by Greg Sisco
“Yes sir.”
“Well, thanks for your cooperation. I don’t think anybody got murdered here,” said Halleron with a laugh as Tyr and Thor led him and the other cops out of the house.
“No, just drug dealers in this house,” Tyr said jokingly and the cops seemed to chuckle at it. Normal humans with nothing to hide made this kind of lame joke often.
“Sorry if I got any blood on your floor.”
“It’s no problem.”
“And hey, get that window fixed. It’s gonna run you up a fortune in air conditioning.” Cops liked to tell civilians to do things, even when it was none of their business.
“Yeah, definitely. Thanks officers.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
Tyr shut the door and he and Thor groaned to each other and shook their heads, glad to finally be rid of the bastards with no violence and ten minutes or so to spare before sunrise. They were tempted to high five and hug as people usually do when police leave their houses.
“Are they gone?” Loki asked, coming down the stairs.
“Yeah, just left,” said Tyr.
“All right, good,” said Loki. “Tyr, we gotta talk. It’s time you and I straightened some shit out.”
“This whole thing has gone on too long,” said Loki. He and Tyr had let Heimdall out of his bourgeois prison cell and now the two were there together where they could speak in private.
“What whole thing?”
“Eva. We’re all sick of her and what she does to you. The rest of us go out to the club for opening night to have a good time, you run home and cuddle up next to cancer bitch. The rest of us are out here dancing and getting with a couple good looking drains, you’re up here with Eva doing nothing. Somebody breaks in and damn near stabs Thor to death and all hell breaks loose, you’re no help to anybody because you’re up here with a fucking human. She’s a human, Tyr. That’s all. No more, no less.”
“I don’t know that you want me to say, Loki. I’m sorry shit went down and it’s been a crazy night, but none of it’s her fault and none of it’s my fault either. As soon as I came down I helped you resolve the situation. I wasn’t distracted or fucking around, was I?”
“No, no. Not when you were down there. You were distracted and fucking around the whole time the rest of us were getting stabbed and shot at, but when it came time to deal with cops, you did just fine.”
“You’re getting sarcastic and ugly Loki. I’m telling you she and I had nothing to do with it. It was a freak occurrence. Somebody broke in; he had a silver knife. But Eva didn’t ask him to break in. It just happened. Jonathan freaked out a little bit and shot you. Fine. But Eva didn’t shoot you. You’re looking for somewhere to place the blame but it’s not something that happened because of any of us, least of all Eva.”
“See, this is what I’m talking about. ‘Least of all Eva.’ This attitude you have toward her. It’s disgusting. It’s embarrassing. It was funny at first, maybe even a little rebellious, like you didn’t give a damn about the Augury and all that, but it’s getting so all you give a fuck about is this woman and it’s… it just isn’t right. It isn’t the Tyr I knew.”
“Well, get over it. She’s only got another week or so and then it’s over with anyway.”
“No, you get over it. Finish her off. Thor and I are sick of her and sick of you acting like a child. Be a goddamn vampire and kill the bitch.”
“I’m not going to do that, Loki. Not until after the new year, at least. She swore to herself she’d survive into the new millennium and I’m going to let her do that.”
“Aw, fuck off with your sappy shit, you sound like an Anne Rice character.”
“Loki, you and I have different priorities. You’ve got the club. I’ve got Eva. Neither one is a permanent fixture but they’re our connections to the human world for the time being.”
“Yeah, but my club isn’t turning me into a little bitch and fucking us all up the ass.”
“So you say, but the fact that all this happened on the night of your grand opening suggests otherwise.” It was the wrong thing to say, but it felt worth saying.
“This conversation is over. You kill Eva. You do it now. We move on. That’s final.”
“I’m not going to kill her.”
“You’ve got twenty-four hours to drain her or I do it myself.”
