Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book One)

by Greg Sisco

  “I fight with whatever I got,” Michael told him. “Do you want something from me?”

  "Nah,” Tyr looked at his feet. “My friend’s taken a likin’ to ya, though. Wouldn’t have liked to see ya beat to death in the street.”

  "I could’a handled myself.”

  "Doubt it. I was watchin’ from ‘cross the street, you looked ready to take a beatin’. You’da stood yer ground, sure, and I can respect that. But we both know they’da been scrubbin’ yer blood off the boardwalk come sun up.”

  "And now they’ll be scrubbin’ their own blood instead.”

  "I didn’t bleed ‘em save for a little on the bigger fella’s neck.” Tyr licked his fingers. “They’ll be cuttin’ off the little fella’s finger and the other one’s got a broken nose needs tendin’ but they’ll find ‘emselves recovered in a couple days.”

  "And what about yer friend? The one that’s fond o’ me? Where’s he all this time?”

  "Back at Cherrywood with Katie Locke.”

  "Oh? What are they up to?”

  Tyr gave a bemused laugh and looked at his pocket watch, “If I know Mickey I’d imagine right about now he’s watchin’ himself in the mirror with a big smile on his face as he bends her over her vanity dresser and slams her into it hard enough to bruise her tender little thighs.”

  Michael blinked, stuck in a daze. “Yer friend from last night? The one from the card table? Yer tellin’ me he’s up there fuckin’ Locke’s daughter?”

  "Fuck is such modest word. I’d say if a storm starts brewin’ that’s God’s wrath.”

  Michael laughed delightedly, “Y’all are my fucking heroes! Where’d y’all come from?”

  "That’s not important, Michael, and everything I’ve said thus far about Mickey and myself is strictly between you and I. Is that understood?”

  Michael nodded.

  Mickey had been Loki’s name for the past four years or so, since they’d knocked over a bank near Deadwood. Tyr’s name for the time was Todd, though he didn’t much care for it and hoped to be rid of it as soon as he could.

  "I’m Todd,” he told Michael, shaking his hand. “Mickey and me, we’ll be in town a few more weeks at least. I’m here because its boomin’ and I like being where things are boomin’. Mickey’s here because we travel together and his aim will be to stir things up and get people’s attention and their fear.”

  "Well he’s doin’ a fuckin’ helluva job.” Michael still couldn’t contain the excitement he got from the images in his head of Loki’s mammoth form in the seventeen-year-old Katie’s bedroom, pants around his ankles, hands squeezed around either of her hips, slamming her against the furniture in her bedroom. The balls on this man!

  "Are we in any danger with your father?” Tyr asked Michael with no fear, regret, or malice, merely a question of curiosity.

  "Uh, maybe. He thinks you ran off with his whores. He was talking about putting out a bounty.”

  "Them whores won’t be coming back to you. I don’t want any further questions on the subject.”

  "I don’t understand.”

  "That’s fine. Don’t ask. What I do now I do between the two of us and mention of it is never to be made to anyone besides your father. That is to say, word never gets to any other local of this town and especially not to Mickey. Are we absolutely clear on this?”

  Michael’s nerves boiled, he swung his head around, glancing back and forth down the empty streets.

  "Yes.”

  Tyr handed Michael a wad of money, “This is five hundred dollars, two-hundred for each of the whores and an extra hundred to keep quiet on the topic. Mindy and Mitsey fled town, pure and simple. Will your father accept this?”

  "I uh… I’d bet he will.”

  "Good. Now we can move on.”

  They walked farther down the street. Michael kept quiet until the silence killed him.

  "Look,” he said finally, “I don’t know what y’all are planning, what y’all are tryin’ to do here in town, but I want ya to know, I want you and yer friend to know, if there’s something y’all want from me, I’m there for ya. I’ll do whatever I can to help you boys. I like y’all.”

  "Of course you like us, Michael. We’re good at that.”

  As though materializing out of the night, suddenly Loki was there, walking next to them and still smelling of sweat and juices rubbed off from a young girl.

  "Howdy, Michael,” he said.

  Michael jumped, now with the mysterious drifters on either side of him.

  "Mickey. Howdy.”

  "I was just tellin’ Todd I wanna help you boys out by whatever means I can. I wanna be a friend to y’all.”

