God Killer (Redneck Apocalypse Book 3)

by eden Hudson

  Lonely cocked his head at me. “You want to know why crows follow the shiny ones?”

  Sure, why not?

  “The entertainment value.”

  I snorted. If you like this, you’re going to love my next trick.

  Lonely threw his head back and cackled.

  “Try not to get yourself staked, tarnished one,” he said.

  Yeah. Hey, do me a favor. There’s someone I don’t want going to the Dark Mansion tonight.

  He raised a metal-studded eyebrow. “Who?”

  Willow Bue. Distract her, drug her, do that paralyzing trick. I don’t care what you do, just keep her away.

  Tempie

  One more time, I begged Kathan.

  He pressed his ear to the spot just under my bellybutton and listened for several seconds.

  The seed’s already taken, he said.

  Not for that, I said. For me. I know what’s going to happen when Desty and I become the Destroyer. I know it’s not going to be like this anymore.

  He didn’t deny it.

  What seemed like long minutes passed with only the touch of our bodies. This time, he didn’t pull me into his mind. More than anything, I wanted to be shattered into those thousand pieces and feel my loathsome self burned away, but I didn’t ask and he didn’t offer.

  When it was over, I hugged myself to his chest. Don’t go marching off to war, Johnny.

  You’ve always been honest with me, Kathan. You’ve never hidden anything from me.

  Are you asking now?

  No. I know how you work.

  You’re speaking of that old “fallen angels use the truth to lie” axiom.

  Better than using a lie to lie, I said. I respect you for it. And I respect that you’re the same all the time. You never change. I think that’s what I like the most about fallen angels. Whatever they were yesterday, they are today, too. If something makes you angry once, it always makes you angry. If something makes you happy once, it always makes you happy.

  Constant, Kathan said. That’s called being constant.

  Yeah. You’re constant. Humans…they might say they hate something today and tomorrow you find them fucking it out behind the barn.

  Temperance, you’re not some fickle whore. I couldn’t have stomached you for this long if you were. Your devotion is constant. Your fury is constant.

  No, I said. It was gone sometimes. Really gone. Sometimes…sometimes you made me feel so good…sometimes you almost made me believe that I deserved to feel good.

  Silence seeped back into the room and we put it to good use. I was panting and soaked with sweat when it was over, but Kathan wasn’t even breathing hard. He wiped the wet hair out of my eyes and kissed my forehead.

  Your anger is a gift, he said.

  He was right. But the tag on that present didn’t say “To: Tempie.” No, scrawled in fat black Sharpie on the wrapping paper was the name KATHAN and the instructions FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.

  Tough

  The first place I went after I left the tattoo parlor was to get my truck. I’d left it parked over behind the bank when I’d tried to get to the bakery to help Colt.

  A ghost of a memory whispered in my brain. Tried? Talk about a nice way to say fucked up and failed.

  Well, I was done fucking up and failing. I fired the truck up and headed for the Dark Mansion.

  Clare and Lonely had left it up to me to decide how I would get inside without getting staked at the door. I had considered sneaking in the back way again, but that hadn’t done me any good earlier. This time I figured I would just drive right up to the front door.

  I thought I heard myself giggle at that, then I remembered that I didn’t have a voice to giggle with anymore. A shiver rolled down my back. This was the kind of crazy you went when you knew you were about fifteen minutes away from waking up in Hell.

  The truck fishtailed as I took the turnoff onto gravel, but I didn’t downshift or take my foot off the gas. The muscles in my arms pulled tighter and tighter the closer I got to the Dark Mansion. I was almost to the mansion’s lane before I realized I was silent-humming and tapping my thumbs on the steering wheel along with the psycho-thrash death metal playing in my head.

  I turned down the lane, fishtailing again, but I still didn’t touch the clutch or the brake. The little orange needle on my speedometer was climbing toward sixty.

  That parking lot full of Hummers and helicopters was coming up fast.

