The Musician and the Monster Read online

  “That was ABBA,” said Ángel. “Lots of people get them mixed up. MelodEye was like ABBA’s less-cool Danish cousin.”

  “Did MelodEye do ‘Dancing Queen’?”

  “ABBA. MelodEye did ‘Baltic Rain.’” He sang a few bars, and she nodded.

  “Oh. Well, I like it a little,” said Lily. “Not too much. After a while it starts to scratch at your nerves. Ángel, I am soaking beans for tomorrow night’s soup.”

  “Great.”

  “I found a similar recipe with no ham,” she said. “Oberon doesn’t really like ham. And I might put a little ginger in it.”

  “Then it won’t be just like my abuelita’s,” said Ángel, smiling, “but that’s okay. I’m looking forward to your version.”

  After she’d wiped down the counters, she put on her coat and headed back to the gatehouse. When the door closed behind her, Oberon said quietly, “She is married.”

  “I know.”

  “Her husband is an important member of my security team. I highly value them both.”

  “Yes. Oh,” said Ángel, with a puff of laughter. “No, oh my God. Don’t worry. I’m not trying to get with Lily.”

  “Does she know that?”

  “I think so. She hasn’t slapped me across the kitchen.”

  “I wouldn’t want misunderstandings to make her, or her husband, unhappy.” Oberon seemed to be serious. The envoy’s eyes were as green as jade and just as hard.

  “Neither would I.”

  “You smile at her,” said Oberon. “You are very beautiful when you smile.”

  Ángel’s face heated. “No,” he said, averting his eyes.

  “And you danced with her.”

  “And I flirt, yes.” God, he was blushing like a little girl at a surprise birthday party. “I know. But she is my mother’s age and married, and I am extremely gay. So.”

  “But,” said Oberon, “does she know that?”

  “That I’m gay? Yes. It’s totally obvious.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. People can tell.”

  “Explain to me how you communicate that you are gay.”

  Ángel reminded himself that Oberon’s questioning wasn’t intended as a challenge, but came from genuine desire to understand. “The way I walk and move, probably,” he said. “And also I have gay voice?” He deliberately upspoke. “I don’t do it on purpose. Some guys are really kind of swishy all the time, but I usually tone it down, unless I’m out with other gay guys. Or trying to annoy people.”

  Oberon was silent, and Ángel shrugged. “If it makes you feel better, go ahead and talk to Lily and her husband. Assure them of my innocent intentions.”

  “You would not be offended if I did that?”

  “No.” Ángel smiled wryly. “I think they’ll be surprised that you’re worried about it.”

  They ate in silence for a moment, and then Oberon said, “Ángel. I know you are not very happy here. Please do not leave.”

  Then disable the cameras in my room.

  But he didn’t say it. Because what would he do if Oberon refused his ultimatum? Make good on his threat to walk away from this mansion? Put on his new coat and try to hitch a ride in the dark through the mountains? He wouldn’t even know which direction to go. And then what?

  He shook his head, refusing to commit either way.

  Oberon’s voice went very soft, sweet-toned, as he asked, “Then will you come to my room tonight?”

  What was Oberon actually asking? Did he want them to sleep together? Or to sleep together? For a split second he imagined himself agreeing to join Oberon in that soft pile of blankets and duvets. Imagined what might happen next. He glanced into Oberon’s mask-like face, the lustrous but empty green eyes, and felt himself shiver.

  “No, Oberon.”

  In the dream, the cultural envoy from the Otherworld was chasing Ángel across the flat sand at Neptune Beach, not far from where he’d grown up. He fled into the surf, but running in knee-deep water slowed him down, and he couldn’t run or escape or scream. Oberon pounced on him like a lion, a full-body tackle that drove Ángel down into the water. Falling, drowning, he awakened with a gasp. It took him a moment to remember where he was, and why he was under the bed.

  Even disoriented from the dream, Ángel found that he was fully aroused, his cock hard and throbbing with inappropriate excitement. The slide of the silky bedspread on the heated skin of his thighs and belly was wickedly delicious; his dick strained against the cotton of his underwear and quested up under the elastic waistband. He breathed deeply, pulling the bedspread away and his underwear down, hoping that in the cool air his erection would subside on its own.

