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

and kicked me and prayed and cussed and screamed some more. I don’t know how long it went on. I just held onto my neck and watched her try to tear me apart because I killed him. I killed Jax.

When the ambulance got there, Scout and the paramedics helped Harper into the back with Jax’s body. Before they closed the doors, I saw Harper lay her head on his chest. Then they left.

I was shivering again.

“Come on,” Scout said. She took my arm and led me inside the house. “Here.” She turned her head and pulled my face down to her throat. “I know you need something stronger, but this’ll help for now. Tonight I’ll make it stronger.”

I drank. The liquor buzz spread out through my head. I felt Scout slip her hand into my jeans, but I couldn’t get up. I grabbed her wrists and held them behind her back until she went dead weight on me. My vamp mind tried to react to the fake collapse, but I shut it off.

Scout got her feet under her.

“I need to get to the hospital, baby. Harper’s going to need a ride home and—”

I pushed her back and fell onto the couch. It was still warm where Jax had been sitting. His game was waiting for him to come back and beat level ten or whatever.

“Okay,” Scout said. “I’ll be back.”

Her footsteps crossed the porch and Jax’s car started. She pulled out of the driveway. Idled in the street for a few seconds. Girls’ voices were talking, but I didn’t try to make any sense out of what they were saying. Then Scout drove off.

Footsteps on the porch. The foamy citrus beer smell beat Desty inside.

“Tough?”

There was a can of that candy-piss Red Hot energy drink Jax was always drinking sweating on the coffee table next to his new controller. His new wireless controller. Jax had gotten a wireless controller and I was too stupid to realize that meant he had a spell to make it work with all the NP-energies in this town. But he’d been too in love with his games not to get a wireless controller.

“Scout told me what happened.” Desty crouched down between my knees and looked into my eyes. “Tough? Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

Desty’d been crying, she was bleeding from a dirty scrape on her shin, and Scout had just told her that I killed my best friend, but she wanted to know if I was okay.

I grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back against the wall. Tried to rip her shorts and underwear off, but my hands were shaking too bad. She shoved my hands out of the way and pulled them off for me while I got my jeans down. I couldn’t think, I just knew Desty would take some of it away from me.

It couldn’t have felt good for her—she wasn’t ready, and I didn’t even think of getting a condom to make it warmer for her—but she didn’t try to stop me. She just kept whispering in my ear and touching my face.

After I came, I was crying. Desty didn’t tell me to man the hell up or to stop bawling. Half of what she said didn’t even make any sense. Stuff like how it was okay, everything would be okay. Feeling the heat of her skin against me, hearing her tell me the stupidest, most obvious lies anybody had ever made up…I don’t know what you would call that feeling. Good? Seems like a shitty thing to get to feel after you just killed your best friend. But that was me, right? Vamp-Whore Drunk-Ass Murderer Tough Whitney—kill your best friend, fuck the girlfriend you cheated on last night, and call it a day.

Thank God Mom and Dad are dead. Thinking that tore something way down deep in my soul that I had figured was already long gone.

Somehow, Desty got me up to the bedroom and held me some more. I didn’t fall asleep, but I felt every part of me shut off at the same time.

Desty

 

I combed my fingers through Tough’s hair again. He hadn’t moved in more than an hour except to blink. His body was there, but he wasn’t. Even as hot as it was in the room, I was starting to shiver from prolonged exposure to his cool skin. I needed to move, but I didn’t want to. I just wanted to feel him next to me and never, ever tell him that I’d come here to break up with him.

God, he was like a drug. As soon as I got close to him, all I wanted was to stay. I pushed my face against his. Felt my tears turn icy-cold when they hit his cheek.

“I can’t do this, Tough. You got the wrong twin.”

It felt like something started bleeding in my chest. I couldn’t believe that this was just now becoming obvious to me. Tough and I were like a bad joke somebody had thought up while they were drunk. The coward and the badass. The doormat and the rebel. Ha, ha, ha.

“This isn’t about what happened to Jax,” I said because I thought he might need to hear it, even though Jax’s death was just one more thing on the laundry list of crap I couldn’t handle. When I closed my eyes, I could see Colt’s face with the gun pressed to his temple, begging me to understand that he’d never wanted to be a murderer. “I know you’re not a killer, Tough, not really. I know that—that—”

That what? That sometimes, some places there’s just nothing that can happen but violence and death?

The screen door downstairs opened.

“Tough Whitney?” It was a man’s voice. “You here?”

“Check the kitchen, I’ll check upstairs.” I knew that voice—Bailey, from the Witches’ Council.

The footsteps on the