But Gwen wanted me to talk about myself, which I guess I understood. If she was considering a friendship with me, she needed to know what I was like now.
“Going out and doing whatever I wanted, regardless of anyone else’s opinion, has gotten me into trouble on more than one occasion,” I admitted. “Early in my police career, I was determined I knew what had happened with a particular case and that our informant was actually giving us false information deliberately to lead us in the wrong direction. My captain yelled at me for a long time about how I was jeopardizing a years-long investigation, but I ignored him and continued my investigation anyway.” I shrugged a little. “Turned out I was right, but it didn’t land me any brownie points with my captain. He tried to block my promotion for several years out of spite but finally ended up getting demoted due to something else and I ended up with his job. He was not happy about that.”
“Were you a good boss or did you make him pay for it?” She seemed somewhat interested in this, so maybe this was a good topic?
“I tried to be fair. He was blatantly disrespectful and it got to be enough of a problem that eventually he was transferred somewhere else. Last I heard, he got himself fired and went into private security.” I tried to think of another instance like that which might be interesting to her. It was, ultimately, why I’d ended up adopting a kid by myself – setting my mind to something and not listening to anyone else’s comments on the subject – but I was trying to think of something unrelated to our kids for the time being.
“There was this other instance when we were investigating a potential drug ring, or at least, that was the running theory. Now, I had an advantage here because I happened to know that one of the suspects was a fairy. I figured they might have actually be growing some stuff, but not for drug purposes, so I was adamant they were not involved while the rest of the team disagreed with me.”
Gwen raised an eyebrow. “I assume you were right?”
“Yes,” I agreed, trying not to sound too pleased about it. “They were definitely growing secret stuff, though – just fairy plants, nothing inappropriate, but that didn’t help the process because they could tell the fairy was hiding something.”
“I suppose having a supernatural on the police force is helpful.” Gwen sounded thoughtful.
“It is,” I nodded immediately. “In some larger cities, there are even entire divisions that are made up of supernaturals or protected humans who help deal with incidents involving supernaturals. We have a small group of us in Port Fylin that are sort of a supernatural task force but mostly the supernaturals in the force are more spread out. It also helps to have a supernatural on the force who can deal with supernatural-specific crimes if they’re called to a scene and don’t realize initially that it’s supernatural, but find it out when they get there. Having a supernatural who can call back to the station and let me know, so I can arrange to pull humans off the case, can be helpful. But it can also just be helpful if it’s a supernatural offender and they need a way to contain them that humans simply won’t have.”
“Like what happened to my mother,” Gwen murmured. Her eyes flickered to me, then back out towards the ocean. “Sterling said he told you what happened. The woman responsible and the two people she called who actually killed her were caught and prosecuted by supernatural courts. Technically they could have been tried in human courts, but since they were supernaturals who would live longer, they’d have to be housed in supernatural prisons, anyway.”
“Things like that,” I agreed. “Or even just crimes against other supernaturals – we can’t always go into details about stuff they did in human courts. Say a shifter bites someone in shifted form, well, they can’t be prosecuted for that normally because humans wouldn’t realize that the shifter was the animal. At most, they might be considered responsible for the animal.”
Gwen thought about this for a bit as the last of the baby sea turtles reached the water, to the kids’ cheering. “Where are most of the supernatural prisons, anyway? I presume they have to be max security places or something.”
I nodded. “Well, they have to have different reinforcements and magical safeguards, for one thing. Even in local jails, we try to have at least one cell that can hold a supernatural, just in case. That was an issue at the conference we talked about today, actually. We had a session with other supernatural law enforcement and protected humans – closed session with theoretically limited capacity, but really we were just confirming identities and made sure no one who wasn’t a supernatural or protected human got in. Anyway, that was an issue we were talking about, trying to make sure everyone has ideas for how to contain supernaturals. Some are easier than others, some it just depends. Shifters, for example, vary widely. Some might be able to shift down to something small, others could be an elephant or a rhino. Our best bet is to have a cell that’s magically reinforced that would hold a large shifter but also prevent a smaller shifter from leaving as well. But it also has to work against those with magic, say, witches, fairies, or demons. It’s actually easier to have an entire facility designed for supernaturals than to just have a single cell or even a cell block in a jail that’s designed for them. As far as the location, it depends. Most of them are not located anywhere near large human populations for safety reasons. Some are even underground.” I shrugged. “Of course, most of the prisoners in underground prisons are the ones who never even entered the human justice system, because we can’t just produce them for a human court for a parole hearing or something.”
Gwen frowned a bit. “But some of them are from the human justice system?”
“Sure, anyone who has harmed a human, for instance, and they were prosecuted in the human system. We keep an eye on them, make sure we have at least one prison guard on them during the trial process who’s a supernatural, then have them transferred to a supernatural facility after sentencing. They still can’t stay in a human facility, even if they were strictly prosecuted in the human court. I dealt with some of that as an attorney,” I explained. “We had a lot more to deal with any time we had a supernatural we were handling in the human justice system. Some accused individuals would even take advantage of the fact that they were in a human court surrounded mostly by humans – including a human defense attorney – and get their attorney to try to argue against their transfer and stuff. It could be awkward at times but we managed to make it work.”
I was quiet for a bit. “I’ve thought about becoming a politician the next time I restart my life,” I announced abruptly. “I thought I was going to be able to do more as a police superintendent, but there’s not a lot of policy I actually have control over. Some, yes, and I’ve tried to make positive changes, but there’s too many things I’m fighting with the government about. I’m thinking maybe I need to reconsider my law career, but this time as a legislator. Try to see if I can’t do more good there.”
