Fire Touched (Page 52)

Zee came, too.

I hadn’t asked him. Adam hadn’t asked him. Zee hadn’t said anything, he’d just been sitting in the backseat of Adam’s car when we were ready to leave. He wouldn’t say anything, and he wouldn’t get out. None of the other cars parked at the house would start. So, instead of being late, we drove to the hotel with him in the backseat.

Thomas and Margaret came out to meet us. The sky wasn’t quite dark, and Thomas wore gloves and a black hoodie with the hood pulled over his head. The hoodie made him look . . . smaller, and less dangerous—more like a gang member and less like a vampire.

Adam started to explain our stowaway to Thomas, but Zee got out of the car and looked at Margaret.

He frowned at the crutches and the scars on her wrists. “Your father was an honorable enemy,” he told her. “He deserved better followers. Are you as tough as your father?”

She raised her chin, but it was Thomas who said, “Tougher. They were both trapped underground in mining tunnels for decades. He died, and she survived.”

“My father was injured,” she said sharply. “I was not.”

“I did not know about this imprisonment,” Zee said. “Or I would have put a stop to it. I heard only afterward how it happened that you were trapped by those who should have cared for you.” He raised his eyes to her. “I would have broken my old enemy out of a prison he did not deserve—if only to ensure that a worthy opponent still walked the earth. For the error of my ignorance, I will do my best to make sure that his daughter walks away unharmed today.”

She looked at him. “That’s not why you came here,” she said.

“It is,” he said. “But it isn’t the only reason, nor the most important, until I saw your face. The Dragon Under the Hill lives in your face. You have his eyes. Your father was one of the few enemies I had who was capable of giving as good as he got. He fought with cunning, skill, and honor; those three qualities are seldom found together. I disagreed with him, and he annoyed me—but he was a worthy opponent. I have other reasons to speak to the Gray Lords, but your safety will be my primary concern.”

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.