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

Tiffani. While he’s dicking around looking for me, call the Dark Mansion and tell Mikal where I am.

***

The Tracker made it to the house first. Maybe Mikal was too busy screwing my brother to get her damn clothes on and come kill me. Or maybe it was just routine—send in the zombie to secure the prisoner before the big shot came in and did all the ass-kicking.

Jax and Harper sat at the bottom of the staircase in the living room while the Tracker wound his trusty log chain around my arms and stomach and pinned the loops together behind my back. Harper flinched when the padlock snapped closed.

I tried to look confident so she wouldn’t freak out. I’d only had a couple of minutes to bring Jax back around and get my plan across to him and Harper before the Tracker showed up. Harper had told me straight-up that she didn’t think there was any chance it would work.

“Should’ve brought steel,” the Tracker said. He had a voice like someone with throat cancer had eaten a bag of nails and he stunk like rotting shit. Not having to breathe was kind of a blessing with him in the room. He gave the chains a test-jerk. “These’ll work ‘til Mikal gets here. Try to break out…” He pulled an old Wild West .44-40 out of his gun belt and aimed it at Jax and Harper. “Bang. Bang.”

I growled at him—as much as someone could without a voice.

The Tracker ignored me and slopped over to the window, maybe to watch for Mikal.

I started feeling around behind my back for the padlock.

Jax shook his head at me. He touched the step, then waved his hands around him and Harper.

I rolled my eyes. I didn’t play baseball and neither did Jax. If he was trying to send me some kind of message, it wasn’t going to work.

My fingers grazed the padlock and I worked at it until I got the shackle into my hand.

But Jax touched the step again, pushing down really hard this time. There was a spark like when you flick a lighter, then he gave me a thumbs-up.

Jax had just done something with magic.

Then I got it—he wanted me to know that they were safe. That I could go ahead with my plan and not worry about them getting killed.

The Tracker turned back around and squinted at me. I smiled up at him like a good little prisoner.

Tiffani

 

I threw the last bucket of soapy water on the sidewalk in front of my bakery, then went inside and hooked up the hose to the sink. I’d have customers coming in half an hour and I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone while I could still smell the Tracker’s putrefied corpse.

That damn kid. Why couldn’t he have figured out another way? Damn me, too. Making Tough wasn’t the same as doing something. It was more like putting a Band-Aid on a knife wound.

Hell. Now I was starting to sound like Colt.

I dragged the hose outside and unkinked it. Water sputtered, then exploded out and washed the suds off the concrete. I pulled out a cigarette and held it between my lips while I lit up. The crisp, ashy smoke helped hide the reek of the Tracker and the cigarette gave my other hand something to do while I hosed off the sidewalk.

Two crows flew over, crawking at each other and heading for the highway. Probably off to patrol the edges of their territory for coyote trespassers.

After Ryder died, the closest thing Colt had to friends were crows. Although it had always struck me as more mutual understanding than friendship—the primals never stopped fighting their wars with each other and Colt never stopped fighting his war. Probably didn’t hurt that Colt was supplying the crows with guns and ammunition, either. They were how he found out that Mitzi was letting me listen in while she and Tough had sex. The crows at the tattoo parlor gossiped like biddies at the hair salon.

I had come back from hunting one morning to find Colt waiting outside the bakery, hunched over against the wind in a ratty Carhart coat and watching me like he couldn’t decide whether to stake me or throw holy water in my face. That hair, those eyes—he hadn’t filled out much yet, but even all arms and legs and angles, he screamed Danny. Just being near him made me feel as if I’d somehow fallen backward in time.

“What the hell do you want?” I asked.

“Lonely Pershing said Mitzi lets you listen in while she and Tough are—are together,” Colt said.

I had less than an hour to shower, throw stuff in the oven, get the coffee going, and suck down a breakfast smoke.

“Piss off, kid. I don’t have time for a sermon today.”

Colt took a step toward me.

“No, I’m not—I wouldn’t—” He had that innocent look in his eyes that Shannon used to flash at people like a Get Out of Jail Free card. I could smell her in him—tattoo ink and skin so hot that it could only be full of unbalanced, unholy fury. “I just wondered whether Tough was okay.”

“Well, he had a rocky start,” I said. “But Mitzi got him whipped into a Casanova who can go all night and be ready for another round in the morning, so I’d say he’s better than okay. Maybe even—”

“That’s not what I meant,” Colt said.

“Piss off,” I said again, and I started to unlock the door.

Behind me, I heard the sound of fingers curling into fists. I braced myself. Colt had inherited too much of Danny’s looks to have gotten anything from Shannon but her temper.

“Tough thinks he’s so damn smart,” Colt said. “That he’s beating the system. But he doesn’t get that as long