Briana wasn't entirely sure how much time had passed since the mountain had collapsed. Not that themountainhad collapsed, not really, but God, it felt like it. Back toward the leading edge of the slide people had been knocked down and half buried, but were either able to get out or stuck in ways that at least let them breathe. The closer she went to the mountain-facing edge of the fairgrounds, the deeper the muck got. The Torbens' tavern and the forge were both obliterated. But she knew the people who had been at those two specific locations were okay, so she darted across the rest of the mess, straining her ears and nose in hopes of catching scents, movement, cries for help,anything.
She thought it hadn't been more than several minutes, honestly. She'd basically been helping Laurie to his feet before the mudslide even stopped, and was back in the deep end of the disaster within two, maybe three minutes. But every minute counted when people were buried, so too long had already passed, no matter how much or little time thatwas.
Somebody moaned, somewhere underfoot. Briana shifted to human instantly and yelled, "Here, over here, I think I've got somebody!" and began to dig with her hands. She sank as shedug, the mud acting kind of like quicksand and her human form much less able to distribute weight the way her goat could. But goats were terrible at digging, so she did what she had to.
Damien, who had been searching another section between her and the leading edge, came bounding up. Literally bounding: it took maybe two huge pounces in his snow leopard form for him to cross the forty feet between them. His big paws were much,muchbetter for digging, though he took a heartbeat to shift to human so he could say, "I've got them. You keep searching."
Briana nodded as he shifted back and began to dig at an incredible speed. She moved on, picking her way through the ruins more carefully than she needed to, at least more carefully than she needed to for safety's sake. As a goat she could handle all of this broken earth effortlessly. But she needed to listen and scent and ideally not make anything beneath the surfaceworse,so she went very carefully indeed.
Other shifters also crept across the debris field, all at about equal distances, like they had an understanding of each other's scenting and hearing ranges. Here and there somebody stopped to dig frantically, pulling people free when they could. As the minutes wore on, Briana became more and more afraid that there were no other survivors to find, although another muffled cry gave her hope. She shifted, called for help, and began to dig.
One of the Torbens came to help this time. He was so utterly filthy, his fur black with mud and matting, that without the mate bond, Briana would honestly have been unable to tell whether it was Laurie or Jon. It happened to be Laurie, who, like Damien, shifted to human long enough to say, "I've got this. Keep looking," before he began to dig. She did glance back once to see him, still in bear form, delicately grabbing somebody by the back of their doublet with his teeth and dragging them free of the mud.
That…was probably going to be a problem, later. Right now, though, the fear of shifter secrets being revealed wassomuch less than the fear of lives lost. She finished patrolling one direction, then started back the other way, straining to hear, to scent, to hope.
Somewhere in there, the real paramedics and disaster relief arrived. She could hear their baffled, alarmed curses as they took in the inexplicable scene of a dozen or so bears, wolves, and big cats combing the wreckage, and she heard a very calm woman's voice say, "I need you to trust that this is okay."
A very brief argument arose, followed by a curse that sounded loud enough to start a new mudslide. Briana, panicked and angry, shifted back to human to yell, "Stopshouting!" and saw half the other shifters on the debris field doing the same thing.
Down at the leading edge, where the disaster relief was setting up, were half a dozen true humans gaping at an orangutan, who stood between them and the field. She was utterly enormous, orange fur in ropy dreads and her leathery grey hands lifted placatingly, and even Briana had to admit seeing an orangutan was extremely unusual.She'dnever met an orangutan shifter before.
The true human gazes leaped from the orangutan to the now-human shifters on the field, and even at the distance of a couple hundred yards, Briana could see their bewilderment and the way they tried to reconcileknowingthere had been animals there a second ago and now humans stood where the animals had been.
Then one of the true humans shook himself and spoke, not loudly enough for Briana to hear, but with a very clear 'Okay, what the hell, but let's get on with it' vibe, and the rest of them took their cue from him. The orangutan shifter didn't bother switching back to human, but instead joined the other shifters on the field, scenting and searching. She found somebodyalmost immediately, too, and with incredible strength, dug them free.
