by eden Hudson
“He’ll be okay,” I said because I wanted it to be true.
Tough pulled off his hat and let it hang from his fingertips between his legs. Then he kissed me, really softly on the shoulder, the neck, the jaw, the cheek. Every kiss was a little harder than the last. When he got to my mouth, he slid his fingers into my hair and pulled me into his lips like his life depended on it.
But his fangs bumped against my teeth and snapped me back to reality.
“Stop it, Tough.” I stood up.
He stood up, too, and grabbed for my hand, but I backed into the sunlight.
“Don’t touch me!” I yelled. “I know how this story goes. The hometown girl, the one who ‘gets you,’ the girl who’s the spitting image of her older sister who you used to love? She’s the one you pick. I’m not going to be the brokenhearted, delusional ex, wishing some cheating bastard would dump his younger girlfriend and come back to me. I’ve seen how that ends.”
Tough took a step toward me and reached out, his fingertips an inch from the sunlight.
“I don’t even like vampires,” I said, backing toward the tree line. Cowards always back away. “Maybe Kathan, Tempie, and I will see you and Scout around town.”
Tough snorted and shook his head, this awful smile on his face. He ran his hand through his hair, then pulled his hat on. Gave me a Screw You, Too, wave.
I grabbed my backpack out of his truck.
When I looked over my shoulder, Tough was sitting on the porch again. He had his head down and his fingers laced over the back of his neck like someone had kicked the last of the goodtime durr-Chevy-kid out of him.
Tough
After Mikal killed Mom, I thought I’d hate music forever. For years it made me sick to even think about. I would wake up with a song in my head and bawling my eyes out. Sissy would hug me and tell me that the war would be over soon and we’d be back home and everything would be okay, but I didn’t care about that. I was upset because music was everything to Mom and to me, too, but music was just a sound. It was just noise.
I stretched my leg out, then dragged my boot heel backwards through the dirt and dead grass by the porch. Made the scrape I’d been working on since Desty left deeper.
It was so quiet. The whippoorwills weren’t even singing. I needed a drink. Fifty rounds of PKR with Jax and Harper and to wake up with a hangover so bad I’d throw up everything from the last week including my shiny new fangs.
What did I expect? I’d known Desty was leaving as soon as she heard Tempie say I had screwed around on her with Scout. No, before that. As soon as I’d realized she was this good thing, I knew I couldn’t keep her or I would fuck her up so bad that she wouldn’t be good at all anymore. Mikal was right. I was a disease.
The sun was down. It had to be after eight. Colt had come back around a while ago, but he hadn’t moved or said anything since he woke up.
I would’ve given anything for some sound to break up all that fucking silence.
Before I even thought about moving, I was up and in the truck, turning the key back and cranking up the radio. The music pumping out of the speakers was worse than the quiet, though. It was just noise.
I punched the radio hard enough to break my knuckles. Then I leaned back in the seat and kicked the fucking thing until it stopped.
Some part of me—I guess the crow magic—knew that blood would help. It remembered Scout saying she could make her blood stronger for me. That part of me started the truck and headed for town.
I smacked the steering wheel. I didn’t want to fuck with the heart of a girl who’d been like my little sister forever. Just considering it proved that I was a shittier man now than I ever was when I was alive.
When I got to town, Mitzi’s look-at-me-red ‘66 Ford Fairlane was sitting in the motel parking lot with the ragtop down. Mitzi was on the hood, kicked back like she was waiting for something.
I whipped the truck into the space beside her car and shut it off. Jumped out. Slammed the door so hard the truck rocked.
“Heya, Romeo,” she said.
Before she could hop off the bumper, I was on top of her. Kissing Mitzi felt like getting murdered. Like sticking your finger down your throat until you throw up. Like everybody being right about you all along.
Mitzi laughed and pulled me toward one of the motel rooms.
“Aw, I missed you, too,” she said.
Tiffani
Not five minutes after I finished with some skinny vamp-groupie in Lestat knockoffs, the connection with Mitzi opened. She and Tough were in Halo’s motel, having sex in the outdated shower. She gave me a quick look around. The bathroom was full of steam, but I could see that the shower curtain had been ripped down and a severed arm was leaking blood onto the tile.
Then Mitzi turned her attention back to Tough. When the scratches across his chest and stomach started healing, he pulled Mitzi’s hand back up and she dug four new gashes with her fingernails. Vamp venom welled up, congealed, scabbed off. Tough had her do it again, down his neck and across his sternum. He had his eyes closed.
The connection shut. That was all Mitzi had wanted me to see—Tough realizing he was too dead to hurt right.
I leaned against the corner of the mausoleum and listened to anorexic Lestat finish getting dressed.
It could have been territorial. Maybe Mitzi wanted me to know that I might’ve made Tough, but she’d had him first. Or it could have been her way of showing me how easy it would be for her to stake him. I could reopen the connection and try to find out, but I didn’t want her to know that she could use Tough to get under my skin.