  "You are a friend to me, Michael,” said Loki, patting Michael on the back and wiping a sticky fluid substance from his fingers on his shirt.

  "Did you really fuck Locke’s daughter?” Michael couldn’t hold the question in anymore.

  Loki threw his head back in laughter, “Oh, she’s fucked alright.”

  And the three of them laughed though only Tyr and Loki really understood what he was saying. Loki had left her body in the bedroom, slumped over the bed and bleeding down her sheets onto the floor. Give it an hour or so and the blood would pool up, dripping onto the bar in the front of the tavern and they would run upstairs and Locke would find his daughter, robbed of her innocence banished to Hell.

  Loki pulled a cigar from Tyr’s pocket. He bit off the end and spat it into the gutter then lit the other end and sucked in deeply.

  "Do you want to know how you can help us, Michael?” he asked.

  Michael perked up his ears and smiled.

  "Before I say anything, you understand once I make this offer to you I will take no refusal. I’m entrustin’ to you information you can’t have lessen you accept.”

  "So… you’re tellin’ me if I say no… you’ll kill me?”

  "Well that ain’t really how I operate. I’ll maim you. And then I’ll kill your father and I’ll fuck every whore the two of you have, and then I’ll drink all your wine and smoke all your cigars, and I’ll burn down the whole fuckin’ place and sell the property to Locke. And then I’ll kill you.”

  Loki gave a playful smile that seemed to come with no indication he was joking. Michael wanted laugh but even in awe of Loki as he was, he was terrified of him.

  "I ask again, Michael. Do you want to help us?”

  "He’s not saying you’ll regret it,” Tyr cut in. “We’re just specifyin’ this is information between Mickey and myself and if we speak it to you, you become part of the circle. Once that line is crossed, you don’t step back.”

  Michael hesitated for a moment before he could force it out, “I want to help. I want to be you boys’ friend.”

  Loki grabbed Michael around the neck and put him in a playful chokehold.

  "I knew we could count on this sack o’ shit!”

  He laughed to Tyr, who forced a laugh and nodded. He let Michael go and put his cigar back in his mouth.

  For a long time they walked in silence, Loki smoking his cigar and clicking his tongue. By now Tyr had lit a cigar of his own and passed one to Michael and they were, the three of them, a gang of ramblers headed for the outskirts of town.

  They didn’t stop until the edge of Tombstone, looking into the desert where the sun would be rising in a few hours. Loki pointed off into the distant nothing.

  "A train runs through there, about thirty miles out. Don’t many people know it runs by cause it’s a train they done their best to keep us from knowin’ about on a track that don’t get used too often. But tomorrow, ‘bout one o’clock in the mornin’, it’s gonna run through there. And you, me, and Todd; we’re gonna get on our horses and we’re gonna catch it. Just like you seen in the papers. We’re gonna ride up and we’re gonna jump in, masks on our face, and we’re gonna put everybody on the ground and throw our new gold out of it.

  "We don’t even need the money. Lord knows me and Todd, we got enough. But we’re gonna do it anyway for one good r
eason and it’s the one good reason why anyone should do anything. We’re gonna do it cause we want to fuckin’ do it. And so are you. You’re gonna do it, whether you wanna do it or not, because I want you to do it. How’s that?”

  There was a long silence before a stupefied, I-should-have-known smile found its way to Michael’s face. A train robbery! He would be reading his own story in the paper come Sunday. He saw it in his mind, him and his new friends, his new gang of bandits, drunk on brandy and spouting out sections of the paper and rolling on the floor and grabbing at their sides. He thought he could do it. He thought he could do anything to get in good with these boys. Mickey and Todd, whoever they were, they were the type to go down in history.

  "I’m sold,” said Michael. “Let’s rob the fucker.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  In the morning, two maids at a Motel 6 would find the naked bodies of two pale, young Goth girls laid across the beds in a spatter of blood that would have made them proud. This would be only mildly traumatic for the maids, given they worked in Las Vegas and this was not the first time they discovered dead people during a shift.

  The hotel room was rented under the name of Kortney Gibson, who apparently had enough spare time to legally change the spelling of her first name on her driver’s license. Though the girls had two gentleman callers with them, neither had approached the front desk and so neither appeared on the surveillance tapes.

