Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers: Magical Tales of Love and Seduction

A Wife of Acorn, Leaf, and Rain Dave Smeds

JORDAN WELLES WAITED IN his study, glad to spend a Monday at the mansion. The paneled walls and heavy bookcases insulated him, holding at bay the purposelessness that clutched at him at work. Downtown was a universe away. Among the century-old rooms, the vast garden, and the wooded acres stretching toward the shore, he could concentrate on the goal that surmounted all others.

Here, the Outsider could visit, as he could not in the city, with all its metal and trappings not of nature.

Jordan stared down into the box at the items he had placed within it. A negligée. An evening dress. High-heeled shoes. A makeup kit. A diary with its lock removed. He resisted the temptation to turn the box over and restore the contents to their places around the house. Though he would be getting everything back within a few days, it hurt to be deprived of these mementos.

He was adding articles to the accumulation when the housekeeper appeared in the open doorway.

“Your visitor has arrived,” she said. A faint twitch of her mouth hinted at the disapproval he knew she must be feeling.

“Very good, Mrs. Cory. I’ll meet with him here.”

She vanished, reappearing only briefly as she escorted the guest to the room.

The Outsider was taller than Jordan, as his kind often were, and slim to the point of emaciation. Fair-skinned and fair-haired, he paradoxically conveyed the impression he was standing in shadow. A human inexperienced in the effects of the glamour might have, after the fact, remembered him with the aspect of a Sicilian or Spaniard. A Mediterranean teenager, Jordan thought, body hair atypically sparse, with a distinct flavor of androgyny.

The visitor shrank away from the metal lamp at the end of Jordan’s desk. He tucked his head farther beneath the hood of his robes and hid his hands within the sleeves, retreating from the hostile emanations of the house, encasing himself in layers of chestnut and sorrel.

“You’ve found someone for the job?” asked Jordan.

“Indeed.”

Jordan had already learned his guest was a creature of few words. That was just as well, given the unnerving tendency of his speech to echo. All that mattered was that he could deliver what he had been asked to acquire.

“She’ll need these,” Jordan said, gesturing at the box on his desk. He also picked up a thick manila folder and extended it, declining to make contact as the material slid from his grip.

The Outsider glanced in the folder. Photos of Véronique flashed momentarily into view. He grunted approval at the thick sheaf of biographical notes.

“I’d like to add something else,” Jordan stated. “Do you have access to a VCR? Can you operate one?”

The being reacted with distaste. “We study all the magicks of your world, as best we can. A way can be found.”

“Tapes will make the task easier. They’ll provide a means to study physical mannerisms, speech patterns, and so forth.”

“If you wish, we will use them.”

Jordan opened a drawer and added the half-dozen videocassettes he found there to the box. He held up the final one, unmarked save for a blue sticker. “This one’s especially important.”

Jordan paused, then let the cassette settle into the box. He had promised Véronique he would never let anyone see that recording. It was for him, for those times when Véronique couldn’t be with him, and occasionally for them to view together. He grimaced at the thought of strange pairs of eyes poring over its images. Did Outsiders feel voyeuristic delight? What of any human that might be brought in to assist in the operation of the machinery?

The visitor lifted the box. He cradled it against his body, apparently able to tolerate the traces of metal therein — just a few tiny screws in the cassettes. “These will help, but the dreams are the key,” he said.

“She can do this, can’t she?” Jordan asked, almost hoping to be told otherwise.

The other nodded. Taking off his glove, he held out his hand. The index finger grew indistinct. When it came back in focus, it had become thicker and was no longer the same length as the middle digit. It strongly resembled Jordan’s own.

The transformation lasted a few moments, then reverted back. The Outsider swayed, blinked, and caught his breath.

“That much I can do with but a smattering of the talent. The one I have arranged to bring is rich in the skills and will have the time needed to prepare herself. A pooka could not do better.”

“She’ll have to hold the shape for hours at a time,” Jordan warned. “As much as half a day.”

“She can. Depending on how you dream.”

“My dreams have been of nothing but Véronique.”

“Then your companion will be Véronique, for as long as you wish her to be.”

