Honkytonk Hell: A Dark and Twisted Urban Fantasy (The Broken Bard Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  A zombie bit my guy. I threw my controller onto the coffee table and fell back against the couch.

  Harper jumped up to shut the window and the little red crystal charm on her bellybutton ring jingled. Jax paused the game and turned the volume all the way up. He didn’t even say anything about taking it easy on the controller.

  It was the middle of August, a million degrees, and we didn’t have an air conditioner. We sat in the living room with the windows closed, half-dying from heat stroke, listening to zombies groan and blood spurt until Jason’s song was over.

  Having friends was something Colt and Ryder never understood. Even if there wasn’t any rule against leaving and I could get away from Halo, I would eventually come back for Harper and Jax.

  Desty

  “And this is the Dark Mansion.” The tour guide gestured behind her as our bus turned down the lane. “Home to Halo’s mayor, Kathan Dark.”

  I swiped my bangs out of my eyes and craned my neck to see the mansion better. It looked like someone had grabbed a cathedral out of the Middle Ages and dropped it onto a farm in rural Missouri. A cathedral with a parking lot. Off to one side was a long, low building that had to be the foot soldiers’ barracks, and next to that, an old barn that looked like it was clinging to those last couple of bent, rusty cow panels for dear life.

  Tempie had to be in there. The Dark Mansion was exactly the kind of Fallen Angel Dream Home she had described on her blog.

  I got a death grip on my backpack straps.

  I can do this, I told myself. I can.

  Unless they recognized me at the front door and realized why I was there. Crap. Why hadn’t it occurred to me before that very second that other people might just notice that Tempie and I were identical twins? Say, when I was shelling out the twenty bucks to take this stupid tour?

  I started to swipe my bangs out of my eyes—they were in that weird stage where they were always in my eyes but too short to tuck behind my ear—but I stopped. Maybe having my hair in my face would be enough to obscure my identity. I ducked my head and tried to look like I was just messing with my bangs, not purposely pulling them back into my eyes.

  Oh, yeah, totally nonchalant.

  But no one looked my way. Up front, the tour guide was still lecturing.

  “Most people know that these grounds house the fallen angel foot soldiers,” she said. “But what you may not know is that this was also the site of one of the final battles between people and non-people before the Armistice was signed.”

  The know-it-all in the seat in front of me raised his hand. “Isn’t it true that this land was originally a farm belonging to Daniel Whitney, the man who instigated the NP-Human Conflict?”

  The whole ride out of town, Know-It-All had been asking questions that showed everyone else how smart he was.

  “That is true,” the tour guide said, flashing her big, white smile. “Former pastor, Daniel Whitney, lived here with his wife and four children. Many historians believe that Whitney blamed the death of his wife, Shannon, on what he called ‘the hell spawn of Satan—’” She did the finger quotes. “—and that sparked his desire to ‘scour them from the face of the earth.’ However, eye-witness accounts have surfaced recently that suggest Shannon Colter-Whitney—who music buffs might remember as the former lead singer of The Lost Derringers—was having an affair with an NP and Daniel Whitney killed her in a jealous rage.” She waited out the appropriate oohs. “Whatever the case may be, Whitney was deeply intolerant of the fallen angel community in Halo and refused to ‘abide’ their presence—which, as you said, led to the outbreak of the NP-Human Conflict.”

  The bus rolled to a stop and my heart gave a frantic little jump.

  Take it easy, I thought. If Tempie was there, she probably wouldn’t just appear and agree to go home all ecstatic that I had found her.

  The tour guide led us off the bus and up the mansion’s front steps. The door swung open exactly the way it would have in a scary movie.

  At least there weren’t any security guards. And no immediate sign of Tempie in the entrance hall. I took a deep breath and prayed I didn’t look as conspicuous as I felt.

  Everyone else was studying the architecture, so I did, too. Maybe I could memorize the layout or something in case Tempie and I had to make a break for it when I found her. But the stained-glass windows lining the walls kept distracting me. Rather than filtering the morning light through in reds and blacks, the windows held it back. I couldn’t make out any pattern to the colors. The longer I stared, the more my skin tried to crawl off my body and my eyes teared up.

