Octo BEAR fest (Renaissance Shifters #1)

Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

B ill, having three younger brothers and a whole load of younger cousins, knew organized chaos when he saw it, but the Sixty Pix had it down to an art form. Tall slender Myles and the square-jawed pianist, Gemma, were apparently the sound and tech people for the band. They worked together with blazing efficiency to roll out cables, test speakers, and to set up the unbelievably cool 'glass paper' screens. Two went up at opposite ends of the beer garden, along with speaker sets that any audiophile would envy. Bill wasn't the only one who drifted up to the screens, peering at them from a couple feet away like they were afraid they'd break them, even though they'd watched Gemma and Myles manhandle the things to get them into place.

In daylight, the big screens were basically transparent. At night, the darkness would provide enough of a backdrop to make anything displayed on them easily visible, although when one suddenly lit up in a test run, Bill realized it was bright and high-res enough to be seen in everything but the very strongest sunlight. Laurie, standing at his side, whispered, " Cool, " like he was about eight, and Bill had to agree.

The other screens went up around the parking lot, twenty feet in the air on well-braced stands that were obviously designed to hold them. By then, Torbens were being recruited to help, although Bill stayed on the ground to watch. Myles slithered down the rigging to stand next to him for a minute, studying the screen above them critically. "Not bad. Crowd will love 'em."

"I love them," Bill said honestly. "What do you do when it's windy?"

The bassist smirked. "Mostly don't put 'em up. The bases are wide enough to give 'em stability, and they're hung to turn on an axis if the wind picks up that much. The only thing we can do at that point is take 'em down, but the key is that they're designed to not fall over and crush people in a stiff breeze. I checked the weather forecast. Wind's supposed to be low the next few days. Should be fine." He left Bill standing there, and went back to work.

They were set up and doing both video and audio tests on all the screens by about four in the afternoon, by which time Penny had somehow found crowd control barriers and was making Torbens arrange them in the parking lot. Bill, vaguely, said, "This might be illegal," and Penny, walking by, gave him a positively wolfish grin.

"I checked the town public gathering laws. There are house party limitations, but no block party or outdoors gathering size limits here. I'm betting there might be after this, but as of right now, this basically falls under the same laws as your Renaissance Faire thing, which means we could theoretically have about five thousand people show up before they could start throwing the book at us."

Bill gaped, and Penny grinned sharply again. "Don't worry, we're not expecting that many. But basically we can have as many people standing around a parking lot as we want, as long as there are clearly defined exit-ways and plenty of accessibility support. We've got two areas blockaded for people with mobility and other accessibility difficulties out here, and a space set aside up front inside."

"Wow. You're good at this, aren't you?"

"Baby, I'm great ." Penny strode off again, leaving Bill to stare after her for a moment. She was incredibly fierce and he wouldn't have been surprised to get a shifter scent off her, but she seemed to just be a really strong-willed person. It was almost too bad. She'd make a great predator shifter.

His bear sniffed. Doesn't smell like a threat.

A predator and a threat aren't necessarily the same thing. Bill thought of house cats chasing black bears up trees, and grinned.

His bear sniffed again, with great offense this time. Nothing attacks bears, it said. Not first. A bear is wise to retreat from something that attacks unprovoked.

"You know what, I've watched angry cats going at veterinarians, and you're right. Nobody wants to fight a cat. Not even a bear." He went back into the pub, where half a dozen cousins and brothers were standing around, heads lowered together as they gossiped. Bill lumbered up and Ashley made room for him, elbowing Jon to the side, and all of them looked at Bill like they expected some kind of profound statement. "Don't ask me," he told them at large. "I have no idea what I've gotten us into here."

"I looked at the ticket sales," Jon said, "and then I called three people who were supposed to have the weekend off and offered them overtime to come work tonight and tomorrow. That's what you've gotten us into."

"Really? Thanks for doing that."

"Ashley made me."

Bill dropped his chin to his chest and chuckled. "Of course she did. Thanks, Ash."

"That redhead, Penny," Ashley said, sounding a bit smitten. "She went and laid out a plan for reducing crowding at the actual bar. She's got somebody picking up thingies. You know. Like in airport security lines. To cordon off the bar and have entrance and exit points. I've never seen anybody so organized." She definitely sounded smitten, and Bill couldn't help grinning.

"And she's a drummer in a rock and roll band. You should ask her out."

"Right. Because she has time to date when she's organizing a sell-out concert. There are forty people out there in high-vis vests, Bill. They're volunteer security to direct traffic and do crowd control. She's got them in a chat group so they can communicate during the concert. What is going on here? I don't mean any offense to Gwendolyn Brooker, but I don't think they'd be beating down the doors to see her and her jazz quartet tonight, and with this woman…" Ashley gestured broadly at the band's setup, the parking lot, the whole of it all. "It's like a flash mob concert. Who the hell is she?"

Emma Hart, Bill thought, but that really wasn't the answer, and he knew it. "She's Gwen Booker," he responded with a smile. "I talked to Mike Piccolo over at the Harlequin for a while last night and he said she'd walked away from a studio deal when she was young and was going it on her own. It just turns out that she and her band are really good at 'on their own,' I guess."

