Abduction in Fairytown

We got the call at 2:45, threw our doughnuts away—yeah, stereotype much—and headed for Fairytown sirens blaring. Dispatch said it was a missing children’s case, and you gotta hurry for those. Even if you are going there, and you are likely too late anyway.

When a call comes from Fairytown, you know there will be a human involved. The Fay don’t squeal on each other. There has never been a case of a fairy calling the cops in all the time they have lived in the city. Which, admittedly, hasn’t been more than a decade or two, but still.

They used to live in forests and shit, but with deforestation and we humans expanding into any habitat we can set our eyes on, they have urbanised just as we have. There’s a large community of them living here now, mostly in the south-central district, semiofficially called “Fairytown” now.

They mainly stick to themselves. They deal with their issues within their own community, and we cops never hear about it. Or if we do, it is rumours that no one will ever corroborate. But we still get called there, and when we do, it is because something went wrong in a human-fairy interaction. Usually, some idiot wandered in there, thinking he could behave with them the way you can with humans. Well, you can’t, as someone had just found out.

Bill, my partner, got a description of the woman who’d called us from dispatch. A detailed description hadn’t been necessary, though; when we got to the address, there could be no doubt. A woman, mid-thirties, was balling her eyes out.

“That would be her,” I said and parked the cruiser.

We got out of the car. Bill went over to the woman, a Mrs Karen White, while I scanned the surroundings for anything that might be relevant. That was more for show than anything else. Who knows what might be relevant in Fairytown?

This shouldn’t be our kind of case anyway. Bill and I are beat cops, and if we are talking abduction or anything of the sort, the specialists should be called in. There is a whole department to deal with that. But I had a good feeling that they were gonna dump it on us and only sweep in to take the credit if we somehow managed to solve the case.

No one understands the fairy community, and my feeling is that no one wants to. They prefer to think of fairies as just another ethnic minority and Fairytown as some extra spice to cosmopolitan living. They are fucking wrong, and what is worse, they know it. Deep down inside, they know that this is not Little Italy or Chinatown or any of the other ethnic enclaves. Fairies are not humans.

That’s not some racist shit saying that, and I’m tired of woke professional activists claiming it is. Fairies are not humans, and that is just how it is. They are nothing like us; they don’t think as we do, they don’t act as we do, and they don’t follow the same rules that we do either. I don’t just mean laws, although they don’t really see the point of following our laws either, I mean they don’t obey the laws of fucking physics!

Fairies are just different, okay? When you work the beat, you know this. If you don’t, you can pretend otherwise. And I understand that the politically correct thing is to pretend this isn’t so. Humanity has a horrible history of classifying everyone not familiar to us as not human, and that is terrible when we are talking about our fellow humans. I understand why they don’t want to do this with fairies, but in this case, it is overcompensating.

Fairies aren’t humans, and it is dangerous to pretend otherwise. If you don’t know that you are playing with fire because everyone tells you that you aren’t, you will not be careful enough. That could pretty much be the description of every case I’ve seen in Fairytown.

Anyway, although everyone pretends that fairies are just people in funny dresses, I think that my higher-ups secretly know this isn’t so. How do I know that? Because every time something happens, for some reason, we don’t follow the usual procedure. When there is a homicide, the homicide unit takes over. If there is a homicide in Fairytown, beat cops like Bill and me have to deal with it. When there is a missing person case, that would be the missing persons unit’s job, right? Guess who gets the case if it is in Fairytown? Yeah, you got it in one.

With this case, where some woman lost her children in Fairytown, some woman who should know better but didn’t because everyone pretends that fairies are just funny people? Oh, there would be someone from another unit to talk to her, get all the information, make sure that she knows that we are doing everything we can, do all the right things, except for actually doing anything. It would all be theatre, while my captain would be leaning on Bill and me to actually do something. And he knows full well that there is probably fuck all that we can do.

But yeah, Bill talked to her. I looked around. We have to go through the motions, don’t we?

