I kicked up my speed a notch and as I rounded the corner the noise hit me – a wall of hate dressed up in chants.
‘No! No! Ogres, you should go!’
‘Monsters walk free when they should flee!’
‘Humans, not creatures!’
I didn’t need to see the symbol of the Anti-Crea spray-painted on the placards to know who was protesting outside the station – infull viewof the Common realmers. This was madness.
I hustled over to the group. ‘Your presence here threatens the Verdict,’ I said firmly. ‘You are within your rights to protest peacefully, but any slogans or signs that depict the Other realm must be removed instantly.’
‘Course you’d say that!’ a man with long flowing hair said, beard straggly. ‘How does it feel, sleeping with the enemy, you bestial bitch?’
Arsehole.
‘I will not justify your vitriol with a response. You have five minutes to remove references to the Other from your chants and signage, or you’ll be arrested for threatening to break the Verdict.’ The Verdict was the piece of magic that helped keep the Common realmers ignorant of the Other. But even the Verdict couldn’t hide our presence if these idiots kept mouthing off.
The protestors mumbled, and I heard a fair few “Ogre’s whore” and “Ogre’s prostitute” comments before they began to remove the signs that referenced magical creatures.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ the bearded guy continued to rail at me. ‘Your parents, wizards through and through, raised you right and you’re slumming it with a creature. A creature who goes around murdering innocent elementals like Lord Marlow.’
Now then, wasn’t that interesting? Only a few knew of Marlow’s death, and while it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that his family had sent out an Other-wide email, it struck me as profoundly interesting that they were here protesting before any media coverage had reported on the death.
Beardy continued, ‘You’re fucking a criminal, Inspector. Just like your bedfellow.’ He was all but spitting in my face.
He was wrong though. I wasn’t fucking anyone, and Krieg’s moral code might vary from mine, but he was no villain. No, these people were the villains, spewing hatred because they didn’t like anything or anyone slightly different from them. Howsad their lives must be that they lived, breathed and bathed in hatred. Preaching separation and division and slowly rotting the world with their prejudice.
Above him, Loki switched to stealth mode and took a fly-by shit. The white splatter landed and matted into the protestor’s long hair. Hard to feel anything but satisfaction at Loki’s morning constitutional, which increased when the man didn’t even notice the shit in his hair. Might he wear it unknowingly all day.
The group was small – no more than ten at a quick count – but they varied in age and gender. Six men, four women. Two of the men had buzz cuts and tattoos, and one looked like a professor with a neat goatee, a tweed coat and little fussy glasses. Then there was the long-haired bearded guy and two other mucky mates who looked like they thought it was still the seventies, dressed in tie-dye and bell-bottoms. No matter their respective socio-economic backdrops, they were united in hate, which struck me as sad. People should bond over love, nature’s beauty, or books, not bitterness, bigotry and bile.
‘Cop cover-up!’ a female protestor snarled at me. Dressed in a sharp navy suit with her blond hair in a neat chignon, she looked like a doctor or a lawyer, not a woman consumed by hate. I’d seen her type often enough to know that the outer package mattered little. So many hid bigotry and anger under a nice veneer, but I could see through it now, see it glinting in her eyes and in the twist of her mouth. She thought Robert Krieg was a creature to be tagged and controlled at best, to be put down at worst.
The thought sucker-punched me. To imagine Robbie dead, his eyes lifeless and unseeing, even for a second, made my heart stutter to a stop. How quickly he was becoming essential to my being. If anything happened to him …
I had to swallow down a fit of temper that roared up in me as I watched this woman spit vitriol at me.
‘Ogre-fucking whore,’ she snarled. ‘Hiding the truth, you monster-fucker!’
‘You think he’s a monster? Look in a mirror.’ I raised my voice so they could all hear me. ‘The law protects your right tospeak. I protect the world from what happens when people like youact. Step a toe out of line, any of you, and you’ll be in lock-up awaiting a nice visit with your lawyer. Consider this your only warning.’
Then I pushed past them and into the office. Somehow, even though I couldn’t see him, I knew Loki had come into the building with me, invisibility mode still activated.
DS Roberts looked up as I walked in. ‘Wise,’ he greeted. ‘What the hell is that all about?’ he asked. He looked tired, on his way out after a long shift.
‘Animal rights protestors,’ I said casually, hoping any references to creatures could be passed off as some sort of weird extremist animal rights group.
‘They seem to be against creatures though,’ Roberts said, frowning.
I shrugged. ‘It takes all kinds.’
‘Ain’t that the truth.’ He eyed me. ‘Heard about your new unit, all hush-hush. What exactly is Unit 13 going to be doing?’
‘Like you said, hush-hush.’
He grunted. ‘Some spy shit, I reckon.’
I grinned. ‘Do I look like a spy to you?’