The visitor restored his glove, turned, and left. Jordan stayed where he was until the being was fully gone, beyond the ability to call him back. During that vigil he wondered if Véronique, wherever her spirit might be, would forgive him.

The Outsider reappeared on Friday at twilight, a juncture his kind seemed to favor. Jordan had dismissed Mrs. Cory and the other servants, leaving no human witnesses to the arrival of she who was to be his companion.

The guest recommended the lights be dimmed. Jordan agreed, and in stepped … Véronique.

The subdued illumination almost preserved the illusion. She was Véronique’s height. The body silhouette matched. The clothes and cosmetics were Véronique’s own. She would have fooled anyone casually acquainted with Jordan’s late wife, but he caught the subtle differences. The woman’s skin contained a pallid undertone at odds with Véronique’s robust complexion. She wore no jewelry. Her facial features were slightly elongated, the collarbones overly delicate. His wife’s pupils had rarely displayed such a deep, black-pool intensity.

But the attempt was as good as he had been promised, and he knew it had the potential to improve.

The male — was it male? — of the pair held out the contract. Jordan had already signed other documents, but until he added this one, the woman standing in front of him was still just a candidate, as was he to her.

Jordan signed.

The male rolled up the parchment in the manner of a scroll and slipped it into a pouch. “Follow my instructions carefully.” He produced a cord of hand-woven hemp and a long thorn of dark wood. “Tie one end of the rope to her wrist. Tie the other end to yours. Prick her finger and drip three drops of blood along the leash. Do the same with your own blood. Then recite aloud, ‘You are mine.’”

“Is all that really necessary?” Jordan asked.

“She cannot do as you require until the ritual is fulfilled.”

“I have to be sure it’s what she wants,” Jordan said.

The Outsider glanced at his companion, who at last gave up her silence.

“I undertake this bond of my own will.”

Her voice mimicked Veronique’s. The pitch was high and ethereal, the diction more formal than anything Jordan’s wife would ever have used, but the similarities raised hair on the nape of the widower’s neck.

“Very well,” Jordan replied. “But your word is enough as far as I’m concerned. That and your continuing service.” He recalled stories he had heard of such ceremonies, but in those, the cord had been tied around the woman’s neck, or her waist. In Bangkok or Saudi Arabia or Japan. This was better, but still enough to bother him, no matter how he believed in the integrity of his own motives.

“The bond will help me,” she explained. “I cannot endure this place long without it.”

“It is our way,” the male added.

Ultimately Jordan did as he was asked, proceeding methodically, checking her reaction throughout. To his astonishment, no sooner had he uttered the final words than the cord vanished. He could still feel the loop over his own wrist, snug but not confining, an invisible presence that neither chafed nor tugged nor restricted his movements in any way. Unless he focused his attention, the fingers of his other hand passed right through it.

“The compulsion is upon her,” the male said. “She is yours as long as you will have her. Just as the laws of your people bind you to the terms, the laws of the Sidhe bind her. Let neither of you violate your oaths.”

Jordan considered the signature he had placed upon the contract. An oath? He had faith that he would not abuse a single clause, but it was, after all, just an arrangement of words on paper. What the elf had committed herself to seemed alarmingly complete and inviolate, like nothing extant in human culture.

“For the rest of the evening, it is best that you see her as little as possible,” added the male. “She is still only a depiction of what you want her to be.”

“I understand,” Jordan said.

“Good. My part is done. You have been generous in your remuneration. I hope that we can do business again.”

“We each had what the other needed,” Jordan said. “All ventures should be so clear-cut.” For him, it had been a bargain. The acreage he had leased out, valuable as it was to the Outsider clan as a home and refuge, would have remained undeveloped woodland for the foreseeable future. The interim presence of the elves would not diminish its worth.

The intermediary took his leave. Jordan saw him through the window as he reached the edge of the lawns and crossed into the woods. The Outsider relaxed and reached up to clutch a handful of pine needles and shower his head with them. They briefly assembled into the shape of a crown.

Alone with the woman — strange, but he found it difficult to refer to her as an Outsider — Jordan shuffled uneasily from foot to foot, trying to think of what to say.

“You should try to sleep, my lord,” she said.

“It’s very early.”

“Then go to bed. Read. Let yourself be lulled. I will keep vigil, and when you do sleep, I will be ready.”

