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

by eden Hudson

“Hey—” When Jax grabbed my arm, it was just reflex to knock him off.

  He didn’t get back up.

  Desty was standing in the doorway to my room. She smelled like oranges or grapefruit—something yellowish with a foamy buzz like beer—and under that, alive. Her heart bolted when she saw me, from a steady bass to a double-kick.

  “Tough?” She smiled and ran for me. “You’re okay! I was worried that Mikal found you.”

  When she hit my chest, her body heat soaked into my skin. If I’d had a voice, I bet I would’ve moaned. She hadn’t seen the fangs yet, but she shivered and goose bumps popped up all down her arms and chest.

  “You’re freezing,” Desty whispered. She tried to step back, but I moved with her, my body instinctively following the heat. She burned like an overfilled wood stove. And damn if I wasn’t thirsty again.

  Tough, back off, Tiffani yelled across the connection.

  Then it was like another radio turned on in my head. That connection was weaker, second-hand or something.

  Holy shit, he’s going to kill her! Mitzi.

  What are you doing in my brain? I snapped. I thought this was just between me and Tiffani.

  Heya, Romeo, Mitzi said. I haven’t heard your voice since Jason cut that track yesterday.

  Stop it, Mitzi, Tiffani said. Something’s not right. He drank a whole person’s worth of blood, he shouldn’t be hungry.

  “Tough?” Desty tried to push me away so she could look into my eyes, but I was a lot stronger than she was and I wasn’t letting go.

  Tiffani saw the images flickering through my brain, a pornographic snuff film. Did it count as porn if the girl was dead for more than half of the fun?

  Something’s wrong, she said. Don’t move until I—

  The connection clicked off like somebody had hit the power button.

  I’ll be damned, I thought, I did figure it out. And the sun was up, so there wasn’t any way Tiffani could get there in time to tear Desty away from me. Convenient.

  Desty was staring at my mouth. With my tongue, I pushed at a fang. They took getting used to for me, too.

  Her breathing was shallow. She hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday and I could smell me on her breath—the way I used to smell, like beer and sweat and body spray.

  “But…” Desty shook her head. “You’re a vamp?” Her mood changed as soon as she said it out loud—scared to pissed in less than a second. She yanked her arm out of my hand and hit me in the stomach. “You’re a vamp! You stupid—damn—son of a bitch!”

  That made me laugh. Desty cussed like a homeschooled third grader.

  Downstairs, Jax’s phone started ringing.

  Desty punched me again. The stab of pain from my broken rib was enough of a shock that I let her go. She stumbled backward a few steps, then bumped into the doorjamb. Her towel dropped.

  I locked her muddy hazel eyes into mine.

  Don’t run. Somehow I told her she didn’t want to.

  “Tough, please—” She was fighting me, pushing back, and that pissed me off. I was supposed to be the strong one, the one with all the power. Otherwise, what was the point of getting made?

  Cover up the window. Lay on the bed. I told her she wanted to, showed her how I wanted her to lay, pushed those thoughts into her brain. She stumbled as she untied the window-sheet, but I busted out the vamp speed and caught her before she hit the ground. Then she was laying on my bed, scared again, but she didn’t move.

  “You dickbag. I trusted you.” Her voice cracked and she took one of those shaky breaths. “I—I liked you, Tough. A lot.”

  I touched her cheek. Maybe I was a vamp, but she was still Desty, my girl. I wouldn’t do any of that serial killer snuff-film stuff—not to her. I just needed a drink. I hadn’t had anything since that piss-poor excuse for blood Tiffani had on ice, five or six hours ago. What Desty had—what was lighting up through her skin like a bonfire in a pitch black field—would keep me satisfied a whole lot longer.

  Tears started to slip down the sides of her face and drip into her ears.

  Shit, Desty, don’t cry. I thought it, but I couldn’t push it on her, couldn’t remember how I did it the first time. It was my job to protect her and here I was making her cry. I’ll fix it. I promise.

  I was going to kiss her, but my hand touched that red fire in her leg. I pushed her thighs apart and tore into the vein. She made a noise in her throat and flinched, tried to struggle away from the hurt. I felt bite sedative rush through my fangs. Her body relaxed.

