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

my spine into my brain. I wanted to scream for Dad not to leave, to fight, to do something so he could stay and help me—somehow he had always helped Mom—but what if I started screaming and I couldn’t stop?

“Shh,” Sissy whispered, even though Tough wasn’t making any noise. She had him tight against her side and she kept rubbing his arm. “Shh.”

Then Mikal appeared beside Kathan and the lines did, too. Differently colored halos surrounding NPs and strings stretching between them or arching up and out of sight. Kathan glowed like a black light, but Mikal’s power was the most spread-out—a bloody web connecting red spheres. She reached into the sphere at her hip and pulled out the flaming sword.

I tried to tell Ryder about the lines, but he grabbed the back of my neck and banged his forehead against mine.

“Get your shit together, Colt.” His whisper was so sharp that it shocked the black noise into silence. “You’re scaring Tough worse and if they see that you’re—” Ryder choked on whatever he was going to say. Squeezed my neck with both hands like he wanted to strangle me. Then he let go and he tried to smile. “Come on, Sunshine. I’ll make it up to you, I swear, just keep your shit together until this is over.”

Then it was night. I was starting a fire while Sissy and Tough set up camp. When they finished, Tough dropped onto his pallet as if he was dead. Just one more decapitated corpse.

Sissy quit moving. The breath whistled through her broken nose. She was going to cry.

“Um—” She pointed over her shoulder. “Perimeter.”

I nodded, but she was already going.

I rolled up my pants leg and pulled the makeshift bandage away from my knee—the hole was finally clotting. I covered it back up.

For the longest time the only thing I could do was stare into the fire, trying to remember the words to one of Mom’s songs. Something something, I need this done, I need some help, I need a gun, Something, I want to fight, I want to die, Find some light—

When Ryder came back to camp, he was whistling. Never mind the dirt and blood and ashes on his clothes from dragging Dad’s body out from under the pile of what used to be our army and digging a grave all by himself. He held up the bottle—Southern Comfort.

“Who came through for you, Sunshine?” Ryder said. “This motherfucker right here.”

Then he tossed it to me.

The SoCo smacked the back of my fingers and rolled under the coffee table. I was in the cabin again.

Ryder snorted.

“Nice catch,” he said.

“Where’d you get it?”

Ryder stared at me with his mouth open for a second. Then he straightened up and rubbed his hands together.

“Hot damn hallelujah,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

“That first night,” I said. “Where’d the booze come from?”

“A little birdy gave it to me when I went back for Dad’s body,” Ryder said. “Mikal heard you before I could get you to shut your trap. She told me it would help.” He looked like he wanted to apologize, but he just shrugged. “It was still sealed, but I figured even if she had poisoned it somehow…well, hell, at least it would kill us.”

Something in my chest tried to expand, tried to tell me that Mikal had given Ryder the SoCo because she’d been worried about me, because she had loved me even back then and she didn’t want me to suffer, but that wasn’t right. I could feel that it wasn’t.

“What’d that castoff say?” I had been coming out of the tattoo parlor when I walked right into a castoff taking swigs from a gas can. “He said something like, ‘Broken minds can see the lines.’ He looked right at me and said it like he knew I could see them.”

Ryder nodded. “Now, back to the booze. Mom didn’t drink. Start there.”

Mom hadn’t drank since before she left her band. Something to do with a close call. An overdose? Or maybe alcohol poisoning…

“Wrong way, Sunshine,” Ryder said. “Try again.”

Mom didn’t drink, but I did—every single night starting with that very first one by the fire—because at around two shots in, the black noise backed off and the glowing lines got dim. At fall-down drunk they disappeared altogether.

“Mom heard the black noise, too,” I said. “She could see the lines, but she didn’t drink, so she couldn’t shut it off. That’s why Mikal killed her—because she could see the lines.”

Why were the lines so damn important?

 “Colt!” Someone rattled the cabin door, then backed up and put their weight into it.

I got to the kitchen just as Grace tripped into the table. A pair of black boxers stuck out of the left leg of her jean shorts.

“They’re taking Tough to the Dark Mansion—I’m sorry about this morning, Colt—I’m so sorry—but he killed Jax—and I tried to drive up here, but the truck died in the creek bed and—”

I grabbed Grace’s shoulders and made her stand up straight so she could catch her breath.

“Slow down,” I said. “Someone killed Jax?”

“Tough.” She took a long, ragged breath and let it out. “The Witches’ Council is taking him to Kathan. They want to stake him—stake Tough. Please help.”

“Stake him? Tough’s a vamp?”

Grace looked confused.

“Yeah,” she said. “He wanted to get you away from Mikal, so he—”

“Shit!” I kicked one of the chairs and it clotheslined itself on the table. Tough was a vamp, damned to Hell for eternity because of me.

“Leave it to that dumbass to pick the only wrong way to do it,” Ryder said.

“Colt.” Grace grabbed my hand and made me look into her eyes. “I need you to stay with me right now. They want Kathan to stake Tough because he killed Jax.