Last Battle: A Gritty Action-Packed Urban Fantasy (The Broken Bard Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  Table of Contents

  PART I: UNCLOUDY DAY

  PART II: WASHED IN THE BLOOD

  PART III: ME AND MY HOUSE

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Don’t you know where I’ve been?

  Don’t you know what I’ve done?

  I know what you think,

  But I’m not the one.

  ~from “The Hell Alone” by Tough Whitney

  PART I: UNCLOUDY DAY

  Tempie

  My vision shrank to the steps, my twin trying to stand, trying to pull herself up. Blood trickled down the one face in the world identical to mine. I took a step toward Desty, shock thrumming through my veins. Kathan hadn’t meant to hurt her. Not really.

  Kathan? I thought. What—

  He grabbed my arm and turned me toward the mansion’s huge entry doors. Then I wasn’t outside anymore, but in our suite. He opened the bedroom door and shoved me inside.

  I reached for him. Babe?

  He didn’t answer, just shut the door. At the same time he closed himself off to me, leaving me empty and alone.

  I swiped the closest thing I could lift and launched it. Screw shock. He was mad at me? Well, I could be mad, too. A wing-backed chair splintered against the foot of the four-poster we’d made love in so many times. I could make his anger look like a kid pouting. I could tear this world apart.

  Fat. Ugly. Stupid. The worst of your family. Troublemaker. Screw-up. Whore. You caused this.

  The pain was back. I’d tried to skip over it, go straight to the anger, but it was flooding in.

  Desty is bleeding because of you. Your sister. Your twin. Your other half. And it’s all because she tried to help you, tried to save you. You’re not worth saving. You’re the reason Dad had to leave. He couldn’t stand to put up with your shit anymore. All those fights he couldn’t win with Mom about the way you dressed, the way you acted. You made him leave.

  That coward ran! I told him what was happening with Leif, gave him the chance to be the family protector—he could’ve stopped it, but he ran off with Gianna instead.

  You wanted him to save you? You couldn’t save yourself! You ruined their lives—Dad’s, Mom’s, Desty’s—and you think you’re worth saving?

  “Come back, Kathan,” I begged. “Please, babe, don’t leave me here.”

  I had spent so much time before I met him trying to feel nothing that the first day he enthralled me, I kept breaking down in tears. I hadn’t realized I could feel good. I’d thought the best I could do was numbness or impotent rage. That whole first day we were together, we holed up in his room while he held me. He told me that he’d already seen every part of me, every broken piece, but he loved me anyway—that he loved me because of my broken pieces. He wanted me. All that day, Kathan held me and talked to me while I cried and cried.

  Of course, there was the sex, too. Before Kathan, I’d thought it was wrong, the way that boiling black ball of fury opened up inside me every time a guy touched me, that I should be feeling something different, like love or horniness. I thought I was the screwed up one. The first time we made love and I tried to shut off, Kathan stopped me.

  “Don’t try to block it out, Temperance,” he’d said. “Be angry. Unleash hell. Feed on it. But never hold back. You’re not going to hurt me.”

  So I did. I hit him and scratched and bit and screamed until my throat was raw. He loved it. He loved me.

  Kathan understood. He had lived out his existence in a perpetual state of anger so deep and so intense that the universe could barely contain it. He and I were made for each other.

  I lowered the vase I’d been about to launch at the bedroom door. I knew first-hand that there were different sides to anger—fury, fear, pain, frustration—and I had seen inside Kathan’s mind deeply enough to know that this wasn’t fury. It was desperation.

  “Kathan?” I called, and this time my voice was soft. I reached out to his essence. Babe?

  No response.

  Don’t shut me out, Kathan. I love you. You know I would never leave you. Don’t leave me.

  Temperance. His presence poured into me, forcing out the anger and washing away the pain. There was only his love and power. Even though he wasn’t in the room, I felt his scorching body nestle against mine, his muscled arms holding me to his chest. His wings enfolded us. The world around me disappeared in the perfection of his embrace.