"I can't imagine what they'd do with a label," his cousin Luke said. "If they're doing this with five of them and a bunch of volunteers, they'd be selling out stadiums with a dedicated team."

"That's what Mike said. How are Mom and Dad taking it?" Bill raised his head, looking for his parents, who were nowhere to be found.

"They went out for an early dinner to 'get out of the young peoples' way,'" Laurie said. "They said they'd be back for the concert. Concert?"

"I think at this point it's a full-on concert, yeah," Bill said. "I'm beginning to think we should have sold gold-circle tickets for the inside and cheap seats for outdoors."

"Well, now you know for next year," Jon said brightly. Bill stared at him, and he said, " What ? Don't tell me you're not booking her again next year! I mean, she's gonna be—" He broke off, obviously remembering Bill hadn't told anybody else that Gwen was his mate, yet, and after a moment of flailing, redirected to, "—crazy popular, so why not take advantage of it?"

"Yeah, I think we've got a lot of things to talk about before that," Bill said. "But look, people are starting to show up already to make sure they get the good seats, so let's…woo." He exhaled. "Let's reserve some of them, all right? We've got a lot of long-time customers who bought tickets early for what was supposed to be Gwendolyn Brooker, so if they want premium seating for the Sixty Pix, they deserve that. How many people did cancel?"

"About forty percent of the tickets across tonight and tomorrow. But we resold them all, and then some," Jon said. "And it wasn't sold out for Ms Brooker anyway, so if we reserve maybe half the seats and tables…?"

Bill nodded. "Yeah. That sounds good. And Mike Piccolo wanted a good seat, so we need to save one for him, too. Thanks, Jon."

"No problem, bro." Jon broke away from the group and headed for the office, where Bill assumed he'd be printing out reserved signs. The others drifted apart, leaving Bill to stand in the middle of the pub, watching it begin to fill up hours before the show was meant to start. The clientele was completely different from their usual: younger, and much, much louder. They were also ordering food and beer like it was the start of a long night of partying, and, watching them go up to the bar, it was clear that very few, if any, of the people who had arrived so far were using the free beer pass Gwen had suggested. That was great for the bottom line, although Bill also hoped the people who'd bought early tickets would come, and that they wouldn't be disappointed with the show.

"You can't make everybody happy, cuz," Ashley murmured as she walked by.

"Am I that obvious?" he muttered after her.

Ashley stopped and came back to him. "You look like a man who's been given a million dollars and a kick in the gut at the same time. Look, Bill, the jazz thing worked for the pub for a long time, but a lot of that crowd have turned into people who are babysitting their grandkids on Friday or Saturday nights so their kids can get out on a date. I know the jazz festival is still huge here, but people haven't been turning up for the unofficial opening weekend here at the pub for a while, right? I think it's great that we're doing something different, even if you didn't quite mean to. Except I think subconsciously you did."

"Jon said something like that, too. I didn't think anybody else had noticed about the numbers falling off. I'm not doing such a great job here, Ash."

"Don't be ridiculous. You've taken on a job two people used to do and you're beating yourself up for not being able to do it all by yourself as well as they did. I tell you what, if this place was mine to run I'd really shake things up."

Bill, taken aback, said, "Seriously? Is that something you've thought about?"

"Oh my God, yeah, obviously. I love this place. I've always envied that it belonged to your parents and not mine. I'd have kicked my folks out ten years ago. Well. Okay, I was like seventeen ten years ago, but you know what I mean. Yeah, I'd love to manage this place," Ashley said wistfully.

"Why didn't you ever mention that?"

Her eyebrows shot up. "Because it is your parents' place, not mine, and you never ask for any help!"

Bill opened his mouth and shut it again as a cold ball of dismay sank all the way from his throat down through his stomach. "I ask Jon and Laurie…"

"No, you don't. Not the way you think you do. You've never sat them down and said, this is too much, I need you guys to pick up these specific tasks going forward. Have you." The last two words weren't a question at all. They were a challenge, and Bill flinched almost guiltily.

"I shouldn't have to! They're adults, they can see what's going on around them."

"They see their competent, responsible older brother handling it all, Bill. You ask them to do this or that, but they don't see it as an ongoing job, just something you can't do in the moment. And then you get really frustrated, and I get that. But they see this place as yours, not theirs, and they don't want to step on your toes."

"And you…?"

Ashley sighed. "I'm a woman, Bill. I want you to look up a thing online, a comic strip about mental load. Right now you're carrying a lot of mental load, but women end up doing it a lot, like a lot a lot, so maybe I can see it easier when you're doing it."

He stared at her a few seconds, then nodded. "Okay. I'll look it up. But, Ash, if you want to talk about managing the pub…this weekend probably isn't any good, but maybe after this craziness is all over?"

She smiled up at him. "Yeah, not now, but yeah, I'd really like that. Right now ," she said, her smile growing, "you should go grab Gwen and take her and maybe the rest of the band over to the diner for something to eat in comparative peace and quiet before the show."