Hello again, everyone! Immeasurable thanks and gratitude to the people that reviewed the last chapter: AgiVega, Buchworm13, and Bluesparks.

Disclaimer: I do not own Artemis Fowl, as Eoin Colfer owns Artemis Fowl. I do not own the Phantom of the Opera, as Gaston Leroux, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Susan Kay, etc. own Phantom of the Opera. What part of my non-ownership isn't clear here?

Chapter Six: The Contradiction Of Angels

By God, she had been terrified, but she had shouted at him.

She had every right to, of course. He was being cruel to his little student. Artemis knew he was a bad man, but he could not help but take perverse delight in her. What splendid spirit she possessed at times, a quality that made him all the fonder of his little student! And Artemis gloried in how disobedient she could be when she felt that she was right and he was wrong.

A state of uneasy truce had existed between them since he had lost his temper last week, and he was dismayed to notice than she no longer looked at him in quite the same way. He believed she found it difficult to believe an angel could lose his temper so ferociously and destructively, screaming and shouting and in general behaving like a complete idiot… as he had done. But there was something about her that makes him weak, something that made him so afraid he is going to lose her, whether it be romantically or not, to someone – a man, who has a human face instead of that of a monster.

He had made plans for her to appear on stage next week, but he had not told her yet. For some reason he was holding back on telling her. She had improved exponentially, beyond his wildest dreams, and once when she sang he was surprised to discover that she rivalled his own voice in her perfection. But it had only been three weeks! It seemed to him that it was almost supernatural for her to have improved this quickly, and yet… Certainly it was not God who gave her the skills she had mastered so easily! But she was perfect to him, all one hundred centimetres of her, perfect from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes, and he would still teach her even if she sounded like Carlotta when she sang.

At least, he thought he would.

He had managed to persuade the managers around to his way of thinking, although it came at a price, of sorts. Most regretfully, last Tuesday one of the stagehands had fallen to a tragic death on the stage, in the midst of the ballet rats as they had practised for Faust. He had heard later, eavesdropping on the managers as was his custom, that the man's brains were splattered about in a grotesque fashion, and some of the ballet girls were so traumatised they had not spoken since that and were the unfortunate victims of hideous nightmares at night. That same day a message had came to him from the worthy Madame Giry, his box keeper, that the managers were willing to do whatever he wanted, so long as no more tragedies would occur.

Artemis was very pleased with himself, but one element soured his triumph. The next morning he had seen Butler prowling around the front entrance looking rather predatory. He was not certain what his former bodyguard was doing at the Opera; the groceries were always brought through the Rue Scribe entrance. Still, he would not let anyone interfere with her triumph, even if that 'anyone' happened to be his faithful and former bodyguard. Holly was nearly ready to awe the world with the power of her voice, and he would let no one stand in his way – her way. Artemis was conscious of the bridge between him and the other members of his species widening. He existed in a realm beyond the veil of humanity and as such, the common bonds of decency among humanity mean little to him.

xx

"No, Holly!" he snapped in exasperation for what felt like the twentieth time. "C, not C flat! Begin again!" His previous opinion of her outstanding success lay in ruins. The notes, which she had soared over yesterday with no qualms, were little more than stumbling blocks that she fell across today. He was enraged, almost ready to lose his barely reined in temper, but he managed to contain himself. He winced beneath his mask as another wrong note jarred through his ears and into his skull. "Holly! Again!" Wrong. "Again!" Wrong. "Again!" Wrong! "Again!"

"Damn it!" she snapped, breaking her singer's stance and flopping down on the divan. "Screw you and screw your singing! I can't do any more of this today!"

"You could do it yesterday!" Artemis snarled, his Voice becoming less powerful and otherworldly and more like that of an irritated, all too human male. "You have not been practising! How do you expect to improve if you do not practise?"

"I have been practising, goddamn you, and its not my fault you choose the most ridiculous songs for me to learn – "

"You have not been practising!" Artemis said to her, cutting her off in his best 'Angel of Music' tones. But, to his mingled disbelief and pleasure, his Voice had no effect on her. What a change, he reflected bitterly, from the shrinking child who had been prepared to do whatever he had said! And what a poor time for her to make that change! He decided to resort to alternate tactics. "How will you ever be prepared to sing on stage next week if you refuse to learn?" Her forehead, creased in lines of frustration and anger, smoothed in shock.

