He wasn't wrong. The landslide had been channeled straight through the middle of the fairgrounds, and it was possible that not more than a third of the space had been destroyed. It seemed like a vast, incomprehensible amount, though. Even looking right at it, knowing there was an entire perimeter of booths and walkways left, it just felt like an impossible amount of destruction. She glanced toward the parking lot and the businesses closest to it, then tried to convince herself that the surviving booths which swung east and up to the north meant landslide hadn't quite wreckedeverything.
Even so, Briana said, "Christ, this is a disaster," quietly, and Laurie sighed.
"Yeah. On every count."
For a minute or two they sat together, not talking, just watching the shifters who remained huddle together in little, worried groups, or stand staring at the ruins in the same way Briana kept doing. Then Laurie stood and lifted his voice. "All right, everybody, there's literally nothing else we can do here tonight. Why don't we go over to our main pub and figure out a game plan? I'll ask Ashley to close the place down to the public."
Glances were exchanged, and then people began to nod, clearly glad that somebody had a plan ofsomekind. A few of them drifted away immediately, heading for their cars, and Briana rose to join them, but stopped at Laurie's side. "Do we know anything about the orangutan? I didn't get her name, but if we could get her to come over tonight…?"
"Larisa. Larisa LaBrant. She comes into the pub sometimes, usually after a hard day on the mountain. I don't think she actually ever has an alcoholic drink. She just comes in for the company. And I think she's got her team under control, but yeah, that's a good idea. Ashley probably has her number. I'll see if she can get hold of her." He smiled at Briana, then pulled his phone out as he took a few steps away to make the call.
Everyone looked cold and tired and miserable as they shuffled away from the wreckage. Briana could hardly think about tomorrow. In fact, shecouldn't: every time she tried to imagine what it would be like, her thoughts shied away from the various levels of danger, heartbreak, and recovery that lay ahead. She went down to her Jeep and finally looked at her own phone, which was full of messages from her family, the other smithy employees, her rock-climbing community, and her housemates.
She turned the Jeep's overhead light on and video-phoned her family's group chat, letting their relief and questions wash over her until they calmed down enough to hear her say, "I'm sorry I didn't call earlier. We were so busy trying to rescue people I just didn't think of it. But I really am fine."
Her mother broke in to say, "You're coming home tonight, of course," and Briana shook her head.
"You live a hundred and fifty miles away, Mom, so no, I'm not. There’s a meeting to coordinate with other Faire people about what we'll do tomorrow, and then I'll…"
For a tired moment, she let the thoughtthen I'll crawl into bed next to Laurie and go to sleep for a hundred hourscross her mind. She might not be thrilled to have a fated mate, but if fate was going to insist, she bet the big blond man was warm and comforting to sleep beside. "Then I'm heading home to my apartment to reassure my housemates and get some sleep," she said instead. "I promise I'll keep you posted, okay?"
She listened to them protest for a while, then said goodnight and texted her housemates to promise she was all right and would be home later, and her other chats to assure them of her well-being. By then most of the people left on-site had driven away, so she finally followed them, oddly glad to have a destination and a group of like-minded people to meet with there.
It was only after she walked in the Thunder Bear Brewpub's doors that she realized how long it had been since she'dbeenthere. For obvious reasons, she'd been avoiding it for the past couple of years, and before that, it had only been an occasional stop-off point anyway. It was the same building it had always been, log-cabin style with a pitched roof and extensive beer gardens outside, but the interior was?—
—notmodernized, exactly, but brighter and more open and welcoming than Briana remembered it. One end of the buildinghad a permanent stage built in, though that wasn’t new. Briana knew there was a jazz festival of some kind that the bar was a venue for, and that they had live music regularly enough to justify the space, although at the moment there were tables and chairs on it.
The pitched roof definitely didn't used to have rainbow and trans flags hanging from the rafters on either side of the state flag, either. It sort of felt like the whole place had undergone an emotional renovation, and Briana was amused to see that they had three different kinds ofrootbeer on tap. One was their own home brew, another was a big brand name, and a third was a smaller brand. The tall blonde woman behind the bar was pulling root beers as fast as anybody had ever pulled regular beers, handing them out and saying, "You need the sugar boost and I'm not giving anybody who might be driving later alcohol," to the very few people who protested.
It was cozy warm inside the pub, too, which Briana was suddenly, shiveringly grateful for. She hadn't thought she was cold, exactly, but being in such welcoming warmth made it clear she had been. There were people in the kitchen, and as somebody came out with a platter of finger foods to distribute, Briana realized they were all carby comfort food with a side of protein. Her stomach suddenly rumbled and she took a couple of potato skins and some mozzarella sticks, with a longing glance at the messier-but-delicious-looking nachos and cheesy bacon fries.
"We're making more," the employee dropping the food off promised. "Lots of baskets of the messy stuff."
Briana said, "Thank you," and to her horror, felt tears well up, threatening to overwhelm her. She wasn't the only one suddenly struggling, either: it was as if the warmth and food had finally released a valve, and the awfulness of the day could really start to hit them all. For a while people mostly ate and drank andcried, until the food started to stabilize them a little. Then the bigger problems seemed more possible to face.
It was still hard to watch Laurie stand up and draw attention, and to hear him say, "We've all lost a hell of a lot today. Businesses, and even worse, friends. We can rebuild the businesses, and mourn our friends, but…" He sighed. "I don't think Chris and Johanna and Mike would begrudge us also acknowledging that we have another huge problem that we've got to face and fixfast, here. As far as I know, there's never been a modern situation where so many shifters have been exposed to so many true humans at once, and…"
"And we're fucked," somebody volunteered, and since everybody had been thinking something along those lines, a low, tense chuckle went through the room.
"We reallyare, if anybody was taking pictures," someone else said more quietly. "I mean, I know we've got the weird photo thing, but…"
Another chuckle went around, along with some grim nods. Shifters didn't photograph well, exactly. Not like storybook vampires who couldn't be seen on film or in mirrors, but the shifting itself seemed to create a sort of blur-inducing field of effect. It wasn't that hard to get a picture of a shifter in animal form. It wasn't atallhard to take pictures of shifters in human form. But if they were shifting back and forth, photographs got…messy.
"There were a lot of us shifting today," Briana said. "I don't know if that blur factor, like,increaseswhen there are a lot of us doing it?—"
"We can test that, though," Laurie interrupted, but with relief, not rudeness, in his tone and intent. "There are a bunch of us here now and we all have phones."
"Mine's wrecked," another Torben said. Briana squinted at him, trying to remember his name: Liam, maybe. Or at least thatwas his Faire name. He was actually prettier than Laurie, but didn’t count in her rankings because he was only a cousin, not a brother. A bunch of other people nodded agreement, with a couple of them holding up badly damaged phones as example.
Someone else said, "That's good, though," wearily. "Probably some oftheirphones got wrecked, too, so they couldn't take pictures."
"We'll go out to the beer garden behind the pub and do a bunch of shifting and try to take pictures in a few minutes." Laurie shot a tired smile at the tall blonde woman behind the counter. "Because if we all start shifting inside the pub, we'll have a much shorter list of more intensive problems when Ashley tries to kill us all."
"Damn straight you will," Ashley said gently.
"We'll do it now," Liam said after some consultation with the people immediately around him. "I really want to know if it's got an area of effect, because we're so much less screwed if it does. It's still not great, because there were a lot of witnesses, but…"
Laurie, who had taken charge somehow, nodded, and about half the shifters in the pub got up and headed out to the back. Ashley called, "I'm turning the lights on for you," and got a wave of thanks.
