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I saw his mouth form the word “Thanks,” although I couldn’t hear him through the screaming roar of voices and bodies.
I registered the impact before the pain chased it as something—glass bottle, my brain belatedly identified—crashed against the side of my head. I could tell immediately that I was bleeding, and I hissed sharply. Hands closed over my bicep as Dan tried to pull me away from the break in the riot line that had been filled in—run over, more like—by MFM protestors.
Something else bounced off my vest, but that I ignored, roughly wiping blood off the side of my face, the back of my hand coming away red.
My blood’s as red as any human’s. Orc blood is purplish, Vampire blood a darker wine color, ghoul blood more of a brown, but fauns and elves—ours is that same, shocking red you find in human veins. It was one less thing they could use against me, although shedding it didn’t seem to bother them any today.
Beside me, Dan leaned into the shield with the uniform next to him, helping the guy push the line back toward the overturned barrier. On my left, another guy with a shield was standing, not doing much. I stepped toward him to offer the same help, but then suddenly found myself on the other side of that same shield.
Time slowed, and I looked over the top of it—not hard, at six-foot-four—and met the hate-filled hazel eyes of a pale, round-faced uniform, his brown hair matted to his forehead with sweat and his teeth bared in a sneer. I dropped my eyes to find his badge and saw that he’d taped over both his name and his badge number.Fuck. Then hepushed, shoving me straight into the MFM crowd.
Bloody fucking shitcocks.
It’s a fucking good thing elves are stronger than humans. Because I was surrounded by humans—pissed-off, racist-as-fuck humans who thought I was less deserving of things like oxygen and life than they were.
I needed all that extra strength to stay on my feet as I was pummeled by fists, some of them weighted by sets of keys or honest-to-fucking-God brass knuckles, jabbed by elbows, kicked by feet, and assailed by whatever they’d manage to scavenge to throw at me—an apple core, a couple small rocks, a handful of change (that was weird), and even half a cup of tepid coffee.
In the whirl of bodies and limbs, I had a glimpse of Dan’s horrified, panicked face, and had a moment of strange comfort that at leastsomebodydidn’t want me to get trampled or beaten to death.
And then the shield wall surged forward—not including the dickbag cocksucker who had shoved me into the middle of the rioting crowd—and rough, gloved hands grabbed me and pulled me back through the gap until Dan Maza wrapped his arms around me.
“Hart!” he screamed into my ear, and I winced.
“Yeah, Dan, I’m here,” I yelled back.
“You—fuck, man. You okay?”
“I’ll live.”
“Fuck this, we gotta get the fuck out of here.”
But I shook my head. Maybe it was the adrenaline or maybe it was my mile-wide asshole streak, but fuck those fuckers if they were going to drive me out of my own goddamn job. “No. I’m good.”
“You’re fucking insane, Hart!” Dan yelled at me.
I nodded. “Yeah, probably.”
We spent another ten minutes pushing against the shields before some asshat unleashed the tear gas, not bothering to recognize on which side of the damn line they were throwing the cannisters.
Or maybe it was on purpose.A chill ran down my spine. My assailant had disappeared somewhere where I couldn’t get my hands on him, which I both regretted and figured was maybe a good thing for the longevity of my career, since I would have wrung his fucking neck and not given a shit about the consequences.
The acrid burn of the gas made my eyes water and my lungs burn, and I kept coughing, struggling to stay upright. The riot line had full gas masks, but Dan and I only had our standard issue blue masks that didn’t do all that much in comparison to the riot gear gas masks, but they were sure as shit better than nothing. But we could still only take it for so long before we had to stagger back away from the line.
Thankfully, the shitheads on the other side had also run from the smoke, and the riot line was able to push the barriers back to where they were supposed to be.
But there were a lot of people on the ground.
Both of us started helping them up.
Until I found someone who wasn’t going to get up.
She was alive, at least, but I could see the fragments of her tibia sticking through her shin.
“Dan!” I got his attention, and he came over to keep us both from being trampled while I crouched in the slush and mud and blood on the grass to try to soothe the poor woman’s hysterical sobs.
* * *
It was almostnine at night before they let me go. Nine people had died—five pro-Arcanid and four MFM protestors. Four of the pro-Arcanid protestors killed were Nids—one faun, an orc, a ghoul, and a shifter. The last one was an Arc-human. All four MFMs were ordinary human. No surprise there. Another two or three dozen people of various varieties had gone to the hospital, and another fifty or so to jail. Estimates were putting about six thousand people at the riot.