I pulled the Marlboro hard pack out of my pocket and lit a cigarette. Took a long drag. Then I opened the connection with Tough.
Fuck off, Tiffani, he said.
Did you leave your girlfriend with Colt? I asked.
My girlfriend is probably deep-throating Kathan by now. Unless it’s her sister’s turn.
So Colt’s alone? You left a castoff by himself? What in the hell were you thinking?
A combination of shame and guilt filled the connection for a second, but Tough shook it off with pure punk-ass belligerence.
Sort of busy right now, Tiffani, so unless there’s something else you need—
Yeah. Mitzi’s going to stake you when she’s done screwing you. Better make it last.
Tough didn’t care. I could feel it. He was existing second by second, refusing to think about anything but what was happening right then. Maybe he would make it to be one of those rare long-lived male vamps, after all. That survival-at-all-costs instinct is half the battle.
I shut the connection.
The mausoleum door scraped shut and the stick figure in the Lestat knockoffs came out, holding a patch of sterile gauze to his jugular.
“Hey, uh, I’ll be in town all weekend if—”
I left.
It was strange to think that in almost five years I’d never gone out to the old Baumeyer cabin.
It hadn’t seemed strange before, though. Colt compartmentalized everything. The cabin equaled training, reading, drinking alone. Tiffani equaled the bakery, X-Files, cinnamon rolls and coffee. Hell, half the time Colt forgot to eat because food was filed away in the “indoors” compartment and he spent most of his time outside. If I hadn’t suggested he get a grill, he probably would’ve ended up as starved as that anorexic kid in the cemetery.
The cheap, curling linoleum on the kitchen floor crackled under my shoes and the heartbeat in the bedroom raced. Colt started talking under his breath, incoherent and hoarse. Fear has a distinct scent that the super-smeller never misses, but it wasn’t enough to mask the scent of a creature living outside of time. Feathers. Sex. Tar. Mikal.
The jealous bitch in me snarled. Colt should’ve been mine.
Probably what Mitzi was feeling about Tough.
“Hell,” I said.
The cabin went quiet.
“Colt?” I eased the bedroom door open. “It’s all right. It’s me.”
/> He was on the floor in the corner, knees up and head down. His whole body stiffened as I got closer.
“You’re not real,” he croaked.
“The hell I’m not,” I said, touching his shoulder.
He flinched and pulled away. “I can’t handle any more. There’re too many already.”
“Look at me, Colt.”
He raised his head. No sudden recognition, no shy smile or flood of endorphins, just a hollow stare.
“Tiffani,” I said. “Tiffani Cranston. The bakery. You come by a couple times a week to check up on Tough. Before Mikal, you did.”
“Mikal.” The gravelly scratch in Colt’s voice made my throat hurt. “I loved her so much, but I—” He put both fists to his eyes and started rocking back and forth. “Fuck. This isn’t enough. It’s never going to be enough without her.”
I slid down against the wall and crossed my legs. “You loved Mikal?”
“She was all I had.”
“Mikal was all you had.” Maybe my throat really did hurt. When I laughed it sure felt raw, anyway. “Your favorite food is cinnamon rolls. Your favorite drink is Southern Comfort. Your second favorite is black coffee. Your favorite show is The X-Files. Right after we watched the ‘Resist or Serve’ episode, you went out and got that tattoo on your chest. You couldn’t wait until morning to show me, so you tracked me down after dark.”
I could still picture him trying not to grin.
“What do you think?” he had asked.
“I’m not that into tattoos,” I’d said, tracing the red tenderness around the new ink, watching goose bumps rise on his skin, feeling his heart pound underneath. “Sort of old-fashioned that way.”
“You like it,” he’d said.
In the here and now, Colt rested his face against his knees and curled his arms tight around his legs.
I leaned my head back against the wall. Tried to tell myself this had been inevitable. Even without Mikal, Colt would’ve broken eventually. The hyper-compartmentalized life. The unbalanced temper he’d inherited from Shannon. The obsession Danny had worked the kids into that Colt hadn’t been able to escape. The rigid routine where every second was exercise, reading, guns and ammunitions—no downtime—as if he was scared to stop moving.
Looking back it was easy to tell myself I should’ve done something, but when Colt was with me he hadn’t needed help. He’d made those dry, geeky jokes or let me lean against him for warmth. Nothing else belonged in the “Tiffani” compartment.
The only time I’d seen a crack was that last morning Colt had come by the bakery, a little more than six weeks ago. He had watched me get ready to open, but didn’t touch the lobster tail pastry I’d given him. He barely said anything, even when I asked him questions. I could smell that he hadn’t had a drink in a week—that alone should’ve been a clue. We tried to watch an X-Files, but he wasn’t paying attention. After a while, I had shut it off.
“Want to tell me what’s wrong?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said.
“But something is.”
He had shivered, but when I started to move away, he put his arm around me. “It’s not you. I’m not cold, I promise. Will you talk to me or something?”
I don’t even remember what we talked about. Nothing important, I guess.
