Gus turned to face Crispin, across the apartment, and Crispin was already charging him, howling. Gus got his arms up and got the handcuff chain across his brother’s neck, under his jaw. High enough so that he couldn’t get his stinger out.

Gus grasped the back of his head with his hands and pushed Crispin down to the floor. His vampire brother’s black eyes bugged and his jaw bucked as his mouth tried to open, which Gus’s strangling grip would not allow. Gus was intent on suffocating him, but as time went by and Crispin kept kicking, and there was no blacking out—Gus remembered that vampires didn’t need to breathe and could not be killed that way.

So he pulled him up by his neck, Crispin’s hands clawing at Gus’s arms and hands. For the past few years, Crispin had been nothing but a drag on their mother and a big pain in the ass for Gus. Now he was a vampire and the brother part of him was gone but the asshole part remained. And so it was retribution that moved Gus to wheel him headfirst into the decorative mirror on the wall, an old oval of heavy glass that didn’t crack until it slid down to the floor. Gus kneed Crispin, throwing him down onto the floor, and then grabbed the largest shard of glass. Crispin wasn’t quite to his knees when Gus rammed the point through the back of his neck. It severed the spine and poked the skin out of the front of his neck without quite ripping it. Gus worked the glass piece sideways, slicing Crispin’s head nearly off—but forgetting its sharpness against his own hands, cutting his palms. The pain stabbed at him, but he did not let go of the broken glass until his brother’s head was removed from its body.

Gus staggered back, looking at the bloody slash across each of his palms. He wanted to make certain none of those worms wriggling out with Crispin’s white blood got into him. They were on the carpet and hard to see, so Gus stayed away. He looked at his brother, in pieces on the floor, and felt sickened by the vampire part of him, but as to the loss, Gus was numb. Crispin had been dead to him for years.

Gus washed his hands at the sink. The cuts were long but not deep. He used a gummy dish towel to stop the bleeding and went to his mother’s bedroom.

“Mama?”