"Stage? Next week?" Her eyes were both achingly concerned and devastatingly hopeful.

"Next week. In Faust." Her Cupid's bow lips formed a silent 'O'. His heart ached. How he longed to take her in his arms, to kiss away those worries that lingered at the corners of his eyes. But, remembering his many fateful encounters with beautiful women who he wanted to kiss over the many years of his life – oh, Luciana, why could you not leave well enough alone? – he clamped down on this desire. She would not run from him. She must learn to love him, but they were running out of time.

The lesson progressed much more smoothly after that. Holly seemed to concentrate less on what was going on inside her pretty head and more on what was happening in the outside world i.e. her lesson. Artemis leaned against the wall of the passageway behind the mirror, one long fingered musician's hand pressed against the glass as he watched her sing. She was luminescent, glowing with radiance, her dimpled little hands held loosely together, and he gazed down at his own hand introspectively, comparing the two. The fingers were long and delicate, musician's hands, artist's hands… murderer's hands. His skin was the colour of bleached bone from so long away from the sunshine.

Those hands did not belong on her coffee coloured skin, unnaturally pale against the warmth of her body. In his most sensible and levelheaded moments, which happened with alarming infrequency, Artemis knew this. But sometimes, caught up in the wretched desire for her that he could not suppress, he would imagine her softness against his own emaciated body. She would be soft, of course, like living silk underneath his hands. He could almost feel her skin; almost see her stretched out on the bed he had prepared for her in his home. Angrily, he tore his mind away from the images of her. She was pure, practically an angel. She did not deserve to be the object of his perverted lust.

Again, Artemis pondered his little student. He has long since known something was different about her, not least of all her height. Her differences attracted him to her – she was different, like him, but she was still beautiful regardless. Artemis… well, he was not. But she was tiny, so small; she could not have been more than a metre in height. He had seen women that small a long time ago, in the carnival he no longer spoke of, but she did not look like them. She looked for all the world like a very small fully formed woman, not strange to the aesthetic eye as those other women had been. And her ears were pointed… and sometimes in her large hazel eyes there was a gleam of feral blue, like sparks behind her eyes.

He did not dare ask her why. Her Angel would have known without being told, and so to continue the illusion of the Angel of Music, he had to pretend he knew, too. Even if the urge to know her secret was practically driving him mad, since he no longer believed she was truly human. And therein lay the reason for his fascination. He, too, could not identify himself as human, but where his differences had made flaws of him and make him terrifying, hers only enhanced her natural beauty. It wasn't fair, Artemis decided, but then again, little had been fair in his life. The contradiction between them was consuming him.

One small thing that disturbed him about her was her apparent instability, the way her mood could change so easily and fatally. Before her ire had been at its peak: driven to frustration by weeks of gruelling voice lessons and a stern and uncompromising maestro, she had spoken her mind. But as Artemis had mentioned her upcoming performance on stage, her anger had left her. She had become calm, introspective, ready to learn. He was well aware of a flaw in Holly, in the vulnerable expression in her eyes while she sang and the bitterness of her words whenever she spoke of her father. Inside of his pupil, he was certain, there was a damaged child that was still waiting for her father to save her. Any lover of hers would have to be prepared to be both the husband and the father, sheltering and protecting her from the outside world. She was a swan made of glass, perfect but for the crack running through her, as fine as a human hair but as obvious as blood on snow.

And that was another thing that worried him, something else that he could not quantify. She received so much attention from men, he was certain that one of them were bound to steal her away eventually Even if she did not see them or speak to them, they certainly saw her. He had grown tired of watching his beautiful little angel be ogled by men who cared nothing for the wonders of her personality. Regardless of her loveliness, she was more than just the curves of her lithe body and the prettiness of her physical form.

And in the way she turned her head from those lustful stares, he knew that something in her was crying out for someone to stop it, to claim her, to make all the terrible things go away. And Artemis knew he was up to the task.

It was time, he thought, that he made her his.

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