Honkytonk Hell: A Dark and Twisted Urban Fantasy (The Broken Bard Chronicles Book 1)

by eden Hudson

  Most of me wanted to. Just the part of me that wished it could’ve killed Jason and got my voice back because why the hell did he want to live out my dream—and anyway, it was my fucking band in the first place—didn’t. Right then, though, that part of me had the majority of the vote.

  “This shouldn’t be that hard a sell,” Dodge said. “I’ll cut you back in and you can put together the sets. I never could figure out how you did it so good, anyway. You always knew the right song to play next. People really felt what you—”

  I waved him off before he started telling me my dick was made out of gold and all the girls for miles around worshipped it.

  “You’ll do it?” he asked.

  I shrugged, but inside I was happier than I should’ve been. It was like that little rush you get when you decide to buy some meth or a needle of fae glitter for a big night. Maybe I really was addicted to music.

  “Hot damn!” Dodge slapped his hands together and stood up. “I’m telling everybody. This place is going to be double capacity. See you later?”

  Yep, I’ll be the one wishing I was singing instead of you.

  Desty

  Bub’s Diner didn’t have wireless, but the air conditioning felt like heaven on my sunburn, and the waiter kept my water full, even during the lunch rush. I sat at a two-top by myself, nibbling at a cheese sandwich and pickles and trying to drown my dehydration in ice water.

  Maybe I could head back over to that bar again and ask around some more. This time I’d be ready for Schoolgirl. If she gave me any trouble, I’d tell her I wasn’t interested in Tough anyway, and that she could shove her attitude problem up her butt next to whatever else she had wedged in there.

  While I was daydreaming about having enough attitude and guts to defend myself, a group of faeries came in and sat at the big family table in the center of the room. I’d seen faeries in person before, but the shimmering always took me by surprise. They were so sparkly.

  One faerie said something that made the rest of her friends laugh. Then she touched the tabletop and a blue rose with glowing orange veins blossomed from the laminate. The spikey-haired faerie sitting across from her scooped the rose up and popped it in his mouth. He burped and a puff of blue smoke drifted out.

  I ducked my head and took a drink of water so the faeries wouldn’t see me smiling and realize I had been watching. The last thing I needed was to get trapped in some eternal dance party or made into faerie wine.

  Pretty soon the waiter would probably tell me to order some more food or get out and I would go because I didn’t want to spend any more of my blood money and I didn’t have anyone to sit and talk with.

  I flicked a sandwich crumb into the green pool of pickle juice on my plate.

  Twins weren’t made to be alone. If I’d learned anything from the last eight months, it was that.

  Tough

  I expected it to hurt worse, but the truth is, I was gone halfway through the first song. Not being able to sing was kind of how I imagine losing your sense of taste would be—it blew like a hundred dollar hooker, but my other senses overcompensated. Sometimes before, my picking would get a little sloppy or I’d drag my fingers, but that first night back at Rowdy’s, I was on, all the way. Figure in the packed house, the energy flying off the crowd, the music hitting that sweet spot between the real world and something higher… It was like being free again. Like I could hit the highway out of Halo and never have to look over my shoulder for the Tracker.

  Near the end of the second set, I saw Desty squeeze through the crowd to the bar. I hadn’t been very drunk last night—at least not while I was talking to her—because the way I remembered her was pretty much the way she looked. Short hair, cute nose, big eyes, worn-out boots. Her legs didn’t go on forever, but they went far enough in those shorts.

  I kept an eye on her through the last song of the set, “Flirting with Disaster.” She talked to a few different people—a couple tourists and Beth Anne Hicks, the rip who runs the pharmacy. Whatever Desty was asking them always got a negative answer. Maybe she wanted to know about Finn, whether he had come in, where pretty-boy vamps spent their time so she could find him. That happened sometimes. Girls got hung up on guys too retarded to appreciate them. Whatever she was asking, she didn’t see me.

