by Greg Sisco
A woman shrieked.
Jonathan pulled the door opened, more of a reflex than anything.
“You’re Thor, right?” Thor heard a male voice say while he was receiving mediocre head from a moderately attractive woman. He opened his eyes to see a man a little bigger than Loki holding a knife.
He was more confused than frightened. People didn’t typically approach him in his own house, especially people who knew his name. By the time he put it together that this was Mr. Staple Gun, there was a knife in his neck.
Getting your throat slit is not a pleasant experience, and Thor never got used to it no matter how many times it happened. He put up a hand to slow the bleeding and the fucker stabbed him twice in the chest.
Bev screamed and stood, backing to the far end of the room.
Thor tried to stand and face his attacker, but he tripped over his own pants and hit the floor, still cupping his hand over his neck.
It didn’t make sense. The wound should have clotted over by now and the bleeding shot have stopped. Unless…
Silver.
The big fucker got down on one knee and stabbed Thor six or seven more times in the chest. Thor was dazed and weak in his poisoned state and couldn’t fight back.
Somewhere Bev was screaming.
And somebody else was screaming.
And everyone was running and stumbling.
Thor was only half conscious when a series of gunshots rang out and Mr. Staple Gun collapsed on top of him.
Loki was ten seconds from finishing Vivienne off when the screams started.
His first thought was that Thor had bared his fangs early, maybe bitten into her face or something. But the screams kept up for several seconds and he could hear people banging around in the other room, knocking over furniture, and then two women were screaming instead of one. It wasn’t Thor’s way of doing things, not that Loki was worried.
“What happened?” asked Vivienne.
“Probably just a spider,” said Loki, still fucking the drunk girl from behind.
“No. Bev! What happened!”
“Come on. Forget it.”
“I’m sorry. I have to check on my sister.”
She squirmed out of his grip and ran naked from the bedroom. Loki rolled his eyes, sat on the edge of the bed and put his pants on. After a minute there was a third woman joining in the screams and Loki’s curiosity was piqued.
He grabbed one of the guns off his dresser and headed for the living room.
When Jonathan jerked open the closet, Thor was on the couch with his pants down and a big man he didn’t recognize was stabbing him in the chest. Bev was half naked, doing nothing to resolve the situation other than screaming. Jewel took to the same strategy.
After he’d regained control of his body following the shock (which took at least ten seconds), Jonathan tried to get Jewel to run with him in the direction of the front door. She was hysterical and paid little attention to him. He grabbed her hand and pulled her with more force than he liked to use and she continued to scream and stare at the man who knelt next to Thor, plunging the knife into him over and over.
Before they could get more than a few feet, a naked Vivienne pushed her way into the room and joined in the screaming. There were now three screaming women—one dressed, one half-dressed, and one not dressed—forming a triangle around a man with his pants around his ankles who was being stabbed repeatedly in the chest. Believe it or not, this was not the first time this had happened in Las Vegas.
Loki came stumbling down the hall shirtless with a semi-automatic pistol in his hand. Seeing Thor curled up on the ground with a knife in him, he shrugged and fired the gun several times into the aggressor’s back. The big man collapsed on top of Thor, struggled to move for a few seconds, then died with an odd smile on his face.
The women were screaming louder now than they had been before the gun was brought out. Jonathan was more or less paralyzed. With Loki now in the room and armed, he gave up on the idea of running.
“What the fuck, Thor?” said Loki. “You forget your nuts in your other pants?”
Thor lay there breathing hard. He didn’t respond.
Everyone had quieted down and they were waiting for Loki to tell them what to do.
Bev fished her cell phone out of her pants pocket. “I’ll call 9-1-1.”
Loki shot her. Her blood drenched her sister and the wall behind. Vivienne gave a horrible cry and ran to her big sis and Loki shot her as well. Both were head shots. Both were down for the count.
“No!” screamed Jewel.
