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“So, when are we starting this whole thing, anyway?” Lana asked, changing the topic.
“I figured I’d let some of the conversation naturally calm down, and then I’d get up to start,” I said. “I’m trying not to make it feel like a mandatory work meeting, you know? I want it to have the vibes of a cookout.”
“You’re so cute,” Rosie said with a smile.
It was nice to see Rosie smiling. She’d experienced some of the worst when it came to Lanyon Clover—both her and Paulette, really. It had been a while since I’d spent any time with her. It had probably been too hard for Rosie to see me and Cole and not be reminded of the night she was taken.
I didn’t blame her for that. A lot of the time, I’d felt similarly while getting to know Cole. I was lucky he’d been so patient with the ups and downs of dating me in the beginning. I was sure it had felt like a long game of hot and cold.
Cole had taken the lead on helping Rosie get in touch with a reputable therapist, and she seemed to be doing better. She was still sort of keeping to herself, though. I could imagine that being exposed to the strange social hierarchy of some of the new pack members unlearning bad habits had been triggering, too. After all, she’d fled another pack because of some of those very things.
I hoped this would be the beginning of her being around more again. She deserved to reap the benefits of this pack more than anyone.
“Rosie, we should get together for lunch or something soon,” I told her. “I really miss you.”
“I miss you, too!” she cried, reaching out a hand toward me in the way only girlfriends could do. I laughed as I took her hand in mine, our fingers barely twining together with the distance between us. “I know I’ve been super hard to get a hold of,” she continued. “I was worried you would be mad at me and never want to hang out with me again.”
“Of course not!” I said. “I could never be angry at you. I thought you were mad at me!”
“What? No!”
Between us, both Lana and Travis stared at nothing with glazed eyes. They really were perfect for each other, that much was clear.
“Alright,” I said to Rosie. “I’m going to get this whole thing started, and we can set up an actual date for things later, yeah?”
“Yeah, of course!” Rosie said, beaming. “I’m so excited!”
“Me too!”
After a minute, I discreetly walked up to the head of the room. I hadn’t bothered putting up a podium or anything like that, doing my best to keep things casual. Instead, I grabbed a chair and took a seat in it, reaching for a lapel mic that Travis had helped me set up that would come through the speakers we’d installed in the building to act as a sort of intercom system. I tapped it a couple of times, just barely able to hear it come over the speakers in the noisy room. It was perfect, though, judging from the fact that all the shifters in the room turned their attention to the mic being adjusted on the speakers.
I smiled as the room naturally quieted down, my heart racing a bit in my chest as everyone’s attention zeroed in on me.
“Sorry to interrupt everyone’s conversations,” I said a bit sheepishly. “I figured we ought to get business out of the way so we can just get back to enjoying everyone’s company and getting to know each other.”
There were a few nods throughout the crowd. So far, this group was much more receptive than the last time I got up in front of a crowd of shifters.
“So, we invited you all up here for a few things,” I started. “One was to make you aware of the resources we have available to you all through our official establishment as a pack. We also want to introduce you to headquarters so you can get an idea of what’s been finished and what else we have to handle before we consider this oversized house a home.
“We also want to talk about the very large elephant in the room that I’m sure many of you have been made aware of through the grapevine,” I said somberly. “Which is, the declaration of war made against our pack by Curt Fowler and his followers.”
I’d expected some gasps, maybe even some shouting. At the very minimum, I’d expected shocked gazes to be exchanged between people. Much to my surprise, though, most people either sat in quiet attention or nodded, as if this were the thing they were most concerned about.
“So…” I said, continuing somewhat cautiously, “as you guys may have heard, Curt Fowler is going to war with us because he believes we’re ill-equipped to protect the members of our pack from threats like the one we faced a few months back with the Lanyon Clover incident If I’m honest with you all, both Cole and myself also see this period of time as a failure. We feel if we’d been less complacent, if we’d considered every possible thing that could have gone wrong, we would have had contingencies for the nightmare some of our members had to endure.”
I swallowed tightly as the room quieted to the point you could hear a pin drop. Looking over to my friends, I saw Rosie’s face take on a sober expression as she watched me.
When I next spoke, I directed my words right to her. “We are so sorry,” I said. “So sorry we didn’t take the threat of Lanyon Clover seriously enough to be adequately prepared when we came to help you.”
I looked at the other faces in the room I’d come to memorize. The ones who’d streamed out of those cannery doors before collapsing into the arms of their loved ones, or the ones who’d collapsed into the arms of the first helpful face they could find.
“Please don’t take Cole’s absence as his lack of caring. Right this moment, he’s visiting his grandfather in Georgia to talk to him about how best to take this threat of war as seriously as we possibly can,” I continued. “The effects of those horrific injections still haunt us, and we’re doing everything we possibly can to set everyone up for success and get them out of the woods and back to normal. Back to being able to shift into their forms as they should be able to. Cole has spoken to a doctor experienced in helping nonshifters transition into becoming shifters. That doctor has been cleared to try an experimental version of lycan gene therapy to reverse the effects of the Lanyon Clover serum.”
Now there was a bit of a clamor in the room. I let it happen, wanting people to have the opportunity to react and respond to the information in the way that felt most natural to them. I watched the room, making note of people I thought I might need to approach when the meeting was done to check in with them.
I spotted a few families pulled one of their members into a hug as they smiled with relief. Some people looked a little daunted and distant. A few looked only cautiously optimistic. I looked at Rosie, who was looking down at her plate and pushing her uneaten food around while Paulette gabbed with Ginger and tried to rope Rosie into the conversation with mixed results.
Rosie was one of those who couldn’t shift at all anymore. She hadn’t spoken to me or Cole directly about it, but Paulette had told me. She and Paulette, understandably, had gotten very close in the aftermath of Lanyon Clover. They’d both had a unique understanding of what they were going through, and it was nice to see them get close, especially as my life kept getting busier and busier.
