by Greg Sisco
“The dog next to you tied you there and killed you.”
Thor turned his head to the tethered beast. A dog? Is that what you called that thing? It didn’t sound right.
“I can untie you,” Loki told him, “or you can break the rope behind you. If you focus it will be easy. But do not panic when you are free.”
Thor took a moment to digest this. Panic? He wasn’t sure what panic was and certainly didn’t know how to go about doing it. He hoped he wouldn’t accidentally engage in this ‘panic’ activity as he took Loki’s advice about the rope. He tugged at it for a minute.
“Don’t pull upward,” Loki said. “Don’t try to slip your hands out. Just pull them outward, apart. The rope will give way and tear.”
Thor pulled his hands apart. Sure enough, the rope ripped to pieces like bread and before he knew it he was standing next to Loki, still dazed.
The dog in the other chair had taken to barking. He seemed fearful of his owner and he spouted curse words and screams at them. Thor slapped him on the head as it seemed the right thing to do. Tyr and Loki laughed at this.
“Drain him,” Tyr commanded, but Thor did not know the meaning of this. “Your instinct will take over and you’ll begin to understand.”
Thor stared blankly at Tyr. Drain? What did it mean to drain a dog?
“I don’t know how,” he said.
Loki held out his hand to Tyr, who pushed the maiden to him. She was dressed in a white nightshirt, clinging loosely to her body. Thor had the distinct impression she had something he wanted but he couldn’t be sure what it was.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Loki asked, holding the teary-eyed maiden in front of him.
Thor nodded his head yes. If the other thing was a dog, this one must have been a cat. A kitten even. She was shy and small in the hands of her owners. Loki ran his hand up and down the curves of her body, pressing her back against his front and tasting and smelling the sweat of her neck.
“Touch her,” he told Thor.
Thor reached out and put a hand on her cheek. She tried to turn but her master held her there. The dog to Thor’s left continued to bark and Thor would have struck him again were he not so immersed in the kitten. Her skin was so soft! He rubbed his thumb back and forth on her face and moved his hand down her neck to her shoulder.
“What is she?” he asked Loki, then he reached into the nightshirt and gently caressed the skin underneath it.
Tyr and Loki laughed again and looked at each other. Thor was lost but his actions seemed right. Even so, he took his hand away in a fit of embarrassment.
What animal was he? Tyr and Loki were watching him like he was behind a window at the zoo.
Suddenly Tyr remembered his own rebirth and the church in England centuries ago, and for just an instant, he thought of the black roses and touched the tattoo on his shoulder.
“She is a drain,” Loki said. “She is a gift to us.”
Thor cocked his head. That word again, drain.
“What is a drain?”
Loki smiled an ‘I thought you’d never ask’ smile. He didn’t answer with words. He twirled his drain like a dancer and caught her in his arm. As her head leaned back, he lowered his lips to her neck and bit into her throat.
Her body tensed and she gripped the back of his head and pulled his hair. At first it seemed he was hurting the poor drain. She tried to push him away but her arms became weak and her screams quieted to moans that sounded of pleasure. Thor couldn’t say whether Loki was pleasing or torturing the beauty as her body went limp and struck the floor, but it didn’t matter. She was his.
The dog was Thor’s. Somehow this was clear. His barking had been replaced by cautious yelps and he seemed to try vainly to keep his distance. Thor cocked his head and studied the dog once again.
“Drain him,” Tyr repeated. “Drain him and it will all make sense.”
Thor took a step forward. The room fell silent except for the hysteric dog.
He bent down carefully toward the pooch’s neck, but it snapped and spat at him as he tried to get in close. The dog didn’t want to be drained. Tyr and Loki continued to laugh, making him all the more uncomfortable. He didn’t want to be a laughing stock.
The dog jabbed at him with its head and tried to back him away but Loki seemed to urge him on. He pushed back on the dog’s head and tried to shush him, putting his lips on its neck. The dog tugged and struggled as Thor attempted to bite into the flesh, being careful not to do that ‘panic’ thing.
A thin wound opened and the slightest drop of blood was on Thor’s tongue. It tantalized him. He held the dog tighter and brought his teeth down with a bit more force, still chewing more than biting as the skin began to tear open.
What poured out of the dog’s neck was wine. Ancient wine. Delicious and aged to perfection. It was a taste unlike anything Thor had tasted before and yet it was powerfully familiar at the same time. And then, as Loki said would happen, instinct took over.
The drain’s actions ceased to exist and there was no Loki and no Tyr, no frail kitten and no room. It was only the feast. Thor knew what he needed now and he pressed his fangs down harder, sucking back the nectar from inside the dying dog.
“Breathe,” something was saying from somewhere else. Thor tried to obey. He breathed through his nose and held the back of the dog’s neck, pressing it into his mouth and licking and slurping, trying to swallow everything he could squeeze out.
For a moment the memory of sex—no, the instinct of sex—came back to him. This was the instinct he let control the moment. He went with the flow now, climbing onto the chair with the dog, placing his knees on either side of its lap. He struggled to keep his lungs working as he forced the canine body into his.