When he had settled into bed, she entered the room in the negligée from the box and sat down in the Edwardian parlor chair beside his bed. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, but he resisted staring and managed not to converse with her.

He thought it would be easier to ignore her once the lights were out, but he was wrong. He could hear her breathing, and it was a measured whisper lacking Véronique’s punctuated, often sharp, nighttime inhalations. And in the darkness he was aware of her scent. Essences of woodlands, fallen leaves, freshwater streams, wild grasses.

The middle of the night came and went, bringing drowsiness, but not enough to claim him. Or had he dozed, just for a moment?

The woman left the chair and joined him in the king-sized, four-poster bed. His heart thundered against his sternum. She curled up on her left side, taking a moment to reach out and run the back of her hand gently down his neck. A quintessential Véronique gesture.

Suddenly, he regained the confidence that the plan would work. He lay quietly, believing now that sleep would come, and with it the dreams they both required.

In the morning, Véronique was beside him. No more pale undertone. No more whiff of forest. Hair tousled, late to rouse, she snuggled close. Her breasts were hot where they pressed against his ribs, while her toes exhibited their trademark clamminess and chill despite long hours deep beneath the blankets. She, and everything about her, was just as he remembered.

Tears welled up and poured down his face, a flood withheld since the funeral.

She stirred and opened her eyes. Reaching out, she captured a droplet on her manicured fingernail and murmured, “No, no, no, my love. I’m here.” She held him tight, kissing his shoulder.

He sobbed audibly. It was Véronique’s voice, down to the last nuance.

Mrs. Cory, to her credit, hid any ambivalence or other emotion she may have felt as Jordan and Véronique gathered on the sun deck for breakfast. The cook, however, remained entrenched in the kitchen, foregoing his customary hello.

The wind teased the waves in the distance. Small fishing boats drifted offshore. Jordan had paid well to own such a view as this.

He had chosen to eat outdoors partly because he believed the elf would be more comfortable here, within reach of oak boughs and immersed in the fragrance of the trumpet vines in the railing. Véronique herself might have preferred the dining nook now that summer was being lured south.

Or perhaps not. The weather had been brisk the morning of his wife’s death, and that had not kept them from enjoying the air as they lingered, post-coitally, over coffee and pastries.

This would do as a start. They were neither post-coital nor preparing to catch separate flights from JFK, she aboard an aircraft with a puncture in a hydraulic line. Instead, it was a Saturday, and they could reach for the sort of quiet, insular day he might have had with the real Véronique, had she never boarded that jet.

After the meal, they strolled through the woods east of the mansion. Along the way she slid her hand into his, and he let it stay — the first extended contact he had permitted since the embrace when she had awakened. Again, Jordan had chosen a setting he felt would appeal to the elf, but she gave no hint of relief to be out from within the unliving walls of the residence with all its electrical fields, any more than she had seemed distressed while inside. She addressed herself to their surroundings the way a human would, such as when a squirrel pranced exuberantly up a tree trunk, kindling the smile that had won his heart the first time he had ever seen Véronique.

She filled the excursion with conversation, relating the news she had read in the morning paper as Véronique had a tendency to do. Had she taken that detail of character from his dreams? He hadn’t realized how much the lack of his wife’s chatter had isolated him. After the funeral, as before, the only parts of the paper he read were the business and sports sections, giving him at best a workaholic’s outline of happenings in society at large.

In the afternoon, they climbed into the limousine for a ride along the South Fork to tour wineries. The chauffeur jumped visibly as she called him by name, and was perhaps less attentive to his driving than he might have been, but Jordan forgave him that.

At the third tasting room they selected an expensive late-harvest Riesling. Véronique usually preferred dry whites and reds with a strong hint of the barrel atop the fruitiness, but he knew she would have liked the vintage. His companion drank selectively so as not to become so sated she lost the keenness of taste. Just like Véronique, and unlike elves, who he had heard were gluttonous in regard to alcohol. She wore gloves to avoid touching the metal of the car, but even those were Véronique’s own, bought in Paris two winters past.

The divergences mattered less and less as the hours wore on. Just before dinner, a call from his brother in Hawaii drew him from the room. It tortured him to leave her.

