’ll never hear the end of it.” She turned to Loki. “Sorry. She’s only eighteen. She’s still in high school.”

  “Hey, I’m not much older and I own the place,” said Loki. “Know the secret? I never worried what would upset Mom.”

  “Yeah, neither does she and it hasn’t really paid off,” said the sharp-faced girl. Vivienne gave her the finger.

  “Let’s just go,” said Thor, but Loki had a hard on for Vivienne and they weren’t going anywhere without her.

  “You know,” said Loki, “I know you’re her sister, but you act like her mother. Girl’s already got a mother, and a hard-assed one from the sound of it. Sisters ought to be advocates, in the trenches together. Take my Brother here.” He put his arm around Thor. “My dad was a mean old bastard and I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if my little bro hadn’t fought for the Resistance with me.”

  The girl seemed unimpressed so Thor gave her that teen idol smile of his that girls masturbated to later. “Don’t mind him,” he told the sharp-faced girl. “He likes to talk.”

  “Yeah, he does,” she said, not realizing by agreeing with Thor she was already establishing a bond.

  “That’s a cute outfit,” he said. If you look like Thor and have the same level of confidence, this is all you have to say. “What’s your name?”

  “Beverly,” said the girl. “Bev.”

  Thor took her hand and kissed it. What the hell. If he didn’t drain her she’d report her sister missing and make Loki the prime suspect. There was no sensible option other than to fuck her and drink her blood.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Loki’s place was in the middle of nowhere. Horace parked half a mile past it and walked back to stay inconspicuous in case Thor was coming or going. As a former cop, he ought to have wanted proof Thor was his man, but he’d never been a good cop. Acting without proof was an easy way to speed up the process and he was after peace of mind, not a conviction. Tonight, ‘pretty sure’ was sure enough.

  As he traversed a dirt road that was a little long to be considered a driveway, he imagined Thor’s obituary.

  DOUGLAS THOR.

  DEVOTED BROTHER.

  BELOVED SON.

  SADISTIC FUCK.

  He heard an engine behind him and turned. There was a pair of headlights off in the distance coming toward him. He ducked behind some bushes fifty feet from the front door.

  Six people piled out of the Rolls Royce—first three young women and a large man who had all been piled into the backseat, then a not-so-happy and slightly drunk looking fellow in his early thirties who had been in the driver’s seat, and then—yes!—a rather dashing boy with blonde hair and blue eyes who’d been riding shotgun.

  The big fellow sang songs and danced with one of the girls and slid his hands up and down her body. The girl was high school aged and so she could neither hold her liquor nor keep her vagina in her pants with both hands and six rolls of duct tape. She was rubbing his crotch through his pants and whispering in his ear, probably dirty talk about cocks and pussies with all the words she’d heard in porno movies, words like big, hard, tight, wet, and so forth. ‘I want to put your such-and-such in my such-and-such.’

  The blonde-haired chap, who must have been the honorable Douglas Thor, was resting his hand against the side of the house near the older girl’s head and talking in a way that had her equally mesmerized and horny. It was possible he was also using words like big, hard, tight, and wet, but she looked like a colle
ge girl rather than a high school one, so it was more likely he was talking about money and/or the federal government, or possibly dying African children.

  The other two—the serious guy and the black girl—didn’t look as eager to rub their privates together as everybody else. In fact they both looked downright uncomfortable and tried to console each other as the others danced and flirted in the front yard. Whatever might have been bothering them, it was none of Horace’s business. He was just here to kill Thor. Once that was done, he could be on his way.

  When they entered the house, they locked the door behind them. It took a few minutes for Horace to find an out-of-the-way window to smash open and climb through.

  “You two ought to loosen up,” Loki said to Jonathan and Jewel. “Get your fuck on. We won’t peak.”

  “Yeah!” shouted Vivienne, who was drunk enough she didn’t understand anything going on around her. All she knew was there was loud music and she was dancing with a hot guy in somebody’s house.

  “Here you go. Like high school, right?” said Loki, pushing the couple into a closet and shutting the door.

  “Seven minutes in heaven!” said Vivienne. This is the name of a game teens and preteens play where girls give orgasms to boys whose names they don’t know without feeling like sluts.

  Thor and Bev were dancing a quiet and understated dance in some corner of the room, looking much older and more mature than Loki and Vivienne since Bev was older and less shit-faced.

  “You are so right,” Bev said about some point Thor had been making.

  “They’re the enemies of progress,” said Thor. “Every important milestone in this nation’s history, the GOP has stood in the way and held us back.”

  Bev brought up something about animal rights and Thor agreed that people shouldn’t wear leather or whatever the fuck she was on about. This was standard conversation for seducing a college girl. It probably wouldn’t have felt so tedious if he wasn’t so preoccupied with getting out of town.

  “I want to suck your dick!” Vivienne shouted from across the room, louder than anyone ought to shout that particular sentence. What had happened was she had begun talking just as a rather loud song finished playing. Everyone looked at her and she blushed slightly, too intoxicated to be properly embarrassed.

  “God, just take her somewhere and do whatever you’re gonna do. I don’t wanna know,” said Beverly to Loki. He complied, and within a few seconds he and Vivienne had vanished down a hallway.

  Thor and Bev danced quietly for a minute before Thor said, in a very ‘college boy’ sort of way, “My brother’s totally getting a BJ from your sister right now.”

  Bev laughed, pressing her forehead into Thor’s shoulder. “I know. God. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “It’s fine. It’s good. They’re having fun.”

  “Are you having fun?”

  “…Sure.”

  “What was that pause?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you, jealous?”

  “No.”

  “You’re totally jealous!”

  “Eh… little bit.”