Jonathan ran at Loki without realizing what he was doing and fought for the gun. He’d been hearing Loki’s stories for months and there had been no shortage of physical threats from the man, but this was the first time he’d witnessed an act of violence firsthand and it had an intense effect on him.
Loki pushed Jonathan away and he landed on top of Thor and the big stranger. Jonathan looked up and cowered.
Loki aimed the gun at Jewel. “Hm. Now you I’m not sure about.”
The knife was still buried in Thor’s heart and Thor, semi-conscious, was pointing at it and seemingly trying to say “Take it.” What he was actually trying to say was “Take it out,” but Jonathan drew tremendous courage from what he thought he heard.
“Please,” said Jewel, the way humans always do. “Please.”
Loki stroked her hair with the barrel of the gun.
Jonathan grabbed the hilt of the knife and ripped it out of Thor’s chest. Thor breathed in a little and put his hand over the wound as Jonathan stood and ran at Loki. Loki turned around with a smile just as Jonathan buried the knife between his shoulder blades.
Loki gasped and grabbed for it. It hurt more than it should have, but he didn’t know why. He dropped the gun and tried to reach around his back. He ran around flailing his arms until he crashed through the sliding glass door and landed on the balcony outside.
Jewel was back to screaming—seemingly her only defense. Jonathan picked up the gun and chased Loki out onto the balcony.
The house sat at the edge of a small cliff, and the balcony swung out some fifty feet over a rocky gorge. Loki was leaned up against the railing, pulling the knife out of his back, and Jonathan was standing outside in front of him with broken glass crunching beneath his feet and a curtain blowing in the wind between them as Jewel watched from the living room.
Jonathan knew he had to fire, but he wasn’t sure he could do it. He’d been in his share of barroom brawls, but aside from the knife he’d stuck in Loki a moment ago he’d never caused real harm to another person.
Loki got the weapon out of his back and looked down at it. The material was already burning his hand. He let go of it and flung it back into the living room. It landed at Jewel’s feet and she picked it up without thinking.
“Silver.” He looked up at Jonathan. “You sonofabitch.”
He started to advance and Jonathan pulled the trigger automatically. Loki stopped. Jonathan fired again, and a third time. Two in the chest, then one in the head. Then another in the chest when Loki refused to drop. Then another.
Loki stumbled backward in the hail of gunfire until he was leaned up against the railing and glaring at Jonathan with violent eyes. And then—
Click.
No more bullets. A streak only lasts so long in Vegas.
Jonathan looked down at the empty gun and Loki grinned, and all Jonathan could think to do was give him one hard kick. Luckily for Jonathan, his adrenaline was high enough that this one hard kick was one hell of a hard kick.
The railing behind Loki shattered and he lost his footing and fell over the side of the balcony. He reached out as he fell to grab for anything he could, but there was nothing to grab and he tumbled fifty feet onto a bed of jagged rocks that pounded his bones and tore apart his skin.
Jonathan breathed for the first time in a minute or two, as did Jewel. Everything became perfectly quiet. Jonathan laughed, not at anything in particular, but becaus
e his nerves were firing on all cylinders and the emotional sector of his brain didn’t know how to operate. As he laughed, Jewel looked terrified of him, and he had to force himself to stop.
He advanced slowly to the edge of the balcony to look at the body of the man he’d killed.
“Should we call the police?” asked Jewel.
Jonathan peered over the edge into the rocky gorge below.
No. It couldn’t be.
It didn’t make sense.
At the bottom of the gorge, Loki was standing upright on top of a rather large boulder with blood glowing on his skin in the moonlight. His eyes were open and he was breathing hard. Not only was he not dead, but he didn’t much look like he was on the verge of death either.
“I’m comin’ up!” he shouted. “And I’m fuckin’ pissed!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The walls around the bourgeois prison were sound-proofed to mask the cries of the people inside. Naturally, the reverse was also true and all the sounds throughout the rest of the house were muted from the inside.