Loki ripped the door open and stormed out.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Heimdall’s first kill was a clusterfuck. He had been a vampire for sixteen hours and he had yet to drink blood. It was dangerous to go that long. It was also dangerous to read diaries of one’s past self and develop a connection to mankind and to the man one used to be, but the Brothers weren’t great at avoiding trouble anymore.
When the sun had gone down and it was time to make his first kill, their hunt took them to a club called The Library. Somebody had given a bar this name because he owned a bar and was an idiot.
It would have been nice to find Jewel, as it was in their best interest for her to be dead and it was in Heimdall’s best interest—at least in the opinion of Loki—to be the one to kill her. Loki would have argued this by saying such actions familiarize one with the life that a vampire must live, but it likely had more to do with Loki’s own predilection for cruelty.
It was Loki, Thor, and Heimdall in the bar, with Tyr back at the house with his woman as usual. It had taken several clubs and bars to find one with three attractive girls not accompanied by men. Considering they were talking about Heimdall’s first, it was best not to overcomplicate things.
They spotted the three girls, college students celebrating their Christmas break, and agreed they would suffice. When they approached, Loki did most of the talking and won them over with stupid trivia about the meanings of names. Loki ended up with Erin (whose name was Gaelic and meant ‘peace’), Thor ended up with Megan (whose name was Irish and meant ‘soft and gentle’), and Heimdall ended up with Jamie (whose name was unfortunate—too masculine for women and too effeminate for men, not really suiting anybody except dainty, homosexual nine-year-old boys).
“You are so smart,” Erin said to Loki when he told her that her sister Sarah’s name meant ‘princess.’ Women often told Loki he was so smart.
Thor and Megan were engaged in conversation about Nikola Tesla. Talking to college girls about Nikola Tesla is another good strategy for getting them to sleep with you. Nikola Tesla’s first name meant ‘victory of the people.’ He was so smart.
Heimdall and Jamie were drinking a lot and not really sure what they were supposed to talk about, so they mostly kissed and touched each other.
“I just had my tits done. Do you want to see them?” This was a rhetorical question. In human history, one would assume, it had probably only been met with a ‘no’ six or seven times and always by dainty homosexual boys named Jamie. This Jamie, of course, was not a homosexual boy, but she did have fake tits to show to Heimdall, whose name was that of a Norse god who created social classes. Before his name was Heimdall, it had been Jonathan, an Israeli name that meant ‘gift from God’.
“S-sure,” Heimdall said in answer to the tit question.
“Meet me in the bathroom in one minute.”
She got up from the table and left and thirty seconds later Heimdall announced, “I’m gonna take a piss.”
This was unlikely, as vampires rarely pissed. Pissing was much more of a human hobby. A vampire’s bloodstream flowed at a steady pace instead of at a pulse and the blood functioned differently, absorbing and converting virtually anything ingested into positive resources for the body. What little was left was expelled mostly through sweat and breath and any waste that built up did so for long periods of time. They pissed only once or twice a year.
At this point, however, it was a possibility that Heimdall’s body had not fully adjusted to its new circumstances and his digestive system was purging itself to begin anew. A week later, Loki might have escorted Heimdall to the ba
throom and supervised the piss so as to be sure a clusterfuck didn’t occur, but on this night he let it go. This is one reason why the clusterfuck occurred.
Jamie had to stand in the doorway for a minute and give Heimdall hand signals to guide him into the bathroom. Fucking in the bathroom at a crowded club is not a task for amateurs. It is easy to get caught in the act and forced to go fuck in the parking lot instead. Thankfully, Jamie was no amateur and was able to find the right window amid the steady flow of pissers in and out of the stalls, as well as the bathroom itself, when Heimdall could move undetected past the sinks and into a stall with her.
“Don’t be too loud,” she whispered to Heimdall once they were alone. “There’s other people in here.” Actually she wasn’t whispering so much as shouting less loudly than normal. The volume of the music, even in the bathroom, could be described as exorbitant.
