The two of us outran him. Instinct took over; I didn’t even think about it.
Hundreds of people gathered, running down the street as if drawn by the noise, the sheer energy of it. A police siren sounded nearby. Once outside, we stayed close to the building and eased toward the street in front, pressing past people, working along the wall. We rounded the corner.
Wolf bristled, snarling behind the bars of her cage, and I had to stop to catch my breath, to quell the instinct to simply turn and run away. Too many people, all pushing together, shouting. And Esperanza was in the middle of it? What must she be feeling?
Ahead of me, Luis looked back. “You okay?”
“I hate this, but yeah,” I grumbled.
Frowning, he’d hunched, his shoulders tense, grimly pressing forward into the crowd. I grabbed his elbow in an effort to keep close to him, to be sure we weren’t separated. He clamped his arm to his side to keep me there.
The crowd surged like a live thing. We were making progress until something happened in front, and a wave of flesh and angry attitude pressed back. We had nowhere to go because people had closed in behind us. Luis shouted for his sister. I was just barely tall enough to see to the tops of people’s heads, but no farther, even standing on my toes. But we kept moving forward, Luis pushing on, a cat on the hunt. I kept my gaze on his back, ignoring the hordes pressing on every side. I was trapped. I wanted to howl.
The people around us were all ages, male and female, shapes, sizes, and builds. The words they shouted came out muddled, blurring into one another, and I couldn’t read any signs—most of them were up front, where it was easier to hoist them. I couldn’t tell which side of the debate we’d ended up on. Somebody, or several somebodies, reeked of garlic, like they’d bathed in it. Maybe they had. No one recognized me at least.
Ahead, a space opened, a place on the street where the crowd ended. Striped police barricades kept people corralled. I heard a voice shouted through a bullhorn—authoritative, a police officer maybe. Cars with flashing lights parked on the other side of the street, also keeping the crowd corralled. Luis called Esperanza’s name again, and we were close enough to the front of the protest to hear words.
Luis elbowed past people and pulled me the final step to the barricade.
Esperanza was on the other side of it, shouting, hands in fists at her sides, teeth bared. “You don’t have that power! If someone stands here and tells you they’re a human being, a person, you don’t have the power to argue with that!”
“You are not a person, you are not a human being! You’re not like us!” He was a young man in jeans and a T-shirt. Sweat matted his hair, and his muscles stood out. He brandished a sign on a stick, waving it above his head as if it added to his voice: ANIMALS ARE NOT PEOPLE.
God, this was so wrong. Both of them had crossed their respective barriers, but hung back, arguing across an open stretch of sidewalk, as if kept to their side of the protest by magnetism. Where were the cops? I saw the cars, the lights, heard the bullhorn—they were trying to push forward, I thought. I hoped.
“Esperanza! We need to break this up!” I shouted. “Now, before the cops get here!”
“Essi, listen to her!” Luis added.
She glanced back at us. Strain marked her features; her mouth hung open, her teeth slightly bared. She was hunched and tensed in that cat-like manner, like Luis.
Luis reached his hand, held it out despite being jostled by the crowd behind him. Everyone was shouting; the sirens were loud. Esperanza nodded, then. She glanced back at her heckler, spit at the asphalt near his feet, and turned to reach back to Luis.
Someone from the other side ran forward, tipping one of the sections of barricade in his effort to get past it. He was also young, also scrappy—and he held a bucket in his hands. He moved like an attacking predator, head down, arms reaching.
“Esperanza, get down!” I shouted. Too late—she was looking at the attacker. Everybody was looking at the sudden burst of movement across open space.
The man threw the contents of the bucket, an arc of thick, red liquid that splashed in a wall, hit Esperanza in full, and continued on to spatter a swathe of the crowd on either side, including me and Luis. People around us screamed.
The stench of it filled my nose, making me sneeze. I fought past the initial shock and horror to identify it: cow blood. Plain old cow blood. Nothing more sinister than what you found on the average butcher block, which was probably exactly where this came from.
Not that that mattered. He might as well have thrown kerosene on a fire.
The taut fury marring Esperanza’s features, the hiss she let out, weren’t human.
The crowd was in motion, and its tenor had changed. Instead of a slow press, an ebb and flow, people surged in a panic, away from the source of the attack, away from the blood. Luis went the other direction, toward his sister, and I followed. He knocked down the plastic barrier and leapt for her, far more agile and graceful than a normal person would have been.
I wasn’t a jaguar who could leap and turn on a dime, but I could put my head down and power through. We both reached Esperanza and grabbed her before she could pounce at her attacker. Luis took her arms, held them back, and locked her in an embrace; I got in front of her, hands on shoulders, holding her back, blocking her view. The man with the bucket, now empty, stood in the middle of the sidewalk, regarding his handiwork with wide-eyed bafflement, as if he hadn’t expected everyone to actually start screaming.
Luis was speaking rapid, steady Portuguese close to Esperanza’s ear. Her skin was hot under her clothing, tingling against my touch—close to shifting. Her glaring eyes had turned emerald—she might not even have seen her brother.
“Luis, we have to get her out of here.”
He’d already hoisted her into his arms, cradling her. She struggled, batting him with a hand that now bore claws. I hovered close, both to grab her if she broke free, and to shelter them from the screams and shouts of the mob as I guided them to the nearest doors at the hotel’s lobby.
Without the barricade, the two groups of protestors came together, merging into a riot. Somebody fell, smacking into my back—Wolf turned to snap, until I yanked her back. Had to stay human. Had too much to do, too much to go wrong.
The bullhorn was close, now. Somebody was yelling to stop. I assumed they weren’t yelling at us.