“How do you send stuff back to the Otherworld?” asked Ángel one day. “Music, and your notes and things? I thought the veil was one-way only.”

“That is a simplification,” said Oberon. “There are libraries of books on the veil, universities of scholars who study it. I am not a scholar, but I understand that it takes a huge amount of energy for something to pass through the veil. Exponentially more energy to pass from this side to the Otherworld, than from the Otherworld to this side. But either way, it is very difficult. So I am alone here.” He gestured toward the rose bush by the window. “Except for that plant, which is an Otherworld plant. It is full of magic—its magic ceaselessly draws it toward home, through the veil. So I use a spell to put music and my notes and my ideas into the flowers, and it passes them through.”

Ángel hesitantly examined the rose bush. In its large ceramic pot, it was not a particularly graceful plant: sturdy stems bristling with hooked thorns, shiny dark-green leaves. It bore flowers in all stages of development—tight buds, flowers that were just opened, perfectly formed flowers that were blown wide, all silver-white, almost sparkling. “It’s magic?” he asked. “If I touch it, will it suck me through?”

“No. Neither you nor I can go through.”

Ángel touched a flower with a fingertip, and the whole rose bush seemed to tremble. “And they can, like, read the roses, there?”

“That flower holds Bach’s Suite number 1 in G Major, played by Johannes Moser,” said Oberon. “Perhaps they will feel your touch too.” Ángel snatched his hand away. “The entire experience is there. I put my notes in this one—” Oberon indicated a different flower “—so that they can listen to the music without my interpretation.”

“Is that something that you are born knowing how to do?”

“Oh, no, I studied. I am not a naturally gifted spell-caster—I had to learn. And also, one person doing magic alone can do very little. Great spell-casters work together; they dance together, and their magic combines, and becomes stronger than anything any one spell-caster could ever do. Because I am alone, I am weak in magic.” He touched the rose. “But the plant helps.”

Ángel pictured groups of dancing fae, creating magics. He had read about things like that, in folktales: faerie rings, spells.

To help Ángel pass the time, Lily began to bring him library books with her weekly shopping: biographies, mysteries, poetry, romance novels, whatever was new. Ángel read them all and begged for more. He asked for fewer romances—not because he didn’t like them, necessarily, but because he got through them too quickly. Plus some of them were pretty sexy, and his libido didn’t need the encouragement. Dense and slow was better. Nonfiction. Classics. Tolstoy.