The Musician and the Monster Read online

  “I really do wish I’d gotten this yesterday,” he admitted, holding the bracelet to his wrist, deciding that the black leather of the band and the cream-colored vinyl of the guitar pick looked nice against his brown skin.

  “An ornament?” said Oberon.

  “Yeah. Not much call for it here, but I want to see how it looks.” Ángel fumbled one-handed to secure the bracelet onto his wrist.

  Oberon extended a hand. Ángel hesitated, then held out his arm, and Oberon, emitting his rumbling subsonic vibration, fastened the clasp. Ángel’s nerves jumped when Oberon’s fingers gently brushed the inside of his wrist like nettles, but he bit his lip, hard, and forced himself not to recoil.

  He had the strangest feeling—as though the fastening of the bracelet were a ritual. As if, by allowing it, he had given Oberon permission to pay him court.

  Ángel awakened the next morning feeling as though everything had changed.

  He blinked. The washed-new feeling came from the quality of the light coming through the window: it had a pearly sheen, unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He got up and peered out.

  The ground was covered with a thick blanket of snow, and more was falling, heavily, silently, in fat clumps rather than individual flakes. It was like the cover of a Christmas card, all sparkling and soft. Except in Christmas cards the sky was usually blue, not that low menacing gray.

  He washed and dressed and ran downstairs, singing “Sweet Baby James.” He caught Lily in the kitchen and, since “Sweet Baby James” was in three-four, waltzed her around the island, singing.

  “Did you look outside?” He swung her in a circle.

  “Yes, it started around midnight, and we have four inches! We’re going to be stuck until the snowplows come.”

  He stopped dancing. “We’ll be forced to cannibalism. We should start with the security team. They’re beefy. I’m stringy and tough.”

  “Hah,” she said. “You’re the youngest, and they have guns.”

  “That is a good point. I think I’ll go outside. Should I make a snowman? Is that an appropriate snow activity?”

  “They never look as good as in the cartoons,” she warned him. “You want breakfast?”

  He pulled on his boots. “Yes, when I come back in. You don’t have to make it.”

  “That’s what I do,” she said. “Put on a hat, or you’ll catch a cold.”

  He put on a hat and crunched out into the snow. The world was strangely silent, the mountains surrounding the estate invisible behind low clouds, the air full of downy flakes.

  Ángel didn’t make a snowman, but he did make and throw several snowballs. Then he discovered the satisfaction of creating a line of lone footprints across an unblemished blanket of snow. He walked for an hour, crisscrossing his footprints, the snow getting deeper and deeper around his legs.

  As he rounded the house he saw, in the distance, a slim figure waiting for him. He walked toward it, his mood was so light that he considered starting a snowball fight.

  The cold did wonderful things for Chandler Evanston’s Snow White coloring: her pale cheeks were flushed with red, like poppies; her black-lashed eyes were ice blue and sparkling. She was not smiling. As usual.

  “This place is dead to security. The cameras at the house and the cameras on the walls—none of them give a view of this spot.”

  This was weird. “Oh?” he said, abandoning any idea of playing in the snow with her.

  “I wanted to thank you for intervening for me with Oberon, Ángel.” Her voice was stiff and awkward.

  “Oberon overreacted.”

  “He did. He was right, though,” she said. “I lied about your package. I was being passive-aggressive, and I apologize.”

  “Well, that was kind of bitchy.”

  “I know.” She pressed her lips together. “This job ties me in knots. But it’s not an excuse for dishonesty. I’m sorry.”

  She was probably not a person who apologized very often. Too lighthearted to hold a grudge, he said, “It wasn’t a firing offense. Not bad enough for . . . what he was doing.”

  “Does he ever talk to you like that? The way he talked to me?”

  “No,” said Ángel. “Well, maybe once, a little. But I was definitely pissing him off.”

  He looked around, newly aware of how isolated they were out here on the lawn, in the falling snow. Chandler had come out here deliberately, to talk to him where no cameras, no microphones could find them. He made a note of the location.

