Read The Devil's Reprise for Free Online Page B

fucking airport. All of them. For me. And why? How? It just didn’t make sense. In the States I had my fans, but they hung around after the show by the back door, loitering quietly in the alleyways. But this…I was completely unprepared.
    “Sage!” one young girl with a severe haircut squeezed past Jacob and thrust her Hybrid T-shirt into my hands. It was obvious she’d never worn it; it was white and in showroom condition. “Please, Sage, sign it! My friend in America got Robbie and Mickey to sign it, but she never saw you.”
    I stared down at the shirt. Mickey’s signature still looked fresh, and I felt like I had been kicked straight in the gut. He was dead and I was here .
    I absently scrawled my name on it with a fat marker, my gaze falling on the crowd around me, and my headache in full force, the pumping blood drowning out their cries. This tour was a mistake. The album was a mistake. Everything was a mistake.
    “Come on,” Jacob said, taking my arm roughly and yelling at everyone to back off and that I’d see them all at the show in two nights. He led me right over to the limo and thrust me into the backseat, which smelled of stale smoke and whiskey. Tricky, Jacob, and Angeline slid in after me, but I was already reaching for the small bar and pouring myself a glass.
    “Easy now,” Jacob warned, but there was no stopping me. I downed the burning liquid in one gulp. I know I’d been a rock star before, but I had never felt it like this. Hybrid’s fame had always been…spread out. It was placed on the group as a whole. We dealt with it as it came and we made it work. And when things got really weird, whether with crazy fans or super groupies (the demonic GTFOs, or “Get the Fuck Outs” as we called them, didn’t count), it was always Robbie who handled it. He got the fan mail. He handled most of the interview requests, the autographs, the perks, and the downfalls of fame. He shouldered it all and had done it well.
    Now I was in Robbie’s role. I was the rock star. And everyone wanted piece of me, a taste of these damaged goods.
    By the time we reached Paris, I was pleasantly buzzed and no longer wanting sleep. Angeline tried to point out the sites to me, rattling off the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe and a whack of other places with frou-frou names, but I wasn’t interested. I just wanted to keep the buzz going, to enter the land of “I don’t give a shit” and “come back later.”
    Luckily the mob that greeted me at the airport wasn’t here. Apparently our limo driver took a few detours in order to lose any possible paparazzi, and I was checked in at the hotel under the name Mr. Underhill. I let Jacob handle all the paperwork while I took my bag upstairs to my room. We had dinner reservations at the hotel restaurant at eight (they liked to eat late here) and until then I just needed time to myself, time to think, time to plan how I was going to handle all of this.
    Because suddenly, as I gazed out of the window with a bottle of the finest French champagne in hand, taking in the sights of the grey streets with meandering tourists and the rows of similar houses and the clouds that hung lower than a fat man’s balls, it finally hit me. My psyche had pushed past the feelings of guilt and unworthiness and had found a ripe new fruit to feast on—the fact that I had no fucking idea what I was doing.
    None.
    The shows I’d played in the States before this—that was nothing. A few appetizers before the main course. Now we were all the way on another continent, just me and Tricky and Jacob. I had a drummer and another guitarist and a keyboardist I had yet to meet and new roadies and sound techs and whoever the fuck else that would be joining us on the tour. I had a voice that was feeling rough and apparently legions of fans who actually gave a fuck. Who actually expected something from me. This wasn’t America, where people watched you politely for a few moments while you