  “Photography inside the Dark Mansion is discouraged,” the tour guide said to someone behind me. “Fun fact—the non-person energies concentrated here used to set film on fire. Nowadays with the digital, it just wipes the camera’s card.”

  “Why isn’t there a particular picture or pattern to the windows?” an old, aw-shucks guy asked.

  “Excellent and telling question,” the tour guide said. “There are several theories about why certain people can or can’t see the scenes depicted in the Hell Windows. The one that the fallen angels substantiate is that the windows show their images only to those souls bound for Hell.”

  That got everyone looking around at each other. For a few seconds anyway, because then the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen came striding into the entrance hall like he owned the place.

  He didn’t have a shirt on, just a pair of black silk pajama pants, and his chocolate-brown hair was the epitome of sex-swept disarray. Muscles rippled under his caramel skin, and massive black wings glittering like liquid obsidian folded gracefully behind his back.

  The woman standing beside me made a strangled sound in her throat.

  “The nine-forty-five tour group,” the fallen angel said. He smiled at me and I swear my knees almost gave out. “Right on time, as always, but I’m afraid you’ve caught me unprepared. Come in, please, and continue your tour. I’ll meet you back here when you’re finished.”

  The tour guide grinned at him like she was in love. And how could you not be?

  “Thank you, Mayor Dark,” she squeaked.

  Mayor Dark. The Mayor Dark? I’d seen him on the news before, but in real life—and half-naked—wow. Just wow.

  He left the way he’d come and as soon as he was out of sight, people started whispering to their travel buddies about how gorgeous he was, how he’d probably just climbed out of bed with his human lover.

  “The feathers on his wings…they were covered in that black stuff…I expected black feathers, but there was that…”

  Everyone was staring at me.

  Oh, please, somebody kill me. That last isn’t-he-dreamy voice had been mine.

  To make sure I knew how stupid I should feel, the know-it-all from the bus turned to his travel buddy and whispered at the top of his lungs, “You hear that high school dropout over there? Everybody knows the tar covered their wings to mark their sins.”

  My fingernails dug into my palms. I wasn’t a dropout—I had been our class’s freaking valedictorian. I had acceptance letters from Harvard, Oxford, and Arrowood gathering dust in my bedroom back home. I knew more about fallen angels than Know-It-All knew about being a superior jerk.

  I’d just never been in the same room with one before.

  If Tempie had been there, she would’ve said something to Know-It-All that would destroy him emotionally. She was so good at being a bitch. All I did was look like an idiot and wish it was possible to kick a guy in the crotch with your mind.

  “Follow me, everyone,” the tour guide said, backing through a set of double doors into a sort of throne-room with a dais at the front. “This is the parlor. Because Halo doesn’t have a regular city hall, town council meetings and circuit court are held here every third Monday evening and every first Saturday. During the rest of the month, this is where the fallen angels entertain, hold various charity functions, and especially lavish parties.”

  “I’ll bet that throne u
p front is the mayor’s,” Know-It-All told his buddy.

  I wished Tempie was there so I could whisper “You think?” to her loudly enough that Know-It-All would hear.

  The tour guide led us through the dining room, a common room, some halls, then into the visitor’s wing, pointing out items of interest along the way. After a while my embarrassment started to wear off and it occurred to me that if not for all the soaring colonnades, stained glass Hell Windows, and straight-up unashamed excess of the furnishings, you might start to freak out that you hadn’t run into a single other being yet in all that space.

  “You all are a very lucky group to have come while the guest wing wasn’t completely full,” the tour guide said, sweeping her arm around the visitor’s breakfast nook. “In today’s globalized world, political leaders, corporate representatives, and influential dignitaries both human and non-person visit on a regular basis. And of course, this wing will be full by the weekend with the Armistice Celebration coming.”

  “I’d ask why not put them up at a hotel,” the old, aw-shucks guy said. He touched the velvet wallpaper. “But this’d sure put any five star I ever seen to shame.”

