Free Thicker Than Water (Blood Brothers) by Greg Sisco

Tombstone, looking into the desert where the sun would be rising in a few hours. Loki pointed off into the distant nothing.
    “A train runs through there, about thirty miles out. Don’t many people know it runs by cause it’s a train they done their best to keep us from knowin’ about on a track that don’t get used too often. But tomorrow, ‘bout one o’clock in the mornin’, it’s gonna run through there. And you, me, and Todd; we’re gonna get on our horses and we’re gonna catch it. Just like you seen in the papers. We’re gonna ride up and we’re gonna jump in, masks on our face, and we’re gonna put everybody on the ground and throw our new gold out of it.
    “We don’t even need the money. Lord knows me and Todd, we got enough. But we’re gonna do it anyway for one good reason and it’s the one good reason why anyone should do anything. We’re gonna do it cause we want to fuckin’ do it. And so are you. You’re gonna do it, whether you wanna do it or not, because I want you to do it. How’s that?”
    There was a long silence before a stupefied, I-should-have-known smile found its way to Michael’s face. A train robbery! He would be reading his own story in the paper come Sunday. He saw it in his mind, him and his new friends, his new gang of bandits, drunk on brandy and spouting out sections of the paper and rolling on the floor and grabbing at their sides. He thought he could do it. He thought he could do anything to get in good with these boys. Mickey and Todd, whoever they were, they were the type to go down in history.
    “I’m sold,” said Michael. “Let’s rob the fucker.”

CHAPTER NINE

    In the morning, two maids at a Motel 6 would find the naked bodies of two pale, young Goth girls laid across the beds in a spatter of blood that would have made them proud. This would be only mildly traumatic for the maids, given they worked in Las Vegas and this was not the first time they discovered dead people during a shift.
    The hotel room was rented under the name of Kortney Gibson, who apparently had enough spare time to legally change the spelling of her first name on her driver’s license. Though the girls had two gentleman callers with them, neither had approached the front desk and so neither appeared on the surveillance tapes.
    Two single rooms were not available, so Kortney instead opted for a double as she and Sioux were too drunk to care and men in general were typically too horny to protest. Since Tyr and Thor had few hangups after a hundred years of watching one another commit murders, they had no reason to protest.
    It was a funny thing that humans believed vampires couldn’t have sex. The notion, like most misconceptions about their species, probably came from works of fiction. Some of these works were created by misguided mortals while others were the work of vampires such as the brilliant Bram Stoker whose work was monumental in painting a picture in human minds of vampires as an evil they could overcome. It was amusing. Loki in particular would nearly fall over laughing every time a mortal brandished a cross at him and chanted prayers in a quivering voice.
    It was hard to say where the fallacy of vampiric impotence had gotten started. Perhaps it was the work of the beings themselves to avoid appearing as sex symbols in the minds of humans, though it did little good in that respect. Regardless, the idea had stuck and humans generally accepted that these beings—which few of them believed to exist in the first place—could not engage in sexual activity if they were real. They paid little attention to the gypsies of ancient Russia who believed a vampire’s sex-drive alone was enough to bring him back from the dead, and who cut the heads off of corpses with erections for fear they would be reanimated to walk the Earth like Tyr or Thor.
    The Brothers disproved the hell out of this myth for Kortney and Sioux, who spent the last ten seconds of their lives fully convinced that