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

got any worse. Thor was smart. He didn’t deserve to be tortured and killed because of Loki’s stupidity.
    Thor misses you , Tyr remembered the Butcher saying. He wondered how Thor had been doing these past few years. Thor alone with Loki. That was a scary thought. They certainly weren’t pandering to the better sides of each other’s natures. Loki was losing it after all this time. From the look of it he’d given up completely on his belief in The Augury, which was a dangerous thing for someone like Loki to do.
    Tyr himself was skeptical of the beliefs these days, but regardless of any possible stretched truth within them, he understood and obeyed the rules. Whoever had written The Augury were smart. They were keeping the species in line. The less mature, the weak, the vampires who didn’t have the willpower to keep themselves together, the myth of Ofeigr was there to keep them contained, to keep them in fear so they didn’t abuse what they had. It was a system in place to keep them from becoming gluttonous, but after a thousand years of threats and never a slap on the wrist from The Chosen what was to keep them believing?
    The idea was if they disobeyed any of the laws written within The Augury, Ofeigr’s Chosen would find out about it and punish them. The thing reeked of a college freshman’s personal rendition of the Bible. It was a fairytale, and to creatures like them, alive for as long as they chose to be, the notion of an all-seeing ruler who wanted their obedience was infantile. “Mustn’t let humanity know we exist, or we’ll get coal in our stockings this year,” Loki once said.
    Still, the rules made sense. Tyr was the first to admit that. While the document itself ran wild with ridiculous tall tales, the morals rang true. They had been compiled for good reason and following them was important whether they were enforced by law or not. It was all about keeping themselves hidden. Humans were their prey and if they were made to co-exist with them, the worlds—both mortal and immortal—would enter a state of chaos. It was for this reason fledgling vampires were given guidelines that kept them from exposing themselves. They were not to speak to humans about any details of their personal lives. They were to change their names often, every thirty years or so. But what was really meant to keep them in check, and the place where Tyr lost his confidence, was the big finale: the obligatory religious apocalypse story.
    According to The Augury, a half-breed child would one day be spawned. The offspring of a vampire and a human. The child’s father would be killed and his mother would die in childbirth. The orphan would be taken to the bosom of a female vampire. The two of them, through bitter rage against their own race for the wrongs that had been done to them, would destroy all other vampires before taking their own lives, thus putting an end to the species forever. For these reasons there was a set of rules, seemingly random on first observation, that were to be strictly obeyed by all of them under penalty of torture and death by The Chosen.  
    There were to be no female vampires, ever. And as their sex-drives were increased remarkably with their heightened adrenaline and testosterone, they were cautioned to avoid sex whenever possible, and to dispose of the female immediately whenever it occurred—what Loki called “the ultimate birth control.”
    Tyr’s guess was these rules were set in place to stop them from overpopulating their race and thereby keep them in the shadows for as long as possible. Presumably the system had kept them at least mostly-hidden from mankind for thousands of years. If they were to engage in the amount of intercourse they engaged in without the tactics they were using their numbers would have been extravagant, so it was lucky most of their race appeared to obey. In all their time spent breezing about the world they’d come across few vampires, never a female, and they knew