  Chandler said, “I want you to know something, Ángel. We never watch the cameras inside the house. We installed them, because those were our instructions, and we have access to the feeds, but we’re security, not voyeurs. When we heard you’d destroyed the cameras in your room, we cheered.”

  “Uh, thanks. That’s good to know.”

  She shifted her feet in the snow. “If you need to get away, Ángel, please speak to me. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “What are you saying?” he demanded.

  She looked torn, as if what she was doing was a crime against her own loyalty. “Just that. You’re in a strange situation—none of us realized how strange until you got here.”

  “So you did watch that video,” said Ángel. “The one from the office. The morning after he was sick.”

  Chandler dropped her eyes. “Only me,” she said. “The others haven’t seen it.”

  “Okay.” He wondered how hard it was for her to keep that video from her team. She seemed to hate dishonesty.

  “I’ve been in contact with your friend Marissa,” she added.

  He raised his eyebrows at her. “Oh, you have, have you? And what do you think? Gorgeous, right?”

  It was a complete shot in the dark, intended mostly to annoy, but the way her entire face went as red as cherries told him that he’d hit a bull’s-eye.

  He laughed. “She’s brilliant too. She just got out of a relationship, you know. She might need a shoulder to cry on.”

  “Be serious!” Chandler snapped, her voice going up. “I got complacent. I forgot he was a monster.”

  “He’s not a monster,” scoffed Ángel.

  “He is.” Her face was white and passionate. “I was on his security team when he first arrived. I lived with him in his little condo in Atlanta. I remember how hard it was to be close to him all the time; constantly afraid that he’d try to touch me.” He could see a muscle jump in her jaw. “You and Lily both, you’re in total denial. I understand that. The only way you can bear to be around him every day—the only way you can bear what he does—is to pretend that he’s a man. But he’s not a man, any more than a python is a man.”

  “He’s not a python!”

  “You have no idea what motivates him or what his agenda is. Marissa asked me to look out for you. But you have to be smart, Ángel. Look out for yourself too.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  She just shook her head, pityingly. “I’m not wrong. But the point is—you’re the only one in the house who has to be alone with him, who has no one to turn to. Lily has John, but you don’t have anyone. Except now you have me. If you need to get away from here, you come to me.”

  “I really don’t think—” stammered Ángel. “But thanks. Thank you. It’s good to know I’ve got a—” friend didn’t seem like the appropriate word “—an out. If I need one. But I really do think you’re wrong.”

  She nodded shortly. “Right or wrong, remember this. I’m keeping constant watch on the camera that overlooks the pool,” she said. “It’s out of sight from both Oberon’s office and his bedroom, and I’ve looped his feeds of that camera so he won’t see anything there. If there’s an emergency, go there. Or put a message in front of that camera. I’ll see it, and he won’t. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you’d better get back,” she said, turning to go. “We’re in a blind spot here,” she called over her shoulder, “but he’ll notice if we stay too long.”

  He stood in the snow and watched he
r stride away.

  He should have been relieved, or even delighted, to know he had an ally on the security team. What he felt was confused.

  He’s not a python, he thought, stubbornly. He’s not a monster. Is he?

  By the time he got back to the mansion his happy mood had dissipated, and he mostly felt wet and cold. He ate the breakfast Lily had made him—rice with bean sprouts and a soft egg, good with sriracha—then went up to his room and found the tablet. There was an email waiting for him.

  Glad you like it, mi vida, it said. Feliz cumpleaños. Wish we could have gone out to celebrate.

  In the real world, he and Marissa usually communicated via text, which was not allowed here in Oberonville. So their emails tended to be text-like—terse, to the point, full of shorthand and in-jokes.

  He typed, Me too. I miss you. Hope the paps aren’t bothering you too much. Hitting Send, he ran downstairs to fetch the mandolin. Then he sat cross-legged on his bed, tuning the instrument.

  The tablet pinged, and he set down the mandolin to read it. They’re assholes. They yell at you just to get a reaction. I still can’t wrap my head around you and the cultural envoy of the Otherworld doing something so hipster as a podcast.