“I can’t tell you what this means to me,” he said as they sat down to the meal.

She didn’t reply. He would not have needed to make such a declaration to the former Véronique. He realized he was holding back, reminding himself that this was illusion.

No more. He had called her back from the dead. By now, it was the airplane crash, the funeral, the grieving that seemed unreal.

“Come to bed,” she murmured after the main course. “We can have dessert there.”

He knew that sparkle in her eyes. It had been bright in courtship and when they were newlyweds. It had not faded.

She was assertive and eager, quickly burning away his nervousness. He knew this body. He was conditioned to respond to it. Just past the brink of middle age, sex was the best he had ever known it to be, because unlike the arrogant young buck he had once been, he knew how to communicate what would gratify him most, and could sense what was wanted in exchange. Knowledge of a partner enriched the passion.

That was why no one but Véronique would do, why in their years together he had not succumbed to adultery, and he a wealthy man who could have starlets and models and golddiggers by the mattressful.

She tasted like Véronique: salt and honey. Slightly on the sweet side the way she was at times. She whimpered in that familiar, inspiring way. Regaining her breath after her first orgasm, she climbed atop him and straddled his face, putting her own mouth to work even as she offered him the chance to bring her to a second peak.

They licked simultaneously, gently and languorously teasing each other to desperation. Sometimes she strained as she engulfed him, as if she wanted to have it all. He had never minded the inability. No other cheeks nor tongue nor lips had ever understood so instinctively what he liked, and the joy she took from it was evident from the sweet liquor coating his own tongue.

When at last she rolled, sighing, onto her back and spread her legs to let him clamber between, he hesitated, wondering if she would feel the same inside as what he knew. Then he breached her, and within her heat and slickness found a homecoming.

He had dreamed vividly of this, night after night, grief fueling the intensity of the imagery. Why should he doubt that this, of all things, would be anything other than what he wanted?

“Don’t ever leave,” he whispered. Though spent, he was still unwithered inside her.

She squeezed back. With her arms as well. “I’m here, my love. I’m here.”

Here. At least until he could bear to let her go.

The clock glowed 3:12 when Jordan suddenly woke. Reaching out, he found the sheets warm beside him, rich with the lingering bouquet of lovemaking, but vacant. No sounds leaked out of the master bathroom, nor any other room in the house.

He rose and went to the French doors that led to the balcony, and pulled aside the draperies. There she was — on the lawn. Her silhouette wavered, occasionally looking like Véronique, other times taking on a foreign, even unnatural, configuration. Arms too thin, fingers too splayed, neck too long. Too androgynous, as well, though he tried not to think about that.

Transformed, she moved under the trees to the spot where the other elf — the prince? — had fashioned his crown of pine needles. The tree’s lowest branch seemed to have reshaped itself since Jordan had last noticed it. It offered the visitor a broad, hammocklike curve, within which she tucked herself and lay her head back, as if exhausted.

She would be back, he told himself. Before dawn, she would return, join him beneath the covers, and peer into his dreams.

He sensed the loop around his wrist. He could tug, and no doubt she would be compelled to join him immediately. The temptation flared, putting a shiver into his lower arm.

Carefully he lay down on the bed, closed his eyes, and tried to be content with what he had.

In the morning, he attempted to forget what he had witnessed in the night. It only distracted him from the quest at hand — to make the most of a resurrection. There were so many little things he wanted to get right, now that he had the chance.

They made love again before breakfast, contorting the sheets until they came loose and nearly slipped from the mattress. She was sleepy and affectionate, per expectations, slow to climax but radiant when it happened.

Breakfast came, and lunch, and then he found himself tied up on the phone.

“We can’t stall on this any longer,” Jordan insisted to his VP of Finance. “I say interest rates are going up. They’ll be up for the rest of the year. Get the loan taken care of before we lose another quarter point.”

The short hand of the grandfather clock at the bottom of the stairs completed a circuit before he had convinced himself his executive agreed with him for the right reasons. He tried never to enforce his authority arbitrarily. He had no yes-men working for him.

He found Véronique in the basement gym. She was practicing yoga in a corner of the mat. Other than her location as far as possible from the weight machines and barbells, he was reminded of the many times he had found her here after one interruption or another had stolen away his attention. Even on Sundays.

