by eden Hudson
“I’ll go,” Danny says.
I shake my head. “What about seminary? Isn’t your graduation coming up?”
“I’ll file an extension,” Danny says. “Or I’ll type my thesis up on a computer and give it to Noah and see if he can turn it in for me. Or I’ll take a year off. Whatever. I’ll figure it out.”
“You can’t just drop everything and fly halfway around the world.”
“Why not?” Danny asks.
“You have a life,” I say.
He laughs at that like Yeah, right.
“And we’re leaving in thirty-six hours,” I say. “You don’t even have a passport.”
“Yes, I do,” Danny says. “The guys and I had to go down to Juarez last August.” When he realizes that Corey’s staring at him, he adds, “For a mission trip.”
“Damn it, Danny, you’re not going,” I snap. “Nobody is. I don’t have a plus-one on this tour, Corey. Write that down. And write this down, too—this is my last tour. I said I’d make all my shows and I will. Every single one. But after this, I’m out. No more albums, no more anything. If Terrie and Anna want to keep the Derringers going, they can, but I’m done.”
“You don’t mean that,” Corey says. “You’re upset. You just had a near-death experience. We’ll talk about this in a few days if you still want to think about it.”
“Yeah, we will talk about it because it’s happening,” I say. “Now, not to be a jerk—I know you’ve been working your ass off trying to get me out of trouble—but will you please buzz off for a little while?”
Corey lets out a sigh that somehow manages to be both offended and dog-tired. “You had better fucking make the flight, that’s all I have to say.”
“I’ll be there,” I say. “Even if I have to show up in a hospital gown dragging this damn bed behind me.”
Corey shakes his head. He thinks I’m full of shit. I don’t blame him. After everything that’s happened over the last year, I wouldn’t believe me either.
But on the bright side, he does leave.
Before the door’s even all the way shut, Danny starts in.
“You’re not touring alone,” he says. “If those fallen angels come back—”
“Do you really believe what you said earlier?” I ask. “About God?”
Danny looks at me like he has no idea what I’m talking about.
I try to think of a way to say this that won’t make me sound like a crazy person. “Because if you really think it’s true that God… I mean, I made a deal with the devil because if God existed, fuck Him for never being there. If you think Him and I could really—I don’t know—make up or whatever, like if I could do something to make Him stop hating me—”
“God doesn’t hate you, Shannon,” Danny says. “He spoke to me, like with a voice and everything, just for you. He loves you.”
I look down at the white knit hospital blanket.
“Well, okey-dokey, then,” I say, forcing a laugh. “Let’s add that to the Shit I Need to Deal With Sometime column. Sounds pretty unfair to everybody who’s been good little boys and girls their whole life, but whatever.”
Danny starts to say something else, but I don’t let him. I have to get the rest of this out.
“Because if what you said is really true, then I don’t think that fallen angel can force me to do anything,” I say. “Even if she does turn me into her slave, she won’t be able to make me release Bullet Proof. She won’t have any power over me. Just like she didn’t over you.”
“I’m not convinced that’s their real endgame,” Danny says. “It seems too obvious. They call him the Father of Lies for a reason.”
“Whatever.” I shrug. “They won’t kill me and they can’t make me do shit. That’s the point of this mental breakdown.”
Danny takes a deep breath and lets it out. “I’ll get down on the floor and beg if I have to. Don’t go by yourself. If you don’t want me around, I can find somebody else. Clare knows people pretty much everywhere.”
“Remember the Column of Shit to Deal with Sometime?” I say. “I need to deal with it. And it sounds like you’ve got a column of your own to deal with. Have you really not gone back to Halo in a year?”
“Sixteen months,” he says, picking at his thumbnail. “It’s why I wasn’t there when Charlotte and your dad were killed. If I’d been around—”
“You couldn’t have done anything.”