  It didn’t happen. This was both ridiculous and horrifying. He’d nearly had a heart attack at the slightest contact with Oberon’s hand. An autonomous fight-or-flight reaction, an instinctive recoil from the touch of something genuinely inhuman, like the touch of a snake’s scales or an octopus’s tentacle.

  Ángel’s dick wasn’t listening.

  He covered his face with his left arm and wrapped his right hand around his shaft, stroking up and down the entire rigid length, biting his lip against a groan of pleasure.

  Quiet.

  He remembered feeling a similar mix of shame and sexual agitation when he was thirteen or fourteen years old. For some time he’d been secretly fascinated by the faces and bodies of men, but his feelings had never found a specific objective until a visiting priest had come to Assumption Catholic Church from another diocese. Father Joseph had been young, clean-shaven and doe-eyed, androgynous in a way that Ángel would always dig. All Ángel’s inchoate desires had focused on him like a laser. Ángel had stared at him, rapt, throughout Mass, his heart beating with admiration, his penis quiveringly rigid beneath the missal clutched in his lap. He’d known it was wrong to have those feelings—toward a man, toward a man of God—but that knowledge had done nothing whatever to mitigate them.

  This was wronger than that. Oberon was not a person, not human. Still, Ángel spread his legs, brought his left hand down to palm his balls, to stroke behind them, while with his right hand he worked his wretchedly excited cock. He squeezed his eyes shut as his pleasure climbed and climbed, and the fantasy of Oberon being here with him invaded his mind. He grabbed his discarded shirt, pressed it to his body, and came into it—silently, silently, his hips spearing the shirt, soaking it with spunk.

  God, I am so gross, he thought, even while his body luxuriated in the aftermath of release. What the hell is wrong with me?

  Logan the goon rousted him early the next morning. “Get up,” he said, kneeling beside the bed and reaching under it to tug on Ángel’s blanket.

  “¿Qué bolá?” Never a morning person, Ángel bumped his forehead on the bottom of the bed. “Ow.” He crawled out of his cave and pushed his snarled hair out of his eyes.

  “Put some clothes on,” said the goon. “You need to go to the basement for a while.”

  “I do?”

  Logan seemed nervous, glancing around the room. He was the one who’d said that Oberon gave him the willies. Ángel washed his face, brushed his teeth and, clad in jeans, socks, and his new blue embroidered shirt, headed downstairs.

  He paused on the stairs when he saw the whole security team was there. Oberon was just emerging from the gym, wearing nothing but black track pants, one of his black button-down shirts in his hands. Ángel got a long look at the expanse of the fae’s bare torso.

  His body was fatless, pale as milk, shimmering with sweat. All covered in that weird hairless inhuman skin, gleaming across his pecs and shoulders and hipbones, darker and rougher in texture toward his waistband. His biceps and shoulders, slender but curved with muscle, vanished beneath the shirt as he shrugged it on. Collarbones arched like wings above a lean chest that tapered to narrow hips and sinuously rippled abdomen; a flat mark, like a scar, shone where a navel should be. He looked both graceful and powerful, his body somehow eloquent as a dancer’s.

  An
d then Oberon closed his shirt.

  Oh shit, that was way, way too hot. He hadn’t been that moved by a glimpse of a shirtless chest in years. He would have turned around and gone right back up the stairs, but Logan the goon gave him a nudge. Ángel cleared his dry throat and continued down.

  “A grounds crew is here to do some work,” said Chandler, crisp in her usual navy suit. “They got here early; I apologize for interrupting your morning routine.” She spoke to Oberon, who was now buttoning his cuffs, but Ángel decided to assume it included waking him up as well. “We haven’t had time to check them all out, so we’d like you to go down to the wine cellar until they’re gone.”

  “All right.” Oberon glanced around, found Ángel with his eyes, then turned back to Chandler. “What are they doing?”

  “General maintenance to get ready for winter,” she said. “Fertilizing the lawn, clearing the gutters, that sort of thing. Draining the pool.” She, too, glanced at Ángel as she said this, and he smiled at her.

  “Qué vergüenza,” he said. “I was looking forward to my daily swim.”