I didn’t see anything of interest. No big sign that said, “I hAVe thE ChilDREn” or nothing. I knew I wouldn’t spot anything, and my expectations were met to the fullest. Sometimes, the universe plays by the rules like that.

I wasn’t paying attention to what Bill and the woman were saying until Bill raised his voice.

“You left them in there?”

That is unprofessional. You don’t blame the victim. Even when they have been incredibly stupid, and if she had left her children alone with a fairy, she had been incredibly stupid. If you are professional, you can think that the victim did something foolish, but you can’t say it. But Bill and I aren’t that professional; that is why we are still beat cops.

This I had to hear. I went over and got a quick recap. This woman, Mrs White, had gone to Fairytown to meet a friend for a coffee. Weird place to go for it, but okay, everyone to his or, in this case, her taste. But instead of looking after her kids while they had said coffee, she had sent them in to play in the bookstore next to the café. Sure, why not? Maybe the lovely fairy in there will do some free babysitting, right? Anyway, post-coffee, it turns out the bookstore isn’t there any longer. Crying ensued.

I am sorry I sound so dismissive of her right now. I felt for her, really. It just gets harder and harder to feel pity when people keep doing the most idiotic things imaginable, and you have to try to fix it afterwards. Very rarely successfully, I might add.

You never, ever, ever, send children alone into a fairy’s demesne. Whether that is a forbidden forest, a ruined castle, a gingerbread house, or, as in this case, a fairy bookstore. Literally anything can happen.

If it’s a bookstore, they probably weren’t eaten by a troll or something like that—although that might just be my prejudice talking, trolls might enjoy selling books for all I know. But from what I can tell, a fairy’s domain usually follows its nature somehow, and I don’t picture trolls when I hear ‘bookstore’. But that might just be me.

Anyway, excluding trolls, there are plenty of other options. A beautiful but wicked witch that will take you to a land of eternal winter? A pretty ball where you wind up dancing for a hundred years? Do you think I am making it up? Read the old tales! Not the Disney versions, but the originals. Then consider that these are the beings that you are messing with. My point is, this is fucking dangerous, and you don’t take your children to Fairytown and then let them run around unsupervised.

I didn’t say any of that. I wanted to, but I also want to keep my job.

“Ma’am, this is probably a misunderstanding. Shops in Fairytown occasionally move around, it happens all the time, it is likely simply somewhere else at present, and blah blah blah…”

At least I didn’t have to bullshit that long before a car of civilian cops showed up. They took over, dragged the woman away, and told us to search for witnesses. That was code for “solve the fucking case because we won’t.”

There really wasn’t much point in asking around on the streets to see if anyone saw anything. They probably didn’t, and if they did, they wouldn’t tell us.

It’s not that the fairies don’t want to talk to us. There probably are many who don’t, but my guess is that those wouldn’t live in the middle of a human city. No, those that are here are happy to talk, they just don’t understand what you are asking them, or if they do, then you don’t understand their answer, and in either case, you do not get anything out of it. It’s a great big waste of time.

But there is a trick to this. I can’t take credit for it; it is an old trick, way older than urban fairies. Cops have used it for centuries. If there is a non-cooperative community that you need help from, you do not ask the people on the streets—you go to the community leaders.

Admittedly, we do not know how the leaders of Fairytown are, but to be fair, I am not convinced that we know who runs Chinatown or Little Italy either. What we have is an idea of whom the most respected members of the Fay community are, and that would have to do.

The go-to guy in Fairytown is Mr Tomtom. He’s a wizened old guy who runs a tobacco shop. I can’t imagine there being much run on a tobacco shop these days, and I can’t say that I have ever seen any customers in his shop, but you won’t have worked the beat in Fairytown long before you notice that the community treats him like royalty. Sure, we might be misunderstanding something essential in Fay culture, and that interpretation could be entirely wrong, but that is what it looks like to me. And even if it is just something we are imagining, I am willing to believe it since this Fay is actually willing to talk to us, and most of the time, what he says makes some sort of sense.

So, we went to Tomtom’s Tobacco. What else were we going to do?

We parked the car, took our firearms and put them in the boot.