He shrugs, but won’t look at me. He swipes his bangs out of his eyes. For a second all I can do is stare at this gorgeous, exhausted creature sitting by my hospital bed with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
That angel’s words ring in my head—You think you can’t love anyone more than you loved your parents or your sister? You’ll regret this—and I see my mom holding the pieces of that porcelain angel figurine in her hands and crying because I break everything I touch. And I know the smartest thing to do would be to shut off, stop feeling anything, especially for Danny.
But then I think, This is my life. I’ll regret whatever the hell I want.
“Do you really have a passport?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He says it as if he thinks I don’t believe him.
“With you, though?” I ask. “Here in Brooklyn?”
Finally, Danny catches on. He stands up. “Yeah. Back at the hotel.”
I look out the window and wonder how long it is until sunrise. I hope Tiffani is somewhere safe. I wish I had a way to tell her that I’m not upset at her for running. That I know she did the only thing she could. That I really do love her, even though she was right, it’s different than the way I love Danny.
He’s still standing there, waiting for me to say something. I look into those blue-green Whitney eyes and the fist squeezing my chest relaxes. I know I was right—everything bad really does go away when I’m with him.
“I have conditions,” I say. “If you come with me, there’s not going to be any hanky-panky. Keep it in your pants.”
He snorts and ducks his head. When he looks back up, he’s blushing.
“Condition accepted,” he says.
“And I’m going to want to make an honest man out of you. So, if you don’t think you’re cut out for holy matrimony, now’s the time to say so.”
“Whatever.”
“I’d get down on one knee, but—” I raise my fists and rattle the restraints. “—I’m kind of tied up at the moment.”
He’s quiet for so long that I’m sure I screwed this up. Maybe he still doesn’t believe me. Maybe he doesn’t trust me. Maybe I was being stupid and conceited assuming that he could want me after everything I’ve done. And maybe that’s for the best. I don’t deserve him, anyway.
My fingers twitch. I wish I had a cigarette or something to do with my hands.
“So…” I say.
“I wonder if it’s possible to get a marriage license in thirty-six hours,” Danny says. “If not, can Americans get married in Scotland? Surely they can.”
I try to laugh, but the sound gets stuck in my throat.
“Want to find out?” I ask.
Danny grins. “Everybody’s going to think we’re crazy.”
“Fuck ‘em,” I say.
Danny
Noah and Clare stay with Shannon while I head back to the hotel for my bags and passport. Thank God I never got around to cleaning out my backpack after Juarez.
I take a cab. I don’t want to be away from Shannon any longer than I have to. I feel like if I’m gone for too long, I’ll wake up and realize I’ve been dreaming this whole time.
At the hotel, I run up to the room. Most of my stuff is already packed. Noah’s, too. Clare’s clothes are all over the place, just like back at our house off-campus. Looking around at the mess, it occurs to me that I’m really leaving. My best friends, school, the past five years. Everything.
I stop for a second, get on my knees, and ask God to protect Noah and Clare. Then I ask Him to please be with my parents. When they hear that I’m dropping out to
get married and follow Shannon around Europe, it’s going to take all of God’s grace and understanding to keep them from tracking me down and murdering me.
I don’t know whether the concealment on our weapons can fool an airport metal detector, so I leave my sword and knife on Noah’s bed. I’ll ask Clare if he knows anyone I can buy new ones from in Scotland. Or maybe I’ll just leave demon fighting here with everything else.
On the way out the door, I throw my thesis notes in the trash. Without all the steel and paper, my bags feel light.
The sky is turning gray when I get down to the street. I catch another cab back to the hospital. The radio is playing a Lost Derringers song.
I lean forward and ask the driver, “Will you turn it up?”
“Sure.” He cranks the volume until he has to yell over the music. “I love these guys!”
“Me, too.” I’ve never heard this song before. It’s one of their newer ones. One I spent the last five years avoiding.
Let’s get worse,
Let’s get worse,
Let’s get worse,
Together.