  Two single rooms were not available, so Kortney instead opted for a double as she and Sioux were too drunk to care and men in general were typically too horny to protest. Since Tyr and Thor had few hangups after a hundred years of watching one another commit murders, they had no reason to protest.

  It was a funny thing that humans believed vampires couldn’t have sex. The notion, like most misconceptions about their species, probably came from works of fiction. Some of these works were created by misguided mortals while others were the work of vampires such as the brilliant Bram Stoker whose work was monumental in painting a picture in human minds of vampires as an evil they could overcome. It was amusing. Loki in particular would nearly fall over laughing every time a mortal brandished a cross at him and chanted prayers in a quivering voice.

  It was hard to say where the fallacy of vampiric impotence had gotten started. Perhaps it was the work of the beings themselves to avoid appearing as sex symbols in the minds of humans, though it did little good in that respect. Regardless, the idea had stuck and humans generally accepted that these beings—which few of them believed to exist in the first place—could not engage in sexual activity if they were real. They paid little attention to the gypsies of ancient Russia who believed a vampire’s sex-drive alone was enough to bring him back from the dead, and who cut the heads off of corpses with erections for fear they would be reanimated to walk the Earth like Tyr or Thor.

  The Brothers disproved the hell out of this myth for Kortney and Sioux, who spent the last ten seconds of their lives fully convinced that vampires were capable of, even proficient at, sexual intercourse.

  They died with terror in their hearts.

  “We’ve reported on the so-called ‘Blood Brothers’ before,” Tyr read aloud from the Las Vegas Sun, “the notorious gang of blood-sucking criminals who have terrorized the United States since the Amtrack Massacre in 1986. Well it seems a recent bank robbery in Carson City is the latest work of the diabolical desperadoes…”

  Thor laughed. They were sitting on a ledge not visible to or accessible by humans on the fake Eiffel Tower at the Paris casino. After the pleasures and the blood of the women had been enjoyed in a cobweb of naked limbs and dual geysers of red mist, they had come here to unwind.

  "It isn’t funny,” said Tyr. “Loki has done a lot of stupid shit in the time I’ve known him, but this is irresponsible even for him. You guys are going to get yourselves killed.”

  "Jesus,” Thor muttered. “You know, when you were around your opinion meant something, but who the hell are you to try to take charge now?”

  "What’s to gain? I know the worst case scenario is you get chained up in silver and suffocated with each other’s severed dicks, so what’s the best case scenario? Why is it worth the risk?”

  "Look, Tyr. I’ve been following Loki as far back as I can remember and so far it’s always been a gas. Okay, so maybe a little celebrity status could get us in a bit of trouble, but if you want to talk about disobeying shit that’s explicitly stated in The Augury, why don’t we talk about sustaining a romantic relationship with a human fucking being.”

  Tyr fell silent. The Butcher. That son of a bitch. If word had spread to Thor already it was only a matter of time before vampires older and smarter than he was would be knocking down Tyr’s door and dragging him back to the torture chambers.

  "Yeah, that’s right,” said Thor. “I’m not going to judge you. I’m not going to tell you you’re being stupid. But you and I both know we’re walking similar territories here, so don’t get all fucking smug and indignant.”

  "Does Loki know?”

  "I don’t know. I didn’t tell him. You know, you might not realize this, Tyr, but Loki doesn’t give a shit about you. He was pissed off for a little while, but we don’t talk about you now.”

  "So you’re not in Vegas to kill me?”

  "Is that what you thought? Shit, I didn’t even know you were here until this week and I can’t tell you whether Loki knows at all. You might want to check your opinion of self-worth Tyr; the sun doesn’t set and rise on your ass.”

  "So if I went back with you tonight and talked to him, you’re telling me he wouldn’t kill me?”

  "Hell, I don’t know. If you come to him like you’re coming to me, telling him he’s an idiot and he needs to reconsider his whole way of life, he might give you a fuckin’ Holy Water baptism. The fact is, and again I’m saying this as a friend, you were the antithesis to all of his aspirations and he’s glad not to have you in the way anymore. To the best of my knowledge he doesn’t want you back.”

  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 Robb
ery 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.