Regulations say this is a no-no. You never leave your weapons in the car. The thing is: regulations are bloody wrong. The Fay do not like iron—don’t ask me why—and the steel in our firearms qualify as iron to them. We could go in there armed, and Tomtom would unfortunately not be in today—if the shop would even be there when we arrived. Or, we could go in there, not carrying any iron, and there would be the off-chance that we could learn something.

As it was, Tomtom was behind the counter as we entered the shop. I took that as a good sign; he could just as easily have disappeared into thin air when we set foot on the stairs.

“Sir Jack, Sir Bill, what a marvellous surprise. How can I serve you today?”

“Mr Tomtom, we are in a precarious situation, and the city is in desperate need of aid that only yourself can provide,” I answered. Bill always lets me speak when it comes to fairies, the lazy bastard.

Don’t think I speak that way all the time. It is an act, just like the act I pulled when I was talking to the idiot who lost her children. The fairies like that kind of talk, don’t ask me why, so I try to give them what they want.

“If my poor person can be of any assistance, however slight, you need but say the word.” Tomtom flashed a bright smile.

He moved around the counter and shook our hands, bowing to us as he did, which we reciprocated because who the hell knows what the protocol is with fairies—better just to imitate what they do themselves.

“Two children were taken, Mr Tomtom,” I explained.

“Taken? How dreadful!”

Tomtom looked genuinely shocked. Don’t let that fool you. He could be faking; that is always an option, but not actually what I was worried about. More likely, and as it turned out correctly, it was a communication issue.

“A mother let her two children explore a bookstore while she went for coffee with a friend…”

“Ah, then that is alright then.” Tomtom looked relieved. “Then why did you say that they were taken?”

“The mother wants them back!”

“Yes, mothers often do.”

Tomtom nodded, smiling as if that was all that there was to say about that.

“Mr Tomtom, we also want to get the children back.”

“Why? Do they owe allegiance to you, Sir Jack? Are they beholden? Has someone made a claim that is rightfully yours?”

Tomtom looked concerned once more.

You know, I do believe that he tries to understand us and that he wants to ease the tension between humans and the Fay. I don’t know why, but it is the feeling I get, and that, really, is the only thing I rely on when dealing with them—my gut feeling.

It’s just that he doesn’t understand what we think and feel, and in fairness, we have no clue about what the Fay think either.

“No, Mr Tomtom, they are not beholden to anyone, except perhaps their parents, that is not it…”

That gave me a confused look.

“…but human parents want to have their children back,” I continued.

He looked from me to Bill and back again. He was trying to understand. I think Mr Tomtom was generally more interested in understanding humans than we have ever been in understanding the Fay. It didn’t look like he was getting anywhere with it, though.

“Do you think that you could help us try to find the Fay that took them?”

I tried to give him something to grasp onto. If he couldn’t grasp why anyone would want to find their children, surely he could understand that Bill and I wanted to talk to whoever had them.

“Yes, yes”, he broke into a smile, “of course!”

He shouted something towards the back, in a language I wouldn’t be able to even describe no matter how long I tried, and then turned his impressive smile back on Bill and me.

“It shall be but a moment! Now, Sirs, while we wait, can I offer you refreshments? Tea, beer, spirits?”

We both hesitated. You don’t work long in Fairytown before you learn that you never accept food or drink from a Fay. I am not entirely sure why, but you hear stories, and those stories never end well for those who do.

“I offer it freely, with no obligation!” Tomtom insisted.

You learn that phrase as well. Whatever danger there is in accepting something from the fairies is apparently negated when they insist that you do not owe them anything in return.

I think it is some contract law shit, if I am honest. By accepting something, you accept a deal, even if you do not know what that deal is. Caveat emptor and all that. You are bound by the deal in any case. By promising “no obligation”, I guess that contract is no longer on the table.

If you think about it a bit further, you wonder how they make such contracts stick. How do they prove that you took food or drink in the first place? Or if you did, after they offered it freely, how do you prove that they did offer that? I don’t know. They seem to know. From what I hear on the streets, and not just when it comes to refreshments, they know everything that is promised, explicitly or implicitly. They just know. I don’t think they care one bit about what we would consider proof or arbitration or anything of that shit. They know if you made a promise or not, even when you don’t.

