Honkytonk Hell: A Dark and Twisted Urban Fantasy (The Broken Bard Chronicles Book 1) eden Hudson (best book club books txt) 📖

on inside my brain. She got off my throat and let me go. I was trying to keep you from destroying my bathroom and massacring the first ten people you got ahold of.

I slid myself up. Then I inhaled through my nose and the world turned into a fuzzy black and white picture someone had smeared with ashes. Except for the blood. It was cold and dead and packed in sterile plastic bags, but it glowed red like a taillight in the middle of the night. I tried to lunge for it, but Tiffani smacked my head against the bathtub again and lightning flashed behind my eyes.

I know you think you’re starving, she said. You’re not. It’ll pass.

Her smudgy black and white arm reached past me and picked up one of the glowing bags. My shoulder hit her in the stomach and pinned her against the bathroom wall.

Before the blood bag hit the floor, I was flat on my back again with one of her knees on my throat and the other on my chest.

“Dammit, Tough, stop,” she yelled. She kicked with the knee on my neck and I gagged. “Just give me a second.”

She tore open the blood bag and the smell filled up the bathroom. Pain stabbed through my upper jaw like someone was shoving a pencil down through the gums. The bone on the right side popped and creaked and felt like it was going to break unless something made room. Then a tooth dropped out of my gum. I almost choked on it, but Tiffani shoved her hand in my mouth to grab it.

“Bite me and I’ll beat the piss out of you,” she said.

As soon as she pulled the tooth out, I reached for the blood bag again. She slapped my hands down and squeezed it into my mouth. I was so hungry I couldn’t even taste the blood, just felt it sliding down my throat and into my stomach. It burned in my chest the way liquor did right before it hit me. The world got a little clearer, and in the back of my brain somewhere, I felt Tiffani smack my hands away again, this time from her breasts.

The blood bag ran dry and she reached for another one. Almost before I thought about moving I was on top of her.

Tiffani kicked me in the balls. Pain exploded all the way up into my stomach and I almost threw up everything I’d just drank. It hurt so bad I forgot I couldn’t yell.

Son of a bitch!

I’m always going to be faster and stronger than you, she said. Don’t try anything else or I’ll rip them off and never give them back.

Tiffani rolled me onto my back and sat on my chest. It was so hard to hold still while she ripped open another blood bag I thought I’d lose it. Time got stuck in place. My teeth kept snapping together and tearing at my cheeks. I was trying to bite something. There was a noise, too. Like the sound of a growl without vocal cords to support it. Tiffani was teasing me—the way Mitzi used to when she knew I was dying for her—letting me go crazy waiting. I could rip her apart and she wanted to dick around. The first glowing red drop hung on a jagged strip of the torn plastic. By the time it finally started to fall, my whole body was shaking so bad that Tiffani looked like she was vibrating.

Is it good for you?

Drink your blood, she said. I’d like to take a shower sometime today.

A couple more bags of blood and the smoky, ashy smears faded out of my vision. By about the seventh one, I could smell and see why she wanted a shower.

I’d never been big on embarrassment. When I took the biggest crap of my life—which I guess still held the record now that I was dead—I went and got Harper and Jax and a tape measure. But that was in a toilet and I didn’t try to mud wrestle and grope and I think possibly rape someone in it.

How was there even that much inside me?

Then I remembered Tiffani could hear what I was thinking. I waited for the top part of my cheeks to start burning, but nothing happened.

It’s easier to seem alive after you feed from a human, Tiffani said. You’ll figure out how to close the connection, too. Just takes practice.

I tried to run a hand through my hair and ended up with a handful of crap-pudding.

Tiffani stood up and grabbed me under the arm. “Come on, let’s wash off. Then you can clean my bathroom.”

Tiffani

 

I changed the heat setting on the oven, then leaned with my back against it to soak up the warmth. Closed my eyes and listened to my tablet playing an old X-Files episode. The one where Krycek ends up locked in the abandoned missile silo.

It used to be that watching X-Files made me feel like I was with Shannon. She had gotten me into the show back when she was still with the Derringers. She loved it so much that she had “Believe the Lie” tattooed up her arm, the centerpiece of her right sleeve. Whenever she had a concert during the show’s timeslot, my priority job went from body-guarding Shannon to making sure I got the latest episode taped so we could watch it.

Tough’s voice came through in my brain—Are you seriously daydreaming about my mom right now?

If you don’t want to know what I’m thinking, learn how to shut the damn connection, I told him and forced myself to think about something else. Are you still cleaning?

Just got done, he said.

If I can smell—

You won’t. I got it all.

I checked the clock. It had taken more than five hours for