Read Online The Devil's Reprise by Karina Halle - Free Book Online Page B

shouldn’t have been picked to go on the road with Hybrid. I had barely written anything, I was still in school—I was a nobody. But it was like my dream came true.”
    He cocked his head. “But not quite.”
    “No. Not quite. But still. I lived to tell about it—me, Dawn Emerson, ex-rodeo queen and music junkie. And now I’m doing this all over again. Sage…Sage is hot stuff. He’s dynamite right now. I hear his songs all over the radio, I read articles about him written by other people. Any reporter worth her salt would love to cover this story, his first solo tour in fucking Europe, and yet I’m the one doing it.”
    “Well, you two have a special connection,” he said almost softly.
    I frowned at that, but he quickly continued, “And you’re in good with Jacob Edwards. The Cobb, man. He’s…legendary. It just so happens that both of those men want you around. And I’m sure they believe in your writing, too.”
    “But they aren’t Creem ,” I said.
    “I see,” he said. “So you think I’m your babysitter.”
    I nodded and looked down at my hands. “I may have been the only person to cover the end of Hybrid, but I don’t think they appreciated my…um…metaphors. You might be here to keep me on track without even knowing it.”
    He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I reckon you’re worrying over nothing, little lamb. In fact, I reckon you like to worry. And when things are going well, you worry even more. I’m here to take photographs. You’re here to write. Right now that’s the truth, so we might as well enjoy it while we can.” He opened one eye at me and added, “We’ve got a six-hour flight and time change to prepare for. I’ll see you when we land.” Then he closed his eye again and seemed to drift off to sleep, just like that.
    I stared at him, dumbfounded and lost for a few moments, before I took out a magazine and started to read it absently, stealing the occasional glimpse at him. What a weird duck. He was hard to read but at the same time seemed to know me. He at least figured out that I loved to worry, especially when everything was going great. Maybe I had worrywart written on my face. That or pessimist .
    While Max slept through the whole flight—the lucky bastard—I divided my time between staring at the Atlantic Ocean far below my window, dozing off, and writing in my notebook. It was clean and new and perfect, and I had my favorite pens and pencils on me. Some reporters carry one notebook for everything they cover, but I liked to divide mine up, one for each band. The Hybrid notebook had been full. It was tucked away in a drawer in my rickety desk back at home. This notebook had Sage’s name scrawled on the first page, and the rest was blank.
    I treated it like a clean slate and started writing down all my impressions of Sage’s music. It was hard for me to separate the music from the man, but once I started, it got easier. Sage had only released one album, Sage Wisdom (yeah, a terribly redundant name), so I went through each song in my head, playing each one like my brain was a jukebox on demand, and jotted down my thoughts and impressions, which could shape the basis for the whole article.
    I fell in love all over again. It was practically impossible to be objective. But that’s what his music had always done to me—I couldn’t help that the man was just as enigmatic, just as layered, as his music was.
    When Sage Knightly was the key guitarist and songwriter for Hybrid, you could hear parts of his past and personality coming out through the songs. But Hybrid also had the input of Robbie Oliver and the late Mickey Brown and a record label that always expected more. As much as Sage tried to push the envelope, they still remained a slightly edgier, fuzzier version Led Zeppelin. They were a band with chunky swagger.
    Sage’s solo stuff, on the other hand, really broke away from that. That wasn’t to say that it wasn’t loud. It was loud. It had a