Air seemed to collect behind his heart. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be gone so long.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t. I got distracted. Coleman means well, but sometimes I think he was born too rich. He doesn’t quite have the urgency of someone who had to scramble up the way I did.”

“I don’t need explanations.”

The real Véronique had seldom asked for any, either. She had her foundation work, her friends, her beautiful mansion. Her life.

“I …” He hadn’t planned this yet, but—“I think we should go to the symphony tonight.”

“Anyone we know going to be there?” she asked casually.

That struck at the heart of the matter, all without dropping out of character. “Yes,” he replied. There would inevitably be members of his circle of acquaintances at the buffet for patrons. Precisely who could not be predicted, but it would include those who knew of Véronique’s death.

“I’m looking forward to seeing them,” he added.

They arrived at a fashionable point, not too early but allowing time to mingle. Eyes turned immediately to Jordan’s companion. He realized this was inevitable. Even among ladies bedecked in finery and enhanced by everything liposuction, health clubs, and beauticians could offer, Véronique attracted more than her share of admiration.

It was not until late in the feasting that he was approached by a rotund figure in a tuxedo that, despite the expert tailoring, no longer fit.

“Ramsey,” Jordan said, offering his hand.

Ramsey’s grip was moist, his handshake cursory He leaned forward, breath heavy with Cabernet. “So, Welles, you’ve found yourself a foxwife. Been borrowing ideas from old Takahashi?” He thrust his chin toward the buffet table, where Véronique was adding a pair of strawberries to her depleted plate.

“Don’t compare me to Takahashi,” Jordan retorted, failing in his plans for a calm explanation of the elf’s presence.

Ramsey failed to suppress a locker-room chuckle. “Oh. Well, of course. He’s yakuza. They don’t think like you or me. All I meant—”

“Outsiders have rights,” Jordan said. “This is all properly done.”

“Of course, of course.” Ramsey gazed at Véronique again from the straps of her shoes to her pearl necklace — one of the few types of jewelry the elf could tolerate. Jordan suspected antebellum plantation owners had scrutinized their slave women in just such a way.

As quickly as possible, Jordan disengaged from Ramsey and escorted Véronique to their seats in the concert hall.

The musicians played as if inspired, but after the finale, Jordan had to consult his program simply to recall which compositions had been featured.

Jordan made no further arrangements to go out in public with the elf, except to places where they would be perceived as just another wealthy couple taking in the sights. This annoyed him, because it was not a restriction the real Véronique would have tolerated; she had loved socializing. The new Véronique accepted it without comment.

He forced himself to contact his office as little as possible. Monday they loitered at the mansion. Tuesday they spent aboard his yacht, visiting Shelter Island and roaming the Atlantic a bit, beyond scrutiny. Finally on Wednesday he spent three hours downtown.

The lure sank in. Thursday he returned for nearly a full day.

This was not what he had planned when he hired the surrogate, but he told himself the elf needed the respite to shrug off whatever deleterious effects the shapeshifting caused.

His own employees said nothing to him of foxwives or ghost-chasing, and they probably wouldn’t, so long as he didn’t thrust the evidence right in their faces. He knew they knew. He hadn’t told them, but gossip was unstoppable.

She was waiting when he arrived Thursday late afternoon. A kiss and hug, body against his, aroused him as reliably as ever, but he suppressed the urge to take her upstairs that very minute. They had plenty of time to indulge later, in the darkness.

“Let’s take the limo out,” he said.

“All right,” she answered. “That would be nice.”

Véronique had loved riding through the countryside with no particular destination in mind. Jordan told the chauffeur to recreate the route taken a few days before the accident.

The elf talked to him, often serving up the same sort of observations his wife had made on the original trip. Had he been dreaming of the ride last night, letting her siphon from him the raw material to mimic the past? No matter. It soothed him, as did the hand she tucked into his palm.

As they came around a bend at dusk, Jordan gazed across a pasture toward a copse of trees and made out a collection of tents. Even at this distance, he could tell none were made of synthetics. No bright colors. The fabric had been hand-woven of natural materials, the poles selected from deadfall rather than shaped industrially. A handful of fey beings stood in a ring, paying obeisance to the setting sun with raised arms and a crooning that just managed to drift into the car through the half-lowered window.

