The Wages of Sin (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book Two) (5 page)

“Hell no. Loosen up, Thor. Don’t be so focused on
business. Have some fun. Get yourself laid.”

Thor forced a smile. Loki ordered another round of
shots.

“Can we make out?” Vivienne asked after they drank
and Loki laughed and kissed her.

Thor drank his shot and lit a cigarette.

“Ouch!” said Vivienne and drew back. Loki had bitten
the skin on her neck. She put her finger there and looked at the
speck of blood, then she put her finger in her mouth and smiled
around it. “You’re kinky,” she said.

Loki and Vivienne kissed again and Thor looked down
at the table. He’d fallen victim to Loki’s charm. Tyr was
absolutely right.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

“What day is it?”

“It’s Christmas Eve. In fact, you know what, it’s
just after midnight. Merry Christmas.”

“One more week.”

Eva was weak now. She only got out of bed a few
minutes a day and wasn’t interested in talking. Tyr stayed by her
side when he could and fought to fix the relationship, but she
mostly ignored him. He was convinced she hated him, but Eva didn’t
have the energy for hatred anymore. The fact was she felt almost
entirely indifferent to Tyr’s presence, other than for a second
here or there when she either wanted him gone or wished he’d say
something less tedious than ‘I love you.’

She thought she’d fallen out of love with Tyr, but
every now and then her eyes caught his in the way they had six
months ago the night she was told of the cancer, the night her life
turned to hell and Tyr pulled her back, and she wondered if there
was an ember of love still glowing in the recesses of her
heart—glowing dimly, it would seem, since her health took a
downward turn when the abundance of love had faded.

Still, she held on for the millennium. It was less
for Tyr now and more for herself, but she’d come this far and
didn’t see the point in giving up. The arbitrary finish line was
coming into view, and she meant to cross it. Then, on the first,
she planned to surrender to the comfort of death.

“Do you want something to eat?”

“No.”

“Something to drink then?”

Tyr hovered over her bed like a nurse who’d spent
the last ten centuries caring for the dying, which on some
fucked-up level was exactly what he was. The sympathy in his voice
and in his facial expressions was almost enough to kill her this
instant. It never felt feigned or exaggerated, but it was more, she
thought, than she ever deserved to be loved—and more, at the
moment, than she cared to be loved by Tyr.

“Why do you love me, Tyr?”

He looked taken aback, probably because she had not
spoken of anything personal for some time, ignoring his pleas for
forgiveness and responding only to conversation about food and
water and exercise. She’d said it now without realizing it was the
first real thing she’d said to him in days.

The way Tyr lit up when he heard the words, she
feared she’d prompted another flood of apologies and professions of
admiration. It was fine though. She’d taken her medication and was
barely conscious at the moment and if he got boring she could drift
off without being blamed. One of the advantages of terminal cancer
is nobody gets pissed at you for falling asleep when they’re being
boring.

He sat on the bed next to her and put her hand in
his. She allowed it, though she hadn’t much strength to
protest.

When Tyr talked he talked in clichés. “Because
you’re so good. And strong. Of all the people I’ve met, you’ve had
the most undeserved rotten luck but it never made you bitter.
You’re so… pure. You’re wiser than your years. One would think you
were a lot older than nineteen.” Blah, blah, blah.

“How old… do I act?”

“Maybe two or three hundred?”

Eva had to laugh. It was a compliment she’d never
been paid before and his flat sincerity gave it an unintended
humor. “How old are you, Tyr?”

“Not sure. A thousand or so?”

“How did you die?”

“Murder, I’m told. Some Vikings sacked an English
village where I lived and killed me and a bunch of other
people.”

“Mmm…” she said sleepily. “Fucking Vikings.”

“They got theirs in the end.”

“Will you tell me a story about them?”

“About Vikings?”

“And you, when you were human.”

“I don’t remember being human. In death you
forget.”