  I spun the wheel so that my headlights were shining on the Dark Mansion’s front steps. Something about the headlights was bothering me, but whatever it was, it couldn’t get through the noise in my brain. Something about darkness and light? I’d almost got ahold of the thought when it occurred to me that there wasn’t any old barn where I used to play basketball to distract me this time.

  The needle on the speedometer jumped up over the halfway point on my gauge and started heading south again toward 110 mph. Usually my truck topped out at 106, but tonight she was running like a champ.

  I grinned. That Whitney luck’s finally starting to kick in.

  The headlights lit up the t-post with what was left of my brother’s body wrapped around it.

  Dead ahead. I swallowed another silent crazy-giggle at the thought.

  I couldn’t swerve or I would flip the truck. It wasn’t Colt anymore, anyway. It was just rotting meat. My stomach clenched, but I gritted my teeth and mowed the post down.

  In addition to the eight-inch lift and the badass speakers, my truck’s got a set of mud grips that would make an off-roader cream his jeans. They cost me two months’ pay from Rowdy’s and they were worth every penny. When the truck’s front wheels hit the steps, the grips grabbed ahold and hauled me up, bouncing and throwing me around inside the cab. If I hadn’t had the vamp strength and a strangle-hold on the wheel, I probably would’ve broken my neck.

  The big front doors splintered across the hood of the truck. Both side mirrors snapped off. I watched the passenger mirror spin through the air and drop into the bed of the truck.

  Then I was wrapped around the dash with the steering column sticking through my left lung and out the back window. The engine block was on fire. I could tell because it was sitting in the seat next to me. Out my window, I saw black smoke billowing up from the wheel wells.

  Sound faded back in. The engine roaring, the tires spinning. My foot must still be on the gas. I took it off. The truck lurched, died, and rolled back a few inches from one of the big stone columns in the Dark Mansion’s entrance hall.

  The maggots started chewing away at my face, arms, and legs, so I must’ve been pretty messed up. I pulled my right arm out of the hole it’d made in the windshield, then went to work trying to un-impale myself.

  Foot soldiers flooded the scene of the crash like first responders. Except these first responders were holding guns on me and screaming to get my hands in the air and my ass out of the truck.

  With both hands, I shoved the dash as hard as I could. There was this squishing sound. Pieces inside me that weren’t supposed to move moved. Another shove. Another squishy burping sound. Then a wet pop and I was off the steering column. I fell back in the seat and slumped over.

  “Get out of the truck!” a foot soldier with a pistol screamed at me through the glassless passenger side window. He was one of the newbies I didn’t recognize. “Get out of the truck!”

  I nodded and reached for the door handle with my left hand. The maggots picked that moment to go to town on my chest wound. I fell over, squirming around in the cab while they crawled and chewed and generally drove me insane from the inside out. You can’t scratch your internal organs.

  Through the vamp healing fit, I could hear the foot soldiers yelling—newbies were yelling at me, locals were yelling at newbies that I was a vamp, everybody was yelling at everybody to find a stake.

  When the last maggot finally stopped crawling around inside my chest, my hand was resting on the butt of the shotgun. I laughed. If things kept up like this, I wa
sn’t going to be able to make any more jokes about Whitney luck.

  I picked the shotty up and kicked the bent metal that used to be my truck’s driver side door. It screeched open. I came out shooting.

  One for you. The shotgun exploded fire, leaving the entrance hall burning and one foot soldier minus most of his right wing.

  I pumped the action.

  One for you. Another fireworks show that splattered charbroiled angel shoulder-meat across the walls.

  That wreck must’ve screwed up something in my brain because I was pulling to the left. I’d been aiming for his head.

  I racked the shotgun and picked another target that I wouldn’t miss by enough to matter.

  One for you.

  Most of the foot soldiers who weren’t on fire had pulled their sidearms and started shooting. They were probably wishing that they hadn’t brought pussy bullets to an armor-piercing incendiary round fight. I could feel the little nines and .22s slamming into my body, but the pain was far away, like listening to the bass line from a vehicle somewhere down the block.

  My arm froze mid-pump. I tried to move, but it wouldn’t respond. It was like when Bailey had stuck that bag of garlic in my mouth or when Lonely paralyzed me.