The body she pulled out seemed terrifyingly limp. Briana couldn't keep searching with that image in her mind, so she closed her eyes hard, shifted to her goat form, and went back to work.
Everyone was accountedfor by nightfall. There had been three deaths, all of which seemed to have been instantaneous. Briana was grateful for that, in a horrid way. A snapped neck seemed less awful than suffocating in the mud. There were more injuries, ranging from scrapes and broken bones to life-threatening, but even so, there were fewer than twenty victims of the mudslide.
Mostly, Briana was being told, because the warnings she and Laurie had gone around with had been heeded. Even more people than she’d realized had left the site, or had been on their way out, when the mudslide hit. The disaster relief team had told both Briana and Laurie that they'd saved a lot of lives.
Briana, sitting on a broken chunk of wood at the mud flow's leading edge, had only shaken her head at the praise. They'd done a lot. She knew that. They couldn't have done more. She knew that too. But she was tired in her bones, and grieving, and part of her knew there was going to be some kind of reckoning about all the shifters who had been exposed that day.
The orangutan—she was a disaster relief leader, somebody apparently well-known in the community—had spoken with her whole relief team, asking them to hold off on discussing what they'd seen until they could get together tomorrow after everybody had gotten some sleep. Briana had seen thereluctance in a few of them, and had just as clearly seen that a couple of others had already convinced themselves they hadn't seen any of the shifters at all.
"Honestly, I think it'll be easier to get the relief team to keep quiet than the victims," Laurie said in a gravely voice from a few steps away. Briana looked up tiredly, and he gestured, asking if he could sit beside her on the log. She nodded, and he did so, heavily, like his bear's weight was pulling on the bones of his human form. "You okay?"
"No." Briana put her hands in her face, overwhelmed with weariness. "I mean, yeah, fine. As fine as I can be. So, no. But I'm not hurt or anything. You? You swallowed a lot of mud."
"I've shifted enough times now that I'm okay. Lungs hurt a little, but I think it's mostly psychological. I need a bath, though."
Briana laughed tiredly. "Yes, you do."
Her fated mate wasfilthy. Almost comically dirty, with mud caked in the wrinkles of his clothes and in his braids, which were matted flat to his head, lank, and tangled. His face and hands were clean in the sense that they'd obviously been washed, but his fingernails were dark with dirt and grime had settled over every visible inch of skin, washed or not. It had stopped raining at some point, but there were still water marks on his cheeks and forehead where some, but not nearly enough, of the muck had been wiped away. Briana thought it was kind of fair that he sounded a bit petulant as he asked, "How areyouclean?"
"I wasn't digging nearly as much as you were," Briana said, which was true. "And I didn't get rolled over by the slide in the first place. And my goat would never admit to being vain, but it'sverygood at shedding water and dirt when I shift."
Her goat sniffed.It's not vanity. Mountain goats are simply pristine.
Honestly, it was almost hard to argue with that. Most photographs of mountain goats had them looking bright white and clean, even though they obviously got dirty like every other animal.
Laurie was shaking his head wearily. "It's amazing. Enviable. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to take a dozen showers to get myhumanself clean, never mind the bear." He looked up toward where the last of the ambulances were leaving, and at the shifters who hadn't had the nerve to head out yet themselves. "So this is kind of a problem, isn't it."
"Which part?" Briana asked on a sigh. "The part where the entire Faire just got obliterated, or the part where an absolutetonof true humans just found out shifters exist?"
Laurie was silent a moment, gazing at the wrecked fairgrounds. The relief team had set up floodlights that weren't needed since everyone had been accounted for, but no one had taken them down yet, so the harsh white and yellow lights spilled over the mudslide, casting harsh shadows and making it look even worse than it was. "Let's not be dramatic," he finally said, lightly. "It only took out, like,halfof the Faire, not thewholething."
Briana laughed, the sound cracking from her tight throat. "True. What was I thinking."
