6. Charlotte

Charlotte

As he spoke, Leonard’s voice had become quieter and quieter, the tone more pained than she’d ever heard him sound. Even when he’d made press conferences in the past to speak out against injustice, he’d managed to come across as regal and yet empathic.

Even with their shifter hearing, she knew others in the room were beginning to struggle to hear him as his muscles tensed and bunched, his hands curling into fists, and the agony in his very soul seemed to leach into the air. The confident, teasing male she’d spoken to in the other room was gone. Now, she beheld a man broken, desolate, and desperately trying to function. Whatever had happened, had shaken him to the bone, and wounded his very soul.

There was a wrongness in the world, and he had been chosen to begin the battle to set it right. That didn’t mean it was easy, especially at the beginning, and probably not for a long time to come. The only thing she could think of to help him, was to invoke a tradition amongst shifters, one as old as their written records.

“Tell me your truth,” she said, beginning the ritual.

Once, battles between clans of shifters had been ferocious. Violence dominated their world as they struggled to contain their wilder tendencies, especially as human populations grew, and the space to roam shrank. Many conflicts were caused by misunderstandings, something they could little afford, until the wife of a clan leader called for the leaders of the two sides to halt and hold talks. She outlined a simple procedure where each side could voice their issue, their perception of what had taken place, and their desired outcome.

In the beginning, it had been simple, and had resulted in weeks of accusations, but eventually the process had become a negotiating tool, a way to work within the confines of the world they lived in, allowing pressures to be eased without overt conflict. Something which was especially important while they were still hiding from the humans.

“The man and woman were compliant,” Leonard said in a dull tone. “There was no sign of violence in the room, no smashed furniture, no marks of physical conflict on either of them, and no sound of a crying infant or child. There was also no overt evidence of a gun, however, they couldn’t discount that initially.”

“The old woman was lying,” Charlotte said, nodding as she held his golden gaze.

“About a lot of things. There was a child,” he said, his voice breaking off into a rasp.

Which was the crux of the matter. She could see that now. There was a child. Her breath caught in her throat, while her owl screeched, desperate for them to shift and fly to where the pain was, to rent and tear until those who had hurt the child were no more. Quickly she brought the beast to its mental knees, chastising it for abandoning Leonard, when he was telling his truth.

Long familiar with the process, her owl quietened, waiting to hear the rest, and vowing vengeance for the child. It was dead. She knew that. Even as her heart broke, she waited for the words to confirm it.

“What happened to the child, Leonard? What do we need to act on?”

“The girl came running into the room, she was six, and terrified to see armed men pointing guns at her parents.”

“She shifted,” Charlotte said, seeing it all too clearly in her mind. The young girl would have reacted instinctively to the threat, her beast taking over and preparing to flee. She was too young to fight, but if she could remove herself from the scene, then her parents would have a better chance of overcoming the threat and finding their way back to wherever she had hidden herself. “She shifted, the police panicked, and they shot her.”

“Yes,” he rasped.

There was just one more question, one more piece she needed before Charlotte began to put together the public response for what had happened.

“What kind of shifters are they?” she asked.

“Domestic house cats,” Leonard whispered.

Which meant there was no justification at all. Even juvenile shifters could pose a threat if they were large enough. This girl? She would have presented as a large kitten, not even large enough to look like an adolescent cat. In her shifted form, she would probably be small enough to fit neatly into Leonard’s cupped hands.

Her shifted form also explained why this had hit him so hard. Not only was it a young child, not only was it a travesty of justice, but she was a feline shifter. Someone he would connect to on an instinctual and cellular basis. Whether he knew the family or not, they were his people, and once the initial grief had passed, he would tear the world apart to protect them.

Which meant Charlotte needed to protect him. From himself.

“When are they releasing it to the press?”

Leonard looked at his watch. “We have until five pm to formulate our response. The president has asked me to do a joint press conference with her, to ameliorate the responses on both sides. Tensions have been high enough, and this could result in a civil war.”

“We should all be there,” Tony stated firmly. “A united front to show that all shifters are affected by this, and we are united in our grief.”

Phillip Westlund had been quiet until then. The governor for reptiles wasn’t the most outgoing of the representatives, yet he was known for his wisdom and cool head, which was ironically not due to being cold-blooded. Reptiles could be just as blood-thirsty and gregarious as their warm-blooded cousins. His calm demeanour was something the man had mastered on his own.