  Finally that nagging thought about darkness and headlights got through to my brain. It was nighttime.

  No! Shit, not now!

  But my arms wouldn’t move. I took a step, but couldn’t drag my other leg forward to catch me.

  Not tonight, please, they’re going to be here in five minutes and I haven’t even got to Desty yet, please, please, please— I tipped forward. The shotgun butt slammed into my chest and levered me onto my side rather than let me hit the melted carpet face-first.

  Stay awake!

  I couldn’t.

  *****

  At the edge of the blackness, I heard fire crackling and voices yelling. Footsteps circled me. Wings rustled. I tried to force my eyelids open, but it was like they were nailed shut.

  Stupid fucking being the only fucking vampire who sleeps at night. Wake up wake up wake up!

  Someone laughed. The volume turned up on the world just enough that I recognized the voice.

  “Mikal was right,” Kathan said. “You Whitneys may be annoying as all hell, but you’re so damned entertaining.”

  Holding onto consciousness was too hard. It slipped away from me.

  She needs you. They need you. Everybody’s depending on your sorry ass. Get. Up.

  Gunfire. More yelling close by.

  “Tough?” That was Dodge.

  Scout yelled, “Is he—”

  Dammit. The first team was here and I couldn’t open my fucking eyes. Worthless piece of shit!

  “Tough?” Sweaty hands grabbed me by the neck and shook me.

  More gunfire. The hands let go.

  “Dodge!” Somebody started shooting pop-pop-pop-pop without pausing. Twelve shots, then the snap of a pistol slide locking back. Whoever was shooting had just run dry.

  Finally, my eyes cracked enough that I could see a blur. There was a pair of arms and man-boobs in a faded gray-green t-shirt less than a foot from my face. I tried to look up toward the head, but my eyes wouldn’t move. I didn’t need to see his stubbly, razor-burned cheeks and wide nose, though. I recognized the leather bracelet with the bronze bass picks riveted to it.

  “Somebody help me!” A smaller set of hands grabbed me by the ankle and started pulling. My face stuck to the floor, then unstuck and squeaked across the tile. “Grab his other leg!”

  Coyotes yipped and wings flapped all around me. Gunfire was everywhere.

  Then a warm body grabbed me around the knee and elbow and heaved me up onto its shoulders, fireman style. My brain spun. I had to wake up. They were trying to take me out of the Dark Mansion, but I couldn’t leave yet. Desty was still in here somewhere.

  “Let’s go!” Clarion yelled. “I got him. Go! Fall back!”

  The shoulders jolted underneath me. I tried to move my mouth, shake my head, anything. All I could do was look at the blur of blood and skin that used to be the left side of Dodge Kelley’s face as they carried me away.

  Desty

  Even though the lunatic’s cell had almost warmed back up to my body temperature, I shivered. The blood was back. I hadn’t passed out or been drugged this time, but red swirled all around me in the darkness, a comforting ocean of blood, soothing away my pain. This time I could feel my hair floating in it, moving with the currents.

  Kathan had found a way to make Tempie and me the same again, so he would probably escalate the torture now. At least they had stopped digging inside me with that coat hanger. That was something. Maybe they had finally realized that I couldn’t have been pregnant.

  Theoretically speaking, I could’ve been. Vampires are dead, but they come back to life in a way after they drink from a living being. Some start breathing again, others may feel warm for a few minutes after feeding. What’s to say that they don’t make vampire condoms because blood livens up dead little swimmers?

  No break in clinical distance came this time. I hadn’t been carefully detached and analyzing my situation anyway. When Kathan had offered to end the pain if I would just give in and become his familiar, something had snapped inside of me. I could feel what was left of it dangling like a bunch of broken cords inside my brain.

  To join Kathan’s side now would be like agreeing to marry one of the foot soldiers who’d raped me if they pinkie swore not to rape me anymore. It wasn’t happening. They could systematically tear me to pieces, but I would not let myself be mentally handcuffed to that evil bastard. He was just as bad as the God who had let this happen. The only downside to not becoming Kathan’s familiar was that I wouldn’t be powerful enough to destroy both of them.