For this reason, Tyr never heard the loud music or the laughter downstairs, nor did he hear Vivienne shouting lascivious statements at the top of her lungs, nor the horrific screams of three women witnessing a knifing.
Tyr heard nothing until a series of gunshots rang out.
“What’s going on?” Eva asked him, still half asleep as he stood up from the bed.
“I’m sure it’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”
Eva obeyed, choosing sleep over adventure the way her species often did.
Tyr opened the bedroom door, closed it gently behind him, then rushed downstairs.
In the living room, Thor was collapsed on the floor and a young black woman was standing alone in the middle of the room. The sliding glass door was broken and the curtains were blowing out onto the balcony. Somewhere out in the night, Loki was shouting in anger.
“Run!” Jonathan’s voice called from outside.
“What’s going on?” Tyr asked from the top of the staircase, directing the question more at Thor than the woman he’d never met.
The woman turned around, screamed, and ran for the front door. Tyr started after her.
“Tyr!” came a voice from behind him. Jonathan was standing there, pointing a gun at his chest. For a moment Tyr debated whether to run after the woman or detain Jonathan.
He started to run in the direction of the woman and Jonathan made a run for the side door of the house. Now two people were escaping in opposite directions.
Tyr hesitated before going after Jonathan. The woman was a stranger to him and he couldn’t speak for what she might have witnessed, but he knew Jonathan had been in the house for months and had plenty of dirt on all of them. It seemed a safe bet that he should be the priority.
Before he had made it a hundred feet, Tyr had tackled Jonathan and dragged him back into the living room where he was met by Loki, who was dressed in torn slacks and covered in blood.
“Where’s Jewel?” asked Loki.
Tyr paused.
“The woman!”
“She went out the front.”
“Get her.”
Tyr pushed Jonathan into Loki’s hands and headed outside. He ran several hundred feet down the dirt road outside and along the highway in the direction of Vegas, scanning for her in both directions as he ran. When he reached the point where the road to town forked, he came to a stop.
She could have gone either way, and there was no movement in either direction as far as he could see. There was a chance she’d already flagged down a car and was on her way to town, but more likely she was hiding in the bushes somewhere. He walked back toward the house, listening for breathing or movement. He heard nothing.
He stepped to the side of the road, ducked behind some bushes, and waited quietly, expecting to see her step out of hiding at any moment.
Jewel had, in fact, ducked behind some bushes some one hundred feet away on the opposite side of the road. She could see Tyr there, hiding and waiting, and she didn’t think she had it in her to make any move at all until he’d given up and gone home.
At the same time, she had half a mind to go back. She hadn’t seen Jonathan come out of the house. She still figured Loki for human, and humans are harmless after taking multiple gunshot wounds and falling fifty feet, and since Thor had been stabbed a dozen times, Tyr was her only threat as far as she could see.
She looked down at her hand. At some point, without realizing it, she had picked up the knife that had been used to stab her captors. She was armed, and she didn’t think the man out here with her had a weapon, so if she rushed him…
No. Fuck that. He was a lot bigger than she was, and quite probably a professional criminal. It was a safe assumption it wouldn’t be the first time he’d had a knife pointed at him. The odds of something going wrong felt high.
As she sat weighing her options, a pair of headlights appeared in the distance, moving down the road toward her. She knew Tyr was watching them too, and it would have been a stupid move to enlist the help of the driver. At the same time, though, she feared the passing lights would illuminate the area where she was hiding and alert Tyr to her presence, a possibility even more dangerous than flagging down the vehicle.
As the car came close, she tucked the blade of the knife into the back of her jeans so as not to appear threatening and ran out into the road waving her arms at the driver. The car slowed.
In the bushes behind the car, Tyr stood up and ran for her instantly.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Loki shouted. He hit Jonathan in the face and Jonathan stumbled over the sofa and knocked over a bookshelf. “Stabbing me with silver? Shooting me? Pushing me off cliffs?”