His breaths continued and so did the dog’s, gasping in his ear in a way that aroused him even further. He dug his hands into the dog’s back and arched and tensed, his whole body tightening and contracting until his first drain gave a deep exhale and slumped in the chair and the blood stopped coming.
He tugged his lips away and fell onto his back, rolling on the floor in pleasure and ecstasy. His breaths came deep, strong, and fast and he tried to calm his nerves and wind down from this climax. He tried to regain his composure, to relax and breathe.
But he didn’t have to breathe.
All the same, his impulses and his instinct seemed to want to. And if Tyr said it was important, then it was just as well.
The whiskey spilling forth from the keg had lacquered the floor of the whole cellar. It was Tyr’s idea to spill more of it and they spent the next twenty minutes clearing out the bar, emptying kegs, throwing bottles, and soaking every inch of the furniture. They danced and chanted old Irish drinking songs and Loki downed more liquor than he threw but there was more than enough to be wasteful.
When every inch of the bar was marinated in ethanol and the smell was nauseating and intoxicating they stepped out onto the balcony and lit their cigars.
“Do you have any recollection of your mortal life?” Tyr asked Thor, who was already far more aware than he had been half an hour ago.
Thor shook his head no. It wasn’t entirely true but any memories were too dim to be put into words so he left it at this.
“Well you worked with your dad,” Tyr told him, striking a match and lighting the tip of his stogie. “He runs a brothel. Competes with this one. That guy in there you drained, the dog, he ran this place. With it out of the way, your father can be a rich man and it seems to me, maybe he deserves it. Now I can’t say for sure what manner a person he is and neither can you, I guess, but it’s really all the same either way.”
Tyr struck another match and set the rest of the matchbook ablaze with it.
“For Loki and me to keep up appearances, this building has to burn. You, you’re gonna have to stay in the shadows for a little while and maybe change your appearance. Pretty shortly we’ll be getting out of Tombstone and you’ll never look back on any of this. So all I’m asking really is
this: shall I set this building on fire, or would you like to do the honors?”
Thor hadn’t much recollection of his father or the man he had been, but destruction came naturally. He took the matchbook from Tyr’s hand, lit his own cigar, and said, “I christen this bar The Firewood Saloon.”
He tossed the matchbook through the window. The three of them watched, firelight on their faces as the flames explored the den, riding the rapids in the alcohol down the stairs, tearing the curtains, spraying forth sparks from the wiring on the lamps. In minutes the place was a crematorium.
Even Loki or Tyr couldn’t be certain how much danger fire was to them. No doubt they could be killed if obliterated to ash, but such was not likely to happen by accident. Nevertheless, they didn’t like its presence any closer than a few feet away. Much like bullets or blades, even when it was doing no permanent harm to their bodies, it hurt like a bitch. So when the flames had licked every room and started in on making love to the brothel as a whole, it was time to go.
Thor followed without fear when his newfound Brothers leapt from the balcony and landed softly on the boardwalk below. They walked casually into the night as the first members of a crowd were beginning to gather.
And with the torch that was Cherrywood, the night in Tombstone glowed brighter than it ever had before. People from all over town came out of their houses and pointed and gaped as the walls and the roof tumbled down. Some of them rushed with buckets of water and tried vainly to stop the burning, while others stood dumbly as humans are want to do.
The boys watched from a perch in the shadows at the end of the street, smiling as it toppled upon itself, no doubt charring the bodies inside so no one would ever learn what really happened there that night. And as he watched the crowd of onlookers grow larger, and larger, and larger; it was a source of disappointment for Loki that he couldn’t join them and throw his arms around perfect strangers as he sang songs and danced in the light of The Firewood Saloon.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Usually when Tyr pulled up to Eva’s house, she would be sitting on the front porch and waiting for him eagerly. If not, she would come running out to the car before he could even shut the engine off. On this night, there was no such luck. He spent a few minutes sitting in the car and waiting before he shut it off and went to the front door.
He didn’t have a good feeling about this. He had expected tonight she would be more excited than ever to see him here, arriving to take her away for good this time. But no. Here he was knocking at the front door for the first time in weeks.
It wasn’t Eva who answered the door, either. It was Aimee.
“Oh, hi Tyr,” she said.
“Hi. Is Eva here?”
“No, she left like fifteen minutes ago. We had kind of a fight.”
Of course. That made sense. She had been impatient already to get back to Tyr’s loving arms and her bitch roommate had exacerbated the situation by being a bitch.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Tyr said, pretending not to think she was a bitch. “So she took a cab then?”
“I don’t know.”
She did. That was the logical explanation. A rare moment of Tyr’s life when he had the chance to be romantic, to sweep a girl off her feet with love instead of lust, and Aimee the bitch had ruined it. That’s what happened.
“Shit. Um… All right. I guess I’ll head back home then.”
“Sorry.”
Tyr started to turn back to his car when a thought occurred. He might have let it go, but under the circumstances it felt like the right thing to do.
“Aimee,” he said, getting excited already. “This might sound a bit weird, but… can I buy you a drink?”
