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

“Last chance to back out.”

But what about Desty? I could protect her from Kathan. If I didn’t make her a vamp, that dick would enthrall her so he could have a twin threesome and take over the world. That would kill her—maybe not her body, but that thing inside her that was so innocent and funny and awkward.

I could get her out of town. I snuck out twice, and I’m high-priority. How hard could it be to get a random girl out of Halo? Rowdy gets deliveries on Thursdays. Just load her into the back of the truck and never see her again.

But Kathan had her scent. He would send the Tracker after her.

You think Dad was just preaching to hear himself preach? Even Mikal’s scared of Hell, and we’re talking an eternity of hellfire, not just a visit.

What about Colt? He was still fighting, holding out indefinitely.

He doesn’t think anybody’s going to ride in and save him. He’d never know I backed out. I’m supposed to damn my eternal soul to Hell on the off chance I’ll be fast enough to make him before Mikal stakes me?

Colt would do it for me, though. Sure, we’d been assholes to each other over the Mitzi thing, but this was serious. “I got you, Tough, I got you”—that’s what he was yelling when I got cut off from our troops in the last up-close-and-personal battle of the war. He came after me, semi-auto and sword blazing, and he got me back safe.

Even if all I ended up doing was kill him, at least he would be free from that bitch.

“Tough?”

I grabbed Tiffani’s hand and pulled her wrist into my mouth. The venom hurt more than it tasted—like concentrated pepper-spray sauce—so bad that I had to shut out everything else just to choke it down.

Thank God.

That was the last thing I thought before everything inside my body caught on fire. Somewhere along the line my heart gave out. I died. I remember feeling relieved that it was finally over.

Desty

“Oh, I fell asleep.” I yawned and stretched. I was alone and the room was dark. “Tough?”

Maybe he was in the shower, getting ready to head to the bar. I turned over and laid with my face in the pillow, breathing in his smell—beer and men’s body spray and sweat.

Jeez. And I had called Tempie a stupid twee-girl.

But it felt like maybe I loved Tough.

PART II: IN BETWEEN

Tough

Only a handful of people were ever supposed to come back from the dead—Jesus, Lazarus, Dorcas, a couple little kids—and only because God told them to. Vamps are damned to Hell forever and ever because they come back outside the Will of God. They use crow magic to trap their soul in this earthly body, denying Christ’s offer of eternal salvation in exchange for a little more time.

Heck, I guess I did pay attention to some of Dad’s preaching after all.

Tiffani

I sat on the toilet lid and lit a cigarette. Held it with the cherry up, the way the Smoking Man always did. Times like that I hated my super-smelling. The smoke didn’t even begin to mask the bathtub filled with a half-inch of various bodily wastes.

Forcing the last couple of mouthfuls of vamp venom down Tough’s throat had worn me out. No matter how prepared a person thinks they are, the human body panics and fights back when you try to poison it.

At least my skin was warm. That’s one thing about drinking from a living body—blood feeds the crow magic, so for a little while, you get to feel alive. And the smoke helped give me the illusion of heat from the inside out.

Another lungful, then I reached over and turned on the shower.

When you’ve been a vampire long enough, you start to get these feelings of coming full circle. You see things begin and then, later, you see them end. Seeing Tough’s corpse lying in my antique claw foot bathtub gave me one of those full-circle feelings. I’d known him before he was born. The day Shannon got the ultrasound, she came into the bakery to tell me the news and to order a batch of clove cookies with “Another penis!” written in blue icing as a surprise for Danny.

I’m a bisexual divorcée who chose vampirism and eternal damnation over dying alone, so even ignoring my history with Shannon, there were plenty of reasons Danny and I never got along. We tried to keep things civil for Shannon’s sake, but making Tough a vamp… If Danny was still alive, this probably would’ve been the end of his no-staking rule.

If Danny was still alive, though, he would have to face the fact that this was his fault. If he would have just taken care of his damn kids instead of convincing them they needed to start a war they couldn’t win for the sake of a woman who was already dead, none of this would’ve happened.

I took another deep drag on the cigarette and let the smoke out with a sigh. It didn’t help that I understood Danny’s motivation now more than ever. Just made me hate us both.

The scratches on my arms and face started itching, but they weren’t as bad as the cut on my wrist. The worse the wound, the worse the healing process. I pinched my cigarette between my lips and used my left hand to scratch the scabbing and dying skin from that spot so the new layer could grow through.

Tough had always looked more like Shannon than like Danny—him and Ryder both. They had the black hair and Whitney eyes, but they were shorter, with her oval face and long nose. Something about death made Tough