They made out for a while next to the toilet and Jamie screamed, “You’re sexy,” into Heimdall’s ear not quite as loud as she would have if they were in another part of the club.
“So are you,” Heimdall screamed back.
“Oh, I’ll show you my tits now.”
“That’d be cool.”
She was wearing a bareback dress that tied around her neck, so it didn’t take long before it was pulled down to her waist and her breasts were visible—or at least somewhat visible, given the poor lighting in the club.
Incidentally, clubs are designed so that none of your senses work very well—lights so dim you can’t see, music loud enough you can’t hear, and a steady flow of alcohol to knock out the other three. This creates an escape from being alive. People who are in clubs regularly are good candidates for death.
“They look real,” Heimdall screamed in Jamie’s ear while looking at her tits. “Do they feel real?” This question actually meant ‘Can I touch them?’ and really didn’t need to be asked.
“Feel them.”
Heimdall put his hands on Jamie’s breasts. They felt like balloons full of JELL-O.
“Wow, so real,” he lied.
They made out some more. He grabbed her ass. She touched his penis. He sucked her nipples. Yadda-yadda-yadda.
The clusterfuck took place while his mouth was on her breast and she was stroking his hair and trying to breathe sexily but loudly enough he could hear. As he licked the skin around her nipple and felt and tasted the blood under her skin, he realized the blood was what he wanted, not the body. At that point, without thinking, he bit into her breast. Not so much the way a man bites a woman’s breast during foreplay as the way a man bites a chicken breast during lunch.
Jamie screamed and pushed his head away with both hands and his teeth pulled a chunk of skin and silicone with him. She was frantic, crying out and punching and kicking him, trying to get past him and out of the stall door. Her cries might have been loud enough for other pissers and shitters to hear, but the sound would have been faint and the consensus would have been that she saw a spider.
Jamie flailed and Heimdall wrestled with her until he got his fangs into her shoulder at the base of her neck, just as she got the stall door open. They fell from the stall and landed on the floor with Heimdall on top of her, mouth around her neck, blood running down his shirt and across her ruined fake tits. A small audience gathered.
Three women screamed. One of them ran to get somebody.
Anybody.
Everybody.
Civilian response time is one hell of a lot faster than police response time, and within sixty seconds the majority of the patrons in the club were crowding into and around the women’s bathroom. Loki picked up on this instantly.
“Thor, see to the ladies till I get back.”
This was a code phrase. As quickly as he could, Thor would invite the girls to get high in a back alley, kill both of them, and bring the car around. They’d both carried guns tonight, just in case, so this could be accomplished very quickly.
Loki left the table and pushed past the crowd, making his way into the bathroom and finding a sight a little worse than what he was expecting. Heimdall was perched on top of the naked girl, biting her neck occasionally, licking and slurping her blood, and snarling at the crowd whenever they got close. Most people gaped and gawked, but three young men in their late twenties rushed him, pulled him off the woman, and detained him.
Loki pulled his gun from his coat and pointed it at Heimdall.
“Don’t move, asshole,” he said, faking a Russian accent loud enough the crowd could hear it. “You are come back with us for long time.” Then he talked some more in Russian.
The men holding Heimdall down exchanged glances. Loki asked them to help as he got Heimdall to his feet, took off his belt, and used it to tie his hands behind his back, all while keeping the gun trained on him. He was good with his hands and came off looking like he was no amateur at handling weapons or placing people in restraints. He wasn’t, of course.
“I am Alik Lavrov, KGB,” he told the men. “This is psychiatric patient. More law enforcement will be here soon; they will tell you what to do.” Alik was a Russian name meaning ‘helper of man.’ It was a silly name for Loki.
He ducked through the crowd again, this time on his way out with Heimdall in tow. He told everyone he was KGB and the man was an escaped psychiatric patient who had fled his native Russia, that he would be brought back to the ward where he belonged. None of the Americans understood the situation, but he presented confidence and authority so they trusted him.