  I had thought it would be like the blood bags, just hard liquor made out of blood, burning in my chest and giving me a buzz that calmed me down. But drinking straight from Desty’s body was like mainlining kerosene, then lighting myself on fire. It turned me on bad. Worse than anything I’d ever felt while I was alive. My heart pumped like someone had hooked it up to a car battery and revved the engine. I had to take breaks between swallows because I was breathing again.

  The screen door downstairs banged open and shut.

  “Jax?” It was Harper. Running. “Baby, are you okay?”

  Then Jax’s damn phone started ringing again.

  Harper answered and it sounded like Tiffani’s voice shouting through an old AM radio.

  I blocked it out. Whatever she was saying didn’t matter. Right on the edge of coming, knowing it would be the most powerful release I’d ever felt. The instinct to finish was too strong for distractions. I kept sucking off of Desty, hyperventilating, feeling my heart forcing the venom through my body, and getting closer and closer. Everything else faded into static.

  Then ice shot through the back of my neck, down into my still freaking-out heart. For a second I could see Him again, feel Heaven shutting me out, taste the cold, sick loss. It all exploded like a dry ice bomb inside my chest.

  When I could see again, Harper was kneeling by the bed, checking Desty’s eyes. Harper’s wooden crucifix necklace was still wrapped around her palm, she hadn’t put it back in her pocket yet. Maybe she thought she’d need it again.

  “Jeez, you’re dumb, girl,” Harper said.

  It was me, I— It was me. I’d made it so Desty couldn’t run. I’d made her cry. And the crap I was going to do to her, while she was still alive and then…later. Mitzi’s knife-play looked like missionary compared to that. I licked my bottom lip and tasted Desty’s blood.

  I got up on my knees and touched Harper’s arm. She swiped the crucifix at my head to back me up.

  “Dammit, Tough, what were you thinking?” She didn’t even look over her shoulder at me. “You can’t drink out of someone who’s laying down. And you shouldn’t be drinking out of anything but the jugular. I mean, seriously, are you retarded?”

  I must be. I’d had Tiffani make me so I could save Colt and Desty by making them. But I couldn’t make Desty a vamp and put her through that pain in her soul every time she saw something that represented what she gave up. She’d be better off dead than cut off from God and knowing Hell was all she had to look forward to. And Colt—

  I was really going to have to kill him. My stomach turned. I swallowed something that tasted like barf mixed with blood.

  The connection with Tiffani opened.

  You need to do something about Colt right now, she said. She showed me a shot of the Tracker’s big, blue Dodge pulling up to her bakery.

  Not barfing took a whole lot more effort when I saw the Tracker climb out of the truck, wet, rotting skin slipping on his arms and legs like it was full of pudding and not connected to anything. The nine hour trip from Nashville to Halo chained up in his backseat came back to me in high-def smell-o-vision.

  What the hell do you want me to do? I asked her.

  You said you knew how to save Colt, Tiffani snapped.

  I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s broad fucking daylight outside, I said. I can’t get to him.

  What had I thought, that Mikal would conveniently wait until night to come after me? If she had known where I was this morning, her a
nd Colt would’ve been waiting on the porch for me.

  My eyes shot open.

  Let the Tracker in, I told Tiffani. While he’s dicking around looking for me, call the Dark Mansion and tell Mikal where I am.

  ***

  The Tracker made it to the house first. Maybe Mikal was too busy screwing my brother to get her damn clothes on and come kill me. Or maybe it was just routine—send in the zombie to secure the prisoner before the big shot came in and did all the ass-kicking.

  Jax and Harper sat at the bottom of the staircase in the living room while the Tracker wound his trusty log chain around my arms and stomach and pinned the loops together behind my back. Harper flinched when the padlock snapped closed.

  I tried to look confident so she wouldn’t freak out. I’d only had a couple of minutes to bring Jax back around and get my plan across to him and Harper before the Tracker showed up. Harper had told me straight-up that she didn’t think there was any chance it would work.