Ah, the always disappointing Tyr. Just when she’d
begun to take interest, he’d let her down again.

“Tell me a bedtime story,” she said, “about when you
were young.”

“What do you want to know?”

“The first time you were in love.”

Tyr gave a half-smirk. He looked up to one of the
corners of the room and sent for thousand-year-old memories. It
took a while for him to begin, but when he did, he did exactly as
he was told.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Tale of the Black Rose, Part I

A Bedtime Story for Eva

Once upon a time in a faraway kingdom called
England, there lived a vampire named Tyr. He was as innocent and
pure as a serial murderer could be, a quiet, religious man whose
life belonged to the church. Tyr didn’t know he was Tyr yet. He
still called himself Harold. He lived with his brother Loki, whose
current name was John, and his father Odin, who was still called
Jacob.

Tyr, Loki, and Odin were lying to themselves, but
they were happy. Even in spite of their isolation.

“They must never know what we are,” Odin said often.
“If they discover us they will kill us.”

They passed from village to village, never staying
in one place for more than a month at a time. They had to feed once
a week, and usually they drained one woman each. As travelers were
not entirely common in most villages and the townspeople were often
well acquainted with one another, mass disappearances drew
suspicion. Though they occasionally became mildly acquainted with
the humans in various towns, they never divulged their secret. This
was the result of their common sense and nothing more.

It was late one night in a magical land called
Yorkshire when Tyr first came upon a young girl named Eleanor. At
the time, he was living in the catacombs and only slipping into the
village one night a week to hunt with his Brothers. They’d fed
three nights prior, but Tyr told them he was restless. He wanted to
see the beautiful land of Yorkshire. To walk the streets in the
moonlight, to watch over the townspeople as they slept.

Loki and Odin were uninterested. They stayed in the
catacombs and read books from the church library. They furthered
their education however they could. While Loki in particular worked
to build his perspective of the world as an observer, Tyr worked to
build an understanding of his place within it. Such is the
difference between education and experience, and there would come a
time for them when this difference would feel much more
significant.

Eleanor was sixteen years old and the child of
serfs, so she had spent the day ploughing and weeding and
harvesting with her father and the eldest two of her four sisters.
The family had eaten supper at dusk and retired to bed shortly
after, knowing work would begin again at dawn.

She awoke during the night and wandered outside
restlessly. A thin fog had rolled in and the moon was full, and an
ethereal glow emanated from the dew on the grass. She wasn’t sure
how much time she had before sunrise, but she felt the urge to walk
through town, to see the beauty of the village at rest.

With similar ideas on how to spend the night, Tyr
and Eleanor had not wandered long before they came to face each
other on a dirt path near the woods.

“Hello, sir,” said Eleanor. “Are you a soldier?”

“No, madam. What makes you ask that?”

“It was only a guess. I’ve not seen you before. I
thought perhaps you were a night watchman.”

“I am not. I am a traveler. I’ve ventured to all the
corners of our great country and found few sights as beautiful as
Yorkshire on a foggy night.”

“A traveler. What work do you do that permits you to
travel?”

“I am a messenger for the church. What work do you
do?”

“Nothing interesting. I work in the fields with my
family. I’m sure I don’t have stories such as yours.”

“I have many stories that are short and amusing, but
I expect the one story you have is longer and more meaningful than
any of which I could dream. There is no shame in a subtle life. My
name is Harold.”

“Eleanor.”

Tyr bowed and Eleanor curtsied.

“Shall we walk?” asked Tyr. And they did.

Over two short hours, Tyr gave an honest
representation of the last year of his life—though he omitted many
murders and the fact that sunlight would kill him—and Eleanor
talked of the joys and difficulties of a life spent toiling in the
fields. Neither party had to feign interest or wished to prove
anything, and so the conversation went as ideal conversation goes,
with each person more interested in knowing more about the other
than telling about themselves. A two-hour conversation meeting
these criterion is all it takes for a bond to form, and after this
brief period spent feeding each other’s interests and emotions, Tyr
and Eleanor parted ways as great friends and with a spark of
romantic love between them.