  Chandler clearly did not find him amusing. “They should be done by this afternoon. Someone will bring you some food.”

  They headed for the stairs down to the wine cellar. In passing, Ángel said to Chandler, “I’ll have bacon and scrambleds, whole wheat toast, and keep the coffee coming. Thanks.”

  She visibly restrained herself from shoving him down the stairs.

  The wine cellar was a picturesquely arched room, dimly lit and rather chilly, its whitewashed stone walls sporting a mural of Pan and his satyrs frolicking among grape vines. Dusty racks were empty of wine. There wasn’t any furniture, either.

  Ángel and Oberon sat on the floor, leaning against opposite walls. Ángel hugged his knees and closed his eyes.

  He could smell Oberon.

  The fae was still warm from exercise, patches of sweat soaking through his black shirt, and his scent filled the enclosed space. Ángel had noticed a toasted-bread smell around him before. This odor was headier, more pungent, and somehow spicy. Musky, like a man, but also . . . cinnamony, a little. Or nutmeg or something. It was a really good smell—only not like food. It was kind of sexy.

  This was bad.

  Ángel had embraced his gayness in the face of implacable family resistance, and he had long ago stopped trying to deny the direction his dick pointed him in. But lusting after Oberon? That was just creepy.

  Trying to shake off discomfort and find a neutral topic, Ángel asked, “What is your real name?”

  Oberon sang a rapid series of syllables, almost too quickly for Ángel to track, his singing voice low and pure and lovely.

  “Again? Slower.”

  Oberon sang it again, slower, and the notes echoed off the curved walls of the wine cellar. Ángel tried to imitate him: “Ke pa lo ro—”

  “Ro,” sang Oberon, correcting.

  “Ro— Wait, pitch matters?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  The man’s name was a song. Ángel groped in his pockets, found a ball-point pen but no paper. He wrote on his palm: the five parallel lines of a staff. He dotted in the notes: b4, a4, d5.

  “Let me.” Oberon held out his hand, and Ángel passed him the pen. Oberon began to write on the white inside of his own forearm. Ángel got up and sat beside him, watching, as Oberon drew a staff on his arm, a tidy treble clef with an A-major key signature, and nine notes: alternating 16th and 32nd notes, with a 32nd rest after the seventh note and a slur connecting the third, fourth, and fifth. “This is imperfect, but recognizable,” he said, writing the syllables beneath each note, then tilting his arm so that Ángel could see it better.

  Ángel studied it, brows drawing together. The rhythm was confounding, the sequence of pitches tricky. No wonder the Otherworld had made no effort to teach humans their language, if it was all like this.

  Experimentally, he sang, “Daa da daa-a-aa da dah da daa.”

  “You are charming,” said Oberon.

  “I— What?” The momentary ease between them vanished; Ángel looked up at Oberon, his face flushing. Good God, he was singing the envoy’s name like a child learning a nursery rhyme. “I’m not. I wasn’t trying to—”

  “I know you weren’t trying.”

  Alarmed, Ángel scootched away, putting a few feet between them.

  They sat in silence for a while, Ángel trying not to squirm with embarrassment, and then Oberon said, “You deliberately antagonize Chandler.”

  Ángel snorted. Maybe Oberon, like himself, wanted something neutral to talk about. “What, you’re not worried that Chandler’s going to fall in love with my smiles?”

  “Somehow, no,” said the envoy, and Ángel grinned.

  “No, she finds me resistible,” he agreed. “Even though she strip-searched me.”

  “She strip-searched you?”

  “Uh,” said Ángel, wishing he hadn’t mentioned nakedness. “Yeah, when I first came. Not on your orders?”

  Oberon gave a soft snort. “No. I am hardly so blind to my advantage.”

  Did that mean what Ángel thought it meant? “I don’t really get the distinction,” he said. “With the cameras in my room, you can watch me undress any time.”

  “The distinction is obvious,” said Oberon. “The distinction between watching and searching is as clear in your language as in mine. The first implies enjoyment and appreciation, the second something hidden, and therefore suspicion of wrongdoing.”

  “There is no distinction if I’m not a willing participant in either the watching or the searching. It’s disturbing to know I have cameras on me when I should be alone.”