  The tour guide laughed and started to reply, but a voice from behind us cut her off.

  “It’s true, we love to share our sensual pleasures, but the function of the visitor’s wing is two-fold.”

  We all turned at the same time to face the new speaker. She was just as stunning as Mayor Dark had been, with her sparkling, wet-black wings and caramel skin. If they hadn’t looked so good on her, the scarlet cocktail dress and dominatrix heels might’ve seemed like overkill.

  “It allows us to show hospitality to our guests,” the fallen angel said, “And it puts them at ease, knowing we have nothing to hide.”

  She stepped into the room with us and you could feel the temperature crank up ten degrees. Men stood up straighter, women fussed with their necklaces and hair. When I realized I was winding the excess cord from my backpack straps around my fingers, I shoved my hands into my pockets.

  The fallen angel looked at the door as if she was waiting for something.

  A second later, a man naked except for one of those spiked pit bull collars came into the room and dropped to his knees at her feet. The kind of sexy, hard-bodied guy I used to fantasize about dating when I got to college. The bad boy nonconformist who, dressed, would work on his motorcycle while debating the fundamental differences between Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The words “Resist or Serve” were tattooed across his chest and a cross surrounded by text wrapped around his left bicep.

  He’s her familiar. The thought snapped me out of my idiotic high school fantasies. I was standing there staring at a fallen angel’s honest-to-God familiar. What if somebody was trying to find him, too? A younger sister or maybe a girlfriend.

  I tried to catch Resist-or-Serve’s eye, but his gaze was locked onto the floor. He couldn’t be much older than me, somewhere in his early twenties. Did that make him another empty-headed angel-groupie, or had things gotten so bad at his house that being a fallen angel’s slave had seemed like a decent alternative?

  “It’s been ten years since the Armistice was signed,” the fallen angel said, stroking her fingers through Resist-or-Serve’s black hair like a cat she barely noticed anymore, “But in our view of time, a decade is just a drop in the bucket. As you can imagine, a world that only recently accepted the fact of our existence and even more lately came to peace with us is still a little gun-shy of our motives.”

  Out of nowhere, the fallen angel laughed.

  “Forgive me, Alice, I seem to have disrupted your tour,” she said.

  “That’s really no problem, Mikal,” the tour guide gushed. “I’m sure no one here has any objections. Please, continue if you’d like.”

  “Well, unless I’m mistaken, this is the last stop inside the house, isn’t it? From here you’ll go back to meet with Kathan, then out to tour the barracks?”

  “We actually had to stop giving that portion of the tour.”

  Mikal’s laugh turned into a purr in her throat. “I suppose we should have seen that coming. Humans just aren’t used to seeing so many of us in one place. And I’m sure the soldiers didn’t try to tone it down any.”

  An army of fallen angel foot soldiers promising sexual bliss with smoldering glances? Sounded like the comments section on Tempie’s blog. Or like a dream I’d had once in junior high that made me orgasm in my sleep.

  “Well, how about we open the tour up to questions?” Mikal shrugged and her black wings mimicked the motion. “Anyone have something you’ve been dying to ask a fallen angel?”

  “You’re the enforcer, aren’t you?” Know-It-All asked. “I read that fallen angels move in packs, like wolves, with an alpha, an enforcer, and foot soldiers.”

  “I am. Kathan makes the rules and I ensure that they’re followed. Kind of like the government, isn’t it?” Mikal said. She seemed to find that funny, too. “You’d all better watch your step.”

  A couple people laughed, but a couple people probably wet their pants, too.

  Know-It-All piped up again. Obviously he was the only one without the sense to be too scared and aroused to do anything but stare.

  “He’s your familiar, isn’t he?” Know-It-All asked, pointing as if Resist-or-Serve wasn’t in the room. And the way Resist-or-Serve was staring down at the floor, maybe he wasn’t. “How do you choose someone to enthrall?”

  “It used to be that we found someone who struck our fancy at random,” Mikal said. “Most of us still follow our preferences just like humans do for blondes or brunettes, muscles or sexy smiles, but the non-person rules these days are very clear on who we can make familiars. Colter here lost his heart to me.”