When the first traces of the light of morning inched
toward the horizon, they quickly said goodbye as Eleanor was eager
to reach home before her family awakened and Tyr was eager not to
be burned to death by the sun.

A week later, Tyr and his Brothers left Yorkshire,
and though Tyr and Eleanor had only seen one another on the one
night, he thought of her often. She became his picture of the
common people and the life of which she told him became the life he
imagined for all humans—one of hard work and harsh times, of grief
and loss and pain, made worthwhile by love and companionship, by
the joy brought on by other people.

In their travels, the Brothers arrived in Yorkshire
every year, and each time they found themselves in town Tyr would
take one night to wander the village and find her. For years he
came to her house and rapped on her bedroom window and they walked
the streets together in the moonlight and related their adventures
to one another.

When he returned to visit her at age eighteen, she
had been recently married and she spoke of her husband with a
casual indifference not uncommon for the age. A year later when he
found she’d given birth to her first child, Clara, she had the love
in her eyes one might have wanted to see after her marriage.

The relationship between Tyr and Eleanor developed
one night a year for most of Eleanor’s life. As her family grew, as
she gained and lost children, as her husband died of leprosy, Tyr
and Eleanor always looked forward to the one night a year they
would spend catching up with each other, when Eleanor would bear
her soul and Tyr would practice his charm and his half-truths,
though his interest in her life was always genuine.

The meetings were not a secret Tyr kept from his
Brothers. They never came with him to visit Eleanor, but he
informed them of his visits beforehand and they politely asked
about her afterward. There was a level of innocence present in all
of them in those days, and there was no worry over the dangers of
their friendship. There was the small concern that Eleanor might
piece together that disappearances in her village took place
anytime Tyr came to visit, but if problems of this nature were to
one day arise, the situation would be easily rectified by leaving
Yorkshire and never returning.

One night near the land of Ipswich, while venturing
alone, Odin met another vampire, a missionary, and was told of the
ways of their species.

“Have you not heard the word of the great Ofeigr?”
the missionary asked.

“I don’t believe I have.”

“You must.” The missionary reached into a tote bag
and came up with a leather bound book, the edges of its pages
tinted gold. “Your masters have done you a disservice. You know not
of the Augury?”

“I do not. But my family and I are Episcopalian and
we’ve no interest in your strange gods.”

“Not gods; vampires. I am not here whoring religious
faith. The Augury concerns itself only with the physical world.
Ofeigr is very much alive, a being who walks and talks like you or
I, and it would be a grave mistake for you not to follow Him.”

“What does He ask of us?”

“Only that we follow some simple provisions.”

“And what might those provisions be?”

“Take the book. Your life in death will be far
easier if you read it. Through how many human generations have you
lived?”

“Not one. I was given life after death by a
fledgling vampire who taught me little and left shortly. I turned
my sons when they were killed by Vikings. The three of us have
lived not more than thirty years in death.”

“This vampire who turned you, he needs Ofeigr’s word
as well. What was his name?”

“He did not have one.”

The Augury, the book was called. It dealt in
parables and riddles often, same as any religious text, but the
words rang true for the Brothers, perhaps more so even than the
Bible. The text spoke to them in much the same way, excited them
about life in death even while it frightened them of their own
species and their own desires.

“You can no longer speak with that young woman in
Yorkshire,” said Odin to Tyr. They were sitting at a table in the
catacombs with the Augury between them.

“I must,” said Tyr. “In all these years a problem
has never arisen. We do not copulate. She doesn’t know what I
am.”

“The book makes it clear. Nothing more than passing
relationships with humankind. Not even a single lengthy
conversation with anyone but a drain.”

“What if none of it is true?” asked Loki, always the
first to suggest a possibility that benefited him.