  Then, like it sometimes did, Kathan’s mind split into pieces. There was the piece holding me, focusing on me, centering all of his love and attention on me—but at the same time, there was another piece.

  Once before, when I begged him, Kathan had let me see all of the pieces he kept of himself. There were millions. They weren’t broken and jagged like my pieces, but entirely self-contained and smooth, as if the sharpest edges had been worn down by time. At first, I’d thought I would go insane at the amount of data and sensory information coming in, but he’d brought me back down to only the piece of himself that focused on me until I could think again.

  It’s addictive seeing the world the way he does. Exhausting, overwhelming, but addictive. You see and feel and experience everything all at once. You feel powerful, like there’s no part of yourself left, like all you are is knowledge of the things around you. As soon as I’d recovered from that first dose of Seeing, I wanted to try it again. It felt like forever before Kathan let me, and the second time he only allowed me to follow a fraction of his pieces, but my mind still collapsed like a Tracker whose reanimator had been shot.

  The recovery was faster that time. I didn’t have to beg or plead with Kathan for my third look into his pieces. He knew I wouldn’t stop until he agreed, so he just kissed me and swept me into the storm of separation.

  Whenever I spend enough time around someone, I start to pick up traits from them. I’d always been that way, even when I was little. It was almost like I was just a reaction to my environment, like I wouldn’t exist if no one else did, but I tried not to think about it like that. Instead I thought about it like I learned what I needed from everybody I met. In the time I’d been with Kathan—weeks? months?—I’d gotten pretty good at that separation trick myself.

  In one part of my mind, I drowned myself in his desire.

  I’m yours, I told him. Love me, Kathan. Hold me. Make it better. Make everything better, just like you always do. Make everything go away.

  And in that part of me, he did.

  With another part of my mind, I shadowed one of the separate pieces of my lover. Perfectly silent. Perfectly still. Some part of him knew I was there, but he didn’t call me out for spying.

  Kathan was in the hall outside of our suite. Rian stood in front of him, wearing that ridiculous Halo Police Department uniform, and giving a report.

  “—with the vampire who ran the bakery. They’ve been knocking boots for a good long while now, according to that psycho chick who called in the tip.”

  “Mitzi Gudehaus?” Kathan asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “What did she ask for in return?”

  “She wants a pass to carve up whatever groupies she picks up whenever she’s in town. I figured what’s the harm.”

  Kathan nodded. He was thinking that soon he would be running the show on Earth and it wouldn’t matter if NPs around the globe decided to extinguish humanity once and for all. Assuming there was any humanity left after the Destroyer was unleashed, of course.

  Rian hitched his thumbs into his thick cop utility-belt. “A
nd since I killed him and got you the sword back, I figured—”

  “You have the sword with you?” Kathan said.

  Rian smiled. As he reached for the gun on his hip, the part of Kathan’s mind that I was shadowing switched from the human visual spectrum to a world of glowing black halos and laser pointers and ball lightning.

  Greenish black strings reached out from Rian in every direction. According to Kathan’s memories, those belonged there. But there was also a bloody ball of thick-looking red light near his hip. That didn’t belong. It was uglier and more out of place there than I would’ve been in a church choir. Rian’s hand disappeared into the bloody ball and he winced. When he pulled his hand back out, he was holding Mikal’s flaming sword.

  “You bet your ass I got it with me.” He held it out, offering it to Kathan.

  Kathan backed up a step and shook his head. “You took it. You wield it.”

  Rian’s smug grin twisted into something Desty probably would’ve called a leer. “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

  At first, Kathan wasn’t going to give a subordinate the satisfaction of responding to something so idiotic, but then he decided that to ignore the comment would give the appearance of weakness.