  “Should’ve brought steel,” the Tracker said. He had a voice like someone with throat cancer had eaten a bag of nails and he stunk like rotting shit. Not having to breathe was kind of a blessing with him in the room. He gave the chains a test-jerk. “These’ll work ‘til Mikal gets here. Try to break out…” He pulled an old Wild West .44-40 out of his gun belt and aimed it at Jax and Harper. “Bang. Bang.”

  I growled at him—as much as someone could without a voice.

  The Tracker ignored me and slopped over to the window, maybe to watch for Mikal.

  I started feeling around behind my back for the padlock.

  Jax shook his head at me. He touched the step, then waved his hands around him and Harper.

  I rolled my eyes. I didn’t play baseball and neither did Jax. If he was trying to send me some kind of message, it wasn’t going to work.

  My fingers grazed the padlock and I worked at it until I got the shackle into my hand.

  But Jax touched the step again, pushing down really hard this time. There was a spark like when you flick a lighter, then he gave me a thumbs-up.

  Jax had just done something with magic.

  Then I got it—he wanted me to know that they were safe. That I could go ahead with my plan and not worry about them getting killed.

  The Tracker turned back around and squinted at me. I smiled up at him like a good little prisoner.

  Tiffani

  I threw the last bucket of soapy water on the sidewalk in front of my bakery, then went inside and hooked up the hose to the sink. I’d have customers coming in half an hour and I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone while I could still smell the Tracker’s putrefied corpse.

  That damn kid. Why couldn’t he have figured out another way? Damn me, too. Making Tough wasn’t the same as doing something. It was more like putting a Band-Aid on a knife wound.

  Hell. Now I was starting to sound like Colt.

  I dragged the hose outside and unkinked it. Water sputtered, then exploded out and washed the suds off the concrete. I pulled out a cigarette and held it between my lips while I lit up. The crisp, ashy smoke helped hide the reek of the Tracker and the cigarette gave my other hand something to do while I hosed off the sidewalk.

  Two crows flew over, crawking at each other and heading for the highway. Probably off to patrol the edges of their territory for coyote trespassers.

  After Ryder died, the closest thing Colt had to friends were crows. Although it had always struck me as more mutual understanding than friendship—the primals never stopped fighting their wars with each other and Colt never stopped fighting his war. Probably didn’t hurt that Colt was supplying the crows with guns and ammunition, either. They were how he found out that Mitzi was letting me listen in while she and Tough had sex. The crows at the tattoo parlor gossiped like biddies at the hair salon.

  I had come back from hunting one morning to find Colt waiting outside the bakery, hunched over against the wind in a ratty Carhart coat and watching me like he couldn’t decide whether to stake me or throw holy water in my face. That hair, those eyes—he hadn’t filled out much yet, but even all arms and legs and angles, he screamed Danny. Just being near him made me feel as if I’d somehow fallen backward in time.

  “What the hell do you want?” I asked.

  “Lonely Pershing said Mitzi lets you listen in while she and Tough are—are together,” Colt said.

  I had less than an hour to shower, throw stuff in the oven, get the coffee going, and suck down a breakfast smoke.

  “Piss off, kid. I don’t have time for a sermon today.”

  Colt took a step toward me.

  “No, I’m not—I wouldn’t—” He had that innocent look in his eyes that Shannon used to flash at people like a Get Out of Jail Free card. I could smell her in him—tattoo ink and skin so hot that it could only be full of unbalanced, unholy fury. “I just wondered whether Tough was okay.”

  “Well, he had a rocky start,” I said. “But Mitzi got him whipped into a Casanova who can go all night and be ready for another round in the morning, so I’d say he’s better than okay. Maybe even—”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Colt said.

  “Piss off,” I said again, and I started to unlock the door.

  Behind me, I heard the sound of fingers curling into fists. I braced myself. Colt had inherited too much of Danny’s looks to have gotten anything from Shannon but her temper.

  “Tough thinks he’s so damn smart,” Colt said. “That he’s beating the system. But he doesn’t get that as long as he’s got a protector, Kathan can give the word and the protector will kill him. He’s being a stupid teenager.”