“That would be foolish,” Philip intoned, the deep rumble of his voice drawing all attention. “It would be the perfect opportunity for extremists to wipe us out. There’s been increased chatter about a mass strike against shifter leadership, you all know that. Giving them the perfect target would only play into their hands. Leonard should be there, and the pro tem. Nobody else. Our elected leader, and our elected representative, or at least her temporary replacement. It’s a strong enough statement, especially when they are with the human president.”

Tony glared at him, but didn’t argue further, something Charlotte was grateful for. They didn’t have time for that right now.

“Alright, I have to write the speech of the decade. I want your top talking points now so I can start crafting our message,” she said, not bothering to wait to be called upon. This wasn’t the time to adhere to protocols, not when lives were at risk. The blow-out from this would take years to overcome, and what Leonard said at this press conference would make a massive difference to the outcome. They couldn’t afford to fan the flames of discontent already affecting their people. Shifters might win a war against humans, but the rest of the nations on the planet would only rally against them and wipe them out.

This whole situation was a powder keg, and the fuse was already lit. It was up to them to try to control where the damage occurred and prevent more lives being lost in the process.

“What makes you think you’re writing my speech?” Leonard asked her, without rancour.

This wasn’t the time for games. “I’m not playing games, Leonard,” she replied, dropping all formality, making the frowns return. “One, there’s no assistants in here, which means we’re the only ones who know, and I gather we’re keeping it like this for now. That won’t allow anyone else enough time to be brought up to speed and write a speech. It’s also what I do and what I’m good at, the main part of why you brought me here in the first place. Two, Garret is fantastic at what he does. I don’t think he’s the right person for this, but I’ll allow that I’m biased in this instance. However, if I’m standing on that stage beside you, giving the appearance of my support while you make a speech, then it had better be a fucking speech I wrote.”

“Who do you think you are talking to our president like that?” Tony snapped at her.

“A pissed off woman who has reached her limit and refuses to play games when a little girl lost her life to this bullshit that keeps going on. Either we do this properly, or we go back into hiding, because you know the extremist groups will use this as a platform to roll our rights back a hundred years or more. Of course they should have killed her, she was taking an aggressive stance. If she learned to do that at six, imagine how terrifying she would be as an adult, never mind the fact she’s a tiny fucking cat even when she is full grown. They will spew their rhetoric, spread their lies, and overwhelm the humans with hate until all anyone can see is the enemy. We need to nip this in the bud, both in terms of the overreaction from the humans, and the grief from the shifters. Children shouldn’t be subjected to this, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pussyfoot around with protocols, while the future of our people hangs in the balance.”

By the time she finished, Charlotte’s voice was loud enough to be heard outside the building. At least by shifters. Even humans would have heard her from the next room. There was a beat of silence as everyone processed what she said, several of them nodding in agreement. Even Tony had backed down, although she suspected that was more due to a newfound fear of her, rather than actually respecting what she had to say. Fuck him. Whatever worked for now was good enough. She had bigger fish to fry.

“What else do you need?” Leonard asked her.

“I need to know the location. This has to be some place neutral. Not in front of their government building, not in front of a fucking police station — unless they actually want the riots to start right away — and not somewhere normally associated with children or families.”

“Why not the last one?” Patrice asked, a slight bump in her nose showing how close her rhino was to the surface.

Charlotte sighed, the pain of what had happened resonating through her to her bones. She understood now why Leonard had been hesitant to say it aloud. Even though the answer was on the tip of her tongue, she didn’t want to say it.

“Because a family was torn apart today,” Phillip replied before she could gather enough courage to spit it out. “It would be a juxtaposition of what we’ve lost — familiarity, safety, and comfort, adding insult to injury. What about a hospital?”

“No, I don’t want to disrupt lives that have already been disrupted enough. It’s hard enough to get a park around them normally, nevermind with a dual presidential press conference. A conference centre or university hall. Something like that. A hotel even, as long as it has the equipment and space necessary for the press to set up. Don’t ask me about security, that’s not my thing, but indoors would be better than outdoors.”

“The Islington has a large function room that could work,” Roxanne said.

“Good, then someone get onto the humans and suggest it. They can pay, by the way. This is their shit we’re dealing with, they can fucking pay for the room.”

“Agreed.”

“What else?” Leonard pressed.