Anyway, Tomtom offered us drinks with no obligations, so we accepted. I know you are not allowed to drink a beer on duty, but you would have done the same given the situation. And I’ll punch out anyone who says otherwise.

And true to his word, it was ‘but a moment’ before there was word back from the back office.

We were finishing our beer when a melodic voice sang out from the back office. Jeez, if you have heard of ‘siren songs’, you have read descriptions better than I could ever write, and you would still have no idea of what it sounded like. It was beautiful and seductive. If desire, hunger, and horniness were rolled up in one, distilled to maximum potency, and injected directly into your veins, it wouldn’t do it justice. I don’t know who Tomtom kept in the back, but I wanted her and desperately wanted to never meet her.

She, he, it, of course, I didn’t actually know, who or what it was, sang from the back, and I was knocked out. It took me several seconds to reorientate myself, and by then, Tomtom was already halfway through translating it to us.

“…moved to Fields Street, but then to Owen Alley, but now is in Park Avenue, you see?”

Bill was nodding. Either he hadn’t been as affected by the voice from the back room as I had been, or he was a hell of a better liar than I had ever suspected.

“You can go to see him,” Tomtom continued, “but Mr Woodward does not accept your claim on the children.”

Tomtom shook his head as he said the last part. He looked sad, like he felt sorry for us, but that there was nothing he could do about it.

“Shit,” Bill cursed.

“We still need to go and see this Mr Woodward,” I said. “Maybe we can work something out…”

“I will come with you,” Tomtom offered.

Tomtom got up and fetched a long green winter jacket, which wasn’t necessary as it was a pleasant spring afternoon outside. But then, I don’t think fairies dress for the elements as much as they dress up as part of an act. I’ve seen half-naked sylphs in the middle of brutal blizzards and barbegazi gnomes covered in layers of fur in the middle of a heatwave. Their appearance is mostly a game they play, and apparently, Tomtom felt that a winter jacket was the right wear for visiting this Mr Woodward.

We followed Tomtom out of the shop and started walking towards Park Avenue. We didn’t take the cruiser there; it was only a few blocks away. Tomtom would have refused to ride in it anyway—too much iron.

The layout of Fairytown is fluid. There is some basic structure to it; some of the streets and buildings from before the fairies settled here are relatively fixed, but most of the neighbourhood continuously change their geography. I don’t just mean the way that shops open and close as they do in mundane parts of town; I mean that buildings move, streets shorten or elongate to fit them in, and alleys and pathways open and close over time.

The buildings aren’t really buildings in the normal sense, from what I’ve gathered. They are projections of the fairies that inhabit them and manifestations of their nature. A fairy’s home, its demesne, is part of itself. They change with the fairy’s mood, grow or shrink in size and grandeur with the fairy’s status, and move location if the fairy wants them to.

If a fairy wants to run and hide, he can literally pick up his home and take it with him. He can move it to another street, another town, another country—hell, if he wants, he can move it a hundred years into the future or into the past.

If Mr Woodward didn’t want to be found, there would be absolutely nothing Bill and I could do to find him. He would be gone, so would the children, and that would be that. But if Tomtom said Woodward would be here, he would, fairies always keep their word, and sure enough, we spotted the bookstore as soon as we turned down on Park Avenue.

It was an impressive store—a three stories tall victorian building with display books in the arched windows at the lower two levels. A short stone stairway went up to the front entrance, and an artful sign above the door read “Woodward’s Used Books”.

Bill and I started up the stairs, but Tomtom stayed on the pavement. Right. I hadn’t thought of that. There would be rules for entering a fairy’s domain, just like accepting food or drink.

It’s not that there aren’t rules for entering a human’s home—if Bill and I entered a private home without a warrant, there would be repercussions. While this looked like a shop and not a private home, it was in a very real way more personal to the fairy than a human home would ever be. I hadn’t thought about that at all, only because I didn’t know what the rules were, but of course, there would be rules. It would probably be better to let Tomtom take the lead.