“You’re really a vampire,” said Jonathan, his eyes wide as he backed into a corner. “It’s all true.”
Thor was sitting up in the middle of the room now. His wounds had begun to heal but he was still weak, pressing his hands against his chest and neck to hold as much blood as possible inside.
Loki punched Jonathan again, cracking his skull and sending him sprawling onto the floor.
“You okay, Thor? You need blood?” Loki crossed the room to where Thor and Jonathan were lying.
“I’ll be all right.”
“You sure? We’ve got plenty of spare blood right here.” He squeezed Jonathan’s face and lifted him to his feet.
Thor waved his hand to decline.
Loki hurled Jonathan through the sliding glass door, through the pane of glass that hadn’t been broken in the first crash.
“Calm down,” said Thor.
“No, I don’t think I will.”
Loki crossed the room and stepped out on the balcony. He dragged Jonathan up by his collar. There were two large pieces of glass still protruding from his face.
“Loki, please…” said Jonathan.
Loki pushed Jonathan out over the edge of the balcony, still holding him by the collar so that his feet were planted firmly on the edge and his body hanging over the side, looking down at the rocky grave below.
“Think about this, Loki,” said Thor. “You’ll regret it.”
Five months. Five months Loki had kept the fucker in his house, fed him and clothed him, gave him room and board at no cost, provided him booze and cigarettes and porno magazines. Four months he’d treated him like royalty, and he’d asked for nothing in return but a biography. Now he’d been stabbed, shot, and kicked off a cliff, humiliated by a human. No, Loki didn’t need to think about it.
Jonathan said the usual things: “I’ll do anything,” “No one will know,” “Please.” Nothing original.
“E-mails, secret girlfriends, and literal stabbings in the back,” said Loki. “When did I become such a poor judge of character?”
“Loki, don’t!” shouted Thor from inside.
Loki let go.
Jonathan plummeted fifty feet onto the jagged rocks.
“Go, go!” shouted Jewel as she climbed into the car
with a old hispanic man. She could see Tyr approaching through the window behind the driver.
“What’s going on?” asked the driver without stepping on the accelerator.
The driver’s side window burst and a hand came through.
Jewel screamed.
Tyr’s fingernails cut through the skin on either side of the hispanic man’s throat and more or less pulled it out of his neck. He was no longer in any condition to drive. Tyr opened the car door, pulled the man out onto the street, and reached for Jewel, who ducked out of her door just in time.
Tyr tried to climb through the car at her and she shut the door in his face and ran down the road away from the vehicle. Tyr climbed out of the car and it was only a few seconds before he had one arm around her neck and the other around her waist.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get you back inside.”
Jewel pulled the silver knife from her pants and stuck it in Tyr’s heart. He howled and fell to one knee.
As soon as she was free, she ran like hell, jumped in the car, and pounded the accelerator into the floor. She was a mile down the road before she even thought about closing the doors or putting on her seatbelt.
Behind her, Tyr dug the knife out of his chest and got to his feet. For the first time he could remember, he’d gone after a human and she’d gotten the best of him.
“Well?” Loki asked when Tyr came back to the house.
“She got away,” said Tyr. “She had a silver knife and… I don’t know.”
“Fucking hell, Tyr. The one thing I need you to do.”
Tyr could have brought up the fact that Jonathan would have gotten away too had it not been for him, but it wouldn’t have helped any.
“Where’s Jonathan?”
“Dead. Threw him off the balcony.”
“What? Why?”
“Didn’t see any reason not to.”
“Who was that woman, a vampire hunter?”
“No, Tyr. That woman was not a vampire hunter—you don’t get that satisfaction. This enormous fucker here…” Loki kicked Horace, “who broke in and stabbed Thor fifteen times with a silver knife, may perhaps have been a vampire hunter, but the petite bitch who got the drop on you was a writer’s girlfriend.”
