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

Jonathan buried the knife between his
shoulder blades.
    Loki gasped and grabbed for it. It hurt more than it
should have, but he didn’t know why. He dropped the gun and tried
to reach around his back. He ran around flailing his arms until he
crashed through the sliding glass door and landed on the balcony
outside.
    Jewel was back to screaming—seemingly her only
defense. Jonathan picked up the gun and chased Loki out onto the
balcony.
    The house sat at the edge of a small cliff, and the
balcony swung out some fifty feet over a rocky gorge. Loki was
leaned up against the railing, pulling the knife out of his back,
and Jonathan was standing outside in front of him with broken glass
crunching beneath his feet and a curtain blowing in the wind
between them as Jewel watched from the living room.
    Jonathan knew he had to fire, but he wasn’t sure he
could do it. He’d been in his share of barroom brawls, but aside
from the knife he’d stuck in Loki a moment ago he’d never caused
real harm to another person.
    Loki got the weapon out of his back and looked down
at it. The material was already burning his hand. He let go of it
and flung it back into the living room. It landed at Jewel’s feet
and she picked it up without thinking.
    “Silver.” He looked up at Jonathan. “You
sonofabitch.”
    He started to advance and Jonathan pulled the
trigger automatically. Loki stopped. Jonathan fired again, and a
third time. Two in the chest, then one in the head. Then another in
the chest when Loki refused to drop. Then another.
    Loki stumbled backward in the hail of gunfire until
he was leaned up against the railing and glaring at Jonathan with
violent eyes. And then—
    Click.
    No more bullets. A streak only lasts so long in
Vegas.
    Jonathan looked down at the empty gun and Loki
grinned, and all Jonathan could think to do was give him one hard
kick. Luckily for Jonathan, his adrenaline was high enough that
this one hard kick was one hell of a hard kick.
    The railing behind Loki shattered and he lost his
footing and fell over the side of the balcony. He reached out as he
fell to grab for anything he could, but there was nothing to grab
and he tumbled fifty feet onto a bed of jagged rocks that pounded
his bones and tore apart his skin.
    Jonathan breathed for the first time in a minute or
two, as did Jewel. Everything became perfectly quiet. Jonathan
laughed, not at anything in particular, but because his nerves were
firing on all cylinders and the emotional sector of his brain
didn’t know how to operate. As he laughed, Jewel looked terrified
of him, and he had to force himself to stop.
    He advanced slowly to the edge of the balcony to
look at the body of the man he’d killed.
    “Should we call the police?” asked Jewel.
    Jonathan peered over the edge into the rocky gorge
below.
    No. It couldn’t be.
    It didn’t make sense.
    At the bottom of the gorge, Loki
was standing upright on top of a rather large boulder with blood
glowing on his skin in the moonlight. His eyes were open and he was
breathing hard. Not only was he not dead, but he didn’t much look
like he was on the verge of death either.
    “I’m comin’ up!” he shouted. “And I’m fuckin’
pissed!”

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
     
    The walls around the bourgeois prison were
sound-proofed to mask the cries of the people inside. Naturally,
the reverse was also true and all the sounds throughout the rest of
the house were muted from the inside.
    For this reason, Tyr never heard the loud music or
the laughter downstairs, nor did he hear Vivienne shouting
lascivious statements at the top of her lungs, nor the horrific
screams of three women witnessing a knifing.
    Tyr heard nothing until a series of gunshots rang
out.
    “What’s going on?” Eva asked him, still half asleep
as he stood up from the bed.
    “I’m sure it’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”
    Eva obeyed, choosing sleep over adventure the way
her species often did.
    Tyr opened the bedroom door, closed it gently