The Musician and the Monster by Jenya Keefe

Author:Jenya Keefe [Keefe, Jenya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2019-09-29T18:30:00+00:00

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.

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