Page 28 of Midlife Vampire Unexpected

I pulled out my laptop and set it down on a cushion on my lap. “Right, so how do we find this renegade dark Fae? If he’s the one causing the problems we need to find out as much information as we can about him before he shows up.”

“Well, if he’s a leader, he’s got to be about a hundred years old,” Trina said. “The Fae don’t respect anyone who is less than eighty.”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “How long do they live?”

“About three or four hundred years. It depends.”

“That’s one-hundred-year gap in life expectancy.” I pointed out.

“Well, some have more dangerous lives than others. There were a lot of wars, which sort of shifted things, but now things are settled down. The Light Fae live in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.”

“And the Dark Fae live in Europe and eastern Europe?” I asked.

“That’s the way the world got divided at the end of the war.” Hilda explained.

“How do you usually find information on the Fae?” I directed my question to Drake. I figured the kid in the corner with the VR headset and the magic powers was going to have the most insight into how to hack the witches’ dark Internet.

“I’m so glad you asked,” he said, the corner of his mouth lifting in a sly smile.

Chapter 19

Hours later, after an intense lesson in the Fae and demigod wars, complete with a map drawn out for me showing me showing where all manners of creatures I’d never imagined lived, we hadn’t come any closer to finding out about some dark renegade movement. On the plus side, I now knew about Frost Giants, Atlantis, and the DGC capital in NYC. Only Drake, Hilda, Jane, and I remained in the red room. Hilda was pottering about with the plants and Jane was still resting

“How do the Fae communicate?” I asked.

“The Fae are otherworldly,” Drake said. “They’re like the monsters.”

“How do you mean?”

“They come from a land on the other side of the rift. The rift separates Earth from everywhere. So, this is our home plane, but the Fae and monsters come from lands on the other side of the rift. Monsters still live in their homeland mostly, but Fae have migrated here.” Drake chewed on a carrot as he explained the workings of the Earth plane.

“Is that why the demigods were trying to get rid of them?” I asked

“Exactly the demigods are from Earth. The Fae were an invasion.

“OK,” I said. “It doesn’t answer the question. How do the Fae communicate?”

“Psychically,” Drake said.

“Oh,” I said, my eyebrows lifting high, eyes opening wide. “Well, that’s interesting. They’re like her?” I pointed to Jane who was still lying on the couch gently breathing but unresponsive otherwise.

“She’s an air Fae, which makes her Light Fae. Because her element is air, she is able to communicate a lot better and more quickly than most people. She’s able to pick up different psychic energies.” Drake doodled on a piece of paper as he spoke.

“But how do they get a message out? If I were going to take over part of the Fae world, how would I do it?”

Drake stopped chewing on his carrot, put down his pen and looked up at me. “Very carefully. The Fae live in family pods, so you would get as many of the leaders of those families to follow you as you could.”

“And how would I get a message out to them? That they should follow me?” I asked. I had spent my career getting into the minds of perpetrators, or perps as we called them, but getting into the mind of a different species was a little bit out of my skill set or at least out of my experience level.

“You would have to do great and daring deeds that Fae would start talking about,” Hilda shared. “You would also have to use the crystals.”

“The what?” Drake asked.

“Oh, crystals are used for communication in general.”

“What the Hell’s wrong with cell phones?” I asked. “They seem to work for most other people.”

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