I signalled to Bill, and we turned around and walked back to Tomtom. Tomtom nodded and smiled as we did so. Then he looked up to the front entrance of the store. It opened, and a middle-aged man stepped out.

He looked like a caricature of an academic—unruly hair, tweet-jacked with elbow patches, squinting his eyes from the sunlight behind thick horn-rimmed glasses.

“Ah, the constabulary is here,” he said, “good, I have a complaint and a claim.”

He wasn’t looking at Bill or me, though. He looked at Tomtom, who merely nodded and started up the stairs.

Surely, he couldn’t have confused Tomtom with the cops, and what was that about a complaint?

We followed Tomtom to the door. Mr Woodward was holding it open, and we went in. Or rather, we went out, I suppose.

See, on the other side of the door was not a bookstore but a snow-covered pine forest. Maybe Tomtom had expected this, and that explained the jacket? If Bill and I had just walked in earlier, I bet it would have been a bookstore, but now that we were invited, or maybe because we entered with Tomtom, it was this instead.

Behind us, Mr Woodward closed and locked the door, which was standing on its own in the middle of the forests.

“Please come with me,” Woodward said and started walking down a path through the trees. Tomtom was walking next to him, and Bill and I followed, doing our best not to feel ignored. Normally, when the cops show up, people focus on them. Not so here, apparently. We were just tagging along with Tomtom.

In five-ten minutes, we reached another door. This one a large oak door in a stone frame, looking like something that belonged in a fortress wall, but it too was standing alone in the snow. Mr Woodward opened it and beckoned us to enter. This time, the door did take us inside.

I have never been in a castle, there aren’t many around these parts, but this looked much like I imagined one would look. Stone floor, stone walls, heavy tapestry hanging along the wall opposite the doorway, and a high ceiling that I imagined made it next to impossible to heat the place. Not that this seemed to be an issue; compared to the forest outside it was balmy.

Two small creatures that I would describe as goblins rushed over to take our coats. Or rather Tomtom and Mr Woodward’s jackets; Bill and I hadn’t been dressed for winter excursions after all.

When the goblins had taken the jackets, Woodward guided us to another door that opened into a cosy smoking room. A fire burned in a fireplace at one end, and someone had arranged four oversized chairs around a small coffee table in front of it.

“Please sit down,” Woodward said. “Refreshments will be here shortly… ah, there they are.”

Two children came in, a boy and a girl, the girl, carrying a tray with cups and a pot of what I assumed was tea, and the boy a tray with various pastries. I looked at Bill. He was thinking the same as I was.

The children put down the trays, and Mr Woodward guided them to give each of us a cup and to pour the tea in them.

“I offer it freely, with no obligation,” he said, and Tomtom took a sip of his tea. I took a sip as well while Bill went straight for one of the pastries.

Tomtom and Woodward made small talk for a bit. I wish they would get to the point, but I didn’t interrupt them; there was likely some fay protocol at play that I knew nothing about, and despite what you might have heard, I can shut up when it is necessary.

Bill didn’t interrupt either, but that had other causes. Once you feed him, that is where his focus is.

When Tomtom had finished his tea, he put the cup down on the table and leaned forward.

“You say you have grievances, Lord Woodward, and have made a claim?”

‘Lord’ was it now? More formal than I expected. And Bill and I were only ‘sir’. I couldn’t help feeling a little jealous.

“Ah, yes.” Woodward put his cup down as well. “A mortal woman came to my shop and let her children run loose. She asked me to look out for them while she went for coffee with her friend. I naturally declined.”

Tomtom nodded. I shuddered. If she had done that, she might have been in breach of child neglect laws for leaving them unsupervised, but I was more concerned with how the fairies would see the situation. By their logic, she may very well have given her children to Mr Woodward by doing this. If so, would we be able to convince Mr Woodward otherwise?

I elbowed Bill to make him focus on the conversation instead of the pastries.