  “Weapons belong in the hands of pawns,” he said. “In any case, I’ll be damned if I’m going to bring a flashy knife to a full-scale atomic war. I prefer to have my finger on the big red button.” He thought of Modesty in the hands of his foot soldiers, the few he commanded, the first of what would soon be an army of legions, and he smiled.

  Furious passion overwhelmed the first piece of my mind. Back there, I was ripping his clothes off while he pressed me to the wall. His lips burned against mine.

  Now, I begged him. Let me see what it’s like inside you while you make love to me.

  He laughed, his breath hot against my cheek. You couldn’t handle it.

  Please, Kathan. I arched my back and rubbed against him, trying to satisfy the ache for contact.

  In the disconnected, all-business piece of him listening to Rian, Kathan was still thinking about Modesty, about what it would take to forge her into the other half of his Destroyer.

  Not the Destroyer. His Destroyer.

  All right, I’ll show you, he agreed in the first piece, then he pulled me into a third.

  Sensation flooded my world. Sights, sounds, pleasure and anger so intense that some parts of me screamed and cringed away. It was too much. But the rush of sensations drowned out the thing I hated most in the world, made everything but Kathan so small and so distant. Parts of me died in him, reduced to cinders in his heat.

  But one part of me stayed with Kathan in the sitting room of our suite and thought about all the things he would order his foot soldiers to do to my sister to make her the other half of his Destroyer.

  I might not have been the smart twin, but I wasn’t brain dead, either. Not yet. I knew what it meant that Kathan wasn’t stopping me from shadowing his separate parts. He knew I was there, but he wasn’t trying to hide anything. He knew he didn’t need to. I was already his. I was already lost.

  Tough

  I paced the attic of Lonely’s Tattoo Parlor for the hundredth time, tossing a frag grenade back and forth between my hands, and avoiding the tiny slices of light that shined in through the window.

  When I agreed to this, I thought I was agreeing to laying an ass-whupping of epic proportions on Kathan, and at some point, making Rian cry like a bitch. I didn’t think I was signing up to be a spectator in an all-day negotiation-a-thon.

  I took another lap—past the rifles, the coyote, the crow, Scout, the crate stamped TBG-7, around the roll of razor wire, hang a right at the stack of ammo boxes, and then back to watching my step near the window. Outside the sun glared down like it was trying to burn Halo to the ground.

  “Okay,” Scout said. “Then we’re all agreed that Lonely has sole command of the crows, with the chain of command remaining in the crows in the event of his death, and Clarion has sole command of the coyotes, with the chain of command remaining in the coyotes in the event of his death, and that both the crow and coyote forces will back up the human forces under Tough’s command—”

  I stopped pacing and glared at her.

  She rolled her eyes. “We covered this already, Tough. If you don’t head this, everything else all falls apart.”

  Lonely and that old one-eyed coyote, Clarion, shot each other a look. Probably thinking I was going to make one sorry excuse for a leader, even just a figurehead one. Well, no shit. I wouldn’t have picked me, either.

  “Anyway,” Scout said, “Out of all the humans willing to fight, you’re the only one who’s actually been in a war.”

  I snorted. Yeah, and we lost.

  “So where were we?” Scout said.

  “Chains of command remaining within the individual forces,” Clarion said.

  “Right.” She checked her notes. “While taking primary orders from the human chain of command. And in the event that back up is unnecessary or tactically impossible, you each retain the right to issue contrary secondary orders to your pack or murder as you see fit. In the event that you find our methods or orders unconscionable, you may pull out, but neither crows nor coyotes may pull out due to interracial disputes without first consulting a human intermediary…”

  I started to make another lap, popping the grenade up and catching it. I stopped by the window. It looked off to the east, in the general direction of the Dark Mansion.

  I didn’t want to be in some stupid attic, arguing about chains of command. I wanted to be carving Kathan and the rest of his foot soldiers up piece by piece. Hell, I’d take blowing them to bits with a bunch of plastic explosive. I wanted to be knee-deep in fallen angel blood with clumps of tar-covered feathers smacking the ground around me. I wasn’t too picky about how I got there.

