Page 9 of Outside the Veil (Endangered Fae #1)

Chapter six

Art and Asthma

A t dinner, Finn recovered his usual humor and inquisitiveness, as if nothing had happened in the bedroom.

He declared Diego’s chicken ‘quite edible’ though he mourned Tia Carmen’s absence.

Halfway through eating, he leaped up to retrieve the art book from the living room.

Nothing would satisfy him until Diego slid his chair closer to explain each picture.

Luckily there were captions. Diego hadn’t studied art since college. He recalled enough to relate a bit about the major artists’ lives, though, which interested Finn more than technique or theory.

“But why?” Finn asked, after Diego explained Michelangelo’s struggle with the Sistine Chapel.

“Why what? Why did he keep going, or why the ceiling?”

Finn shook his head. “No, no. Why any of it? Why do humans insist on making these representations of other things?”

That stumped Diego. “Don’t you find them beautiful?”

“Some of them, surely. Is it because you destroy so much beauty that you are compelled to create it?”

“I…” Diego drummed his fingers on the table, trying to construct a solid, honest answer. “I think people have asked that question for as long as we could draw. And you’d probably get as many answers as there are artists.”

Finn snickered. “Is this what you meant by ‘ducking the question’?”

“Yes.” Diego smiled, the tight band around his heart easing.

“I’m not an artist or an art historian, so I’m probably not qualified to answer your question.

I mean, some art’s symbolic, or satirical, or provocative instead of beautiful.

I think maybe it’s something about helping the viewer see things in a different way.

In a way you hadn’t thought of before. Art evokes an emotional response.

Maybe not the one the artist intended. But some kind of gut reaction. ”

Finn traced over the lines of David’s marble face. “I don’t understand. The words, yes, but I can’t grasp it.”

“Like holding water in your hand.”

“No, that I can do.” Finn cocked his head to the side. “Ah. You jest. I wasn’t certain you knew how.”

“I’m a little out of practice.” Diego finished his beer and started to clear the table. “Maybe we should go see some in person. Art, that is. It’s hard to feel the real impact from pictures in a book.”

Finn’s head rested on his arms, his eyelids sliding shut. “I don’t think I would survive a trip to Italy.”

“We don’t have to go that far.” Explanations could wait until morning, or the next afternoon, or whenever Finn could manage the stairs better.

After he put Finn to bed, Diego realized he’d never called social services about placement for him. “Don’t suppose they have a Fairy Support Division anyway,” he muttered to his computer. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

Finn turned the corner into yet another room and sighed.

More blasted odd things on the walls he couldn’t fathom.

In the crush of humans, he had lost Diego many rooms before.

A large group had come between them, all tagging behind and hanging on the words of a strident-voiced woman who pointed at the things on the walls and said incomprehensible nonsense about them.

When he had extricated himself from the herd, Diego was nowhere to be seen.

His absence was like standing on a cliff in a hurricane.

Nothing to lean against. No shelter to be seen.

They had stood in a grand hall at one point, one with lovely, ceiling-high windows looking out on trees and with interesting representations of naked or near-naked humans every few feet.

Diego had waved a hand to the chairs by the wall and told him the name of the room.

“Come back here if we get separated or if you get tired. Just sit down and wait for me. No one will bother you if you don’t touch the statues. ”

“European Sculpture Court,” Finn repeated under his breath.

He knew he wasn’t anywhere near the place.

Diego had also said to ask one of the people in the jackets with the shiny buttons to help him if he became lost. But they all looked so forbidding and stern, he’d been rather anxious about approaching any of them.

The last person he’d talked to in a jacket with shiny buttons had locked him in an iron cage.

Lovely buttons, though. Made his fingers itch to touch.

He sat down on a stone bench in front of a man-high, painted canvas.

As a representation of something, it made no sense, but the colors shone bold and bright.

Not for the first time that day, he wished he could decipher the lines and circles humans used to label everything.

Perhaps it held a clue as to what he was supposed to see.

A small boy flopped down beside him, legs swinging.

“Are you tired, too?”

The boy glanced sideways at him with a frown. Gods of night, the children here are all so suspicious. For a moment, he thought the boy might run away.

“I guess.” The boy shrugged.

“Don’t you like this place?”

“It’s okay. I like the armor and swords and stuff. The rest is boring.” He peered at Finn more closely. “You talk funny.”