Be my last,
Be my first,
Be my poison
Forever.
By the time we make it back to the hospital, I’m singing along.
Hell Bent
This is the Hell Bent Original Release. If you’re looking for the Hell Bent Director’s Cut with deleted Scout POV scenes, click here.
“A struggle for Heaven and Earth. Where there is one law: Fight or Die.
And one rule: Resist or Serve.”
~ Alex Krycek
PART I: BELIEVE THE LIE
Tough
I leaned back against the textured motel wall and stared at the dead guy. Some of the dead guy, anyway. His body was still hanging onto one arm and one leg. The missing leg was next to that dry, brownish streak on the room’s nasty-ass blue carpet. The severed arm was over by the bathroom door, leaking what was probably the last couple drops of his blood onto the tile.
My heart beat a couple of times and my lungs started breathing on their own. Drinking off a living human can make it easier to seem alive for a while because the blood fed the crow magic. Wasn’t that what Tiffani said the other day? Back when I was still going to save Desty and live happily ever after with her. I’d already thrown away my shot at Heaven to save her and Colt, but back then I still had the fantasy.
Now I had an ex-girlfriend who was probably nailing my mortal enemy, a dead best friend I had murdered, a batshit crazy brother, and a complete fucking inability to get drunk enough to deal with any of it.
My throat went dry again. I swallowed and took a breath through my nose. Everything in the room faded out to gray and black ash. Except the blood. That glowed bright red against the bathroom floor.
I could probably lick most of that up if I tried. It would burn going down, just like liquor always did before it hit me. For now maybe that would be enough.
Except it hadn’t been enough before. Not even when the guy had screamed and Mitzi and I ripped into him.
The vamp part of my brain tried to react to that memory, but I shut it down. This whole thing made me feel like I was playing one of the Blood City video games with Jax. Like I was pushing buttons to make stuff happen, but it wasn’t really me doing it.
“Hello? Tough? Earth to man-whore.” Mitzi was standing naked in front of the mirror, lip gloss paused halfway to her mouth. Not a real practical place to be standing, considering she didn’t have a reflection. But you couldn’t tell Mitzi that. She did the weird shit she did and she didn’t give a fuck what anybody else thought about it. “I said you’re not going to do that stupid new-vamp thing where you freak out, are you? Because it’s not like you even deserve to be upset. How many people have you killed now, anyway? Like a hundred during the NP-Human Conflict, right?”
That didn’t count. I hadn’t killed any humans during the war, just mortal NPs—and not very many because I’d only been eight when fighting broke out. Probably ten kills, tops, and about half of those with help from Sissy.
So far, for humans, I’d only killed my brother, my best friend, and now this random vamp groupie.
Mitzi went back to spackling on the lip gloss, then rolled her lips together and popped them at the mirror. “You killed a human, you used to be human, mortality this, death that, good, evil, Heaven, Hell—I can’t stand that shit. Just accept what you are now and that you get off on killing. That’s all I want—one newly made vampire who doesn’t go through a postmortem existential crisis.”
Listening to her talk was like having someone jam sixteen-penny nails into my eardrums and twist them around. I hated silence—I always had—but her voice was so much worse. But I couldn’t tell her to shut up because I didn’t have a direct vamp connection with her. To talk to Mitzi, I’d have to go through Tiffani. Call me crazy, but I didn’t really want everyone in town to know that I’d gone running back to the psycho-bitch who’d helped her dickhole husband steal my voice and screw me over.
“—because if you think you can lie to me about how much you like it, remember I’ve been a vampire since before your grandparents were born. Probably your great-grandparents. I am a predator. The apex predator. I know what a rush it is to—”
Man, I hated Mitzi. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten how much I hated her.
The vamp speed kicked in and I was across the room before I realized I was moving. But Mitzi was faster and stronger than me, and she had a better handle on her reflexes.
