by Jenya Keefe
And then, eight years ago, another tree had begun to glow: a crepe myrtle on the Georgia Tech campus. And an elf-lord had stepped from its branches. Alone, naked but for blush-colored crepe myrtle blossoms, and the veil of his long hair.
The elf-lord had been arrested by freaked-out campus police before the DOR had swooped in and established him in a new position: cultural envoy. Since then, Ángel had seen pictures of him on the internet and in magazines. He was tall, humanoid, fluent in English. He was a musician. He said he was a scholar. He only wanted to live on Earth and exchange information. He sometimes gave concerts and little talks about the Otherworld, or at least he used to; Ángel couldn’t remember the last one. He was pretty sure that he’d consulted with the scholars who were trying to understand the gifts that had been sent. For a while he had been a frequent guest at the White House. He’d once played a piano recital at a state dinner for the British Prime Minister and his family. Chopin.
Ángel stared out at the strange landscape beneath him. “If he’s lonely,” he persisted, “why doesn’t another elf come through to be with him? Or why doesn’t he just go back home?”
“The veil doesn’t work that way. Well—we don’t actually know how it works. But he says no one else can come through. It was just that one time.”
“And you believe him? Maybe there are other elves in, like, Africa, or China, and we just don’t know about it.”
“We would know,” said Jeremy.
Ángel wasn’t convinced. The elves were tricksters—everyone said so. It was in supermarket tabloids and Facebook memes, in newspaper editorials and Twitter posts. People discussed “the alien problem” on Fox News and MSNBC. Some were terrified that the envoy was luring humanity into a false sense of security with his apparently harmless ways, the harbinger of a magical invasion. In eight years the invasion had failed to materialize, though. As far as Ángel knew, the envoy was nothing but a piano player.
The only other thing Ángel really knew about the cultural envoy from the Otherworld was that he always seemed to wear exactly the same outfit: crisp black button-down shirts tucked into tailored black pants, polished black leather shoes. “Like he’s trying to be as boring as possible,” Ángel’s best friend Marissa had said. “Like an elf-lord could ever blend in.”
Down below the helicopter’s curved window, an endless deserted vista of mountains flowed by under a sunlit blue sky. He had assumed that the envoy to the Otherworld lived in or near the Department of Otherworld Relations headquarters in Atlanta, so he had been surprised, this morning, when the DOR jet had taken him nonstop from Miami to Missoula, Montana. From there they’d boarded this helicopter and flown north. They were now somewhere up near Canada, and Ángel couldn’t have felt farther from home if they’d been on the moon.
There was nothing down there. Nothing but huge mountains and deep valleys and cliffs and rocks and trees, and streams like shining steel guitar strings, and occasional narrow, winding roads with no cars on them.
Who knew there were parts of the country that were this remote? Ángel shivered and wondered if it ever snowed up here. Did the envoy from the Otherworld like it? Did the Otherworld have mountains? Did it snow there?
“Look up ahead,” said Agent Jeremy’s voice in his headset, and Ángel followed his pointing finger to see a large grassy hill in a valley, cleared of trees, with a tall wall around it and a large pink house in the middle.
The DOR agent said, “The house was built by a software tycoon in the nineties. I guess he thought it was picturesque up here. Didn’t take long before he realized he didn’t want to live in the middle of nowhere after all, and moved back to California. He donated it and all its furnishings to the DOR.”
“Does the envoy like living in the middle of nowhere?” asked Ángel.
“It’s very secure,” said Jeremy. “You’re one of about twenty people in the world who knows where the envoy lives. The locals think a reclusive novelist lives here. If you tell anyone, we will be annoyed.”
“Oh.”
As they got closer, it became clear that the house was in fact a mansion, very ornate, faced with some sort of gleaming salmon-colored stone, with white fluted columns, round-topped windows, and curving balconies. Ángel’s mind groped through the lessons of a half-forgotten undergraduate architecture class, and came up with “plantation/rococo” to describe the style.