“Like what kind of changes?” She asked.
I began discussing some of the different policies I’d like to see in place, mostly social policies about how police handled certain issues, like – like putting kids like Elyse in the juvenile detention center when they ran away because their home situation was awful. Putting her in prison because she needed to escape her foster parents didn’t seem fair. Or there was a situation in a nearby town last year about how some supernatural police officers who hadn’t investigated a case properly based on assumptions about prey and predator shifter types. That hadn’t been in my jurisdiction, but when I’d heard about it, it bothered me that police could make that assumption so easily. From what I could tell of the case, human police might have sided with the victim and investigated properly and in this case, being a supernatural had worked against the victim. That should never have been the case, in my opinion. I wanted to take steps to make sure nothing like that could happen in Port Fylin – or anywhere in our country, for that matter.
I was getting to the end of my ramble when the kids came back over, interrupting me.
“I’m gonna head home for the night,” Alex announced, leaning over to kiss Sterling’s cheek before waving at us and then heading straight towards the ocean. I’d noticed when we got there that she wasn’t wearing shoes and seemed to be in swimwear with a wrap over herself, but I hadn’t expected her to start swimming at midnight.
Once she got into the water, though, I saw a tail flash against the moonlight before she disappeared entirely under the waves.
Sterling sighed a little. “Her family lives on an island,” he pointed in the general direction of the island we couldn’t see through the darkness. “So I never get to walk her home.”
“No,” Gwen agreed, “your options are swimming or boating. Or flying, I suppose, but neither of you can do that, so it’s not really an option.”
“Oh!” Sterling turned to look at me as we started to walk back to our cars, walking backwards as he went. “Can you fly? I’ve never seen a dragon in shifted form before. How big are you when you shift? Do you breathe fire?”
Milo looked at me curiously. “I’ve actually never seen you shifted, either.”
Sterling now seemed offended. “What?! You’ve never seen your dad shifted? Tony! What’s the matter with you?”
I was mildly amused by his response. “I don’t have much of a reason to shift often, and yes, I am rather large in shifted form so it’s not easy to just run around as a dragon. I suppose several hundred years ago it was simpler, but it’d be far too easy to get spotted nowadays and there’s just not space for it. I can fly in dragon form, but technically I can also summon wings in human form and fly, I just again, rarely have need to. It’s not practical. As far as fire breathing, it’s not really a breathing thing, actually. It’s just magic.” I held my hand out, palm up, and a ball of fire sparked into existence over it. “I am a fire dragon, but not all dragons are – some have other kinds of magic. Ice, or poison, water even. Fire is the most common variety of dragon, though.”
Sterling poked at the ball of fire, his brows furrowed. “There’s not very many dragons, are there? You’re kind of limited in number.”
“We are one of the smaller supernatural species, yes,” I agreed. “But we tend to live long and are difficult to kill, so our population doesn’t tend to decline much. It rarely grows, to be honest, because a dragon’s first child – regardless of the partner – is pretty much guaranteed to be a dragon, but a second dragon child is very unlikely. Most dragons, as a result, only ever have one dragon child. Overall, our numbers are still quite small compared to most other species as a result.”
“Huh, kind of like us,” Sterling mused.
Milo perked up. “Like you? Wait, does that mean you know why Sterling’s mom doesn’t look her age?” He asked me. “And you didn’t tell me?”
I felt a little trapped by the question, but more so by the hurt in his eyes. “Not all secrets are meant to be shared,” I started to explain gently.
At the same time, however, Sterling piped up. “We’re unicorns.”
Milo looked at me, then at Sterling, then at Gwen, who was sighing heavily.
“Sterling,” she gave him a stern look, “you really need to consider where you repeat that. Not out on the beach. And Tony, I didn’t mean you couldn’t tell your kids. As long as you trust them, that is.”
Milo frowned again, then demanded to know what that meant.
Instead of letting them answer, I herded him to our car, but explained on the way back to the hotel.
Back in our hotel room, Milo kept frowning as he sat cross-legged on the bed. “So…basically, they have to keep their existence a secret or people might kill them? Not just Hunters, but supernaturals, too? That’s no fair. Seems like there ought to be laws against that.”
“There are,” I confirmed as I sat on my own bed and faced him. “But laws don’t always prevent people from doing bad things.”
“Hmm.” Milo thought for a bit, then sat up straighter. “What if I put an alert out for anything in the area that mentions unicorns? So we can help them keep watch in case someone says something?”
I was surprised at the idea, but actually thought it was a great one. “You’re okay with that? Running another background search?”
“Oh please.” He grinned widely. “That stuff’s easy and it gives me a chance to try some new stuff anyway. You think they’d go for it, though?”
“Let me ask first,” I cautioned. “I doubt they’d have an issue with it since it would only help protect them, but it’s still better to run it by them first since it involves them and their secret.”
“Yeah, okay.” Milo flopped down on his stomach instead, flipping on the TV. “So, any idea where you stand with her yet?”
“Not really, no.” She had seemed to want to know more about me, but was that just to decide whether she wanted to be friends? And if so, what had her verdict been? I couldn’t tell. “I plan to ask tomorrow before we leave if she’d made up her mind just so I have some idea.”
“Good luck,” Milo informed me, then fell deep into his perusal of the TV, feeding off whatever energy he could get from it.
I hoped I would have good luck tomorrow, because tomorrow would be my last chance to convince Gwen to let me stay in her life.
Comments (25)
See all