  Thor gave her that boyish teen heartthrob grin and she laughed and kissed him. It wasn’t their first kiss of the night, but it was the first one that included unzipping his pants.

  He kissed her neck and felt the warmth of the blood beneath the skin.

  It took a long time for Horace to find his way through the house. He could tell there was music playing a few rooms away and he assumed that was where everybody was, but he didn’t want to make the mistake of rushing in and getting shot to death by the big guy before he could find his way to Thor. For all he knew there were thirty people in the house in addition to the six he’d seen enter.

  He crept through dark hallways with his silver knife in his hand for ten minutes or so, moving steadily in the direction of the music, before he saw light up ahead and assumed he must be close.

  Then the song came to an end and a voice shouted, “I want to suck your dick!”

  The drunk girl.

  Yeah, that’s right. Take that big bastard out of the room and leave my blonde friend alone. Just don’t come down this hallway.

  Following a few words from the other room, one of Horace’s prayers was answered and the other was shat upon. Loki and the drunk girl came barreling down the hallway toward him. He ducked through a door to his right, hoping he wasn’t entering the same room they were. He was.

  The big bastard flipped on the lights as Horace hid behind the door.

  The room was a bedroom, apparently. It had been too dark to distinguish anything when he entered but now he could see there was a king-sized bed with gorgeous red sheets that looked to cost a thousand dollars or more. Horace wasn’t aware of it, but the sheets were red so that blood stains would be less obvious.

  Thankfully, the wall he had his back to was a short one with an adjacent wall immediately on his left and the open door immediately on his right, creating a boxed-in area that separated him from the rest of the room and more or less blocked him from view of the big bastard and the drunk girl.

  “Do you want to see my titties?” asked the drunk girl in a baby-talk voice that was supposed to sound seductive but actually sounded like a five-year-old whose titties nobody wanted to see.

  Fucking kids. Children. Why were they so dirty, so lecherous? Is this how Samantha talked around her boyfriends? Around that idiot with the pierced cock who couldn’t handle staples to the thighs?

  Horace didn’t want to think about the eighteen-year-old breasts on the other side of the door. He occupied his mind with the thought that he might be dead in a few seconds. He imagined the big bastard getting up to close the door and how he’d have to stab him in the face if it happened.

  “Take your panties off,” the big bastard said.

  “Do you like?” the girl’s voice asked a moment later.

  Horace held the knife to his chest. If the door moved an inch, he was prepared to start stabbing. He didn’t think the young lady would be the one to shut the door, and he sure as shit hoped she wouldn’t because he would have hated to kill an innocent girl even younger than the one he was avenging. But if it happened, it happened. What they call collateral damage. As long as Thor was dead by the end of the night, that was all that really mattered.

  “Are you gonna eat my pussy?” said the young slut with the filthy mouth.

  “I thought you were going to suck my cock,” said the young man who was just a young man.

  “Do you want to sixty-nine?”

  The big bastard acknowledged with a happy moan that sounded to be in the affirmative, then kissing was heard along with some rustling that might have been the sounds of either party disrobing.

  All the while Horace waited for someone to shut the door, waited in his stab-ready stance, but it sounded as though nobody was worried about being seen in the midst of a lewd act.

  And a lewd act it was. Horace’s sexual vocabulary wasn’t what it used to be, but he was pretty sure that during a ‘sixty-nine’ neither party had a good view of the room, giving him a window of opportunity to escape.

  The young girl said something filthy about the flavor of the big bastard’s parts and Horace took it to mean the act had commenced. He slid the door back and peaked out from behind it, doing his best to keep his eyes fixed to the big bastard’s face without looking at the vulva it was mashed into. He couldn’t look away lest he risk getting spotted, but he didn’t want to witness any of what he was looking at. He did his best to watch without seeing. In a minute he was out of the room and down the hall without having been spotted, and he was standing in the doorway of the living room.

  The frightened couple, the interracial one, were nowhere to be seen. But based on the activity within the living room, they weren’t here at the moment.

  Mr. Thor was seated on the couch with his back to Horace, his pants and briefs around his ankles. In front of him, the sharp-faced girl was kneeling, naked from the waist up, with he
r head bobbing up and down in his lap. Thor leaned his head back on the couch and shut his eyes, stroking the girl’s hair with his right hand.

  Fuck it. Now’s as good a time as any.

  Horace tightened his grip on the silver knife and stepped forward.

  In the darkness of the closet, Jonathan and Jewel were huddled together listening to the activity outside and occasionally whispering into each other’s ears.

  “Do you think they forgot about us?” Jewel asked.

  “Doubt it,” said Jonathan.

  Outside there was the sound of lips smacking. A piece of clothing hit the floor. A belt was undone.

  “If they come back, they’re going to lock us in a room,” said Jonathan. “Should we make a break for it?”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Ooh, hello,” Thor’s voice said in the tone all men use when their penises are inserted into mouths.

  “All right,” said Jonathan. “She’s sucking his dick. Now’s our chance. Do we run like hell or do we move slow and try to sneak past?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Pick one, Jewel. We have to pick one.”

  Jewel said nothing.

  The footsteps of a large man could all of a sudden be heard arriving in front of the closet and coming to a stop.

  Loki. Fuck.

  Jonathan and Jewel stayed silent. Jonathan knew they hadn’t been forgotten, but the longer they were left alone, the better their chances of finding a window of opportunity.

  The heavy footsteps moved away from the closet.

  “Okay,” Jonathan whispered. “I’m going to open the door, then you take my hand and we’re going to run. Got it?”

  Jewel shook her head.

  “Jewel. Get ready to run. Okay?”

  She took a breath. “Okay.”

  They grabbed each other’s hands and searched for courage.

  A voice on the other end of the door said, “You’re Thor, right?”

  Some jerky movements were heard.