Jordan had forgotten the camp was located there. Perhaps he had not seen it on the previous excursion. Outsiders tended to be relegated, by their choice or otherwise, into the nooks and crannies of the landscape. The parcel was not unlike the one he had leased to his companion’s clan.

The tents slid out of view, but the memory of them nagged. Finally, when it was clear she was not going to comment, he asked, “Is that how you live in your world? Or do you have homes? You know, solid structures?”

“Would your wife have such knowledge?” The voice and physical mannerisms remained those of Véronique, but the elf had emerged, if only to remind him of the role she was supposed to be fulfilling.

“No. But I’m asking anyway.”

She leaned back, half-closing her eyes as if gazing over the horizon. “We dwell among the forests and meadows in abodes made of living trees and vines. Bowers for the least exalted among us, palaces for the mighty. The trees shape themselves at our command, and in return we revere and nurture them. They have a kind of sentience possessed by only a smattering of the plants in this realm. To walk beneath the leaves of my home near Cnoc na Fírinne …” Her voice faded, wistfulness stealing its vigor.

“You’d prefer to be there right now if you could,” Jordan said.

“Yes.”

“Is it true what they say, that your people were exiled?”

“The details I will not speak of. I and those forced to this side of the gateway angered our Lord and Lady, who believed our actions benefited a scheme of the drows. A year and a day we must pay our penance.”

“But you’ve been here much longer than that already.”

“Time flows differently on this side of the barrier. A century and more will pass here before we can return.”

“That’s awful,” he said emphatically. “Though from what I’ve heard, you’re capable of living to see the day.”

“We do not age once we are grown, but we are not invulnerable. There is so little in this world that sustains us, and what there is of it is dearly bought. Many of us will die before the exile is complete.”

Jordan had read of murdered elves, of suicide. In less than twenty years since the Fall, a third of the tens of thousands who had been banished had already expired, with almost no births to offset the attrition. To him, those facts had been mere statistics, of no greater significance than the number of malnutrition cases in the Third World.

As for the remark about “dearly bought,” the deprivation of the Outsiders had been something for him to exploit.

“You ask me of these matters as if they troubled you personally,” she said.

“I wanted to learn more about you.”

“Are you courting me, then?”

“No,” he said quickly. “No, of course not.”

“Good. It cannot come to fruition.”

The weather turned stormy, as good an excuse as any to sequester themselves in the mansion once more. Jordan placed the weekend before him as if it were another of his projects, concocted a goal, and set about to fulfill it.

“I want you to read aloud to me,” he announced after brunch.

“All right,” she said. “Read what?”

He deposited a large stack of paper on the coffee table. “I want to hear her words,” he said, settling beside her on the sofa.

The stack contained printouts of the archive of email Véronique had sent him over the years. There were scores of letters written during the many separations while he was off on business trips or she traveling from city to city doing her foundation work. His wife had composed them almost as ongoing journal entries, with a depth he was ashamed he seldom put into his replies on the infrequent occasions he answered her by written word. The paper version saved the elf from what were, to her, noxious energies emitted by the computer.

He had reviewed some of the text immediately after the funeral, but hearing the words in Véronique’s voice restored the full impact.

“Charles managed to uproot the entire tulip bed,” she read from a letter written while he had been in Tokyo for a week, manipulating his way past trade restrictions. “Sometimes he’s still such a puppy.”

Charles had been a strapping boxer, already elderly at the time of the note. The dog had died five years ago come Christmas week. He had been Veronique’s pet from before the marriage, but Jordan had come to love that odoriferous idiot. Yet he had barely thought of him in ages. The note, too, he had completely forgotten, along with the fact that they had always planted tulips by the south entrance, a custom buried with the animal.

“Stop,” he said.

The woman paused in midsentence.

“Read something more recent.”

She rifled through the stack and pulled out a long missive written at Easter. That letter seemed fresh. Current. Jordan relaxed onto the cushions, only then realizing that he had tightened up.

Veronique’s words should not have seemed distant, five years old or not. For them to have that quality meant that these other words, written so recently, would one day be distant as well.