“I need researchers, or if we can’t let the pool of those in the know expand, then I need you all to become my researchers. I need statistics of human on shifter fatalities, and vice versa. I need numbers for violence too. I want to know the protocols for police when dealing with callouts where shifter involvement is suspected. We need to find the root of this problem and shine the biggest light on it we can find, because if we want this shit to stop, if we want change, then we’re going to have to use this poor little girl as the leverage to make people listen. I don’t want her death to be in vain. I’d rather she hadn’t died at all, but she has, so we make sure she’s the last one.”

There was a patterned knock on the door, and the president held up a hand before she could say anything else. “Come in,” he called out.

A sharply dressed man walked in, handing a white phone to Leonard, who sighed again when he spotted it. He held a finger to his lips, before raising the phone to his ear. They would all be able to hear whatever was said on either side due to their superior hearing, which meant this was safe enough for them to be witnesses, whoever it was.

“Mr President, how may I be of service?” Leonard asked.

“Fuck the formalities, Leonard, I’ve told you time and again to call me Jessica,” a woman’s voice replied. “There’s been a development.”

Of course there was. It had been hours since the little girl had been shot, more than enough time for the wheels to start turning and for people to fuck things up further.

“What now?” Leonard asked, switching the phone from one ear to the other.

“Officer Tyson Warner was the individual who was suspended pending the investigation, as per normal protocol. He shot himself ten minutes ago. It was fatal.”

A fresh wave of grief swept through the room. Some of it was because this had now escalated, and the conversation changed. Losses had occurred on both sides, which for some would mean justice had been served. While it would cool many tempers, it would only fan others. It meant the battle to make changes, to bring more understanding between the two peoples in order to forge a better path forward, was going to be that much harder. Many humans would now think the shifters no longer had something to whine about. The killer was dead, after all, so to pursue the matter further would be in bad taste.

Except that was wrong. For Charlotte, this tragedy had doubled. Not only had a little girl been killed, but a human in law enforcement, the best of the best, the ones who held the darkness at bay. That wasn’t a win for anyone, it was just more grief.

“I am sorry for your loss,” Leonard said, sympathy clear in his voice. “My condolences to his family. Do we know what happened?”

“He handed in his badge and gun, was sent home, and an appointment was made for him to see a psychologist tomorrow. Leonard, he was a rookie, just twenty-two. A full officer for less than a year. He still lived with his parents, for fuck’s sake. He came home from work, didn’t say anything about what was going on, just told them he had a headache and went up to his room. His mother went to fetch him some acetaminophen, but heard the gunshot while she was in the kitchen. She ran in to find him slumped over on his bed with half of the back of his head missing.”

“Fuck,” Leonard whispered.

“She didn’t even know he had his own gun. He didn’t have a licence for it either. Ballistics is working to see if it matches anything else on the system, given it’s an unregistered gun.”

“That poor, poor woman,” Leonard said quietly. “The father wasn’t home?”

“Oh, it gets better in terms of optics. The other mother wasn’t home. She’d run out to get some groceries, got back to the sounds of her wife screaming from the house and called nine one one before running inside.”

Which meant if anyone went after the family, it could be interpreted as homophobia, or it could go the other way and homophobes everywhere coming out and declaring that this was what happened when you went against their deity’s laws. It shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t have made a difference at all, but Charlotte knew that this was just going to make things an even bigger mess. The press would have a field day with it, disregarding the pain and heartache their callous comments and one-liners would cause. All they would achieve would be to engender hate and pain on all sides.

She just wished there weren’t any sides at all. Human, shifter, lgbtq+, cis, parents, children, black, white or pink with purple polka dots. Why couldn’t everyone accept that nobody was the same as anyone else, and be happy about it? There was no such thing as ‘us’. Not really, because every group, ethnicity, religion, gender, political faction or whatever, had its outliers, and even those who were ‘in’ weren’t identical in their thoughts and ideologies. They only had some things in common, not everything.

Hate was just stupid. In capitals.

And an exclamation mark or ten to boot — and she hated using those damn things.

Now it was her job to smooth things over, to remind people that they had things more in common than they did in opposition. All in one speech. Given by the president of her people, and listened to billions of people around the world, because she had no doubt it would be.

This one small incident would either be the flashpoint that threw their peoples into a war that would last centuries. Or it would be a Nobel moment, that changed the talking points and redirected that frenetic energy into a more fruitful outlet.

One little speech? Easy.

This speech? Not so much.