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

I locked her muddy hazel eyes into mine.

Don’t run. Somehow I told her she didn’t want to.

“Tough, please—” She was fighting me, pushing back, and that pissed me off. I was supposed to be the strong one, the one with all the power. Otherwise, what was the point of getting made?

Cover up the window. Lay on the bed. I told her she wanted to, showed her how I wanted her to lay, pushed those thoughts into her brain. She stumbled as she untied the window-sheet, but I busted out the vamp speed and caught her before she hit the ground. Then she was laying on my bed, scared again, but she didn’t move.

“You dickbag. I trusted you.” Her voice cracked and she took one of those shaky breaths. “I—I liked you, Tough. A lot.”

I touched her cheek. Maybe I was a vamp, but she was still Desty, my girl. I wouldn’t do any of that serial killer snuff-film stuff—not to her. I just needed a drink. I hadn’t had anything since that piss-poor excuse for blood Tiffani had on ice, five or six hours ago. What Desty had—what was lighting up through her skin like a bonfire in a pitch black field—would keep me satisfied a whole lot longer.

Tears started to slip down the sides of her face and drip into her ears.

Shit, Desty, don’t cry. I thought it, but I couldn’t push it on her, couldn’t remember how I did it the first time. It was my job to protect her and here I was making her cry. I’ll fix it. I promise.

I was going to kiss her, but my hand touched that red fire in her leg. I pushed her thighs apart and tore into the vein. She made a noise in her throat and flinched, tried to struggle away from the hurt. I felt bite sedative rush through my fangs. Her body relaxed.

I had thought it would be like the blood bags, just hard liquor made out of blood, burning in my chest and giving me a buzz that calmed me down. But drinking straight from Desty’s body was like mainlining kerosene, then lighting myself on fire. It turned me on bad. Worse than anything I’d ever felt while I was alive. My heart pumped like someone had hooked it up to a car battery and revved the engine. I had to take breaks between swallows because I was breathing again.

The screen door downstairs banged open and shut.

“Jax?” It was Harper. Running. “Baby, are you okay?”

Then Jax’s damn phone started ringing again.

Harper answered and it sounded like Tiffani’s voice shouting through an old AM radio.

I blocked it out. Whatever she was saying didn’t matter. Right on the edge of coming, knowing it would be the most powerful release I’d ever felt. The instinct to finish was too strong for distractions. I kept sucking off of Desty, hyperventilating, feeling my heart forcing the venom through my body, and getting closer and closer. Everything else faded into static.

Then ice shot through the back of my neck, down into my still freaking-out heart. For a second I could see Him again, feel Heaven shutting me out, taste the cold, sick loss. It all exploded like a dry ice bomb inside my chest.

When I could see again, Harper was kneeling by the bed, checking Desty’s eyes. Harper’s wooden crucifix necklace was still wrapped around her palm, she hadn’t put it back in her pocket yet. Maybe she thought she’d need it again.

“Jeez, you’re dumb, girl,” Harper said.

It was me, I— It was me. I’d made it so Desty couldn’t run. I’d made her cry. And the crap I was going to do to her, while she was still alive and then…later. Mitzi’s knife-play looked like missionary compared to that. I licked my bottom lip and tasted Desty’s blood.

I got up on my knees and touched Harper’s arm. She swiped the crucifix at my head to back me up.

“Dammit, Tough, what were you thinking?” She didn’t even look over her shoulder at me. “You can’t drink out of someone who’s laying down. And you shouldn’t be drinking out of anything but the jugular. I mean, seriously, are you retarded?”

I must be. I’d had Tiffani make me so I could save Colt and Desty by making them. But I couldn’t make Desty a vamp and put her through that pain in her soul every time she saw something that represented what she gave up. She’d be better off dead than cut off from God and knowing Hell was all she had to look forward to. And Colt—

I was really going to have to kill him. My stomach turned. I swallowed something that tasted like barf mixed with blood.

The connection with Tiffani opened.

You need to do something about Colt right now, she said. She showed me a shot of the Tracker’s big, blue Dodge pulling up to her bakery.

Not barfing took a whole lot more effort when I saw the Tracker climb out of the truck, wet, rotting skin slipping on his arms and legs like it was full of pudding and not connected to anything. The nine hour trip from Nashville to Halo chained up in his backseat came back to me in high-def smell-o-vision.

What the hell do you want me to do? I asked her.

You said you knew how to save Colt, Tiffani snapped.

I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s broad fucking daylight outside, I said. I can’t get to him.

What had I thought, that Mikal would conveniently wait until night to come after me? If she had known where I was this morning, her and Colt would’ve been waiting on the porch for me.

My eyes shot open.

Let the Tracker in, I told