“I told her that I did not want her children. I have no need for them. She told me to ‘deal with it’ and left anyway.”

“I see,” Tomtom said. “So when she left…?”

“I claimed them as my servant. By Law and Custom, it is my Duty and my Right.”

You could hear that those words were capitalised; they had some fairy meaning besides the literal.

Tomtom seemed to agree.

“It is Right,” he said, “unless someone has prior claim.”

He looked at us.

“You say that you do not hold claim to the children, Sir Jack and Sir Bill. Does anyone else?”

“Only her mother!” Bill blurted out while swallowing a last mouthful of cake. “It’s her children!”

“She released her claim on them when she left them with Mr Woodward, Sir Bill. You heard what happened.”

Bill was about to answer, but I got there first. Believe it or not, but I am the diplomatic one. And I wasn’t going to have a shouting match about laws and whether human or fairy jurisdiction would apply while sitting in a castle in the middle of a fairy realm.

“Is there a way to negotiate for their release? Perhaps pay compensation for your inconvenience Mr Woodward?”

Both fairies looked puzzled.

“If the children have no prior liege, Law and Duty now demand that Mr Woodward is their Lord,” Tomtom said. “Their mother gave them up. She is not fit to be their Lady. It would not be Right to return them to her.”

Shit.

“What about their father, then? Could he claim them?”

“Do the children have a father? A Lord who would let his children be given away by his Lady?”

“Sure, they do. Could he get them back?”

Fuck I hoped she wasn’t a single mother, or this gambit would blow up in my face.

“He is not a good Lord if he loses his vassals so easily…” Tomtom shook his head, “but he would have a claim, yes.”

“There would still be my compensation for caring for the children,” Woodward injected.

Greedy bastard. He’d just told us it was a bother to have the children, and now he wanted compensation for giving them back?

“What would you consider reasonable?” I asked.

“I will lose two servants, inept as they are… replacements would be in order.”

Tomtom looked like he was thinking it over; then he nodded. So, no help there.

“You want us to give you two other children to get these back???” Bill asked incredulously.

“No, no, it doesn’t have to be children,” Tomtom responded. “A servant is a servant; any two servants would do. Correct Lord Woodward?”

“If the father claims the children and brings two servants in return, I shall relinquish my claim,” Woodward agreed.

“Deal!” I said.

Bill looked at me as if I had lost my mind, but I had an idea, and it was worth a shot.

Woodward got up, the children and the goblin servants came in to clear the table. Woodward then took us back through the pine forest to the fairy-side of the bookstore door, opened it for us, and let us out. All the way, Bill was glaring at me, half signalling that I was mad for making the deal, half imploring me to explain what I had in mind.

I didn’t until we were on the human side of the door. We agreed with Tomtom to return in two hours after getting hold of the children’s father and obtaining two servants for the trade. While walking to the cruiser, I explained my idea to Bill, which earned me a few insults but no serious rebuttals.

When we reached the car, we called dispatch and asked them to get hold of the father—and to my great relief, there was one to get a hold on. We got the address where we could pick him up, and they would inform him to be ready for us to fetch him in one hour. We needed time to go to the mall first, and it would be plenty of time to get back to the bookstore in time.

The shopping went without a glitch—I generally find that once you are out of Fairytown, things run more smoothly—and we arrived at Mr and Mrs White’s address a bit ahead of time.

That gave us time to explain the situation to both of them, including getting into a fight with Mrs White about it.

When we arrived, she was all fury and hellfire, demanding that we should storm Fairytown in full riot gear and arrest everyone until someone talked. When we told her that we already found the children, she got even worse, ordering us to storm the bookstore, bring the entire police force or military if necessary.

At first, Bill tried to explain that it would be no good; if we showed up in force, at best, the shop wouldn’t be there—at worst, it would, and we would risk the life of every cop that attacked it. We don’t like to admit it to civilians, but we do not have the upper hand when it comes to fairies, and we would very much be outgunned in a direct confrontation.

She didn’t buy that, and by the way, she knew some very powerful people, and she would report us and blah blah blah.