“It was the morning after you shot Mikal’s familiar,” I told the shadow rocking in the corner. “Took me a week to find out through the grapevine. By then you’d already killed five of the poor bastards and gotten enthralled yourself.”
I could try to tell myself that if I had known I would’ve tried to stop him, but it wouldn’t have worked. All those times I’d told him to piss off that first winter—anyone else would’ve given up. Colt had just watched and planned and caught me one morning when I hadn’t been able to pick up a vamp-groupie. Then he offered me his wrist.
“Let me guess,” I had said, “You’ll let me drink if I’ll spy on your brother for you?”
“Tell me one time if you know Tough’s in trouble,” Colt had said. “You can even pick the situation. It doesn’t even have to be mortal danger.”
I’d been starving, starting to see the veins under his skin pumping him full of hot, red life. I could’ve warned Colt it was going to hurt like hell—the wrist is one of the worst places to be fed on—but I wanted to teach him a lesson. I tore into the vein, clipped a tendon. I heard Colt grit his teeth, but he didn’t stop me and he didn’t struggle. His heart beat exactly the way Shannon’s used to when she was turned on.
It was too much for me—the visceral pleasure of feeding, knowing that Colt liked the way I was hurting him, smelling the tattoo ink in his skin—too much like Shannon. She had thought she needed to cover her body with tattoos, couldn’t stop with just one. “I’m not addicted,” she used to tell me, “I’m art.” Then I had moved just right and the orgasm brought me crashing back to Colt. I threw him the hell out of my bakery.
God hates vamps, but He loves irony. I took Colt’s deal the day before Tough told Mitzi that he loved her.
When Colt came by again, I told him what Mitzi had done. I went through the speech—crow magic, vamps are monsters who get off on mutilation and pain, all that. Colt just stood there, staring down at the table like he didn’t know what to do. Seeing that break in attitude had been like seeing Shannon drop all the rock star swagger in that first panic attack. That was what finally did me in.
I had sighed. Rolled my eyes at what a damn soft-shell I was.
“Coffee’s going to be ready in a minute and those cinnamon rolls are almost done,” I’d told Colt.
He hesitated. I think he knew people around here didn’t like him.
“You can leave before the bakery opens if you want,” I said.
So he had stayed. We didn’t talk. He just sat in the booth and ate his cinnamon roll.
“You ate like you could appreciate all the subtleties of the flavors,” I remembered. “Orange zest in the frosting. Madagascar bourbon vanilla extract in the dough. Probably just me projecting, though.”
In his corner of the bedroom, Colt had gone still. He was listening.
I pushed up to my knees. Leaned forward.
“I think that’s how you got me, Colt,” I said. “The next time you came in, I started up the first episode of The X-Files so I could watch you eat without you realizing it.”
The locusts outside were singing louder than he was breathing. I could feel him straining to hear me.
“It took you six months to make a joke in front of me,” I said. “Do you remember what you said?”
Silence.
“I screwed up the lemon drops I was making. When I cussed and threw the pan at the slop sink, you said, ‘It was that bastard Krycek.’”
The soft huff could’ve been a laugh or the breath someone lets out when they slice open their finger.
“Remember me, Colt. Please.”
He swallowed. I could hear the dry catch in his throat.
“Real or not,” he said, “You’re the last person I want to remember.”
Colt
—the only one who will ever love you, Colter, the only one who can give you what you need. You were a rabid dog everyone else wanted put down. Everyone but me. I wanted you. I trained you. I made the black noise go away. I—
—think that’s how you got me, Colt.
Not that into tattoos, my ass. She liked it. Should’ve seen the way her eyes turned on when she saw it.
Do you remember what you said? When I—
When the pain came, she left. If she was real, if she loved you, why didn’t she stay?
Because she knew you were a weak fucking coward who was going to trade in loving her just to stop the pain. Who would stay if they knew—
—knew everything about you, Colter. Every awful, disgusting, locked-away thing. I am the only one who could ever love you enough to forgive you. The only one who never abandoned you. I protected you from the black noise. I—
—cried ou
t to Him and He answered me. The final battle is coming. Blessed be the Lord my rock who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle. He chose us, boys. I cried out to Him and He—
Please, God, make the black noise go away. Make this all go away. I can’t take it.
“Keep your shit together, Sunshine. You ain’t done yet.”
The Whitney boys’ story continues in Lost Paladin!
Mailing List and Reviews
Thanks for reading Honkytonk Hell! I know finishing a book is a rollercoaster ride of emotions—you love it, but you also can’t believe it’s over. You want to keep spending time with the characters and worlds you’ve grown to love, but what if the next book in the series isn’t available yet? How can you make sure you’re the first to know when it goes up for grabs?
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Here’s a little taste:
“Nice of you to join the party, preacher,” the angel says. “Shannon was just saying her prayers.”
“Not him,” I whisper to God or Jesus Christ or whoever’s listening. “Please not Danny.”
But it is. He’s standing there in the frothing water, holding a fucking samurai sword like he’s ready to go all Teenage Mutant Ninja Preacher on the angel of death.
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