She slammed me to the floor. “That is so cute. As if you could take me down. Even—”
I grabbed the back of Mitzi’s head and tried to pull her down for a kiss—anything to stop that godawful noise coming out of her mouth—but she laughed and smacked my hands away like they were nothing.
“You want to play, Romeo? Let’s play.” She raked her fingernails down the side of my face. The skin shredded.
I winced and kicked the floor. That nasty burning-hair, rotting-blood, hot sauce smell filled the room as vamp venom oozed up in the scratches.
The pain faded way too fast and the vamp healing started up. If I was going to hurt, I wanted to hurt worse, to never stop hurting. I grabbed Mitzi’s hand and put it on my chest. She took the hint and tore in.
The healing kicked in before she could do any real damage.
“Ooh, somebody likes that.” She hopped onto my lap and dug a line down my stomach. Then a handful more down my neck. She smirked at the way I arched into her fingernails. “Now who’s the psycho-bitch?”
Still you. In fact, I was willing to bet my undead ass that she had her sex knives hidden in the room somewhere. I made a slashing motion with my hand and mouthed, Knives?
“And here I was worried you weren’t going to be any fun now that you’re cold.” Mitzi grinned. “I think this might be the beginning of something wonderful.”
Desty
Night settled in as I made my way back toward town. The walk from Colt’s cabin was probably less than five miles, but it felt infinite. Trying to swallow the self-hatred from breaking up with Tough had really worn me out.
I cried a little bit, too, which slowed me down even more. Especially when I had to get off the road for a while because I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t watch for cars. Thank God for that culvert. If someone had seen me and stopped, I don’t know what I would’ve told them.
Once the crying stopped, I felt numb. It was like the tears had washed all the emotion away. I adjusted my backpack straps, dug my fingers into the long grass, and half-pulled, half-climbed my way back out of the culvert and onto the blacktop. There, I put one foot in front of the other like a zombie tracker.
Can’t stop until I see carnival lights.
When I got to town, I took a left off the main drag toward the square, expecting to see the Armistice Celebration in full swing. As much as I loathed the idea of being around other living creatures right then, I needed to catch a ride to the Dark Mansion and
Tempie. She needed me. And she was all I had left.
After a couple blocks, I saw the bank clock blinking the temperature. A cool 92 degrees. Downright frigid compared to the last couple of days. I passed the dark-windowed bakery, a few generic brick storefronts that I hadn’t wasted any time or money in, and the Witches’ Council building, where Jax and I had spent most of the last few days, trying to save Tough.
Tears prickled the back of my eyes thinking about Jax. About Tough afterward, sitting on the couch, staring at that wireless video game controller like the softest touch would shatter him. He had needed me.
No, he needed somewhere to stick it. You were just the most convenient hole.
Movement in the shadows to my left, followed by a metallic rattle. My stomach lurched.
Some guy wearing a black hoodie—with his hood up in the middle of the hottest August on record—and pointing a can of spray paint at the Halo Center for Tourism’s front window.
Definitely nothing suspicious about that.
He saw me staring.
“Get lost, tourist.” His voice teetered in that embarrassing gray area between manhood and puberty.
I rolled my eyes and veered right, toward the lights of the carnival rides and food stands.
Voices echoed off the buildings, filling the square with noise, but something wasn’t right. Something besides graffiti-ing teenagers dressed as conspicuously as possible. I slowed down and hooked my hands in my backpack straps.
The rides weren’t moving. The carnival was deserted. No one milled around the Tilt-a-Whirl or played rigged games on the midway or waited in line at the food stands.
So, where was all that yelling coming from? I turned, searching the square for the source of the sound.
A mob had gathered on the north side, across the street from the Halo Old Town Square marker. Huge work lights, stacks of speakers, and vans with various news logos were all clustered around a podium. Somber-faced fallen angel foot soldiers patrolled the edges of the crowd, and Kathan and Tempie stood together at the front.
