Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers) Read Online Free PDF Page A

then she visited his place in the afternoon but never found him sleeping. He would read the paper, watch television, or surf the Internet, but never once had she found him asleep. He must have had insomnia. It was difficult for anyone to sleep during the day, she supposed.
    “Baby, I want to move in with you,” Eva said without warning, anally raping a comfortable silence.
    Tyr coughed on his cigarette smoke. He should have seen it coming. Almost five months they’d been seeing each other now. That was long enough to warrant a suggestion like moving in, wasn’t it? By human standards? How long is five months? What was the lifespan of these things again? Eighty years or so? That did him no good. This one was dying at nineteen, even if her driver’s license said otherwise.
    Then there was the threat of Loki, who had just arrived in town, possibly plotting to find and kill him. If Tyr’s life was in jeopardy, it put Eva’s in even greater jeopardy. If Loki found him here with Eva, she was dead. That much was for certain.
    Kicking all these thoughts around, Tyr realized after quite some time that Eva was still staring at him with tears in her eyes waiting for an answer. He thought of all the human bodies he’d burned in the incinerator out back. He wondered if there were bones or body parts he’d missed out there. By now he dreaded the thought of having to kill her if she found something.
    He hesitated. “I’m not sure that’s really the best of ideas.”
    Eva looked at the ground and a tear fell onto the rail.
    “I won’t get in the way. If there are things you have to do sometimes, work or something, I can leave you alone. You can just tell me. I just… don’t want to live at home anymore.”
    Tyr turned his gaze back to Las Vegas and stared again at the Luxor. He thought for a brief moment of the ancient Egyptians who’d built the real pyramids. This replica had been erected easily without slave-labor or thousands of mortal lives lost in its construction. Its beacon aimed upwards at the heavens visible from miles away in the night was like a middle-finger thrust at history. It stood as if to say, ‘Anything you could do, we can do better.’ In a sense it was a landmark of human development, and Tyr wondered if there was some other vampire, some former-pharaoh of a vampire, studying that casino as he was now and thinking, Kingdoms will rise and fall .
    The times changed. What once was, was no longer, and what was now was soon to follow. The pyramids built in another thousand years would thrust their middle fingers at this one, and Tyr would still be there to watch and contemplate them. Eva, she’d be gone by the time summer rolled around. Maybe he could put up with having her around for a few weeks.
    Maybe. If Loki wasn’t part of the picture.
    He had to find Loki and Thor. Figure out where he stood.
    “Let me just think about it for a while,” he said. “My solitude means something to me.”
    “Same here. What mine means is that I only have a couple months left to do anything with and I’m going to die alone and isolated. I’d marry you tomorrow if you’d have me.”
    Tyr wanted to tell her everyone was to die alone and isolated; the company of others was a comfort of life, not death, and in the instant of death every being would be divided from every other and cast into the permanent damnation of nothingness. He wanted to tell her from personal experience, there is no memory after death, no sorrow, no regret. As one ceases to be, to have been loved or unloved in life is rendered as inconsequential as the past life itself.
    But none of it mattered. She wasn’t worried about the memory she’d have of her life afterward. Like all mortals, she had nothing worth remembering anyway. She was afraid only of the next month, for obvious reasons. Knowing the fruit of life was about to spoil in her hands, she wanted to squeeze all the juice from it now.
    He didn’t have words for her. He had only thoughts,