  Maybe he is a hipster, typed Ángel. No one would know. Hence the podcast.

  I think it’s working, she wrote. The podcast is huge. People just call it O-Pod. There are podcasts about the podcast. There are blogs and social media networks and it’s like a social movement.

  I stopped reading about it when they started talking about what a hot tamale I am, he admitted. So tell me about you? Have you run into Trina lately? Trina was Marissa’s ex-girlfriend; the last he’d heard, she’d been determined to woo her back.

  The tablet pinged. Operation Trina is off, said the email. Met someone different.

  Intriguing. All emails went through security; both Chandler and Oberon had access to this. Would Chandler get in trouble if the envoy knew she was talking to Marissa? Would Marissa get hurt? Did she know where Chandler’s loyalties lay? Because Ángel didn’t.

  Carefully, he typed, I dreamed that love would never die, I dreamed that God would be forgiving. But there are dreams that cannot be and there are storms we cannot weather.

  Send.

  Five minutes later: I’ll keep that in mind. You take care, Angela.

  You too, Mickey.

  He went restlessly to the window. It had stopped snowing; the lawn was a sheet of blinding white, blemished only by his own footprints. Then movement caught his eye: dark shapes against the snow.

  He gasped, then ran downstairs to the living room, where he could see out the big picture window.

  “Oberon,” he said aloud, to the air. “Are you listening? You should come out here.”

  A moment later, Oberon came out of his office. “What is it? Is everything all right?”

  “Look.”

  Oberon came and stood beside him at the window. After a moment, he asked, “Are they deer?”

  “Elk,” said Ángel. “They’re elk. I’ve never seen one before.”

  A single file of the animals, pale fawn with chestnut necks, trailed across the snow-covered lawn. “Mira, they’re so big. So much bigger than deer. Maybe the snow’s too deep for them higher up in the mountains so they came down here.”

  “They are so beautiful,” said Oberon. “Look, that one has antlers.”

  “I think that’s the boy,” said Ángel. “The male. The others must be his ladies. I’ve seen videos of the males fighting. The one who wins—the strongest one—gets to mate with all the females.”

  “How interesting,” said Oberon. “I admit I haven’t studied the fauna of your world at all. I believe the next envoy—if the Otherworld decides to send one—will be a biologist. Are they rare?”

  “Elk? I don’t think so.” Ángel laughed at his own ignorance. “I’m pretty sure they don’t live in Florida, but maybe there are lots of them here. People hunt them for food.”

  “Are they good to eat?”

  “I have no idea,” said Ángel, smiling at him.

  “They’re delicious.” Lily came up behind him and threaded an arm through Ángel’s. “Elk stew, with red wine and potatoes.”

  “No!” he teased. “They’re too pretty to be stew.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you had a bowl of stew in front of you,” said Lily.

  “Well, true,” he admitted. “I’m weak.”

  A week later, Ángel sat in the swan-shaped chair in the instrument room, fiddling with the music system.

  It was about nine thirty, too dark to see outside. He could occasionally hear snow blowing against the window. It had been snowing, on and off, for a week, and the drifts outside were nearly four feet deep. Lily had been serving a lot of rice, noodles, and frozen or tinned vegetables, since she hadn’t been able to go into town.

  The house was empty except for him and Oberon. And a hundred-thousand-dollar security system that no one was watching. Maybe.

  He and Oberon had fallen back into their usual routine. They saw each other every day, ate lunch and dinner together, chatted about music and planned podcast topics. Several more podcast episodes were done, and they were doling them out every week.

  Ángel tuned the mandolin, thinking about the podcast. He’d done some online digging and Marissa was right: the podcast was a huge cultural event. O-Pod, as it was now known, was the most popular podcast on iTunes by a wide margin, and people all over the world were writing and talking about Oberon, his place in the world, and the world’s reception of him. There were scholarly articles that traced the evolution of his public appearances and the global effect of the way he’d been sequestered away by the United States. Vicious Twitter battles raged about his hidden agenda, his dangerous motivations.