Tyr ripped open the flesh on Aimee’s throat at the moment of orgasm, deliberately making the gash a lot larger than it needed to be. He had carefully plotted to face her back to his front at the height of sex with both of them on their knees. It was difficult to achieve this position in her Honda but vampires were quite flexible and, thankfully, so was Aimee.
This way when he tore open her neck, less of the blood sprayed onto him—as he was wearing a shirt he particularly liked and had been too lazy to take off. This position also gave the added bonus of having the blood spray up to soak everything in front of her. It was interesting to watch the facial expressions humans made when looking at an object being drenched in blood that belonged in their bodies. There was a wholesome humor to it.
Aimee was a worse person than he had realized. He expected he would have to put forth a lot of convincing to get her out of her clothes, given she knew her terminally ill roommate was head over heels in love with him. But after five drinks, Aimee offered to suck him off in the parking lot before he had even had the chance to turn his charm up to eleven.
Initially he had taken her out tonight because he thought Eva would have wanted it that way, but when he killed her he felt he was doing it as much for himself as he was for her. The type of girl so easily willing to betray a friend whose circumstances were already as unfortunate as Eva’s was the type of person who Tyr felt he was doing a service to the world in killing. Of course, this didn’t stop him from thoroughly enjoying the pleasures of her nether-regions beforehand.
After taking a moment to come down from the euphoria, he had to dispose of the body. It was annoying to know Eva was at his house and he couldn’t use the incinerator tonight, but he reminded himself it wouldn’t be long now until everything went back to how it had been. For the moment, he would have to make due using the world to dispose of bodies. Really, what was the difference? He’d had a thousand years to master this art.
He placed her body in the driver’s seat and didn’t bother with the seatbelt, then he fired up the ignition and took a deep breath. This was an uncomfortable way to get rid of a person, but it was a simple and effective one.
Shifting his weight from the passenger’s side of the car, he stepped on the accelerator and picked up speed, blaring down the road at a hazardous pace. He reached over with his left hand to steer, keeping the car centered in their own lane until they reached ninety miles per hour—more than enough to kill a human.
At this point he swung the wheels of the car first a little to one side, then fully to the other. As the tires slid and the car lost traction, he slammed his foot down on the brake pedal and locked the wheels in place. When the car faced perpendicular to the street on which they were traveling, the wheels binding it to the road caught the asphalt and the momentum swung the car upward and into a roll. Tyr and Aimee were now the passengers of a crashing vehicle driven by a woman whose blood-alcohol level was well over the legal limit. Quite frankly, she should not have been driving and it was lucky her mistake had led to her own demise and not the demise of some innocent stranger.
Tyr pressed his hands to the roof and door of the car, holding himself snugly in place while being careful not to exert so much force as to bend the vehicle in suspicious ways.
When the car stopped rolling, he climbed out swiftly. He was pleased to see it had not yet burst into flames and his shirt had sustained little damage aside from a few droplets of blood that had spattered onto his chest during the roll.
Damn, he thought, should have thought of that when I ripped her throat open so far. That’ll teach me.
He put the shirt in his mouth and did his best to suck the little spots of blood out of it as he walked back to his house.
It was a happy moment, in spite of the shirt.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What’s in the box?” Loki asked Eva when they arrived back at Tyr’s house.
Tyr wasn’t home. She and Loki had taken a seat in the parlor. She was drinking a glass of water and Loki a glass of wine. The box was sitting on a coffee table between them.
“Oh, just a few things I wasn’t ready to part with yet.” She moved the box into her lap and fidgeted with its contents. “A couple notebooks of stuff I wrote when I was younger, my diary, some pictures of my parents. You know.”
�
�Family’s important,” said Loki, casually pushing the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go. “You haven’t got family, you haven’t got anything.”
“Um… Yeah,” said Eva, grief in her voice.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Loki, having gotten the exact reaction he expected. “Family’s not a happy story for you?”
Eva sighed. “It’s okay. I uh… I just don’t really have any family anymore.”
“Oh. Oh, wow, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. Really. I didn’t even really get to know them.”
Loki was grinning to himself, having more or less confirmed his suspicions.
“Do you mind if I ask what happened?”
“I don’t know. It’s kind of a sad story. Maybe it should wait for another time.”
“I don’t mind,” Loki said sincerely, coming off far more compassionate than he was or ever had been. “I’d like to hear it.”
Eva choked out the words Loki had been waiting for, “Do you know what The Amtrak Massacre was?”
Of course Loki knew what it was. He led the damn thing.
“I’ve read about it,” he said, hating not to give himself the credit he deserved. “They were on the train?”
“So was I,” said Eva. “I was the only survivor.”
Loki nodded and rubbed her back. Bingo. Everything was just as he thought it was. She was the girl. The survivor. The lucky bitch didn’t know it, but she had Tyr to thank for that.
“Commence the plans,” Loki had said. And a few hours later they were standing on a ridge in the Nevada desert outside Reno, overlooking the countryside where a train track ran across the flat, open sand.
There were lights from the train out in the distance, and the low, mechanical churning of the engine could just barely be heard moving toward them. The three of them were smoking cigars and Loki was whistling the theme from The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly as they waited.