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.
One of the doors ahead of us opened up; Cormac held it, clearing the path for us, urging us inside. He was right where he needed to be, to come to the rescue. The warm air of the hotel lobby had a corporate, carpeted scent that stabbed through the turmoil. I steered Luis toward that smell, our escape route.
“Thanks,” I gasped.
“This way,” Cormac said, pointing to a room—a bellhop station or maybe just an office or small meeting room, I couldn’t tell. I pulled Luis’s arm and pointed to the shelter.
Cormac shouted, a path cleared, and we moved forward.
Another familiar face emerged from the crowd of onlookers—Dr. Shumacher. “Can I help?”
I couldn’t think of very many people I’d want helping in a situation like this, but she was one of them. She’d seen out-of-control lycanthropes before. The four of us lunged into the room, and Cormac slammed the door.
After the mob on the street, the room was very quiet. It was small, no more than ten feet across, carpeted, empty, lit by fluorescents. It could have held a small conference table and a few chairs, or served as luggage storage.
Luis set Esperanza on the floor. She was still batting at him, and he was doing a good job ducking, but she’d gotten a swipe across his cheek, three rows of cuts dripping blood. The wound was hard to differentiate from the smears of cow blood that covered us all.
Her whole body was rigid, braced against itself, and she was gasping for breath. Traces of fur gave her brown skin a sheen. She was trying to keep it in, to hold it together. Luis held her close, still whispering in their language.
“Thanks,” I said to Cormac and Shumacher.
The scientist stood by the door, watching with her neutral, clinical gaze. “Her shifting under duress in public would have been a disaster.”
“Good thing it didn’t happen, then,” Cormac said.
Got that right. If she’d shifted in the middle of the crowd, the odds of her getting out without hurting anyone, even by accident, were slim. At least here, with friends looking after her, she had a chance of staying safe and in control. I couldn’t tell if she was right on the verge of shifting or not.
“You two might want to stay outside for now,” I said. “Just in case.”
Even Cormac didn’t argue, and they both stepped quickly outside and closed the door.
I pressed to the wall, ready to help if needed but wanting to stay out of the way, to avoid upsetting her precarious balance. If she was going to shift uncontrollably, she’d have done it by now, I thought. But I didn’t know her well enough to tell. Luis did, and he continued holding her, cradling her. Were-jaguars didn’t have packs like wolves. I didn’t know if the contact would help. Then again, maybe it would, not because he was another were- jaguar, but because he was her brother.
Using the hem of my shirt, I wiped at the blood spattered on me, which didn’t help to clean it up, really. So my shirt instead of my arm was bloody—hardly seemed an improvement.
Finally, Esperanza sighed, slumping in Luis’s arms. Her skin had lost the sheen of fur, and her hands were hands, with human fingers and fingernails, resting on her lap. Luis continued whispering at her, murmuring at her, until she seemed to fall asleep. He tried to clean some of the blood off her face, using a corner of his shirt. Didn’t have much more luck than I had.
When he finally looked at me, his face was ashen and lined with worry. “That was too close,” he said.
“Is she going to be okay?”
“Pissed off when she wakes up, but yes. I think so.”
I opened the door, let Shumacher back in and introduced her to Luis, who thanked her. Esperanza started to rouse, as if from a brief fainting spell, her face creased, struggling to sit up. She said something in Portuguese, and Luis reassured her.
“You might want to stay here for a time,” Shumacher said. “At least until that crowd clears out a little. Your friend is standing watch, keeping people out.”
If I focused, I could still hear shouting. I settled in to wait. Shumacher pulled a cell phone from her jacket pocket and made a call. She waited for an answer, and waited. When the number went to voice mail, she left a message.
“This is Elizabeth Shumacher, there’s been some trouble outside the hotel and I just wanted to touch base. Please call back when you get this.”
“Who?” I questioned. She looked worried.
“Sergeant Tyler,” she said. “I hope he’s all right.”
“He probably just missed the call,” I said.
She made another call. “Yes, can you call room twenty-four eighty, please. Thank you.”
Again, she waited, and waited. Again, she left a message when no one answered.
“When was the last time you saw him?” she asked me, putting her phone away.
