Honkytonk Hell: A Dark and Twisted Urban Fantasy (The Broken Bard Chronicles Book 1) by eden Hudson (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

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