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.”