Nathaniel gave me wide eyes, because I’d discussed with him that no one wanted me to come play.

   “How? I wasn’t sure you’d get me into the country, let alone me and extra people.”

   “First, the Irish police are interested in seeing how well the shapeshifters work with us, and them. Bring Socrates unless you think he won’t work well with the rest of the group.”

   “Because he’s an ex-cop,” I said.

   “Yes, I’d go with more ex-military and police if possible.”

   “I’ll do what I can. Will the guards who helped us out in Washington state be okay by you?”

   “They’ll do, and Nicky can always come play with us.”

   “He’s so not ex-cop, or military anything,” I said.

   “No, but he’s good enough that I’d take him for backup even if you couldn’t come with him.”

   “Wow, that is high praise coming from you.”

   “Just truth.”

   I’d have to remember to tell Nicky later, though he would probably just shrug it off and say, Of course, or say nothing. I might not even be able to tell if it pleased him. It had tickled the hell out of me when Edward told me I was good enough for backup, but of course my background and Nicky’s were vastly different, and so were our reactions to certain things.

   “Okay, Socrates and Nicky. Any other requests?”

   “Lisandro, Claudia, Bobby Lee.”

   “Claudia doesn’t travel out of town with me, but the other two, check.”

   “She came to Colorado.”

   “She came with Jean-Claude, not me.”

   “Okay, whatever, you can explain to me why that matters later, but right now just bring a small group that would play well enough with police and military to not make them regret the decision to let us come play.”

   But Nathaniel felt compelled to answer the Claudia question. “Claudia doesn’t want the ardeur to rise with her alone with Anita. That’s why she won’t travel out of town with her.”

   I gave him the look that oversharing deserved. It was not a friendly look.

   He shrugged and said, “What?”

   “I’m beginning to like having Nathaniel on this call,” Edward said.

   I frowned harder at Nathaniel and then aimed it at the phone, too, as if Edward could see it. Truth was, he wouldn’t have been bothered if he’d been there for me to glare at.

   “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.