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

hat and rubbed my eyes. Blew my breath out. What had I thought she was going to ask me for? A beautiful song? Trick-ass whores pay the bills with sex. That’s how the real world works.

“Tough?”

I’m kind of in bad shape right now, I told her. Messed up rib. Would you take a hand job?

“A thousand dollar hand job? You can do better than that.” She looked down at the rips in the knees of my jeans. “Can’t you?”

Colt

 

“Just being a pussy is all, and he gets away with it because he’s the baby,” Ryder said. He glared back across the snowy pasture toward the house, then shook his head like he could see Tough sleeping.

I shut the gate behind the last cow and Ryder hooked the hotwire back up.

“He didn’t know we were putting Mom in the ground,” I said, thinking back to the pallbearers lowering the casket into the grave and Tough losing it. Could eight-year-olds even understand death? Dad’s sermon had said Mom’s soul wasn’t in her body anymore, but I was eleven and still having a hard time getting my head around that.

“Tough cried more than Sissy did and she’s a fucking girl.” Ryder was fourteen, shorter than me and most of the guys in his class, and a preacher’s son. He knew every cuss word there was, plus some I was pretty sure he’d made up.

“You cried, too,” I said because Tough was my brother and I stuck up for him. When he was born, Mom had said she got him for me because Sissy had Ryder and Ryder had me, but I didn’t have anyone.

Ryder stared down a heifer as it hoofed past us to the hay ring.

“So did you,” he said, “But you didn’t start screaming and make Sissy miss her own fucking mom’s funeral.”

“Mom’s safe now, isn’t she?” I asked. “Nothing can get her in Heaven.”

“Dammit, Colt, don’t start bawling again.” Ryder’s voice cracked. “Dad’ll see you.”

I nodded and wiped my face on my jacket sleeve.

Dad had dumped the bale in the hay ring and shut the tractor off. Now he was leaning against the side of the bale stabber, watching the cows come running. It was weird to see him in his Sunday pants and Carhart coat doing chores, not even wearing mud boots. He hadn’t changed when we got back from the burial. All he did was take off his suit jacket, put on his coat and tell us to come on, but Sissy had made us put on work clothes before we went out.

“You all remember to shut the gate?” Dad asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good deal.”

We stood there while the herd crowded around the hay ring. They breathed huge whooshes of steam out their noses and banged against the metal. Muddy hooves, manure, piss, and coarse, warm hair. Mom was dead and the cows came up to eat anyway.

“Dad—” Ryder’s voice cracked again, but I was the one who started crying.

Dad grabbed us both, one arm around each of our necks, and hugged us.

“It’s over,” Dad said. I could feel him shaking. “The time for preaching is over. What they’re doing is wrong, and if we let them keep doing it, it’s like we’re helping them. Do you boys understand? If we just turn a blind eye, it’s like we killed Mom. You guys remember the verse from the service?”

“‘On the day when I cried, You answered me, my strength of soul You increased,’” I recited. It had been running through my head since I’d heard Dad say it.

“That’s right, but that’s not the one I mean.” Dad let us go and sat back on his heels to look us in the eyes. He was crying, too. “‘Blessed be the Lord, my Rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.’ Boys, I cried out to Him and He answered me. The final battle is coming. I won’t be around for it, but we can’t allow Mikal to be around for it, either. Without her, Kathan can’t command his army. God chose us to stop them. He anointed our family as His soldiers with Mom’s blood—”

Leave it to you to put off escapism until the very end, Mikal said. I could feel her studying the memory. Are you giving yourself a pep-talk or trying to lose yourself in the good old days?

You know, before I met you I thought you were a man whenever Dad said your name, I told her.

Mikal laughed. Would you rather I be a man? I use this form because I prefer it, but I can change if I choose to. It would be easier for you to hate me if I were male. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To hate me? That’s why you came back here.

No, it’s not, I said.

Mikal liked hearing me deny something she knew I wanted. It made her happy and that made me happy, but in a way that felt like getting pistol-whipped and seeing the world spin underneath you. She was right. I did want to hate her—I needed to hate her—but that wasn’t why I wanted to relive the day of Mom’s funeral.

Do you know what would really make me happy? Mikal asked.

You want me to explain why I’m here, I said.

The tar-covered wings stroking my brain sizzled with her approval, but I was either too far gone to hear the answering screams or—hopefully—dead. I should’ve tried to fight her, but I was so damn tired.

Just make me, I said.

You know that’s not how this game ends, Colter.

I watched the cows push each other around while they ate, and listened to a man who had been a preacher his whole adult life telling his sons that victory wasn’t in the word, but in the actions. He talked about