The Wages of Sin (Blood Brothers Vampire Series Book Two) by Greg Sisco

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.”
    “So what happened? Why are we killing our friends
and running around in a panic like a bunch of fledglings? Why are
Jonathan and his girlfriend in a room with two dead women to begin
with?”
    “Forget it, Tyr. It’s complicated. If the woman got
away, then there are cops coming and we have a lot of cleaning up
to do. We’ve got two dead women and one giant fucker on the floor,
another body out back, a cancer patient upstairs—all this shit
needs to be dealt with.”
    “There’s a dead Mexican in the bushes out front
too.”
    “Jesus Christ. We’re talking about police response
time to a multiple homicide. That’s no more than an hour or so. We
have to move fast.” Loki stepped out on the balcony and looked into
the gorge. “I’m thinking we could use some extra help.”
    Thor shook his head. He’d seen this coming.
     
    Jewel drove for miles without experiencing a
decrease in heart rate. She could barely operate the vehicle. She
was jetting down the road at a hundred miles an hour, sliding
around corners, nicking a signpost every mile or two and killing
small woodland creatures by the dozen. By the time she was within
the city limits, she was still driving in the manner that
identifies a person to Vegas police as a tourist operating a stolen
car while under the influence of alcohol, methamphetamine, and oral
sex. She was pulled over by three cruisers on the outskirts, not
having realized she’d been in a high speed pursuit for the last
four minutes.
    “Hands where I can see them!” shouted an officer who
was pointing a gun at her—the second gun she’d had pointed at her
in the last hour.
    She stuck her hands out the broken driver’s side
window.
    Two of the cops ran to her car with their guns in
her face. They grabbed her hands, dragged her down, and pushed her
into the asphalt, shouting things like “Outta the fuckin’ car!” and
“On the fuckin’ ground!”
     
    “He tried to kill me. Somebody tried to kill me,”
Jewel kept saying through tears, but nobody was paying much
attention. This was mostly because she’d been driving ninety-five
miles per hour in a thirty-five mile an hour zone. The fact that
she was black did not help.
    She was handcuffed and shoved into the back of a
squad car, screaming all the while about a man trying to kill her,
two women who had been shot, a man getting stabbed, another man who
had fallen off a balcony, the usual shit.
    She’d been in the car half an hour and they were
halfway back to the station before an officer even acknowledged
that she was talking.
    “Shut the fuck up,” was all he said.
     
    Loki, Tyr, and Thor had leapt from the balcony and
were standing around Jonathan’s body. Loki had a knife in his hand
and was kneeling over Jonathan’s chest.
    “I want to go on record as saying I don’t like this
idea,” said Tyr.
    “You and I don’t like any of each other’s ideas
these days. How about you, Thor? Any objections?”
    Thor said nothing. The truth was he hated this. He
was set on the idea of running out on everybody, especially now
that the situation with Horace was resolved. He would have spoken
up, but fifteen minutes ago when there had been a silver knife in
his chest and Loki was ignoring the issue, Jonathan had been the
one to pull it out. Without Jonathan, it would have been second
death for sure. He owed Jonathan his life. If he came back, though,
he wouldn’t come back as Jonathan. He’d