I partly understood her. Everyone in the know really does their best not to let civilians know the fairies’ real power, so it is understandable when civilians think we can just go and arrest one of them. In reality, we might be able to overpower one or two lesser Fay, but a powerful one? Someone who would have an entire forest and castle hidden behind his front door? Not a chance. But no-one in Cityhall would admit that, and no-one in the police force’s upper echelons would either. It is not something they write about in the media either. So, I could follow her reasoning; if it had been humans, we would have stormed the bookstore. But with fairies? No way.

Since Bill was getting nowhere with the woman, and since we were running out of time, I changed tactics. I confronted her with the fact that she had explicitly left the children in the store, telling the Fay to ’deal with it ’, and suggested that she should ponder on that a bit. It was a cruel thing to do, but if she kept going on, we wouldn’t be back in time to actually do anything good.

I was rewarded with a screeching verbal attack but stopped her by citing the child neglect laws she had likely broken, which finally shut her up, and she ran out of the room.

When Mr White got up to follow her, I stopped him. We had to leave if we wanted the children back, and we had to prepare him for the meeting with Woodward before that.

Just as we were leaving, Mrs White returned and insisted that she would join us, but we managed to talk her out of the idea. We didn’t know how Woodward would react if she showed up, and there was no point in risking another incident if he held a grudge for her behaviour earlier. Of course, although we didn’t say that out loud, neither Bill nor I wanted to risk her attacking Woodward at the meeting either, potentially creating a dangerous situation that could get us trapped in the fairy’s demesne.

She was turning hysterical, but Mr White managed to calm her down, and off we went, back to Fairytown.

When we got back to Woodward’s bookstore, which was still on Park Avenue, I was happy to see Tomtom was waiting for us.

“This is the father, Sirs?”

He examined the guy but gave no indication of whether he approved a disapproved.

“And the servants?”

“Coming right up, Tomtom.”

I ran back to the car and got the two boxes out of the boot. I handed one to Bill—it was only fair that we took one each, and I didn’t have to carry both.

“We’re ready.”

Tomtom looked puzzled, but I didn’t care. I am perpetually puzzled when around fairies, and I enjoyed that the shoe was on the other foot for once.

“Very well,” he said, “then let us make our presence known.”

He went over to the stairs in front of the bookstore and stood there. We went to stand beside him.

“Are we just waiting here?” Mr White asked.

“I guess so.”

“Aren’t we going in?”

“Maybe.”

Hey, I didn’t know anything more than he did!

But Woodward appeared at the door like the first time and let us all in. Once again, we entered the snow-covered pine forest inside the door, but this time Bill and I managed to hide our surprise from the civilian. It wouldn’t do to let him know that we had as little clue as he did about what we were doing.

Woodward led us through the forest to the castle door, and once inside the castle, we went to the same room as the last time we were here. No-one had said anything on the walk, but as soon as we were seated, Mr White couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“Where are my children? Can I see them? Please?”

It was begging, more than demanding, which was probably a good thing. If he had shared his wife’s personality and antagonised Woodward in his own domain, things might have turned ugly.

“You are their father?” Woodward asked, “and you claim them as their Lord?”

“Yes, I’m their father. Please, can I see them?”

“When reparations are made, you shall have them back.”

Woodward then turned to Bill and me.

“You agreed to the terms mandated by Law and Custom: servants for servants. Yet, I see you have brought no servants. No new vasals to replace those you wish me to relinquish.”

He turned to Tomtom.

“Are these knights of yours not honourable?”

The what now? Tomtom always called us ‘sirs’, but knights?

“The honour of you vasals reflect on you, Lord Tomtom, and on the Power that Custom grant you.”

What the hell was going on here? Vasals, Power, Custom? This was getting a bit out of control, and the worst was that Woodward was going visibly irritated, and I, for one, did not want to be trapped in a fairy castle with a pissed off whatever-he-was.

“Lord Woodward,” I interjected, “we have indeed brought you servants. The best the human world can offer, the choice of tens of millions of our households.”

“Oh?”

That got him interested.

