Ángel wasn’t convinced. The elves were tricksters—everyone said so. It was in supermarket tabloids and Facebook memes, in newspaper editorials and Twitter posts. People discussed “the alien problem” on Fox News and MSNBC. Some were terrified that the envoy was luring humanity into a false sense of security with his apparently harmless ways, the harbinger of a magical invasion. In eight years the invasion had failed to materialize, though. As far as Ángel knew, the envoy was nothing but a piano player.

The only other thing Ángel really knew about the cultural envoy from the Otherworld was that he always seemed to wear exactly the same outfit: crisp black button-down shirts tucked into tailored black pants, polished black leather shoes. “Like he’s trying to be as boring as possible,” Ángel’s best friend Marissa had said. “Like an elf-lord could ever blend in.”

Down below the helicopter’s curved window, an endless deserted vista of mountains flowed by under a sunlit blue sky. He had assumed that the envoy to the Otherworld lived in or near the Department of Otherworld Relations headquarters in Atlanta, so he had been surprised, this morning, when the DOR jet had taken him nonstop from Miami to Missoula, Montana. From there they’d boarded this helicopter and flown north. They were now somewhere up near Canada, and Ángel couldn’t have felt farther from home if they’d been on the moon.

There was nothing down there. Nothing but huge mountains and deep valleys and cliffs and rocks and trees, and streams like shining steel guitar strings, and occasional narrow, winding roads with no cars on them.

Who knew there were parts of the country that were this remote? Ángel shivered and wondered if it ever snowed up here. Did the envoy from the Otherworld like it? Did the Otherworld have mountains? Did it snow there?

“Look up ahead,” said Agent Jeremy’s voice in his headset, and Ángel followed his pointing finger to see a large grassy hill in a valley, cleared of trees, with a tall wall around it and a large pink house in the middle.

The DOR agent said, “The house was built by a software tycoon in the nineties. I guess he thought it was picturesque up here. Didn’t take long before he realized he didn’t want to live in the middle of nowhere after all, and moved back to California. He donated it and all its furnishings to the DOR.”

“Does the envoy like living in the middle of nowhere?” asked Ángel.

“It’s very secure,” said Jeremy. “You’re one of about twenty people in the world who knows where the envoy lives. The locals think a reclusive novelist lives here. If you tell anyone, we will be annoyed.”

“Oh.”