“I’m from far away.”

“No, I mean like you can’t breathe right.”

Finn rubbed at his chest and coughed. Observant child. “It, ah, gives me trouble sometimes.”

The boy nodded. “I have asthma, too. You probably forgot your inhaler, didn’t you? My mom yells at me when I forget mine.”

“Yes, exactly.” Whatever an inhaler was, it sounded plausible.

A portly man sat down beside the boy. The set of his features indicated annoyance; the tone of his voice confirmed it. “You’re not even looking at anything, Jaime. I don’t know why we bother coming.”

“I’m tired,” the boy muttered. “And thirsty.”

“At least look at some of it. Read the plaques. Jasper Johns is a very important artist, the father of pop art…”

The man droned on and on in a pompous, self-important way. No wonder the boy was so bored. If Diego had described art to him that way, he would have dropped off to sleep.

Finn nudged the boy’s elbow and whispered, “Do you feel anything when you look at it? My friend says art is supposed to make you feel things. Or see things differently. Or something of that sort.”

The father halted his exposition in surprise. The boy glanced up at Finn then at the painting. “I like the colors.”

“As do I.” Finn nodded. He cocked his head to one side, to see the blobs of red, blue and yellow from a different angle. “I think,” he said, a smile creeping onto his face, “that I might begin to understand. There is a playfulness to this one. I think it must have been great fun to paint.”

“Like the colors made the artist happy?” Jaime leaned forward on the bench.

“Perhaps so.”

The boy wandered closer to examine the painting in detail while his father turned to Finn and stared. “You’re good. I can’t get him to look at the paintings to save my life.”

“One hopes it wouldn’t come to that,” Finn answered, his brow wrinkling in concern.

The man laughed as if he’d made a joke. “First time in America? You’re Irish, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” He considered a moment. The man seemed friendly enough now. “I don’t suppose you could point the way to the European Sculpture Court? I’m just a wee bit lost.”

The man pulled out a rectangle of paper and Finn watched in fascination as he unfolded it to a much larger rectangle.

A map. Ah. Not that it did him much good.

Maps confused him as much as writing. But he listened as the man described the way back, which sounded easy enough.

He thanked him and started off, confident he would find his way.

Several flights of stairs and what seemed several miles later, he still wandered. His chest hurt. Lungs could be such a bother. He’d considered shifting to a fish and plunging into one of the fountains he passed but the water smelled worse than the stuff from Diego’s sink.

This is ridiculous. Lost in a bizarre labyrinth, unable to find Diego because of the confusion of human scents, he bristled. Was he or was he not Fionnachd the Hunter? The one who had tracked the red-eared boar through endless thickets and mazes of thorns for the Queen’s pleasure?

“Long ago, bucko, in a different world,” he muttered, and leaned against a doorway to catch what was left of his breath. Not to mention the fact that no one had ever called him Fionnachd the Hunter except Herself, and only that once. And the boar had been so frightened he’d let the poor thing go.

“Are you all right, sir?”

Finn glanced down and forced a smile. One of the shiny-buttoned ones had asked the question. Lovely thing. Chestnut skin. Hair plaited into a hundred tiny braids like rushes decorating her head.

“Yes, beautiful lady, I’m quite well.” The lie was ruined by the wheeze in his voice.

“Mmhm. Right.”

“Forgot my inhaler.”

“Oh, hon, you should know better at your age.” The woman’s voice had shifted from professional to maternal scolding. “We better get you to sit down. You here with someone?”

“European Sculpture Court…supposed to meet him there…” Why did his chest constrict further the harder he tried to breathe?

“All right, baby, all right. It’s just through there. Come on.” The woman took his elbow, not to restrain him, he realized, but to hold him up. He gave her a wan smile. Such a confident little thing. She might be able to catch him if he toppled at that.

Under the final archway, relief flooded through him to see the long-sought hall.

Better still, Diego stood in the center of the room, eyes searching the crowd.

Finn’s mouth twitched up into a foolish grin.

Compact and lean, those oh-too-serious features, those heart-melting eyes, Diego was a beautiful sight.

“That’s him,” Finn murmured to his guide and pointed.

She chuckled. “Oh, you got it bad, boy.”

“What do I have?”

“For him. Well, not that I blame you. He’s damn cute.”