Early on Sunday evening as they were engaged in the fifth long session of delving into the archives, the elf asked if they could pause.

He looked at her straight on for the first time in many hours. At some point, she had changed. A hint of darkness marred her cheeks beneath the eyes. The sheen of Véronique’s brunette locks had faded.

“You’re suffering, aren’t you?” He phrased it as a question, but it was more a statement.

“I apologize. I am failing to meet the agreement.” Her voice faltered, almost losing Véronique’s pitch and accent. “If we are to be together later tonight, it is necessary that I take a short rest.”

“Then do so,” he said. He gestured out the window, at the woods.

She rose unsteadily and made her way immediately toward the front door. Along the way, she shucked her clothing, as if even the touch of the costume of the role she was playing overwhelmed her.

Jordan’s glance roved over the familiar contours of her back, thighs, and bottom before she fled from his sight. How many times had he stared at the naked features of the body that one was modeled on? It was a sight he could never get enough of. Yet he couldn’t help but note that, in every past instance, a naked Véronique meant a Véronique approaching him. Never one running the other way.

For the next several days, Jordan attempted to follow a precise schedule. He went to the office, actively taking up matters which he had been delegating during his period of mourning. At first he felt as though he were still going through the motions, but the routine mattered. It comforted him.

He did not, however, linger overtime. He returned to the mansion before dinner each night. That was his rule. Everything in balance.

The elf met him there. Demonstrating no further stress now that she only had to maintain her human shape for a fraction of the day, she continued to be the wife he had known and loved, save that she was more cooperative, as an employee would be.

It was everything he had contracted for, and everything he had thought was necessary.

On Friday, at the close of the business day, a couple of his VPs suggested drinks at the North Star Pub. He declined, letting them go on without him. A drink sounded great, but not with the old gang. Not yet. Instead, he went alone to the bar at the Hilton.

He hadn’t gone out solo in years. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself, so he stared at the nearest television set.

His eyes glazed over while the news broadcast dragged on. He emerged from his reverie during a segment on the problems rising from an attempt to settle a clan of Outsiders in the Imperial Valley of California. Project supporters had argued that the agricultural setting would allow the elves to thrive, as well as provide them with a means of economic self-sufficiency, but the plan had failed to take into account the need of the refugees for sylvan venues. The only deep shade in the region came from buildings.

“Damn spooks. Can’t handle working an honest job,” muttered the man at the table nearest to Jordan.

“No one here asked for your opinion,” Jordan said.

The man bristled, but fell short of a confrontation, perhaps because the segment concluded with an image of an Outsider collapsed in a field, suffering convulsions for reasons no human physician could fathom. After a few tense moments, the fellow polished off his drink and left.

Jordan considered leaving as well, but he’d barely touched his Glenlivet. Though he could always find more in his liquor cabinet at home, he made it a practice never to rush a single malt Scotch.

The amber liquid was half gone when a tall, well-dressed young woman ambled by. She stopped.

“That seat free?” she asked.

Jordan shrugged. “Sure.”

She joined him. “My name’s Angie. You?”

He was going to beg off conversation, but she was straightforward, appealing in manner as well as in body. He gave her his first name.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“A little of everything,” he said guardedly. “I work for Welles and Haggard across the street.”

“You’re kidding,” she said brightly. “I’m an attorney. I’ve done some research on tariff regulations for your firm.”

She was not the hustler he had worried she might be. In fact, within a few minutes it was clear that she was the sort of fascinating woman he’d never expect to meet in so serendipitous a fashion. She had come in to rendezvous with a client, but had arrived to find a message canceling the meeting.

She also managed, by the time his glass was empty, to casually refer to a break-up with her most recent boyfriend, and the lack of anyone new in her life.

At that point, Jordan knew he had to say something.

“Angie, I’m a married man.”

She glanced at his left hand, biting her lip. He probably should have left the wedding band on, but he hadn’t been able to do so since the accident. “I’m sorry,” he added, sympathy fueling the sincerity of the comment.

The woman shrugged, giving a wan smile that said his honesty had made her wish even more that he had wanted her companionship. She gracefully withdrew. As her fine, long legs found rest upon a distant stool, Jordan’s face clouded.