  “Hey, Tough, you in there?” Dodge was setting his bass on its stand.

  Willow was already gone, probably on her way back to Rowdy’s office to call and check on her little girl, and Owen was halfway off the stage, his fiddle laying in its case.

  I hung up my Gibson and followed Dodge and Owen to the bar. Desty could go chasing after whatever asshole she wanted. I’d been around her one time when I was about three shots in. I barely knew her, couldn’t even remember what we had talked about except that she swore she wasn’t drunk and then got all embarrassed like she knew I knew she was lying. And there was that whole thing about my name.

  Up at the bar, I got a Whitney special—a shot, a longneck, and a shot—from Rowdy. Killed the shots, then leaned back against the bar and tried to watch Desty through the crowd. Not exactly an easy thing to do, considering everybody kept talking to me.

  “Hey, Tough, good to see you back in town… Sounding great tonight, man… Really killing it… Band needed you back… Wasn’t the same without you…”

  No one mentioned Colt, probably because that was month-old news. No one made any vamp-whore jokes or asked me any questions they wanted a response to because everyone knew about Mitzi and Jason stealing my voice and taking off.

  I looked around Owen at Desty. She was by the stage talking to Willow.

  Willow shook her head, but they didn’t stop talking. Will was like that. Something about her made you feel safe, made you want to stick around. Except for her baby-daddy, I guess. Willow was a year older than Scout and she had a three-year-old, so if you did the math, you came up with a fourteen-year-old Willow having unprotected sex with a tourist. But you’d never have guessed it, talking to her. She didn’t even cuss.

  Willow nodded in my direction and Desty looked at me. When Desty saw that I was already looking at her, she looked away real fast. Willow raised her drink to me. The top part of my cheeks got hot, so I took a drink of beer and nodded at whatever Owen was saying to Dodge and me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Desty and Willow keep on talking. I sure would’ve liked to know what about.

  Desty

  “You could try Seventh Circle, the angel club on the north end of town,” Willow said, tucking a long, red-orange curl behind her ear. “They let humans in sometimes.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said.

  “So, why would your sister want to become a familiar?” Willow asked.

  The question caught me off guard. I laughed, but it sounded as uncomfortable as it felt.

  “Starting us off with an easy one, huh?” I said.

  Willow smiled.

  I took a drink of my orange juice and stared down into the cup.

  How do you explain to someone that after sixteen years your dad suddenly started liking women closer to your age than your mom’s? Like that, I guess, pretty much word-for-word, unless you still kind of wished he’d get over his midlife crisis and come home.

  “A few years ago, our dad left,” I said. But that wasn’t far enough back to make Willow understand. “See, before, Tempie and him were always really close. They’d go deer hunting and do stuff together. But then he ran off with this girl who was only like five years older than we were. Tempie went after him. She said he took her out to eat and told her that he was happy with Gianna—that he was starting a new life and he needed some time alone to adjust. It really hurt her.”

  “What about you?” Willow asked.

  “What about me?”

  “You must’ve been pretty upset, too.”

  Upset? I didn’t like hunting or fishing, and camping was definitely not for me. Reading—that was pretty much the extent of my hobbies. Dad and I had hung out as much as two people
with only genetics in common could, but he was still my dad. If he emailed me tomorrow and said he wanted to take me to Freezer for a butterscotch milkshake, I would go running home like my butt was on fire. Of course I’d been upset when he left, but there had been school and work and college applications and trying to get Mom to eat and act like a living, functioning human being. So, yeah, I was upset, but not everybody gets to self-destruct.

  Willow touched my arm and I jumped.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You looked like you were about to cry.”

  “It’s okay.” I tried to laugh. “I forgot, what was the question?”

  “I was just wondering why your sister would want to be a familiar. Why would anybody? I mean, they have to know what happens when the angel moves on.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out.

