"Does anybody have a list of who was there?" Briana asked softly. "People we can approach to talk to?"
"Larisa will," Laurie said.
"And she'll be here in about fifteen minutes," Ashley added. "I just got a text from her."
"So if we can try talking to everybody individually, maybe we can keep this thing from…" Briana could barely put it into words, but steeled herself, because it had to be said: "Maybe we can keep this thing from destroying us all."
Chapter 12
Aside from smart, skilled, and gorgeous, Briana Gilson wasbrave, thought Laurie.
They all knew what she said was true. That this breach could destroy the entire shifter community. Not just the Renaissance shifters, but world-wide.
But nobody else had been quite willing to put it into words. Briana looked a little sick over doing so, but she was right. They hadn't survived as a people by just admitting freely that they existed, after all. If the shifters here in Renaissance were verified to be real, there would be a global witch-hunt for others. Even if every other shifter in the world was incredibly careful for the rest of their lives, the memory of their existence would live on, and endanger everyone.
"What do we do if people won't listen to reason?" Carol, the wolf shifter who had helped out that afternoon, spoke in a low voice. No one wanted to be loud right now. Even the people out back taking pictures were doing so quietly, and it washardnot to goof around and be loud and silly when taking big group pictures.
"We can't eat them," someone else said like they weren't really suggestingeatingthem. A tense, mumbled laugh rose, making it clear that…'eating'…people had occurred to a lot of the hunters in the room.
Laurie shook his head. "No, we can't. The last thing we can afford here is violence. Look."
He stood up, rubbing a hand over the braids clinging to his scalp and grimacing as flakes of mud came away. "We know how people react to freakish information, right? Some of them will cope, or even be thrilled. Some of them will decide they didn't see what they saw. And some of them will be scared and ready to fight. We know that. So wecannotgive any of them even one single reason to lash out, okay? Not if we want to keep this under control at all. Okay?"
Reluctant nods met his questing gaze, and Briana gave him an unexpectedly encouraging smile. She looked exhausted. They all did. But there was a quiet light in her eyes that buoyed him. Maybe he wasn't her favorite person, but at least he could show her he was decent in a crisis. He looked back at the rest of the gathering, which now included not only his brother Jon, but Jon's mate, Alis, who looked just as grimly concerned as everyone else.
Laurie had a brief, unhappy realization that their plans to get married at the Faire this year had just been destroyed along with everything else. It was no longer a priority, but it made Laurie’s heart hurt for his brother. Alis caught his eye a moment and smiled grimly, as if recognizing what he was thinking about. She nodded a little, but also shrugged: it wasn’t a for-now problem. They had plenty of those already, even if Alis herself was human. Still, she had the advantage of the mate bond, which meant she'd been able to embrace Jon's dual nature, and would never divulge shifter secrets.
For one positively wild moment, Laurie wondered if they could somehow find mates for every single true human who'd seen the shifters today. In fact, hoping to break the tension, he said that: "Anybody happen to recognize their mate during all the chaos this afternoon?"
It worked, if not as well as he'd hoped. Still, people relaxed a little as they laughed quietly, and he ended up shaking his head. "First thing is we need to find out how many people saw us."
The door opened and Larisa LaBrant, the orangutan shifter and disaster lead, came in on those words and responded to them directly. "I've got a list of thirty-eight for sure, including my own team of eight with whom I'll be speaking myself. There were another dozen or so who didn't want to meet anybody's eye post-disaster, and it's difficult to say whether they were witnesses or just traumatized.
"Hi," she added more generally. "I'm Larisa. A lot of you saw me this afternoon, and we may not all know each other, but I want to make one thing incredibly clear. Without the risk every shifter in this room took today, there would be at least eleven more bodies in the morgue tonight. I am personally deeply and profoundly grateful to every single one of you. It's possible nobody else will say it, so: thank you. Thank you all for putting your personal safety second to the survival of so many other people."
Laurie had thought he was holding together all right, but Larisa's no-nonsense, frank assessment caught him off-guard, and he was abruptly tight-throated and blinking away tears. He wasn't the only one, either. Another thread of tension went out of the room, as if the blunt acknowledgment that their risks had paid off was something they'd all needed to hear. Especially, Laurie thought, from an authority on the matter. It was one thing feeling like they'd probably done the right thing. Having a disaster relief lead tell them as much meant a lot.
What might have become another half hour of quiet weeping was interrupted by the return of the shifters who had gone out to try taking pictures. His cousin Luke—no, Liam; he'd been using Liam at the Faire for years, and had switched to it recently for the rest of his life, too.Liamwas in the lead, his expression bleakly encouraging, and his tone grimly relieved: "There's a field of effect. We spread out all over the gardens and down to the river, trying to cover close to as much ground as we did in the fairgrounds today."
"We didn't spend as much time out there as we did trying to help at the Faire," another of the shifters put in. "But I think the experiment is probably representational anyway. The photos just didn't turn out. Blurry messes, nothing you could even salvage."
Another exhalation of relief went through the gathering. Somebody muttered, "Pics or it didn't happen. Literally," and for the first time a real laugh went up, not just the muted chuckles from before. People started eating again, with better appetites now, and Larisa came over to Laurie with a printout.
"These are the names of the true humans I know saw something today. I was thinking that the people here probably know some of them, if you wanted to try to match people up with who they might be able to talk to, or talk down?"
Laurie took the paper, but shook his head. "Seems like maybe you should do it. You're the disaster relief leader."
"But you know everyone here," Larisa said with a smile. "They're more likely to volunteer information to you. Especially about who they know."
"If you say so." Laurie waved the papers in the air, getting everybody's attention again. "I need somebody to take notes here?"
"I can," Briana said quietly. Larisa handed her another printout of the names and a pen, and Laurie had a brief momentof thinking:nowthat'sprepared for any disaster,since he couldn't remember the last time he'd had a pen handy when he wasn't at work. Of course, arguably Larisawasat work.
"I'm going to read out names," Laurie said. "We'll need volunteers to talk to them, so if you know any of them, raise your hand. We'll start by seeing how many people we've got per witness, and then figure out who'd be best to talk to them next."
A murmur of assent and nods went around the room, and Laurie worked his way down the list with Briana scribbling notes on her own paper. A couple of times somebody said, "They've already texted me, so I've got them," and Briana put those names down as being on point for those witnesses.
It took nearly an hour to get everybody assigned to a true human, and in the end there were only three names that had no connections to the shifters in the pub. Larisa said she would take those ones, though there were other efforts at coordinating to see if anybody had a friend-of-a-friend who might be able to pick up the strays.