  I turned my head and gave Colt an exaggerated once-over. “You should see the view from eighty, kid.”

  “I’m older than I look,” he said.

  “Yeah?” I laughed. “By how much?”

  Colt was quiet for a second. Then he hit below the belt, just like Shannon always did.

  “Tough was her favorite,” he said. “You know he was.”

  That was before I installed the electronic security system. The key snapped off in the lock.

  “Look, vamp, I get that you hated Dad and all us kids, too, but if you loved Mom—if you ever even liked her—”

  I spun around and slapped him. With the key ring still in my hand, I smacked Colt across the face so hard that the broken head of the key cut his cheek.

  Colt hadn’t reacted. The way he had stared made me feel as if he was measuring me somehow. After a few seconds, he left. But he came back the next day, then the next, and the next. He was persistent. Exhausting. Too damn smart for his own good. He knew he’d picked the right vampire to chip away at.

  I finished rinsing off the sidewalk, then re-kinked the hose and flicked my cigarette butt into the gutter.

  Tough was right. His plan was stupid and it could only end one way.

  The last two Whitneys—one destroyed beyond all recognition and the other one rotting in Hell. Kathan would probably throw Mikal a parade.

  Tough

  For some reason, I’d had it in my head that Mikal would have trouble fitting through our front door. I guess I pictured her wings as bigger than they were. But she stepped into the living room, no problem, with Colt following her like a good dog. When she saw me chained up, kneeling on the floor, she grinned and reached down to push my lip up. I snapped at her, but she jerked her fingers back before I ripped one off.

  “A vampire?” she said. “People really don’t give you enough credit, Tough.”

  If you like this, you’re going to love my next trick, I thought.

  I looked over at Colt. Today he had on that dog collar, his tore up Lucky shirt, and an old pair of jeans. Dressed for the most part like he used to, but even when he looked me in the eyes, there wasn’t any sort of sign he recognized me.

  Mikal caught me staring at him.

  “I promised Colt if he was a good dog today, I would throw him a bone later,” she said. “He’s been begging me, but we’ve b
een so busy working on obedience training that we haven’t had any time to play.”

  I snapped at her again, growling so she wouldn’t hear me bend the padlock shackle in the opposite direction. Every time I bent it, it gave a little bit easier.

  Mikal laughed and did the room-jump thing. With the vamp senses, I could tell that she didn’t really disappear and appear somewhere else, she just moved too fast for humans to see. She stopped by the TV stand and up-ended it. Jax sucked in a breath when the TV and his games went flying. Mikal snapped off one of the TV stand’s legs.

  “Colt,” Mikal said in a voice like a dog trainer. She threw him the TV stand leg. He caught it one-handed, with the jagged end down like a professional vamp hunter’s stake. Mikal pointed at me. “Kill.”

  Time slowed down as the vamp speed kicked in. I jerked the padlock shackle. It broke. The chains rolled off.

  The Tracker looked like he was pulling his revolver in super-slow motion. I hoped to hell Jax’s magic trick worked.

  Colt cocked the stake back and jumped, throwing his weight behind it so it would crack my breastbone. To me, it looked like he was moving in regular slow motion. I snatched the log chain up off the floor and whipped the end at Colt’s hand. The stake went flying and the chain snapped two of his finger bones.

  The breaks didn’t even slow Colt down. He made a fist and tried to knock my teeth out.

  I swung the chain again. This time it slapped around his wrist. I yanked him off balance.

  Colt still didn’t go down.

  I grabbed him by the throat and slammed him onto his back so hard the house shook.

  His eyes rolled back, but he didn’t black out.

  I ripped through my shirt and dug into my stomach with my fingernails. Laid across his nose and mouth. Colt started choking. He had to breathe and every breath sucked down vamp venom. It was probably a lot like being water-boarded with pepper spray. He tried to fight me, but I clamped one of his arms between my knees and jerked the chain tight around the other.

  There was a big, pulsing vein in his bicep. I tore it wide open with my teeth and started drinking as much as I could get down.