  “Tempie said all this stuff about wanting to be part of something bigger and truer on her blog, but you have to know her. She’s romantic, but she’s really spiteful, too. She left me a note the night she ran away.” It was weird to hear myself talking about the note out loud. Willow was the first person I had told. “Tempie said if some guy was going to screw her over anyway, she wanted it to be hard and fast and to have his complete devotion while it happened. She said at least fallen angels let you know what you were in for up front.”

  Willow hmmed and took another sip of her white Russian.

  “Where’re you from?” she asked.

  “A little south of Hannibal.”

  “On the river?”

  I nodded. “Close enough that ten acres of our farm is overflow for the levee.”

  “So you guys had plenty of sirens,” Willow said.

  “Yeah.” It seemed like small talk, so I relaxed. “Some of the idiot guys in my class actually hunted them.”

  “Is Hannibal crow or coyote territory?” she asked.

  “Coyote.”

  “I thought so,” Willow said. “But you guys don’t have any fallen angels.” She traced the rim of her drink with her thumb. “No one who lived in an angel town ever wanted to become a familiar, I bet. You can’t see the castoffs and still convince yourself you want that.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. So much for safe conversation.

  “I don’t have anything against Kathan,” Willow said. “I assume he’s an okay mayor. I’m not much into politics, but he must be, right? I mean, he made the ‘every human in Halo has to have a protector’ rule so the vamps and sirens wouldn’t just go around sucking everybody dry and the werecreatures wouldn’t be constantly fighting over who was hunting on whose land, so, you know. That was really great of him, considering he could’ve just had Mikal and the foot soldiers wipe us all out instead of letting our generation live. But Kathan really, really hates Tough’s family.”

  Willow nodded at Tough. He was leaned up against the bar with a beer, watching us. I looked away, but Willow just raised her glass in a little salute to him.

  “It’s okay,” she said to me, “You can look. He’s pretending to listen to Owen now because we caught him.”

  I flipped my bangs out of my face and stole a glance. Tough was nodding at an orange-haired guy, but even in the dim light I could see the top of his cheekbones turning red. Something about the blush touched off a spark in my brain, as if I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “Tough’s brother Colt is a familiar,” Willow said. “He was killing the people Mikal enthralled, so Kathan gave Colt to her, kind of like a poetic justice thing. Angels are really into that. Anyway, what I think people don’t get is that, sometimes, fallen angels use being a familiar as a punishment. Like, they can’t think of anything worse than— What’s wrong?”

  “I saw him,” I said. “Yesterday. Tough’s brother. When I went on the Dark Mansion tour.”

  Willow leaned forward. “How did he look?”

  Naked? Smoking hot? Subservient? Madly in love? House broken? My dad used to have this term he thought was really funny, but I couldn’t say “pussy-whipped” out loud.

  “Ironic,” I said, remembering his tattoos.

  “Huh?”

  “No, I mean, he has these—” I shook my head. “He seemed fine.”

  “Was he like…? I don’t know what to ask exactly,” Willow said. She looked over at Tough again. “But I guess that Mikal still has him is the answer.”

  “She didn’t look like she was going to cast him off anytime soon.”

  “Mikal goes through them pretty fast,” Willow said.

  The eighteen day average popped into my brain. Willow looked at me like she could tell I’d heard the numbers and she didn’t want me to have any illusions about them based on a nationwide figure.

  “A few months ago we had five castoffs zombie-ing around Halo trying to kill themselves,” Willow said. “Mikal is brutal. A week with her would be like forever.”

  “How long has Colt—”

  “Thirty-four days today.”

  I couldn’t say anything to that. Well, maybe I could have, but it would’ve been something that would’ve blown the rest of the stupid from the last few days out of the water, like “Wow” or “Golly.”

  “Not very many people around here liked Colt,” Willow said. “You saw him, so you know he’s hot, but there was just something about him, you know? Whitneys are natural troublemakers.” She shrugged. “I mean, their dad got all our parents killed in that whole mess with Kathan. Tough’s just the fun kind of trouble.”

