Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

They faced off with each other, the delicate woman with her scars and her crutches, and the wiry old man with his bald patch and his potbelly.

“Say no,” said Thomas. “Sunshine, he is dangerous.”

“So am I,” she said, but gently. “So are we all, isn’t that the truth? But he is more dangerous to our enemies.” She frowned at Zee. “You aren’t what I expected from the stories.”

He glanced around the parking lot, then back at her. “This is a different time.” He shrugged—the movement a little shallower than his usual shrug, but she wouldn’t know that.

“I see,” said Margaret. “I agree to your unexpected proposal, Smith.”

“You aren’t riding in the car with him,” Thomas said.

She smiled at Thomas. “All right. We’ll take both cars.” She looked at me. “I’d like some time to talk with you.” She glanced at her vampire guardian, then at Adam. “I think we have a lot in common, and I’d like to compare notes. I had hoped we’d all have a chance to talk on the way to Walla Walla.”

“Maybe we can get together before you leave?” I asked.

She nodded gravely. “I hope so.”

—

“Walla Walla” was a term the Nez Percé used for a place where a stream flowed into a larger stream—or so I was told, though probably the pronunciation had changed quite a bit from the original. The most common translation was “many waters,” probably because it was both shorter and more lyrical than “where a stream flows into a bigger stream.”

Walla Walla was a town of a little over thirty thousand people, though it felt smaller than that somehow. I think it was the old-fashioned feel of the downtown district, an atmosphere invoking the days of horse and buggy or Model T cars. It was the kind of town that got voted “most friendly,” “most picturesque,” or “best place to live” on a regular basis.

Despite its many fine qualities, before the Ronald Wilson Reagan Fae Reservation was plunked down west of the town, Walla Walla was most famous for the nearby site of the Whitman Mission. There, the Protestant missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman, his wife Narcissa, and twelve other white people living at the mission were killed by Cayuse Indians in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Whitman was a doctor and a missionary, and he gained a reputation in the local tribes (Walla Walla, Nez Percé, and Cayuse mostly) as a spiritual leader and a man of powerful medicine. When measles swept through the Cayuse tribe, they turned to him for help he could not provide. The disaster that ensued was not, strictly speaking, the fault of either the Cayuse or the Whitmans, who were all doing what they believed to be right.

The symbolic irony of this meeting between werewolf, vampire, and fae at a hotel named after Marcus Whitman did not go over my head. I hoped our results were better than those Whitman and the Cayuse achieved.

The road to Walla Walla was one of those winding highways that meandered through small towns along the way instead of speeding right past them with nothing more than an exit to mark their place. As I rode shotgun next to Adam, following Thomas Hao’s white Subaru down the narrow highway to Walla Walla, we passed the road that used to lead to the fae reservation. “How do you want to play this?” I asked Adam, abruptly tired of the quiet in the car. I felt itchy with readiness, and the quiet, centered calm in both men irritated me.

“Nothing to plan,” he said.

When I snorted, he grinned at me. It wasn’t a lighthearted grin, but there was amusement in it. “There is no reason to overthink things, Mercy. We don’t know who we’re going to see or what they are going to say. We can’t plan except in the most general of fashions. We’ll let Margaret get her say in first—that’s courtesy. We’ll work our business in as we can. Probably that will be very short and sweet for our part. We’ll let them tell us what they are looking for if it gets that far. That part is up to them as well. It may be that we all just snap threats at each other and go home. I won’t know how to play it until we at least know who we’re playing with.”

He was right. I knew he was right. But I needed something to do, something to think about, so I could quit scaring myself with what-ifs, even if that meant talking about what-ifs. Adam was very good at making them less scary than my imagination did.

“There are only a few things we know for certain,” he said, as if he could hear my restlessness. “Zee isn’t going to let anything happen to Margaret. Thomas can take care of himself.” Then his voice dropped into a low, dangerous tone that was nothing like the easy, relaxed attitude he’d been portraying. “And nothing is getting past me to you.”

I absorbed that—the tone, not the words or intent behind it; those I already knew. Part of the magic of his voice was the Southern softness that blurred his consonants even when his accent wasn’t strong. Part of it was the reliable confidence behind every word—I just knew there was no guile, give, or hesitation in this man the first time I heard him speak. At the time, it had been frustrating and annoying.

But mostly, when he dropped his voice that way, it caressed something inside me—like he’d stroked the back of my neck without touching me. It made me want to melt into a puddle at his feet and settled my restlessness right down.

He knew it, too. He smiled a little and turned his attention back to driving. I glanced at Zee. “How about you? Are you planning or running by the seat of your pants, too?”