  Unless that’s the lie Kathan wanted you to believe—that you needed him so you could destroy the world.

  On the stairs after he’d first tried to enthrall me, Kathan had said that he could hear it written in my blood, that I was the other half of the Destroyer. If a person is born something, then they have the abilities of that thing within themselves, maybe coded into their DNA. All Jax had said about the Destroyer was that identical twins born to identical twins—bred in the bone the same, borne in the flesh the same—who were bound as one could unleash destruction upon the Earth.

  Tempie was already manifesting some powers. On that first night I’d found her, after she’d hit me, she kissed the spot and healed it. She had also laid the smack down on that jerk vampire, Finn, the other day.

  If she didn’t need to be bound to me to display some of the powers of a Destroyer, maybe she didn’t need Kathan, either. Maybe being with him had just enlightened her as to what the powers were, then she had begun using them.

  In knowledge, power.

  I closed my eyes and felt around my body, making a mental inventory. For this experiment to work, I needed an observable starting point. I found the missing strip of skin on the inside of my leg. It was still weeping blood. Kind of a big booboo to start with. The bite mark on my chest would probably take less effort, but minor healing would produce minor results, and minor results were harder to track.

  I laid my palm flat on the bloody spot. The exposed tissue stung from the salt on my skin, but I didn’t move my hand. I wasn’t sure how to begin. How did you heal something? How did you do anything Destroyer-y?

  Maybe you had to be kissing it? I tried, but couldn’t bend right to get my lips to the wound.

  That would be ridiculous anyway. I was sitting alone in a pitch black isolation cell with no one but the blood to see me and I still felt stupid for trying. You would think that major bodily harm and humiliation would make a person a little less self-conscious, but I guess I was stuck with that particular character trait for life. However short that life might be.

  Speaking of which, I should probably speed things up a bit. There was no telling how long I would be left alone this time or how much of that alone-time I had already wasted.r />
  I took another deep breath, trying to hold off the panic, but my heart stuttered inside my ribcage at the thought of the foot soldiers coming back. My hand trembled until I had to take it off of the wound because I was doing more damage than I was magically fixing.

  It wasn’t magic, though, it was something else. Will, maybe? Tempie had wanted me to feel better, so she’d kissed the bruise on my cheek and healed it. But I already wanted to feel better. Who wouldn’t want the thigh they’d just had flensed to feel better?

  Somebody who didn’t think they deserved to feel better. Somebody who didn’t have a purpose fueling their will to feel better.

  I had a purpose—destroy the fallen angels who had done this to me. Pay them back for laughing as if watching my body violated and ripped apart was the height of entertainment. Get my sister away from Kathan and pay him back for everything he’d done to her.

  It didn’t matter whether I deserved to feel better or not, if I was better in every sense of the word—not just cuts and bruises healed, but stronger, more powerful, greater—then I could destroy them.

  I drew on all the anger and hatred and bitterness at the things they’d done to me. That helpless rage from being held down and hurt and laughed at and made into a thing, not me, not a person, not someone who could help them fight the God who had misused them and the rest of the world, but a means to an end, some kind of dumb animal they had to break so she would follow them around and do what they told her to do. I poured all of that into the wound and all over myself.

  The river of blood swirled around my arms and legs and face, making little ripples and whorls where my power disturbed it. Warmth poured across my skin, soothing away the aches and pains.

  I smoothed my hand across the untorn flesh on the inside of my thigh, then over the place where the ridged bite mark on my chest had been. I slid my tongue over my newly unbroken teeth and pursed bloody but scabless lips together.

  “Now we’re cooking with gasoline.” I laughed. Some giddy part of my brain thought that Kathan would’ve cringed if he could’ve seen the levels of hell that self-satisfied smirk held for him and his legions. “Desty Blaine McCormick, ladies and gentlemen—the Destroyer, the Godkiller, and now available in limited edition Fallen Angel Killer.”