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

“Something to drink with that?” she asked.

“Tap water?”

She got me a cup of water and the cheapest, plainest pastry out of her glass-front case.

“Dollar-forty,” she said.

My stomach growled.

“If I got some of the strawberry butter with that, how much would it be?” I asked.

“One-eighty.”

“Can I, please?”

Tiffani dropped a little tub of it onto the plate with my bread knot. I handed her my coins, then went and sat down by the big front window.

At first all I could do was focus on eating. Maybe I was just really hungry, but that bread was incredible and the strawberry butter almost made me cry. It was like a sweet-buttery-tangy orgasm on a warm, fluffy bed. I ate half of it before I even took a breath. After that, I had to force myself to slow down and enjoy the little piece of heaven the way it deserved to be enjoyed. If Tempie could’ve tasted that… Strawberries were her favorite.

Still trying to put off eating the last couple bites, I got out my computer and hooked up to the wireless. The bakery probably had some kind of spell that kept the otherworldly NP-energies from messing with the signal. I wondered if cell phones worked here, too, but no one in the bakery had theirs out and I couldn’t check mine because I’d sold it back in Tucson. Having one had never done me any good once I started chasing after Tempie anyway, considering I spent most of my time in NP towns like Halo.

I had one email from Aunt Arie, sent a week ago.

Everything’s fine here, sweetheart, just getting a little worried. Haven’t heard out of you in a while now. If you could, drop me a line sometime so I can tell your Mom everything’s okay with you. She misses her girls.

For a while, I stared at the screen and tried to think of something to tell Aunt Arie. “I know Mom doesn’t actually care where I am or what I’m doing because she just wants to be left alone to die” didn’t seem appropriate. Not when Arie was trying so hard to act like everything was normal. And I couldn’t say I’d be there soon because who knew how long it would be before I even found Tempie, let alone got her back home?

All I could do was send the standard “Everything’s fine with me, too!” It was lame, but I hoped it would be one less thing for Aunt Arie to worry about.

I ate what was left of my bread knot, glanced around to make sure no one was looking, then licked the last of the strawberry butter out of the little plastic tub.

Then I opened Tempie’s blog. Nothing new. The last entry was fifteen days old. The title was “FINALLY!!!”

My search is over. I’ve been all over this country and even to Mexico looking for a way off of this mortal coil of one reincarnated hell after another. I’ve finally found the one who can take me out of this eternal rat race, and my angel was even closer to home than I thought, right smack in the middle of northern Missouri. So, I guess there’s no point to this blog anymore, except letting you know that you can get out, too.

The first time I’d read this entry was two weeks ago, the day after Tempie posted it. Since then, fifteen days’ worth of congratulatory comments from the people who followed her blog had piled up. No responses from Tempie, though.

Fifteen days. I rubbed my eyes hard, thinking through the figures again.

Everything I’d read said foot soldiers couldn’t make familiars because they didn’t have the power to inflict their essence on humans. Enforcers like Mikal wanted total domination over their familiar’s will, but once they had it, they moved on to someone new fairly quickly—their average turnover was eighteen days. Alphas like Mayor Dark wanted obedience, devotion, and affection. Some alphas kept really well-trained familiars until their brain corroded from the constant presence of the fallen angel’s essence. Average brain-corrosion-time? One hundred and seventy-nine days with a wide range of normal, according to the articles.

I could hope and pray that Tempie had met a foot soldier who was just stringing her along with promises of making her his familiar, but Tempie knew too much about fallen angels to be tricked like that. She had a whole page on her blog dedicated to telling a smooth-talking foot soldier from an enforcer or an alpha.

If I found Tempie and she was already a familiar, there wasn’t anything I could do until her fallen angel let her go. The internet was full of stories about people who tried to steal their enthralled loved ones back. Sometimes the familiar killed the person trying to save them. Sometimes the person trying to save the familiar—their sister or child or husband—ended up killing them instead. “Death is the only release outside of the fallen angel’s will,” one article had said.

My teeth hurt. I forced myself to unclench my jaw, then I got up to refill my water and walk some tension off. I didn’t know that Tempie was already a familiar. Maybe she wasn’t yet. Or maybe she’d changed her mind.

I slid back into my booth and scrolled through the previous entries on her blog, trying not to think what the chances were that Tempie had changed her mind about something for the first time in her life.

There was a picture of her new angel wings tattoo and a post about what she’d done for the artist to get him to ink her for free. She had a week’s worth of Tip-a-Days on how to get a fallen angel to notice you in a crowd of angel-groupies, her reviews of the NP communities in Santa Barbara,