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He shrugged and took a pull from his beer. “Isn’t the first time,” he replied.

I turned and stared at him. “The fuck do you mean, it isn’t the first time?”

He sighed, then took another drink. “Last year in… Sheboygan, I think? There was a judge who got outed as a shifter. Bear, I think he was. Anyway, it got nasty. The judge quit, the mayor resigned, and like a dozen people ended up hospitalized over the week of protests.”

“Because a fucking judge was a bear shifter?” I was incredulous. I know, I know. After the shit I’ve been through, I probably shouldn’t be. But call me fucking Pollyanna—I guess I still had some hope for the people on this planet. The more fool me.

Elliot shrugged. “There was a two-day protest like a month ago in La Crosse when a local chief of police was revealed to be an Arc.”

I knew my eyes had to be huge. “The fuck is wrong with this state?” I asked him. “I live in the goddamnsouth, and we’re not that bigoted.”

Elliot let out a snuffling noise. “North, south, it doesn’t matter. Everybody’s a dick.”

“El, we just elected a witch to the office of mayor.” Okay, most people didn’t know that Julian Vidal was a witch, he was known to dislike Arcanids, and I had significant personal reservations about the fact that he’d been tied up with the Culhua, but I’d still voted for him because the alternative was an even more bigoted dickwad. There’s a reason I hate politics.

“Huh.” He took another swig of beer. “I don’t know, Val. It’s Wisconsin.”

I shook my head, then flopped down on the opposite end of the couch. Elliot immediately turned and put his feet in my lap. Normally, I’d have shoved his stinky feet off me, but I couldn’t make myself do it right now. “Didn’t this state used to be progressive?”

“Libertarian, maybe,” Elliot replied, staring down into the neck of his beer bottle.

“Jesus,” I muttered, taking a drink. “The fuck is wrong with people?”

Elliot let out a long sigh. “A lot.”

And then I got hit with a punch of guilt as a single tear tracked its way down his cheek. Fuck. Here I was fucking blathering on about anti-shifter violence when we were sitting in his dad’s house—his fucking murdered shifter dad.

Fuck.

I put a hand on his calf and rubbed it, trying to communicate being sorry and supportive and whatever else I should be doing because I didn’t really know what else to do. He roughly rubbed at his eyes, then took another long drink, draining the beer.

“Want another one?”

“Yeah.”

He lifted his feet so I could stand up, and I took his empty back into the kitchen. I pulled another bottle out of the fridge, then peeked into the oven to see if the casserole was ready yet. It wasn’t bubbling, so I padded back into the living room and handed over Elliot’s beer.

I was still curious about the anti-shifter protests, but I also didn’t want to bring it up again, since clearly it bothered him. I settled on the end of the couch again, and Elliot’s feet ended up back on my legs while the sportscasters droned on about the stats of the Patriots and the Steelers.

I pulled out my phone and looked up what El had said about Sheboygan. It didn’t take me long to find the story, and I pretty quickly figured out why I hadn’t heard much. Because that had gone down about the same time as I was getting the shit kicked out of me by MFM assholes during the riot in Richmond. I hadn’t been paying a goddamn lick of attention to anything that wasn’t my own shitstorm of a life.

More searching led me to the La Crosse incident, as well. That one was less dramatic—while nineteen people had been hospitalized, a few of them in critical condition, in Sheboygan, the only person who’d been taken to the hospital after one of the La Crosse protests had been treated for dehydration.

I wondered what it was about last year that had led both Sheboygan and Richmond to get so violent. And then I wondered how many other places had seen similar protests. I had the feeling that was something Rajesh Parikh would be interested in—something he and the rest of the FBI A-branch were already working on. I’d ask him later, probably after all this shit was over.

A few more searches, and I found a website that listed cities and counties hostile to Arcanids across the US—Sheboygan wasn’t on the list, probably because it wasn’t big enough to get on most people’s radar, but Richmond was, as was Green Bay. Richmond had acautionrating, while Green Bay had anextreme cautionrating. Fucking great.

At least neither Virginia nor Wisconsin had any of theavoidratings, which encompassed pretty much the whole state of Florida and huge chunks of Mississippi and Alabama, as well as pockets of North Dakota, Utah, and Idaho, among other places scattered all over the US. I then sent a link to the site to Beck with a suggestion that she might want to be choosy about where in Florida she took gigs for a while. She might not be a Nid, but as an Arc-human, she might not be able to completely escape the bullshit.

The kickoff started the game on TV, and that reminded me—don’t ask me why—that I had to go check on dinner. Well, Elliot’s dinner. I lifted his feet off me and took his second empty beer bottle—no judgment—back to the kitchen to replace with a full one.

The casserole was done, so I brought out his beer and a bowl of steaming food, then got myself the plastic Tupperware of pasta salad. Half of my own beer was still sitting on the side table.

Elliot was chewing, slowly, which was good, since the last two days I’d had to remind him that he had to put the food in his mouth to eat it. His eyes were pointed in the direction of the TV, but I was pretty sure that if I’d asked him anything about the game, he wouldn’t have been able to tell me jack shit.

Still, he was eating, so I’d take it as a win.

I needed every win I could get.