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

“Isn’t there some kind of rule about not messing with anyone the Matchmaker’s got under contract?” Harper asked.

“NPs and their fucking rules,” Jax said.

I nodded and pointed at Jax. NPs and their fucking rules.

As if it couldn’t stand to let me forget how great life was going, the radio next door started playing the cover of “Tulsa Time” by “the winner of this year’s Who Wants to Be a Country Singing Idol, Jason Gudehaus!”

A zombie bit my guy. I threw my controller onto the coffee table and fell back against the couch.

Harper jumped up to shut the window and the little red crystal charm on her bellybutton ring jingled. Jax paused the game and turned the volume all the way up. He didn’t even say anything about taking it easy on the controller.

It was the middle of August, a million degrees, and we didn’t have an air conditioner. We sat in the living room with the windows closed, half-dying from heat stroke, listening to zombies groan and blood spurt until Jason’s song was over.

Having friends was something Colt and Ryder never understood. Even if there wasn’t any rule against leaving and I could get away from Halo, I would eventually come back for Harper and Jax.

Desty

“And this is the Dark Mansion.” The tour guide gestured behind her as our bus turned down the lane. “Home to Halo’s mayor, Kathan Dark.”

I swiped my bangs out of my eyes and craned my neck to see the mansion better. It looked like someone had grabbed a cathedral out of the Middle Ages and dropped it onto a farm in rural Missouri. A cathedral with a parking lot. Off to one side was a long, low building that had to be the foot soldiers’ barracks, and next to that, an old barn that looked like it was clinging to those last couple of bent, rusty cow panels for dear life.

Tempie had to be in there. The Dark Mansion was exactly the kind of Fallen Angel Dream Home she had described on her blog.

I got a death grip on my backpack straps.

I can do this, I told myself. I can.

Unless they recognized me at the front door and realized why I was there. Crap. Why hadn’t it occurred to me before that very second that other people might just notice that Tempie and I were identical twins? Say, when I was shelling out the twenty bucks to take this stupid tour?

 I started to swipe my bangs out of my eyes—they were in that weird stage where they were always in my eyes but too short to tuck behind my ear—but I stopped. Maybe having my hair in my face would be enough to obscure my identity. I ducked my head and tried to look like I was just messing with my bangs, not purposely pulling them back into my eyes.

Oh, yeah, totally nonchalant.

But no one looked my way. Up front, the tour guide was still lecturing.

“Most people know that these grounds house the fallen angel foot soldiers,” she said. “But what you may not know is that this was also the site of one of the final battles between people and non-people before the Armistice was signed.”

The know-it-all in the seat in front of me raised his hand. “Isn’t it true that this land was originally a farm belonging to Daniel Whitney, the man who instigated the NP-Human Conflict?”

The whole ride out of town, Know-It-All had been asking questions that showed everyone else how smart he was.

“That is true,” the tour guide said, flashing her big, white smile. “Former pastor, Daniel Whitney, lived here with his wife and four children. Many historians believe that Whitney blamed the death of his wife, Shannon, on what he called ‘the hell spawn of Satan—’” She did the finger quotes. “—and that sparked his desire to ‘scour them from the face of the earth.’ However, eye-witness accounts have surfaced recently that suggest Shannon Colter-Whitney—who music buffs might remember as the former lead singer of The Lost Derringers—was having an affair with an NP and Daniel Whitney killed her in a jealous rage.” She waited out the appropriate oohs. “Whatever the case may be, Whitney was deeply intolerant of the fallen angel community in Halo and refused to ‘abide’ their presence—which, as you said, led to the outbreak of the NP-Human Conflict.”

The bus rolled to a stop and my heart gave a frantic little jump.

Take it easy, I thought. If Tempie was there, she probably wouldn’t just appear and agree to go home all ecstatic that I had found her.

The tour guide led us off the bus and up the mansion’s front steps. The door swung open exactly the way it would have in a scary movie.

At least there weren’t any security guards. And no immediate sign of Tempie in the entrance hall. I took a deep breath and prayed I didn’t look as conspicuous as I felt.

Everyone else was studying the architecture, so I did, too. Maybe I could memorize the layout or something in case Tempie and I had to make a break for it when I found her. But the stained-glass windows lining the walls kept distracting me. Rather than filtering the morning light through in reds and blacks, the windows held it back. I couldn’t make out any pattern to the colors. The longer I stared, the more my skin tried to crawl off my body and my eyes teared up.

“Photography inside the Dark Mansion is discouraged,” the tour guide said to someone behind me. “Fun fact—the non-person energies concentrated here used to set film on fire. Nowadays with the digital, it just wipes the camera’s card.”

“Why isn’t there a particular picture or pattern to the windows?” an old, aw-shucks guy asked.

“Excellent and