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The MFM—the Magic-Free Movement—had begun about five years after Arcanavirus had first struck, although at first it had largely remained pretty fringe. They’d been growing in the last few years, though, and they’d started trying to push legislation in some of the more conservative states trying to limit things like employment opportunities for Arcanids. The MFM had been behind the ban on vampires in the medical profession in most states, although they hadn’t yet succeeded in getting that one on the federal books.
More recently, they’d started targeting orcs and shifters.
My hand froze as I moved to flip over the page I’d been reading. The MFM was focused on shifters. And now I had a case with kidnapped shifters being forced, or so it seemed, to shift into animal form and then being trapped there.
I frowned, then looked down at Taavi.
He cocked his head to the side, fixing me with his brown eye.
I almost asked him if he knew what the MFM was, but then remembered I was talking to Bowman, and they didn’t know that Taavi was anything other than a dog.
I looked back up at Bowman. “Is there an issue with the protest?” The MFM were assholes, but I hadn’t heard about any of their protests turning violent or destructive.
“There’s a lot of them,” Bowman answered, flicking through their phone before holding it up for me to look at.
It was their social media feed, which showed a stream of photos of very angry looking people holding signs that said things like “Humans first!” and “Magic is cheating!”
They were right. There were a lot of people at the protest.
My frown deepened.
I could have done without the sign that read “The only good Nid is a dead Nid.”
“That’s borderline hate speech,” I said out loud.
Bowman’s brow furrowed. “Nobody thought this was going to be this big,” they said. “Or this angry.” Their checkerboard mask puffed out a little on a sigh. “It started getting messy about twenty minutes ago, and they called in reinforcements to help with crowd control.”
“Shit,” I remarked.
“Oy! Hart!”
Both Bowman and I turned at the sound of Captain Andreas Villanova’s voice, which rolled over the bullpen like a shockwave, even through his utilitarian navy-blue mask.
I stood. “Captain?”
“Riot gear and get your ass to the State House, Hart.”
That was bad. Bad enough that the whole damn room went dead quiet.
“Yessir,” is what came out of my mouth. “Bowman, can you take the dog?” There was no fucking way I was bringing a shifter stuck in dog form into the middle of a massive anti-magic protest that had probably turned into a full-scale riot. A deadly one.
Not a lot of other ways you ended up needing homicide to show up in riot gear.
At my feet, Taavi whined loudly.
“Yeah, of course,” the witch answered, holding out a hand for the leash I’d picked up.
“Stay with Bowman, bud,” I told Taavi. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
* * *
I’d assumedI was looking for a trampling victim. Maybe someone who’d been hit with something that had gotten thrown.
Nope.
Stabbing. Brutal. Bloody.
And the riot gear was absolutely necessary.