The mansion was encircled by a rolling lawn, late-summer brown, which was protected by a high spike-topped cinder block wall, which was surrounded by miles and miles and miles of dense forest, dark green under aching blue skies. In the distance stood ranks of purple-and-white mountains. The helicopter lowered itself toward a concrete pad just outside the wall, where an octagonal pink mini-mansion guarded the gates. “The security detail lives here at the gatehouse,” said the DOR agent. “No one lives in the main house except Oberon, and now you. Nearest town is Stahlberg, about twenty-five miles away.”
“Is he really called Oberon? I thought that was made up by the press.”
“Oh no, that’s his name.”
Ángel glanced at Jeremy, eyebrows raised. “Yeah? ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows’ Oberon?”
“No, of course not. No one can actually pronounce his real name. He accepts ‘Oberon’ as a reasonable substitute. Here you go.”
The helicopter touched down. Ángel took off the headset, gathered up his backpack and guitar, and hopped down onto the concrete pad, instinctively cowering away from the deafening concussion of the still-spinning rotors. He glanced back through his blowing hair and saw that the DOR agent had not followed him.
Ángel stood alone as the helicopter leaped skyward. Agent Jeremy gave him a little wave. Ángel swallowed, his mouth dry, watching the helicopter dwindle into the distance.
He walked across the grass to the gatehouse. Waiting there was a young woman in a professional-looking navy pantsuit. She was tall and straight, and carried herself with a competent air that spoke of the military. Her black hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail. She did not smile when she greeted him.
“Ángel Cruz. I’m Chandler Evanston of the DOR, chief of the envoy’s security. Please put your bags, shoes, and the contents of your pockets in this bin, and step through the metal detector.”
Evanston oversaw a staff of navy-suited goons who apparently weren’t content to let the metal detector do its job. They searched his backpack and guitar case, poking a sort of periscope inside the instrument’s sound hole to view its interior. Ángel thought that was funny until they turned their attention to him, patting him down with alarming thoroughness, checking inside his mouth, running fingers through his hair and behind his ears, and impersonally exploring his crotch through his jeans. When they discovered his cell phone tucked into his sock, the chief of security frowned. “You were told no computers.”
“It’s just my phone,” he protested.
“No computers.” She pocketed it. “Did you disobey instructions in any other way?”
“Will I get that back?”
“No,” she said, glaring at him. “Strip.”
“What?”
“Strip, or we’ll strip you.”
He stripped. A goon rotated him by the shoulders and bent him over a table. “Gonna do a cavity search, guapo?” asked Ángel, his voice high and trembling despite his bravado. “Hope you got some lube.”
The goon let go without probing further. “He’s clean.”
“That wouldn’t have been necessary if you hadn’t demonstrated your willingness to disobey instructions,” said Evanston, handing him his clothes.
“So it was punishment, not security,” gritted Ángel, still shaking as he pulled his jeans up over his hips. “Got it.”
“I don’t think you do,” she said. “Mr. Cruz, have a look at this.”
He pulled his T-shirt over his head as she turned on a TV. She showed him footage of a large crowd of angry people, assembled in front of a bank of skyscrapers. There must have been five
hundred people there, chanting angrily but incomprehensibly, waving homemade magic-marker signs that said things like SAVE OUR SPECIES and HUMANS FIRST.
“This was last week,” said Evanston. “On the eighth anniversary of Oberon’s arrival. Chicago.” She pushed a button on the remote. “This one’s in Dallas.” A protester waved a sign that said DEATH TO MONSTERS.
“Las Vegas.” The signs read GOD HATES ELVES and KILL THE ELF-LORD. A brick sailed over the heads of an array of cops and bounced impotently off the gleaming surface of the Luxor Casino.
“Since Oberon’s arrival eight years ago, there have been thirteen credible assassination attempts,” continued Evanston. “He has been poisoned, shot at, and targeted by explosive-bearing drones. He has been injured four times, once quite seriously. Just last April a bullet missed his head by about six inches when he was in New York for a UN meeting.”
“Right,” said Ángel, tugging his hair out from the collar of his shirt. “That’s really scary. But it doesn’t have anything to do with me. I didn’t seek out this position. He asked for me to come.”