  Ángel shrugged away these unpleasant thoughts and put on headphones. He set the computer to record, started the track of himself playing the sad fingerpicked song he’d written on the guitar, and then began to play the mandolin. He was attempting to record the mandolin accompaniment, so that he could layer the two tracks together. After a few bars, his plectrum hit the wrong string, and he stopped with a snort.

  Marissa’s birthday was coming up, and he’d decided to give the song to her. He was proud of it—it was a gentle, complex melody, different from anything else he’d ever composed. Better. In his mind, the mandolin came in on the second verse, in harmony, its high sweet strings chiming beautifully with the mellower notes from the guitar.

  But in practice, he wasn’t good enough on the mandolin to get the sound he wanted. Hell, he wasn’t even good enough to get through the piece without hitting the wrong strings.

  He reset the recording and began again. Messed up again, this time on the key change at the bridge. Sighed.

  He’d discussed with Oberon the global conversation their podcast had sparked, but neither of them had mentioned the strong tinge of sexual puritanism in some of the conversations: the speculation that the elf-lord wanted sexual relationships with humans, which would inevitably lead to moral degeneration and societal collapse. That would hurt Oberon’s feelings.

  The fae was doing so much better—Lily had commented on it—but he seemed restless, unable to settle to his work for long stretches of time. Before the snow got too deep, he’d sometimes accompanied Ángel on his tramps around the estate. One day he’d admitted that he did not like the cold weather very much—he was from a warmer climate.

  “Me too,” Ángel had said.

  “You lived near the ocean.”

  “Yeah. I miss it. I used to swim almost every morning if the weather was nice.”

  Oberon had shivered a little in his heavy coat, snow blowing across his face. “I don’t swim. It’s always so cold, and I’m afraid to drown.”

  “Oh, I know where we could go,” said Ángel. “There's an island on the gulf side. The water’s calm and smooth, and the bottom’s just clean white sand and shells. If you go swimming after the sun goes down, t
he water’s warmer than the air. It’s really relaxing. You’d like it.”

  Stupid thing to have said—he wasn’t even allowed to go to the grocery store, and Oberon couldn’t show his face without inciting a riot. But cold, stressed, snowed-in people everywhere probably talked longingly about islands and beaches. Sunlit, green, with pearly sands and aqua water, far away, out of reach.

  Now he started the recording again, touched the plectrum to the mandolin strings, played, fumbled, stopped.

  The door to the office opened and Oberon emerged. He stood in the doorway and gazed at Ángel for a minute. Ángel, recalling his evening of repeatedly failing to play the mandolin, winced. Hopefully Oberon hadn’t been listening.

  Oberon came into the room and sat on the carpet, his back braced against the turquoise leather armchair, across from Ángel. He stretched out his long legs, crossed his ankles, and extended his hand.

  “You play the guitar,” he said, “and I’ll play the mandolin part.”

  Apparently Oberon had been listening, and Ángel’s incompetence was driving him crazy. Ángel blushed, stifled the urge to apologize. “Sounds good.” He removed the strap from his neck and passed over the little instrument, then picked up his guitar. Running a thumb over the strings to check the tuning, he glanced at Oberon.

  “You should record this,” said Oberon. “From the top.”

  So Ángel set the computer to record, put his fingers on the strings, took a breath to center himself, and began to play.

  It was a bittersweet minor-key melody that had evolved from arpeggio practice and his own homesickness. The first verse was the melody on the guitar, accompanied only by the timekeeping thump of his thumb on the soundboard. On the second verse Oberon’s mandolin came in impeccably, the notes silvery and sweet, precisely timed to Ángel’s guitar. Oberon played with the delicacy that Ángel had utterly failed to achieve.

  Ángel closed his eyes and fell into the song.

  They flowed together, flawlessly, into the key modulation at the bridge. It sounded good. It sounded great. With Oberon playing, it sounded even better than he had imagined it would.