“Let’s concentrate on business, shall we?”
“I’m all about business, Anita; you know that.”
“I don’t know how the hell you pulled this off, Edward.”
“We got lucky; they’re thinking about putting their own preternatural unit together, but they don’t want to simply duplicate the British unit. They weren’t entirely happy with how the Brits handled the last time they had to call them for help.”
“Didn’t they fight to get free of British control for a long time?”
“Yeah, so having to call in the Brits for help the last time they had a preternatural citizen go rogue on them didn’t sit well with the government, or the popular vote.”
“Ah, I hear elections coming,” I said.
“It’s not just the politicians, Anita. You have to know more of the history of the country to understand just how desperate they were to turn to their nearest neighbors for help.”
“Why didn’t they ask Interpol for help?” I asked.
“Interpol’s preternatural unit was tied up elsewhere and couldn’t get there as quickly as the Brits could. To save Irish lives they let their old conquerors into their country again. The president of Ireland and his party lost the next election because of it.”
“Wait. This is like a footnote in something else I read. It was a mixed group of lycanthropes, a human sorcerer, a couple of witches, and some fairies—I mean, Fey, or whatever.”
“Important safety tip in Ireland: Don’t call them fairies.”
“I know that, Edward, honest.”
“Just a reminder. Tell all your people to remember it, too.”
“Why can’t we call them fairies?” Nathaniel asked.
“In old-world Fey it’s the equivalent of calling someone who’s African-American the N-word, except that Fey have magic to punish you for the insult.”
“Wow, really, it’s that big an insult?”
“To some of the older Fey in the Old World, yes,” I said.
“What do we call them instead?” he asked.
Edward answered, “Fey, the gentle folk, the kindly ones; little people has fallen out of favor, but some old-timers still use it.”
“The hidden folk is another one,” I said.
“Fey is shorter and more common among the police in most countries,” Edward said.
“I know that Ireland has kept the highest concentration of Fey in the world,” I said.
“But most of the wee folk are good citizens, or they just want to be left alone to do what they’ve done for the last thousand years.”
“Bullshit, there are still Unseelie Fey over there, and they’ve always been prone to do bad things.”
“They don’t see it that way, Anita. They think they’re neutral like nature.”
“Yeah, nature is neutral, but a blizzard will still kill you, and there are a few types of gentle folk that really do like to hurt people.”
“But they don’t, because they don’t want to be deported,” he said.
“I still remember reading in college about what it took for some of the European countries to deport the gentle folk. Massive magic, because they are tied to the land; you remove some of the folk and the land can actually start to die.”
“That would complicate things.”
“They didn’t know it would kill the land back in the day, and they didn’t understand that Fey that weren’t tied to their land could go rogue in a big way, or the British didn’t know. Apparently Ireland’s Fey population was more wild and even more closely connected to the land than their British Isles counterparts.”
“And you remember all this from college?”
“Enough that I looked it up online briefly after you told me Ireland was a possibility.”
“You, on a computer willingly?”
“Anita’s gotten much better with all the tech,” Nathaniel said.
“Hey, I’ve totally been won over to my smartphone, and it’s a little computer.”
Edward chuckled. “Fair enough.”
“I wanted to refresh myself on some of what I remembered after I talked to you the first time. Some of the Irish believe that the great potato famine and the British occupation not only lost them artists and writers, but their native-born psychics and witches, so they’re pretty welcoming to anyone who’s talented, except necromancers, apparently. Back when they let writers out of income tax, they did the same thing for anyone with a demonstrable psychic or magical ability.”
“That last is news to me.”
“It wasn’t pertinent to you, personally, and except for me I’m not sure you even work with people who are gifted enough to care.”
“True.”
“Marshal Kirkland raises the dead, too,” Nathaniel said.
“Larry and I are two of the very few with any demonstrable psychic talent.”
“I know your gifts help you survive and be better at your job. How do the rest survive without any psychic gifts?” Nathaniel asked.
“We manage,” Edward said dryly.
“I didn’t mean you. You’re Edward.”
I actually understood what he meant by that. “You know he’s right; you are Edward and that’s better than magic any day.”
“I just always assumed that Edward was just bad-ass enough not to need magic, but that everyone else had some.”