“I know,” she said. “He was determined to bring you here. I advised against it. My job is to keep him safe. I do that by controlling every aspect of his environment, and that includes you.”
“Well, good to know where I stand,” sneered Ángel. “Can I have my phone back?”
“No. You cannot have your phone back. From now on, any communication you make with anyone outside this estate will go through me.”
“But—”
“No buts. You signed a contract in which you agreed to submit to any and all measures deemed appropriate by the envoy’s security staff. Learn to live with it, Mr. Cruz. And don’t lie to me again—you’ll find I don’t like liars. Gather your stuff and my men will take you up to the house. Oberon is waiting for you.”
Two of the goons walked with him out across the dry lawn toward the house. They were brawny and fit in their navy suits. They might be carrying guns.
In the distance, at the top of the hill, the tall form of the cultural envoy from the Otherworld stood silhouetted against the sky, his black clothes and famous white-and-green-streaked hair fluttering a little in the breeze. Ángel took a long, shuddering breath of cool mountain air.
The goons exchanged a glance and stopped. Ángel stopped with them.
“Go on,” said one of them, waving him on.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Oberon will take care of you,” said the same goon, with fake heartiness. He waved a hand in greeting to the distant envoy. “Go on. Call us if you need anything.”
Ángel swallowed and kept walking.
Behind him, he heard the other goon mutter, “Better him than me.”
“Me too. Damn, it gives me the willies.”
“Fuck me,” whispered Ángel.
He was on. He could do this. He forced his feet to move, kept his chin high, his shoulders loose. Pretended he was stepping onto a stage. Giving a performance. He looked taller when he was performing.
He met his audience on the brow of the hill.
The elf-lord said, “Good afternoon, Ángel Cruz. Welcome to my home. I am Oberon. Am I pronouncing your name correctly?”
“Yes,” said Ángel. No sound came out. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Yes.”
“May I carry your guitar?” The elf extended a languid hand.
“Oh. Yes, thanks.” Ángel was very careful not to touch Oberon as he gave him the guitar case.
Side by side, they walked back toward the pink mansion.
He felt like a rabbit taking a stroll with an Alaskan malamute. His blood was rushing with adrenaline, his mouth dry, heart thumping. Sweat pooled in the small of his back, ran coldly down his temples to his jaw. He had to force himself to take each step forward, to not break and flee back to the gatehouse, to beg Chandler Evanston and the goons to protect him.
Just stay cool, Ángel.
He kept his eyes forward, but examined Oberon with his peripheral vision.
In photographs—and on the internet, and on the cover of his bestselling album Fae Seasonal Song-Cycles—the cultural envoy from the Otherworld appeared, essentially, to be a man: a strange man, with a serious, high-boned face. A tall and slim man, with large eyes, pale skin and hair, clad in black. Accounts of his first appearance from the tree said he’d had long hair, but it was short in every picture Ángel had ever seen. He seemed odd, not normal, but not necessarily inhuman.
In person?
He was utterly, utterly inhuman. He didn’t look or sound or smell human. He was white and weird and frighteningly beautiful, more beautiful than any human. Now he glanced at Ángel, catching him studying him, and Ángel flinched, heart in his throat.
“This estate is very large,” Oberon said. “You will be comfortable here.”
His voice was deep, a velvety bass-baritone. It sounded inhuman too, as if the organ from which it emerged were different from a man’s larynx. He spoke slowly, but with an unimpeachable North American accent, more neutral than Ángel’s own Cuban-inflected English. His expression didn’t change as he spoke: it was impossible to imagine what thoughts or emotions were happening behind his shining green eyes. The curve of his wide mouth looked contemptuous. Or cruel.
He was a walking Uncanny Valley—almost human, but every tiny difference was just different enough to make Ángel’s scalp prickle.
What the fuck have I done? How am I going to live with this thing for four years?
