Honkytonk Hell: A Dark and Twisted Urban Fantasy (The Broken Bard Chronicles Book 1) by eden Hudson (best book series to read TXT) 📕

“Where’re you from?” she asked.

“A little south of Hannibal.”

“On the river?”

I nodded. “Close enough that ten acres of our farm is overflow for the levee.”

“So you guys had plenty of sirens,” Willow said.

“Yeah.” It seemed like small talk, so I relaxed. “Some of the idiot guys in my class actually hunted them.”

“Is Hannibal crow or coyote territory?” she asked.

“Coyote.”

“I thought so,” Willow said. “But you guys don’t have any fallen angels.” She traced the rim of her drink with her thumb. “No one who lived in an angel town ever wanted to become a familiar, I bet. You can’t see the castoffs and still convince yourself you want that.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. So much for safe conversation.

“I don’t have anything against Kathan,” Willow said. “I assume he’s an okay mayor. I’m not much into politics, but he must be, right? I mean, he made the ‘every human in Halo has to have a protector’ rule so the vamps and sirens wouldn’t just go around sucking everybody dry and the werecreatures wouldn’t be constantly fighting over who was hunting on whose land, so, you know. That was really great of him, considering he could’ve just had Mikal and the foot soldiers wipe us all out instead of letting our generation live. But Kathan really, really hates Tough’s family.”

Willow nodded at Tough. He was leaned up against the bar with a beer, watching us. I looked away, but Willow just raised her glass in a little salute to him.

“It’s okay,” she said to me, “You can look. He’s pretending to listen to Owen now because we caught him.”

I flipped my bangs out of my face and stole a glance. Tough was nodding at an orange-haired guy, but even in the dim light I could see the top of his cheekbones turning red. Something about the blush touched off a spark in my brain, as if I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t quite place it.

“Tough’s brother Colt is a familiar,” Willow said. “He was killing the people Mikal enthralled, so Kathan gave Colt to her, kind of like a poetic justice thing. Angels are really into that. Anyway, what I think people don’t get is that, sometimes, fallen angels use being a familiar as a punishment. Like, they can’t think of anything worse than— What’s wrong?”

“I saw him,” I said. “Yesterday. Tough’s brother. When I went on the Dark Mansion tour.”

Willow leaned forward. “How did he look?”

Naked? Smoking hot? Subservient? Madly in love? House broken? My dad used to have this term he thought was really funny, but I couldn’t say “pussy-whipped” out loud.

“Ironic,” I said, remembering his tattoos.

“Huh?”

“No, I mean, he has these—” I shook my head. “He seemed fine.”

“Was he like…? I don’t know what to ask exactly,” Willow said. She looked over at Tough again. “But I guess that Mikal still has him is the answer.”

“She didn’t look like she was going to cast him off anytime soon.”

“Mikal goes through them pretty fast,” Willow said.

The eighteen day average popped into my brain. Willow looked at me like she could tell I’d heard the numbers and she didn’t want me to have any illusions about them based on a nationwide figure.

“A few months ago we had five castoffs zombie-ing around Halo trying to kill themselves,” Willow said. “Mikal is brutal. A week with her would be like forever.”

“How long has Colt—”

“Thirty-four days today.”

I couldn’t say anything to that. Well, maybe I could have, but it would’ve been something that would’ve blown the rest of the stupid from the last few days out of the water, like “Wow” or “Golly.”

“Not very many people around here liked Colt,” Willow said. “You saw him, so you know he’s hot, but there was just something about him, you know? Whitneys are natural troublemakers.” She shrugged. “I mean, their dad got all our parents killed in that whole mess with Kathan. Tough’s just the fun kind of trouble.”

Even though I’d heard the generation-sweep fact from Know-It-All on the Dark Mansion tour, I wasn’t prepared to hear someone who had lived it say the words.

“Willow? I’m sorry about your parents.”

“I was little,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t really remember them.”

“How did you— I mean, who took care of you?”

Willow pointed at the orange-haired guy she had called Owen earlier. He was racing Tough to drink the long line of shots on the bar between them. Tough grabbed the middle shot before Owen did, downed it, then threw up his fists in victory.

“My cousin and his girlfriend,” Willow said. “I think they did a pretty decent job for a couple of sixteen-year-olds.”

A heavyset guy in a camo hat tapped Willow’s arm as he passed her.

“Got to go,” she said to me, leaving her drink on the edge of the stage and hiking herself up beside it. “You sticking around for the last set?”

“Sure.” I’d paid my eight bucks. Might as well get my money’s worth.

Willow grinned. “Cool.”

I squeezed into an empty spot along the wall. Camo-Hat plugged in his bass. Willow put on a pair of headphones and played a bored little ditty on her snare. At the bar, Tough and Owen were doing another round of shots.

Willow pretended to check a wristwatch.

Camo-Hat leaned into his microphone and said, “Save some booze for the drunks, guys.”

They slammed their last shots, then weaved through the crowd swarming the dance floor.

I guess I didn’t realize that they were waiting for Tough, too. He hadn’t been playing with the band the night before, so it surprised me when he hopped up on stage, picked up a guitar, and slipped the strap over his shoulder. He spent a couple tipsy seconds hooking an amp cord through his belt loop