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

of my cheeks were hot, but not as hot as when I was alive and embarrassed. The heat felt good, but fake, like listening to your favorite song when you know you’re screwed in real life. At least Colt’s crazy had distracted him from the whole me and Mitzi thing.

Then I smiled. Yesterday afternoon while we were taking a break and listening to some music, Desty had said that she thought it was cute when I blushed. Then she’d laughed when she realized “cute” was just about as offensive as “short” is to guys, but she said she wasn’t taking it back. That was what started up Round Two—me wrestling her, trying to make her take it back. I had ended up on bottom. Darn the luck.

That really was the best afternoon of my life. And I guess it got to keep the record since I left her asleep in bed and went off to kill myself not long afterwards.

A lot could change in twenty-four hours. I went from too freaking hot all the time to too freaking cold. This kind of cold didn’t feel right. I wanted to go curl up in bed with Desty. She’d be hot, all the way down to her bones. That would feel right. And since we’d already be in bed…

No wonder Mitzi had called me in at all hours of the night. Even just the inside of my jeans against my dick was turning me on. With Mitzi, the vamp hypersensitivity had paid off in half a dozen orgasms every time we did it. Just guessing, but probably for guy vamps—and their girlfriends—it was more of a hindrance than a help.

In the shower, Colt stopped moving like he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to be doing.

Could you hurry it up some? I said. It’d been almost ten hours since Mikal left the house. Every minute she didn’t bust back in the door and kill everybody ratcheted up the tension in the back of my neck by another hundred notches. We need to get the hell out of here before somebody lets it slip to Mikal that you’re not dead.

The vamp senses told me someone was coming down the hallway.

“Hey, Tough?” Harper knocked. “Come out here for a second.”

Colt would probably be fine. There wasn’t anything dangerous in the shower, anyway. I went out into the hall, but I kept the door open just in case.

Harper was opening a little brown paper bag. She held up the bellybutton stud that had been inside. A blood charm.

“Scout picked it up from Lonely’s,” she said. “If Desty wants to stay, I’ll give it to her, but…”

But only a suicidal retard would want to stay with a serial killer. And even if Desty did want to stay with me, what about sex? We couldn’t use warming gel and I couldn’t imagine a girl would like having something cold inside of her. Other than sex, there wasn’t really anything else I had to offer a girl like Desty.

“You know how it works?” Harper asked.

I nodded. Mitzi used to keep one around in case things got out of hand.

“Give me your finger, then.”

I held my middle finger out. Harper stabbed it with the stud.

“You know it’d be better for everybody if she just left,” Harper said, watching the little grenade-shaped decoration on the end turn the same brownish color as vamp venom.

I shook my head hard so Harper would know how wrong she was. Desty was as close to good—like innocent-good—as a piece of shit like me could ever get. I couldn’t just let her go. I had to find a way to convince her to stay with me.

Desty

 

I kicked and fought my way through the blood, almost at the surface when something grabbed my leg and pulled me back down. I tried to scream, but hot, thick blood filled my mouth and pooled in my lungs. I could feel the bubbles popping in my throat as I choked. Then someone was running. A hiss like a demon cat from Hell. That wasn’t how the blood dream usually went.

What if this wasn’t a dream?

Oh, God, please don’t let me die like this! I fought harder but nothing happened. I don’t know if you can cry underwater—or underblood—but I think I managed.

“Back the hell up, Tough, or I swear I’ll start praying!” That was Harper yelling.

Another hiss.

“God Almighty, Creator of everything, Lord of the Heavens and Earth, Father of Christ in Whom all may find salvation—”

Something hit the floor in the hallway.

I opened my eyes. Tough’s room, the window-sheet pulled aside and the late afternoon sun shining in stripes through the beer-can-props. Someone had covered me up with the top sheet. The fan wasn’t on, but I wasn’t sweating. Dehydrated again.

My thighs felt sticky. It took so much effort to push up onto my elbow that I almost passed out. My arms shook but I kept pushing through it until I was sitting up, then let my head hang down and breathed until the blackout was just a dizzy spell. After a few seconds, I could see clearly. The sheet between my legs looked like the day I woke up with my very first period, which had just happened to fall on December 25th. Mom had thought that was hilarious—Mother Nature’s Gift on Christmas morning. Except today there was a set of fang marks in my femoral artery.

Tough’s fang marks. Merry freaking Christmas.

Hot needles prickled along the back of my eyes and throat, but I made myself breathe until they passed. I couldn’t break down now, not after all this.

“I’ll check on her,” Harper said. “You stay here.”

I had just enough energy to grab one of Tough’s shirts off the floor and pull it on before Harper walked in the door and shut it behind