He was out of the building in a minute. Thor was there to meet him. They put Heimdall in the back seat, got in the car, and drove off a full twenty minutes before the police arrived, making decent time as far as police go.
The customers showed them to the body and told them a guy from the KGB had taken the suspect back to Russia to put him in a mental ward. They sounded stupid, and not just because they said it like, “Dude, it was crazy, you know? Like, he said his name was, um, Alex something—I don’t know, something Russian—and, like, he said he was taking the guy back to the KGB and shit. I’m like, ‘What? Seriously?’ But, you know, he sounded like he was the real deal so I’m all, ‘What do I know,’ right?”
The police would put in calls to the KGB and ask if a guy named Alex detained a cannibal in a club in Las Vegas and brought him back to Russia to put him in a mental ward. They would sound equally stupid.
Two other dead women would be found shot to death in a back alley, their wallets and jewelry stolen. Had they been alive to tell their side of the story, they would have been key witnesses since they shared a table with the alleged KGB agent. They were the only ones in the club who could have told the police he was not Russian—that he was, in fact, Jack Loki.
But they weren’t alive to tell their side of the story. They had been killed in a mugging, or maybe in a calculated assassination of some sort given the friend they were traveling with had been the one killed by the cannibal in the bathroom. What it all added up to no one could say, and the police would never exert much effort finding out. The biggest piece of information they got was that the assailants were Russians, and so the Brothers would never be accused of anything.
The incident would, however, have one negative repercussion for the Brothers, though they would not think much of it at the time, and that was that it would serve as reason to get more stories of vampires into the newspapers. Many of the witnesses said things like, “Man, it was like a fucking vampire, dude. Like, it was crazy shit,” and this would be enough to earn Heimdall the moniker of ‘The Vegas Vampire’, or just ‘the vampire’ for some time. It was the kind of absurd real-life story that got national news coverage just for being weird. National news coverage was a bad thing if you were a vampire, and a worse thing if you associated with vampires who dated women.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When you are a nineteen-year-old with terminal cancer in the final stretch of your life, when you’ve had your family killed before your eyes by vampires as a child, when you’ve devot
ed yourself to a man and come to discover he has been seducing and killing other women for a thousand years and throughout your relationship, when this same man has tried to kill you and then begged your forgiveness and you have conceded, when you are in a state of perpetual fatigue and nausea as your final days count down and this beautiful vampire stands at your bed and watches you sleep, it is only natural to find life strange, to question whether your memory is accurate or if you’re losing you’re mind, to become exhausted.
“We have to go,” said Tyr when he came into her room one night.
“What?”
“We can’t stay here anymore. It’s time to go. Can you walk?”
“Why do we have to go?”
“It’s stupid. Loki wants me to kill you. He thinks you’re a bad influence on me.”
Eva laughed. “I’m so innocent compared to you.”
“He hates that. To vampires, innocence is like meth. He thinks you’re getting me hooked.”
“I don’t want to go. I just want to lie here with you.”
“We can’t do that, Eva. He insists I kill you and if I don’t, he will. It’s not safe for us here.” This is a powerful statement and convinces most humans to do practically anything. But for a dying woman with a vampire for a boyfriend, there is a disconnect from reality, since all women with vampires for boyfriends are dying in some form or another.
“I’m sick of being scared. Let’s just lie here till he comes—”
“No.”
“—and then you can drink my blood. It’s okay with me, now that I know. I’ve accepted it—”
“We don’t have time for this shit.”
“—I’m ready. I don’t mind. I don’t have anything else I need to do. I don’t want to run anymore.”
“It isn’t going to happen.”
“Tyr. I’d like to die by your hand. Cancer is ugly. When you get to Heaven and people ask what happened, who wants to say cancer? I want to say I died in love. I died in the arms of a beautiful vampire. It’s extravagant, romantic even.”