That night, Jordan relished the sensory details of making love to Véronique to a greater degree than he could ever remember doing, as if recording them for all time. The light caught her curves, shadows deepening her feminine outlines. Her mouth was open and hungry. Her nipples quickened as air struck them, then softened until his tongue restored them to hardness. Her hair traced a feathery path along his skin, a faint touch more subtle than her hands or breasts or pelvis, more subtle even than her mouth. Had he ever noticed that before, amid all the pleasures they had shared?

Lying beside him, she draped a leg over him and ground her crotch against his outer leg, her knee gliding on a layer of perspiration. Her eyes blazed with lust. She squeezed his cock urgently, as if anticipating it inside her. He pressed her back and let his own hand rove, bringing it ultimately down to manipulate her labia. She moaned. His finger slid inside and her pelvis drew up, seizing hold. The moan became a gasp.

She pulled him on top of her, wrapped her legs around his pelvis and, by dint of wriggling, placed him at the brink of penetration. He toyed with her, rubbing the head of his erection against her clitoris.

“Put it in.” Her words came out in a hiss.

He entered her and pumped furiously. She rocked with him, challenging him to maintain the rhythm, thrashing. Her tension garnered and he knew that when the peak arrived, it would be a massive, lung-heaving release. As would his.

It was stupendous in the way that farewell passion should be, the way it should have been with the real Véronique, if only they had known the last time was at hand.

In the delirium of the aftermath, they lay intertwined. The sweat cooled. Their heartbeats fell to inaudibility. Their breathing returned to an even cadence. Without a word, the woman slipped from the bed and set off toward the door to the stairs.

“You’re leaving?” he asked.

“Until the morning.” The voice no longer sounded entirely like that of Véronique.

“But …”

“I must. It was what you dreamed, my lord.”

“When?”

“Last night, and the night before, and the night before. I am compelled.” Chin down, reticent, she closed the door behind her.

He rolled to the edge of the bed, intending to rise and follow her, but he never made it past a sitting position. Wisps of memory floated up. Yes, he had produced such dreams, hadn’t he? As often happened, they hadn’t lingered in his daylight thoughts, but in hindsight, he could see the message his subconscious had been whispering.

He lay back, closed his eyes, and waited to see what dreams might arrive this time, with no one but him to see them.

In the morning he excused the household staff, asking them not to return until noon. He found the shapeshifter in Véronique’s dayroom. Jordan and his wife always slept together, but she enjoyed having a bedroom of her own in which to house the spillover from her wardrobe and give her a place to retreat to when she needed privacy.

The elf, looking perhaps as much like Véronique as she had ever managed, was carefully packing away Véronique’s clothes in their designated drawers and hanging them on their proper hooks, many wrapped in plastic as if they were not to be touched again for a long time, if ever. When that was done, he helped her make the bed — apparently she had slept in it for a portion of the night, though her hair was fragrant with pine. Finally, she removed her nightgown, and put that away as well.

They went outside to the lawn, halfway between the house and the woods. She kissed him. Lightly, reverently, the way Véronique always did upon leave-taking. The way she had kissed him the morning of the accident.

The next step was not easy, but there was an element that made it possible: Unlike the loss of his wife, stolen by a whim of fate, he had a choice now in how he acted. Even that small measure of control made such a difference.

He probed for the ethereal bracelet around his wrist. The more he sought it out, the more tangible it became. The hemp hardened beneath his fingertips, allowing him to work the knot free. Finally it slid loose. The cord hung at her side, visible once more.

“You are free.”

She regarded him intently, as if to be sure he would not snatch the noose back up and reattach it once he had had a moment to realize what he had done. Slowly, she pushed the loop off her own wrist, and let the cord drop to the grass. The object seemed so mundane, lying there, surely no part of sorcery or oaths.

“We are both exiles, awaiting the day of our release,” she murmured. “Take heart. This is a presage of things to come.”

Smiling, light-footed, she scampered across the lawns and into the woods, never looking back. Her shape was already indistinct, transformation initiated.

He turned and reentered the house. Echoes danced up the stairs as the door struck the jamb. The house was empty, save for him. As it had to be.