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

himself through the door’s broken window. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t contemplating the best way to commit suicide, but trying to keep up with a one-sided schizophrenic conversation was like listening to someone with earbuds in sing a song they don’t know.

Another paper cut memory—lying with my head on Tough’s shoulder, listening to his mp3 player, even though it was so hot we had to keep wiping the sweat on the sheets. That had been just yesterday. Why couldn’t we go back to that?

On the porch, Colt pushed himself up and walked to the shed at the tree line.

He was taller than Tough and his skin had a lighter undertone, but the family resemblance was there in more than just the hair and eyes. They stood the same, walked the same. On Colt it came off as deadly competence, the equivalent of staring someone down. On Tough it was all attitude. I could imagine Tough in a fight with a guy twice his size. He might not win, but he would mess the other guy up enough that it wouldn’t matter.

A few seconds after Colt went into the shed, the light inside came on and it occurred to me that I should check on him. The drain unclogger was probably in the cabin if it was anywhere, but I remembered another comment from the message boards about someone whose cousin had hung himself in the barn.

I walked down to the shed and looked in the half-open door.

Colt had a broadsword. An honest-to-God broadsword—three-foot blade, two-handed grip, shiny, pointy, lethal end—and he was swinging it around like it wasn’t nearly as heavy or as deadly as it looked. The way he moved with it, even the way he breathed with it, said Colt absolutely knew what he was doing and there was no way I’d be able to stop him if he wanted to use that thing.

Not only that, but the walls of the shed were lined with racks of swords, battle axes, pole arms, maces, mauls—everything you’d need to accurately reenact a medieval war fantasy. There was even a matched pair of crossbows. All along the door-side wall were racks of shotguns, rifles, and machine guns, pistol cases, ammo boxes, and bandoliers of ammunition. In the far corner under a faded, duct-taped, sliced-up punching bag was a metal locker marked Semtex-H.

Semtex. Plastic explosive.

“Holy crap,” I said.

Colt spun around, real-life-freaking-broadsword ready to chop my head off. There wasn’t any sort of recognition in his blue-green eyes.

“It’s me,” I squeaked. I put up my hands to show I wasn’t a threat. They practically vibrated. “Desty. Modesty. Do you remember me, Colt? Tough’s girlfriend? Grace?”

It probably wasn’t more than a few seconds before he brought the sword down, but it seemed like forever.

“I wouldn’t have hurt you,” Colt said, letting the point of the sword rest on the shed’s dirt floor. “I knew who you were.”

“It’s just…the arsenal that scared me,” I lied.

He looked around like the weaponry wasn’t something he’d ever considered.

“I think there used to be more. Most of it was confiscated after the war. This is just what we recovered. And I guess we sold some of it.” He tossed the sword up to eye-level and caught it near the middle of the blade, point-down. There was a cross etched down the length of the sword’s blade. “But this was one of ours.”

I stepped into the shed.

“Jax told me that your dad, um, trained you all,” I said. I had just sort of assumed since Daniel Whitney had been a pastor that ‘training’ had meant ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ not ‘Full Metal Jacket.’ I looked around. “So Tough can use this stuff, too?”

“Not legally,” Colt said. “Everyone who signed the armistice had to swear they’d never carry or use a weapon. It took a while after the war, but Tough signed, too.”

“When you say ‘the war,’ you mean the NP-Human Conflict?” I asked.

“That’s what the traitors and the cowards call it,” he said.

“Uh—” Duh, self—just duh! Of course the semantics were a big deal to somebody who’d fought—whose family had died fighting—than to somebody who had only seen the updates from the warzone when they interrupted her cartoons.

Colt cocked his head at me and half-smiled. “I was just kidding, Grace. It was a joke.”

“Oh.” I tried to laugh. It sounded as awkward as it felt. I swiped my bangs out of my face. “Sorry. I kind of suck at basic human interaction. Until recently, I never really had to do it. My sister handled pretty much all that stuff when we were growing up. Actually, you might know her—Tempie. Temperance? She’s Kathan’s familiar.”

Colt’s fist tightened around the sword grip enough that I could hear the leather creak.

“I didn’t mean to upset you—”

“No,” he said, looking down. “It’s not that. I just didn’t…get out much with Mikal.”

“Yeah, Tempie said her and Kathan almost never leave the bedroom.” Then I realized what I was saying. Way to make things less awkward by bringing up sex-marathons.

But Colt didn’t seem to notice. He kept staring down at the floor. He looked like he had the day I took the tour of the Dark Mansion—like he’d left his body behind. Well, that minus being naked and on Mikal’s leash.

“They need a lot of attention to make up for what they lost when they fell,” he said.

I shifted from one foot to the other and tried to find anything else to talk about.

“Dammit,” Colt said. Then continued as if he was arguing with someone. “It’s not that hard to understand. Everybody else deserted me. She didn’t. She protected me. It’s just basic psychology. Yeah, basic you’re-batshit-crazy psychology.”

I didn’t touch him in case he was on the edge of another meltdown, but I got close enough to make him look me in the