  “Why should you be alone?”

  “I can’t believe you don’t understand this,” Ángel grumbled.

  Giving up, he crossed his arms on his knees, rested his forehead on his arms. Beside him, Oberon stretched his legs, leaned his head back against the wall, and sighed.

  Ángel discovered something, in the quiet minutes that followed.

  If he didn’t look at Oberon—if he just breathed his air, his warm smell, and listened to his rich voice—Oberon was attractive. He was always beautiful, in an achingly uncomfortable way. But if Ángel didn’t confront that terrible face, those expressionless eyes, the mouth that always seemed to be judging, mocking—Oberon was . . .

  After a moment, Ángel cleared his throat. “Do they make you do this often? Come down to the cellar?”

  “A few times a year, when there are people about.”

  “Alone, usually?”

  “Yes.”

  “I asked the DOR agent who brought me if you liked living out here all by yourself. He didn’t really answer me.”

  “I hate it.” Oberon’s face was blank, but his voice was sad. Resigned. “When I first came I lived in a condo near Candler Park, in Atlanta, and I liked that much better. I lived alone, with security of course, but I could look out the windows and see people on the street. Going about their lives. And there were trees. But the protests in the street grew and grew, and the DOR agents hated being so close to me. And then I got shot. So when this place became available they moved me here, where I never see anyone.”

  “And there aren’t any trees,” Ángel realized. “You’re in the middle of miles of forests, but they cut down all the trees.”

  “Security.” Oberon rubbed his thigh absently, perhaps touching the scar from his bullet wound; the loose fabric of his pants rustled softly against his skin. “There is a small Japanese maple on the terrace. It is a very good tree.” His face was still, aloof, but his voice was sorrowful. “We underestimated the degree of resistance to my being here,” admitted Oberon. “When I first came, I read about elves, and watched movies, trying to understand what humans think of us. All the movies about beings from other worlds. Something Wicked This Way Comes. Nightmare on Elm Street. The Thing.”

  “One of my favorites,” murmured Ángel into his folded arms.

  “Yes?” said Oberon. “Brave lit
tle humans menaced by a horrible monster. Somehow it took me a long time to realize that The Thing is me.” His voice resonated bafflement. “And in the legends, we lie and steal children and lure men to their deaths. Still, I thought it would be obvious, as time went on, that I am not a violent predator masquerading as a man. And the nickname Oberon seemed encouraging. Until I read the play.”

  “Not a Midsummer Night’s Dream fan?”

  “He drugs his wife to humiliate her, because she doesn’t obey him.”

  Good point. “Uh,” said Ángel. “I guess we think your morality is different from ours.”

  Oberon only sighed.

  Maybe Oberon was just lonely. Maybe he wasn’t angry, demanding, or critical. He was just desperately alone.

  Ángel . . . sort of wanted to touch him.

  It was crazy—Oberon was not human, for God’s sake, not a man. But why should that matter so much? Had he been brainwashed by all those monster movies? Is that what Oberon was trying to tell him?

  “Brave little humans menaced by a horrible monster.”

  Was it so wrong, to want to comfort a fellow creature?

  Stop kidding yourself. Oberon had the body of an Olympic gymnast and smelled like an unholy combination of freshly baked gingerbread and sweat, and if he wasn’t also terrifying, if he wasn’t also not human, he’d be fuckable as hell. Was comfort really what Ángel wanted to give him?

  Maybe comfort was what Oberon wanted, though. Not sex at all. Maybe that was just Ángel’s deviance.

  God, Oberon smelled good. He closed his eyes and took in the spicy odor that rose from Oberon’s body. He felt light-headed and sensual, and he wondered if Oberon’s scent was acting on him like a drug. That would explain why he was tempted to reach out, right now, and touch Oberon’s arm. Oberon was fully clothed. Ángel wouldn’t have to touch his skin at all; he could wrap a hand around the powerful bicep, damp with sweat.

  And then he remembered the way it had felt, the one time Oberon’s skin had touched his—different, different—and he shivered, and his cock throbbed.

  “I don’t think most humans think of you that way,” he said. But Oberon didn’t reply, and Ángel knew it was inadequate, given how he had reacted when Oberon had touched him.