“For such a Lord as yourself, we couldn’t offer you anything but the best, naturally.”

He nodded. Don’t let anyone tell you that flattery doesn’t work.

“And while it may pale compared to the fine goblin servants you have, the Roomba is the finest cleaning servant that humanity possesses.”

“Roomba?”

“Indeed. The name of the species, but you can give them individual names if you please.”

Bill was already opening the box he had carried, and I started on mine.

“They will tirelessly sweep your floors, night and day, at any time you wish.”

There was a full-on smile on Woodward’s face now, and he looked gleefully at the little round vacuuming robot Bill pulled out of his box.

“Hand it over, knight!”

Bill did. I finished unpacking mine and placed it on the table between us.

“How does it work?”

“I can demonstrate it for you, Lord.”

I looked around for a power plug. Fuck. Yeah, that was stupid. Why did I expect electricity in a fairy castle?

“Er… Lord Woodward, they can only live on electricity, which I had assumed…”

“Electricity? The power of amber is not a stranger to us.” He made a flick of his wrist, and now there was a power plug in the wall next to me. “I use it in my bookstore. It can be convenient. Now show me how these Roombas work.”

I did. I tried to make it as fast as possible because Mr White was about to lose it, but explaining a robot vacuum cleaner to a fairy is as hard as explaining to your grandfather how to log into his email—tedious, slow, and frustrating. But we got there in the end.

Woodward was practically jumping with joy when we finally got the little robot going. And when I informed him that, to the best of my knowledge, he was the first and only fairy to own a Roomba, he was almost bursting with pride.

So, I figured we might as well exploit the excellent mood he was in now and asked if he agreed that compensations had been made and if we could now please get the children.

“Naturally, naturally,” he said and called out in a language I didn’t understand.

Shortly after, a goblin opened the door, and two children in their early teens were shoved in.

Mr White looked puzzled, but when the teens saw him, they ran to him, flung themselves at him, hugging him, and calling him ’dad’.

Oh shit! Of course, I’ve heard that time can move differently in Fairy, but I hadn’t expected this. Neither, obviously, had their father, who looked properly confused. But he hugged them back, and I didn’t want him to compose himself and make a scene.

“We thank you, Lord Woodward, and will be on our way.”

I stood up. Tomtom and Bill did the same; the children and their father were still absorbed in their hugging.

“The exchange is done,” Woodward agreed. He turned to the goblin. “See our guests out.” Then he returned to playing with the Roombas.

“Come,” I said to the children and their father and grabbed Mr White by the elbow. Bill got hold of the teens. “But, but, ...” Mr White started. I silenced him. “Not now!”

Pulling him along, our entire group left the room. The goblin took us out of the castle, and we were back in the pine forest. I released Mr White’s arm there. He wasn’t struggling any more; I think he understood the situation and wouldn’t start a scene. He might have lost a few years of his children’s lives, but it was better than losing them altogether.

The goblin was walking ahead of us, leading us to the door that would bring us back to Fairtown and our own world. Tomtom and Bill were walking a bit behind me. I slowed down to walk next to Tomtom.

“What was that about knights and vassals, Tomtom?” I asked.

He looked a bit uncomfortable with the question.

“Ah, a simple ruse to get you invited in, nothing more,” he said.

I didn’t quite believe him. On the other hand, I have never heard of a fairy telling a direct lie. Bending the truth a little, sure, but a direct lie, never. I strongly suspected that something was going on that I didn’t understand. But that was life when your beat is Fairytown. There will always be something.

We reached the door, the teens and their father went through it first, and Tomtom, Bill and I followed.

This time, at least we got the children back. A little older, perhaps, but no worse for wear. That was a clear win in my book.

We wouldn’t be rewarded for this, and there would be no medals in our future—officially, it wouldn’t have been our case anyway. Someone else would take the credit, but they would also get the blame for the aged children when Karen White overcame her shock and inevitably decided to make a fuss.

Bill and I are beat cops, nothing more. Sure, Fairytown is an odd beat, but you get used to the odd.

I just hoped they would reimburse us for the Roombas…