  Lonely had sworn that Colt wouldn’t get resurrected this time. He’d said Colt was dead for good. Maybe that was true, but dead or not, Kathan still had Colt’s body. That fucker would probably hang him up out in front of the Dark Mansion for the maggots to eat and the tourists to take pictures with.

  The window pane exploded. It took me a second to realize I’d thrown the frag grenade through it. The vamp speed had done it before I could think about it.

  “Tough?” Scout said.

  Clarion’s good eye went from the broken window to me. “You pull the pin?”

  I checked. Nothing in my hands. No boom on the street. I shook my head.

  “I’ll send somebody after it,” he said, standing up. He stopped next to me and looked me in the eye, lowering his voice like he was getting after a little kid in public. “This might look like a lot of firepower to you, but we’ve got a limited supply here and a legion of unkillable creatures to send to Hell. Maybe you should keep your hands in your pockets until you’ve got a little more control over those crowspawn instincts.”

  Sure, I’d keep my hands off the ordnance. Until it got dark out, anyway. Then I was going after Kathan whether everybody else was done arguing about NP rules or not.

  Lonely was staring at me. If being a vampire now really did make it possible for him to hear my brain, then he should be able to tell what I was thinking. I stared back and waited for him to rat me out, but he just grinned his creepy crow-grin and twisted one of his lip-rings with his split tongue.

  Downstairs, the wind chimes over the tattoo parlor’s front door jangled. More new heartbeats, smells, and padding footsteps that clicked with toenails. Small squads of coyotes had been joining the party all morning.

  I looked out the window. One more dusty truck parked out front, so they’d been human when they pulled up. Shifting back to four legs as soon as they walked in must be some kind of up-yours to the crows.

  “So many packs,” Lonely said. “Must get tiresome, keeping them all in line.”

  “I offered to help if you wanted to unite the murders,” Clarion said.

  “Mm.” Lonely crossed his thick arms
over his gut. “Syndicate? No. It’s not our way. Didn’t used to be your way, either.”

  Clarion raised his head, and for a minute, it was like I could see him looking down a snout instead of that scarred-up human nose. “The old ways are broken.”

  Lonely flapped a hand at me. “The old ways are why the crows are here. We follow the shiny ones.”

  “Great work,” Clarion said. “You geniuses followed the shiny ones right to the end of the world.”

  “Keep yipping, puppy. I say the word and this building vaporizes.”

  “—birds didn’t even want Halo territory until the fallen angels moved in on—”

  “—then we’ll find out just how fast coyote healing really—”

  A whistle like a whip-crack rattled my eardrums. Lonely and Clarion both cringed.

  Scout took her pinkies out of her mouth.

  “Since I’m the only human handy, I’ll go ahead and mediate this dispute,” she said, looking back and forth between them. “When the last battle is over, you’re welcome to go back to killing each other over whatever petty bull you’d like to kill each other over. But for now, if you want to run, walk, or fly away from the last battle alive, then I’m going to need both of you to grow the hell up and work together for as long as it takes to end this.”

  Clarion leaned forward in his seat. Lonely adjusted the collar of his open Hawaiian shirt. They didn’t look at each other. Just like that.

  It hit me that this was Scout, the real Scout. Not the whiny little brat or the jailbait whose too-short skirt this version of Scout was still wearing. The seventeen-and-three-quarters-year-old negotiating the integration of two warring armies while recruiting and organizing her own army and herding the dumbass figurehead into place.

  “We need to talk strategy,” Clarion said. “How many of your recruits are armed?”

  “None,” Scout said. “I had Cash—Lonely’s cousin—do a flyover of Colt’s place to see if there was anything we could salvage, but the foot soldiers have cleaned out the arsenal and burned the cabin to the ground.”