Which left me standing in the street facing one incompetent Asgardian commoner, and two fire giant thugs. In front of witnesses.

He didn’t care about witnesses. Probably, he wasn’t planning on sticking around once he’d grabbed Thea. Who wasn’t coming out of the restaurant. Good.

The two fire giants strode towards me. We were even. They were under orders not to kill me. I, who did care about witnesses, wasn’t about to kill them in public. Unfortunately, that meant I had to be careful, too.

“What’s going on here?” came a voice from behind me.

I responded before they could. “Asshole’s looking for a woman who changed her number to get away from him. Looks like he brought friends.”

I felt the shadow come up next to me. “You?”

“Nah. Friend.” I wasn’t sure whether to hope Thea came out of the restaurant all guns blazing or hope she didn’t. “But I hit him below the belt last time he came sniffing around.”

I turned just enough to see what the male presence next to me was. Crap. I’d just admitted assault to a cop.

“She should just get a restraining order,” the cop grumbled.

“Yeah. Last person I know who got one of them, well, it didn’t do her any good whatsoever,” I grumbled.

“Point.”

I noticed the fire giants had hesitated. Then they came forward. The cop didn’t draw a gun, instead he produced a nightstick. And…spun it. I tried not to laugh. It might have been an intimidating move.
And he might be dead in a few minutes, but if he was, then they’d have to run. And I felt something. An energy from around me. A surge. I couldn’t pay attention to what it was, though. The raven had gone.

And then one of the fire giants got within the cop’s range. He swung the nightstick in a leg sweep, but it didn’t take the guy down. I didn’t have any more time to watch, because I was in close combat with his buddy a moment later. It wasn’t a bad fight. Relatively even. He was stronger, I was faster, and that surge seemed to be buoying me up.

Then I realized it was a good number of people, closing on us. Don’t, I wanted to say. Bad enough that the cop…

It wasn’t the entire crowd, but it was a good number of them, and they were bent on breaking the fight up. And focusing on the people who had started it. Thea’s ex was running. The fire giants? They couldn’t take on the swarm.

And then sirens sounded as the cop’s buddies showed up.