  She touched her familiar’s cheek. The way he looked up at her made me feel like I was watching them have sex.

  “Tell them what you call me, love,” she said.

  A second passed. Red bloomed across the top of Resist-or-Serve’s cheekbones as if someone was airbrushing the blush onto a doll’s cheeks.

  “My burning angel,” he said.

  “Isn’t that beautiful?” Mikal said. She bent down and kissed his forehead. “When I heard that, I knew I had to keep him. Hell, I’m just as susceptible to sweet talk and a pretty face as the next girl.”

  The frizzy-haired woman in front of me looked down at Resist-or-Serve, not even making an effort to keep her eyes off the goods.

  “What’s it like to be a familiar?” she asked.

  I don’t know if anyone else saw the way Mikal glared at Frizzy before putting on a big smile. For that split-second, ice chips lodged in my spine.

  “You can address all questions to me,” Mikal told her. “Colt’s not allowed to speak right now.” She must’ve seen the little looks passing between travel buddies because she explained, “My man gets off on submission. He can only talk when I tell him to.”

  “Is that why you—” Frizzy changed her question and looked up at Mikal. “Is that why he chose to be your familiar? Because it’s like being the slave or the sub in a dominant-submissive relationship, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” Mikal said.

  Then she turned on her spikey heel and started to lead us out of the visitor’s wing. Resist-or-Serve sprang up to follow. Maybe “sprang” was poor word choice, but considering the very naked circumstances it was hard to think of any others. Maybe “jumped.” He jumped up to follow.

  Good grief. Just keep your eyes off his package.

  I tried to focus on his tattoos as he passed me, but I didn’t have time to read the text on his arm. His back was covered, too—a Bible passage that I remembered from Sunday school. Everything from “Put on the whole armor of God” to “for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I might declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.”

  Maybe he was a disgruntled Jesus freak.

  I wondered whether I could get a second to ask Resist-or-Serve if he had seen a girl who looked like m
e in the Dark Mansion. Probably not, but if I could just get him to look at me, maybe I could gauge his reaction.

  When we stopped in the entrance hall, I edged closer to where he was kneeling, and flipped my bangs out of my face, just in case they actually were obscuring anything.

  Mikal’s black eyes locked on mine and I felt my heart stop beating. It was like she knew why I was there, like she could see into my brain, all the way back through the last few years—Dad leaving, Mom falling apart, Tempie running away. I thought I was going to start crying.

  Mikal smiled. She knew. She knew and I was just standing there waiting to be killed or arrested or something equally awful.

  “Any other questions?” Mikal asked.

  “Is it true that during Halo’s NP-Human Conflict all of the people over twenty-five were executed?” Know-It-All asked.

  It was such a relief when Mikal looked away from me to answer him. “Those humans—”

  “It’s an unfortunate truth of war with mortals that lives are always lost,” Mayor Dark said, striding into the hall, buttoning the jacket of his tailored suit. He had to be the only life form in existence that looked as racy fully dressed as he did half-naked. “Just as many mortal non-people—werecreatures, zombies, sirens, and some lesser demons—were lost as humans.” He bowed his head as if solemnly remembering their sacrifice. “‘War is hell,’ as the man said.”

  Then Mayor Dark smiled. The moment of silence was over.

  “Thank you all for coming to visit the Dark Mansion.” Either it was lustful thinking or a trick of his powers that made it seem like his black eyes rested on me for a second longer than everyone else. “I hope you’ll all be staying in Halo for the celebration of the Armistice’s tenth anniversary next weekend. Oh, and while you’re in town, you’ve got to eat at Bub’s Diner. Their goulash is amazing.”

  This was the same Mayor Kathan Dark who had united non-people across the country by arguing that Daniel Whitney’s crusade against the fallen angels would become a war against all NPs if it wasn’t stopped. The same Kathan Dark who had created and integrated an NP legal system into human legislation so that the US government could continue to function. We had studied his speeches in school alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., Patrick Henry, and Cicero. That same Kathan Dark was pushing the goulash at the local diner.