Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers) Read Online Free PDF

as he found was too often the case. Instead of offering benign, encouraging prattle, he put his arm around her tighter and pressed their bodies together in hope that his silence would say something deeper. She tried to push away in anger at first, but when he held her there she broke and her fingers clutched his jacket, tears pouring from her eyes suddenly. He felt if he still had tear ducts, he might have cried as well.
    For the first time he could remember, Tyr felt helpless and pathetic. In all his years and for all his professed understanding of human emotion, all he had mastered was a propensity for seduction. While he could bend the will of someone in any state to urges of debauchery, what power over the human heart did he have if he could not make this one happy?

    When he dropped Eva off at her house, Tyr had to promise he would think about letting her live with him. He wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but he wanted to keep her happy. He thought maybe he would wait until she was in even worse health and he would only have to put up with her presence there for a matter of days. It lowered the chances of having to kill her if one of his Brothers made a surprise visit.
    On his way home he stopped by the newsstand and browsed through the tabloids for anything having to do with Loki. It was twenty minutes before he found a story in a tabloid called the Las Vegas Sun, and another in a paper called The Chronicle.
    There it was. The headline in The Las Vegas Sun read ‘ Who Are the Blood Brothers? ’ and told a story about a gang of gun-toting vampires who had knocked over a bank in Carson City. It was a dumb move to say the least, but it was a headline on the third page of a tabloid newspaper known for quirky, outlandish stories and therefore probably wasn’t a prelude to Armageddon. The story claimed the so-called ‘Blood Brothers’ had been ‘at large’ ever since ‘The Amtrak Massacre’ in 1986.
    Right, thought Tyr, At large since 1986? You’re forgetting the building we burned down in 1894? How about all the women we murdered in fifteenth-century England? Too long ago to matter anymore? Twelve people shot yesterday in a shopping mall was a tragedy and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was one sentence in a history book. Even for mankind, time made death insubstantial.
    So what did Loki’s newfound celebrity mean? Anything? Not many humans were likely to take it seriously. Even if there hadn’t been truth to any of it, the story could just as easily have been published as the result of some imaginative and lazy journalist, so what was the harm? There probably was none. If the extent of Loki’s stardom was the occasional article in some dubious newspaper whose cover story was a sighting of Elvis Presley, The Chosen would probably be none the wiser, or simply wouldn’t care to waste their energy on such a trivial matter. This wasn’t worth Ofeigr’s time.
    Problem was, the article in The Las Vegas Sun was not the extent of Loki’s stardom. In The Chronicle, a much more reputable piece of journalism, there was a brief article about a club being built off Freemont Street. It was to be a small hangout targeted at young hipsters and was called The Chupacabra . The article contained an interview with Jack Loki, the man who had purchased the land. As though that weren’t enough, there was even a photograph of Mr. Loki published with the article.
    What the hell was Loki thinking? He knew full well this would put him on Ofeigr’s shitlist. Was he really trying to call them out of the shadows? What was his plan if The Chosen showed up at the club? Public spectacles like bank robberies were a bad idea on their own. These stories were biting the hand that fed them and rubbing salt in the proverbial wound. Loki was playing with his life as well as Thor’s.
    Tyr could bring himself to believe it for Loki, but Thor should have known better. He should have had the wherewithal to remove himself from this before things