They crossed a broad tiled patio, past an out-of-commission fountain of frolicking dolphins, toward the house’s porticoed front entrance. The house was sided in big sheets of pink-veined marble, like raw pork belly. It must have been ruinously expensive to ship all that stone up here. Above each roman-arched window was a circular white frieze, featuring a flying cupid in gilded bas-relief; above the door was a fan-shaped stained-glass window depicting a baroque angel, clothed only in her pink hair and surrounded by purple morning-glory flowers. Ángel mouthed a silent Wow.
They approached the house, Oberon moving with inhuman grace, turning a simple walk into the lazy stalk of a hunting cat, boneless and deadly. The big door was opened, as they approached, by a petite woman wearing jeans and an embroidered shirt. “Ángel Cruz,” said the envoy, “may I introduce Lily Va. She does the cooking and cleaning for us.” He gave her Ángel’s guitar.
She was human, middle-aged, Asian. Short and sturdy, a bit of silver in her black ponytail. He wanted to stare at her all day, rather than look at Oberon. She said, “I’m here every day. Let me know if there’s anything you need,” and reached for Ángel’s backpack.
He reluctantly surrendered it to her. “Thanks,” he said. “I will. Um, do you live here too?”
“No, sir, I live at the gatehouse. My husband works for the security team.”
“Oh, please don’t call me sir.”
Oberon said, “Tell Lily your food preferences, or if there is anything you don’t eat.”
Ángel nodded. Oberon and Lily stared at him expectantly. “Oh. Now? Um, no allergies. I don’t really like zucchini. Or veal, veal is gross. That’s all.”
“Good,” said Oberon. “Come, I’ll give you a tour of the house.”
He led the way, and Ángel followed, casting a longing glance back at Lily. She nodded at him gravely.
The house was decorated within an inch of its life in shades of pink, purple, and turquoise. The living room had a sectional sofa of dark-pink leather like sunburned skin. The sofa curved around a fieldstone fireplace large enough to roast an ox. A gigantic mural of mermaids and seahorses shone on the opposite wall. The dining room featured lavender paneling, a white lacquer and gilt table that seated twenty, and a mirrored chandelier the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. “I usually eat in the kitchen,” said Oberon.
The more Ángel saw of the big house, the more unreal it seemed. He associated elves with nature—they liked woods and forests and . . . natural fibers. Right? Surely the
creatures that inspired everyone from Spenser to Tolkien wouldn’t live in this glossy kitsch mansion?
“Did you decorate?” he ventured.
“No, these are the original furnishings. I have changed almost nothing. It seems rather ornate to me. Do you agree?” Oberon turned to Ángel so suddenly that he nearly startled.
“It’s a little, yes,” he stammered.
“Here is the music room. I know you are a musician.” Oberon gestured with a liquid hand around the small, surprisingly cozy room with a piano, an electric organ, and several other instruments. “It has the best acoustics in the house. It’s a good place to play or sing. And my office is through here.”
The office was someone’s dream of manly power: dark wood paneling, a huge mahogany desk like an altar, flanked by big burgundy leather wingback armchairs.
One object stood out: a big plain ceramic pot by the window, in which grew a plant: glossy dark-green leaves, sturdy thorny stems bearing silver-white roses. Ángel had never seen a rose bush indoors.
“That didn’t come with the house,” he guessed.
“No, the roses came from home. I spend most of my days here in the office. You’re welcome to join me anytime.”
Ángel risked a sidelong glance at the envoy’s inscrutable face. God. He imagined himself hanging out here while Oberon worked, and suppressed a shiver.
Oberon must have seen it. “You’re tired,” he said. “I’ll show you your room; you can rest before dinner.”
To be alone, away from the envoy, for a little while. The idea almost made Ángel light-headed with relief. “That would be nice.”
“First, though, you must see the security system.” Oberon crossed to a panel of monitors built into the wall. “Most rooms have one of these terminals,” he said, pushing a button. A live video image of the living room appeared: empty fireplace, pink sofa. “Push this to scroll through the feeds.” He flipped through images: the gym, the dining room, the music room, all empty. The kitchen showed glittery granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances, and Lily, slicing vegetables. The office showed Ángel and Oberon.
