“Jillian won’t care what you’re wearing. She knows you’re here to help her,” he said, offering her his elbow like some Austenian hero. “We’re really relieved to have someone of your skill set joining us. We have Dr. Carmody running the clinic, but with predicted local population growth after the ‘incident,’ our mathematicians are also predicting a considerable spike in pregnancies over the next few years.”

Any League employee hearing the word ‘incident’ could only think of one monumental event in the supernatural community over the last few months. A Louisville man named Eustace Cornwell, a satyr whose family was the basis for the Pope Lick Monster legend, lost an argument over a parking space and shifted in front of dozens of people. Most of those people had smart phones and Youtube accounts. It was simply too much exposure for the League to cover up. Humanity was informed that the nightmares that used to keep them shivering under thatched roofs at night-from fairies to sea monsters-it was all real. Real and secretly living beside them since time immemorial, and now the truth was out.

Humanity, as a whole … did not handle this well. There was a massive wave of protests, petitions, and inaccurate Facebook posts that had some humans believing that supernatural creatures had been plotting for years to take over the world, as opposed to slowly being pushed out of all their natural spaces by the far larger human population. Watching politicians arguing on the news over whether supernaturals should have to sign up for some sort of registry, Charlotte wondered if it would have been easier if humans found out that one mythological creature existed at a time. The League could announce one a week, “Unicorns are real, but most of them are very cranky. Definitely don’t try to tickle them,” and then the next week, “OK, mermaids, too.” She thought maybe it would have been kinder to slowly introduce the concept as opposed to ripping off the monster Band-Aid all at once.

Fortunately, the League had been preparing for this eventuality for years. They circulated millions of free copies of a book written by Jillian Ramsay, PhD, while she’d lived in Mystic Bayou, where humans and “magique” (the local umbrella term for all supernatural types) had lived in harmony for generations. The Bayou: A Whole-Hearted Approach to a Blended Community was a slightly altered version of a manual Dr. Ramsay had written for League officials, explaining how the two populations of the “(Name Redacted) Bayou” managed to do just that, with minimal violence, while mingling their cultures and bloodlines. Dr. Ramsay had gone on the news and talk show circuit, explaining how absolutely normal the lives of most magique were, that humans had likely lived next door to magique for years and come to no harm. So, it stood to reason that they would continue to be fine and perhaps losing their shit on a world-wide scale was a little premature.