Side by side, Cormac and I marched to the lobby. My nerves felt like they trembled; I wanted to growl.

“You should have stayed back at Ned’s,” I said. “All these lycanthropes, and you don’t have any way to defend yourself—you’d be safer.”

“Didn’t know you cared,” he said.

I stopped. “I care.”

He wouldn’t look at me, and I didn’t know what to say after that. I sighed. “I know you hate it when we get all overprotective, but—”

“No.” He shook his head, gaze downturned. “It’s just I’m used to being the one taking care of everyone else. I—sometimes I think I’d be better off if I moved away. Different city, different state. If I wasn’t around anymore and you didn’t have to worry. But … that would be worse, wouldn’t it? We’d all still worry but we wouldn’t be there to check up on each other.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He gave a curt nod and continued down the hallway. I hurried to follow.

The first person I saw in the lobby was Luis. As nice as he was on the eyes, I didn’t want to deal with his flirting right now. I had to get the first word in, warn him what was happening—and convince him to take it seriously—before he could start batting his eyes and kissing my hand.

“Luis, I need to talk to you—”

“Kitty! I need your help,” he said. He wasn’t smiling.

“What is it?”

“It’s Essi—Esperanza. She’s in the middle of it, and I can’t get her to let it be. The protestors—they know who she is because of her work with the conference. If she gets stuck—I don’t know if she has a way out. She won’t listen to her crabby little brother but maybe she’ll listen to you.”

That wasn’t even the disaster I was expecting. “Let’s go,” I said, taking his arm to push him forward, leading the way.

We couldn’t see a way out of the lobby’s front doors—a crowd of people was blocking them. The local fire marshal was going to get involved if this kept up. We’d have a hard time even getting to the front doors—the crowd was getting larger.

“Back around,” I said, and took off in a run, back for the side entrance.

“Kitty!” Cormac called.

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.