  Even though I’d heard the generation-sweep fact from Know-It-All on the Dark Mansion tour, I wasn’t prepared to hear someone who had lived it say the words.

  “Willow? I’m sorry about your parents.”

  “I was little,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t really remember them.”

  “How did you— I mean, who took care of you?”

  Willow pointed at the orange-haired guy she had called Owen earlier. He was racing Tough to drink the long line of shots on the bar between them. Tough grabbed the middle shot before Owen did, downed it, then threw up his fists in victory.

  “My cousin and his girlfriend,” Willow said. “I think they did a pretty decent job for a couple of sixteen-year-olds.”

  A heavyset guy in a camo hat tapped Willow’s arm as he passed her.

  “Got to go,” she said to me, leaving her drink on the edge of the stage and hiking herself up beside it. “You sticking around for the last set?”

  “Sure.” I’d paid my eight bucks. Might as well get my money’s worth.

  Willow grinned. “Cool.”

  I squeezed into an empty spot along the wall. Camo-Hat plugged in his bass. Willow put on a pair of headphones and played a bored little ditty on her snare. At the bar, Tough and Owen were doing another round of shots.

  Willow pretended to check a wristwatch.

  Camo-Hat leaned into his microphone and said, “Save some booze for the drunks, guys.”

  They slammed their last shots, then weaved through the crowd swarming the dance floor.

  I guess I didn’t realize that they were waiting for Tough, too. He hadn’t been playing with the band the night before, so it surprised me when he hopped up on stage, picked up a guitar, and slipped the strap over his shoulder. He spent a couple tipsy seconds hooking an amp cord through his belt loop and plugging it in. Then he pulled a pick from his pocket and gave the crowd a wave and smile as if he was apologizing for being a little drunk.

  Somebody on the other side of the room laughed, but everyone I could see looked like they were holding their breath.

  And watching Tough.

  He faced his band mates and nodded—two, three, four times—then picked out the opening to “Streets of Bakersfield” as he turned back to the crowd. Willow whooped and she, Owen, and Camo-Hat jumped in.

  I don’t know how to make music, but I do love it. I appreciate it like someone who eats five-star meals but doesn’t know how to boil water. Camo-Hat, Owen, and Willow were good—“awesome” Mom would’ve said back w
hen she still cared enough to talk—but even I could tell they weren’t in the same class as Tough. He was so good that he made the rest of the band look better. He shined like a jarful of sunlight. The crowd worshipped him.

  For a second, I kind of wanted to hate him. How could he be smiling like that? His brother had been enthralled by the most vicious enforcer I’d ever heard of. If I knew for sure that Tempie was a familiar, I wouldn’t be having fun in a bar.

  But if Tempie was a familiar, what could I do? Suicide-proof the house and wait for her angel to cast her off? If she was with an alpha, that could take months. How long could I just sit around doing nothing, knowing my sister’s brain was corroding?

  Tough’s brother was thirty-four days into something that he shouldn’t have survived past day eighteen. I’d heard Willow say it and I knew it was amazing, but it hadn’t dawned on me what that really meant—Colt was beating Mikal. He couldn’t hold out forever and, if the articles were right, then the more brutality Mikal got to use to break him, the more fun she would have. But Colt had already gone almost twice what most people enthralled to an enforcer had.

  I hugged my arms around the pain in my stomach. Maybe it hurt like heck to know your brother was a familiar, but maybe it was also a twisted kind of comfort to know he hadn’t lost yet.

  When the song ended, Tough cocked his head and looked right at me. The pause stretched out. People started yelling requests, but Tough kept staring at me like he was trying to see inside my skin. I squirmed. What if he could read minds?

  Don’t think about how hot he is. Or how hot his brother is. Or how you saw his brother’s—

  Stellar job, brain. Great first instincts.

  Finally, Tough started another song, banging out raw resentment with a country twang. I didn’t recognize the tune, but the crowd went nuts.