Page 2 of Demon Loved
Brianna McAllister sat in the living room of one of her music students, Callie Mendoza, as Callie’s small fingers struggled to find the proper positions for the minor seventh chord she’d just been taught. Although Brianna wanted to go over to Callie and gently press her fingers against the little girl’s to show her the easiest method to duplicate the chord, she knew her student needed to find the way on her own if possible.
Sure enough, the discordant jangle gave way to a fairly respectable grouping of notes, and Brianna let herself relax slightly. Overall, Callie was quite talented, so Bree had guessed she would be able to master the fingering without too much outside assistance.
Every other Tuesday from three-thirty to four, she came to Callie’s house to give these lessons, just as she visited her other students in Cottonwood and Clarkdale on the days when she wasn’t performing at local wine tasting rooms and bars and resorts. Her current schedule wasn’t anything Bree had exactly planned, was more a life she’d fallen into.
After all, what else was a witch without any singular talent supposed to do with herself?
Not for the first time, she did her best to dismiss the self-pitying thought. Everyone who knew her would have pointed out that, while her magical abilities weren’t anything to write home about, she was very musically gifted. Those talents weren’t necessarily magical, but in a way, she appreciated them even more because of that.
They were hers, and not something that had come to her simply because she was a member of the McAllister clan…or because she was Levi McAllister’s daughter.
Levi McAllister, who’d been summoned to this plane to be the consort of Zoe Sandoval, the future prima of the de la Paz clan down in southern Arizona. She’d created him out of nothingness, and he’d been hideous when he first appeared. But he’d grown into his true form a few days later, and now — many years after he’d come to this world — looked like nothing more than a handsome blond man in his fifties.
Anyone who knew him, though, understood he was a lot more than that.
However, his otherworldly gifts hadn’t been passed down to his two children. Bree’s older brother Shane was an incredibly talented chef, thanks to a magical talent for cooking, and was already running the kitchen at The Asylum, the restaurant located in The Grand Hotel at the top of Jerome, but Bree…well, she had a little bit of everything, which was why her cousin Bellamy had referred to her more than once as the Swiss Army knife witch. She could do all sorts of things, as long as none of them were too powerful or too complicated.
And that was why she tended not to do much of anything at all.
“That’s great, Callie,” she said, knowing she’d let her mind wander far more than an attentive teacher should have. “Let’s try the entire phrase now you’ve gotten that minor seventh in hand.”
Callie nodded and bent her head over the guitar, delicate dark brows drawing together as she concentrated on the tricky notation. As always, she’d pulled her long, near-black hair into a scrunchie to keep it from falling into her face while she played, and she frowned in concentration as she began to work her way through the phrase they’d been studying.
Something about the combination of chords reminded Bree of the song she’d been working on for the past week, even though on the surface, they weren’t much alike. Still, the way the A-minor chord melted into the seventh that had been giving Callie so much trouble prompted a moment of illumination, a way for Brianna to resolve the tricky bridge that she hadn’t quite figured out yet.
Her fingers itched to pick up her own guitar and work on the phrase, but the instrument was sitting several miles away in her apartment in Jerome. Anyway, she was supposed to be focusing on her student, not writing a song no one would ever probably hear. Her audiences in the wine tasting rooms and bars wanted to hear covers of old favorites, not anything new, so she rarely trotted out her original work.
No, it just piled up in the trunk she used to keep all her notes. While she had songwriting software on her laptop, she rarely used it, preferring to do things the old-fashioned way.
Coming back to herself, she said, “That was great, Callie. Let’s try it again.”
Better to focus on the here and now, and not a song that would get trunked along with all the others.
Because it was a Tuesday, a typically slow time at the tasting rooms, Brianna didn’t have any gigs scheduled for that night. She had a sort of standing invitation to go to her parents’ house for dinner, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted to do that today. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy spending time with them — she knew she’d been blessed with the best parents anyone could ask for — but more that she realized she was feeling restless, even though she couldn’t say exactly why.
Maybe this unsettled sensation was due to the change of seasons and nothing more. The Verde Valley was plenty warm at the end of September, and the leaves wouldn’t truly start to change for another month, but she still could feel the approach of fall in the shortening days and the way the quality of light had become more slanted, more golden.
Another year passing with not much to show for it.
She wanted to shake her head at herself for allowing such a self-pitying thought to pass through her mind, but it lingered despite her best efforts to dispel it. Stupid, really, since this was all her fault anyway. No one had held a gun to her head and told her to drop out of Northern Pines, the university she’d been attending in Flagstaff until this past summer.
Somehow, though, she hadn’t been able to force herself to return, even though she only had one year to go. But what was she supposed to do with that bachelor’s degree in music, anyway? Teach? Perform?
She was already doing both of those.
And although Flagstaff was beautiful and she’d had fun during her time in college, she’d also missed Jerome. Sure, it was only an hour and a half away, but it had still been a lot harder than she’d expected to carve out the time to make the trip home more than a couple times each year.
So…she was here, living her life, even though she wasn’t sure what she really wanted to do with it.
Might as well go to dinner at her parents’ house. Her mother always made plenty to go around, and there was even a chance — a very small one — that Shane might drop by as well. Technically, Tuesdays and Wednesdays were his days off, but he always seemed to be putting out one fire or another at work, sometimes literally, like the time when the new sous chef managed to catch one corner of the kitchen at The Asylum on fire. The blaze had been snuffed before it could do any real damage, and yet Brianna could see why her brother might want to at least stick his head in even when he wasn’t supposed to be working.
Well, better to share a meal at her parents’ house than sit alone in her apartment, brooding over all the things she’d done wrong with her life.
She picked up her phone and sent a brief text.
I’ll be there for dinner.
Nothing about the house had changed much since she’d moved out, but, not for the first time, Bree was struck by how different it still felt to her as she walked in and gave her mom a quick hug.
