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

I didn’t move.

Pick it up!

My throat closed. I hit him. Then it was like I couldn’t stop, I just kept swinging and screaming inside my head, You asshole, why didn’t you just get a protector? What’d you have to pull this shit for?

Somebody had ahold of me. Two somebodies. They dragged me off him. I ducked my head and tried to make it sound like I was coughing, not bawling like a little bitch, but crying never sounds like anything else.

“You got him away from her, Tough,” Harper said. She picked up the TV stand leg. “You did the hard part. Jax and I can do the rest.”

He’s my brother. I grabbed the stake away from her. Leaned over Colt. It’s my job.

That’s when it happened. A concussion wave exploded off his body. Harper screeched. I slammed back-first into the bottom step. I heard Jax hit the wall.

Colt’s body rose up like someone was scooping him up off the floor. His head fell back, mouth open, and his arms and legs hung down. Light shined out of his skin. And there was this sound. Music—like the very first kind of music that ever existed, back when there was nothing else to fill up all the empty space where there wasn’t a universe yet, no instruments and no voices and no light. It was warm and so clear and perfect and holy. Until I heard it, I didn’t realize that I’d been listening for it my whole life.

And that it was so far away I would never, ever get to touch it.

Being cut off like that hurt so bad that it knocked me back down to my knees. I wiped my eyes on my forearm, but I ended up having to put my face down on the floor and cry. I don’t know what about. Yeah, I felt empty and cold and dead, but I don’t think it was just being lost that got me. Some of it was knowing for sure that I would never see Sissy or Mom and Dad again. Even Ryder, some. And realizing that if I had made Colt or Desty, I would’ve dragged them down to Hell with me.

The house went quiet. I heard Colt’s body hit the floor.

I looked up. Harper and Jax were shivering, blinking, trying to adjust to that music and light being gone.

Colt’s dark, blue-green Whitney eyes opened wide and he sucked in a breath that sounded like it scraped his lungs.

Son of a bitch. I crawled across the floor and threw my arms around him.

His heart was beating. His brain was firing. He was alive. And he was shaking like a guy freezing to death.

“Mikal—” Then I think Colt saw me for real, because he said, “Tough?”

Then he passed out.

PART III: OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

Colt

Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t open my eyes. I used to have nightmares like that, where I would hear gunfire all around me and Sissy yelling for me to get Tough, but it was like my eyes were glued shut.

Except this time everything was quiet, and instead of feeling as if my eyes were glued shut, it felt like something wasn’t working right in my brain, like the first time I tried alcohol. That was the night Sissy died, two weeks after my fifteenth birthday. Ryder had said, “Who came through for you, Sunshine? This motherfucker right here,” and tossed me the bottle. Between us we drank the whole thing. The last I remembered, I’d tried to stand up, but no part of me would move.

That memory wasn’t right. Ryder and I had gotten shitfaced on Southern Comfort the night Sissy died and we buried what was left of her by the cabin, but the first time I ever drank was after that fallen angel—Kevin or something—cut Dad’s head off.

Dammit, that wasn’t right either.

“Why don’t you get your lazy ass out of bed,” Ryder griped.

“Didn’t know you were here,” I said.

“Open your eyes. Kind of makes it harder for people to sneak up on you.”

I blinked, but it was too bright. Closed my eyes and tried again. When they adjusted I could see Ryder leaning against the wall, wearing his faded black Skynyrd t-shirt and carpenter jeans, with a soda bottle for spit in one hand and the other hand hooked in his back pocket.

“Where’s Mikal?” I asked.

Ryder rolled his eyes. “Don’t act like a dumbass, Colt. That’s Tough’s job.”

Screaming. Mikal holding a hunting knife. She started at Ryder’s feet and made sure he stayed alive as long as possible.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I rubbed my face with both hands. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to blow up the foot soldiers’ barracks? I would’ve helped. I could’ve figured out the way to do it so it counted.”

Ryder laughed.

“Man, you’re one cocky son of a bitch,” he said. He spat some tobacco juice into the soda bottle, scraped what was left off of his lip with the rim, then pointed it at me. “I paved the way for you, Sunshine. Where’s my thank you?”

That sounded right. I figured something out because of Ryder, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

“Come on, let’s go see if you can piss without Mikal telling you to,” he said, nodding at the door.

“I don’t have to.” I looked around. A girl's vanity in the corner. A mirror on the back of the door. I couldn’t remember what the bedroom at the cabin looked like, but I knew this couldn’t be it. I nodded at a poster on the wall of a guy in a trench coat. “Blood City III? Is that a movie?”

Ryder shrugged.

“I wouldn't pay to see it,” he said.

Then the memory of Ryder getting cut to pieces snapped into