Free How to Kill Yourself in a Small Town by eden Hudson

want to be a familiar. Why would
anybody? I mean, they have to know what happens when the angel moves on.”
    I
took a deep breath and let it out.
    “Tempie
said all this stuff about wanting to be part of something bigger and truer on
her blog, but you have to know her. She’s romantic, but she’s really spiteful,
too. She left me a note the night she ran away.” It was weird to hear myself
talking about the note out loud. Willow was the first person I had told.
“Tempie said if some guy was going to screw her over anyway, she wanted it to
be hard and fast and to have his complete devotion while it happened. She said
at least fallen angels let you know what you were in for up front.”
    Willow
hmmed and took another sip of her white Russian.
    “Where’re
you from?” she asked.
    “A
little south of Hannibal.”
    “On
the river?”
    I
nodded. “Close enough that ten acres of our farm is overflow for the levee.”
    “So
you guys had plenty of sirens,” Willow said.
    “Yeah.”
It seemed like small talk, so I relaxed. “Some of the idiot guys in my class
actually hunted them.”
    “Is
Hannibal crow or coyote territory?” she asked.
    “Coyote.”
    “I
thought so,” Willow said. “But you guys don’t have any fallen angels.” She
traced the rim of her drink with her thumb. “No one who lived in an angel town
ever wanted to become a familiar, I bet. You can’t see the castoffs and still
convince yourself you want that.”
    I
bit the inside of my cheek. So much for safe conversation.
    “I
don’t have anything against Kathan,” Willow said. “I assume he’s an okay mayor.
I’m not much into politics, but he must be, right? I mean, he made the ‘every
human in Halo has to have a protector’ rule so the vamps and sirens wouldn’t
just go around sucking everybody dry and the werecreatures wouldn’t be
constantly fighting over who was hunting on whose land, so, you know. That was
really great of him, considering he could’ve just had Mikal and the foot
soldiers wipe us all out instead of letting our generation live. But Kathan
really, really hates Tough’s family.”
    Willow
nodded at Tough. He was leaned up against the bar with a beer, watching us. I
looked away, but Willow just raised her glass in a little salute to him.
    “It’s
okay,” she said to me, “You can look. He’s pretending to listen to Owen now
because we caught him.”
    I
flipped my bangs out of my face and stole a glance. Tough was nodding at an
orange-haired guy, but even in the dim light I could see the top of his
cheekbones turning red. Something about the blush touched off a spark in my
brain, as if I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t quite place it.
    “Tough’s
brother Colt is a familiar,” Willow said. “He was killing the people Mikal
enthralled, so Kathan gave Colt to her, kind of like a poetic justice thing.
Angels are really into that. Anyway, what I think people don’t get is that,
sometimes, fallen angels use being a familiar as a punishment. Like, they can’t
think of anything worse than— What’s wrong?”
    “I
saw him,” I said. “Yesterday. Tough’s brother. When I went on the Dark Mansion
tour.”
    Willow
leaned forward. “How did he look?”
    Naked?
Smoking hot? Subservient? Madly in love? House broken? My
dad used to have this term he thought was really funny, but I couldn’t say
“pussy-whipped” out loud.
    “Ironic,”
I said, remembering his tattoos.
    “Huh?”
    “No,
I mean, he has these—” I shook my head. “He seemed fine.”
    “Was
he like…? I don’t know what to ask exactly,” Willow said. She looked over at
Tough again. “But I guess that Mikal still has him is the answer.”
    “She
didn’t look like she was going to cast him off anytime soon.”
    “Mikal
goes through them pretty fast,” Willow said.
    The
eighteen day average popped into my brain. Willow looked at me like she could
tell I’d heard the numbers and she didn’t want me to have any illusions about
them