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.”