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“I’m sorry, James. You were always an easy one to tease. You can all call me Evergreen. I’m not one for too much formality.”
“Did you bring the applications?” Jo asked after James had stopped grumbling.
“Yes. Here,” he answered, bringing out a few tablets for everyone. “The questionnaire worked for the most part. I still had my system conduct a quick address mapping and compare that to a map of all the packs and covens to ensure we had people categorized correctly. There are only a few outliers that I left in both groups. If they make it until we remove the anonymity, I can look to see if they are supernatural or human. Which do we want to look at first?”
“Let’s look at the ones you want to take with us first. Not that I don’t trust you, I’d just like to know what and who we’re dealing with. Once we have the number of people we need to replace at the current office, we can narrow the human applications down to accommodate that. Should be the easiest way to do it. Then we can look at the rest of the current staff, figure out how many we take, and fill their positions with humans,“ I explained.
“Why not just start with the shifters again?” Jo asked.
“Because I felt like it.” I grinned at him. I turned back to my tablet, and my eyes bugged out when I saw the number of applications.
“Three thousand people applied?” I asked.
“Oh, no. That’s the number of humans,” Evergreen corrected me. I clicked a few buttons and found the total number of applications.
“Whoa.”
“That’s what happens when you have one of the most well-known security tech companies,” Evergreen smirked proudly. “But, if we know what we want to look for, we can filter by any questions or attributes.”
“Did you figure out who you want to replace you and who you want in the new office?” I asked.
“Yes. I’ve talked to them. I don’t know if they decided to apply, and now I won’t be able to tell if they did until we unlock their identities,” he answered, and though he didn’t look very happy about it, I nodded. If they wanted to get the job on merit alone, I commended them for it.
After we discussed the six technology engineers and two software specialists Evergreen wanted to bring with him, we spent the rest of the day going through the applications. Four of the six were already trusted pack members, so it was an easy decision to transition them over to the new division. The other four, we decided to ask if they would be willing to join the pack or prefer to remain in the main building before we counted them as positions needing to be refilled.
“I knew you’d still be holed up here.” Mom came in after supper with a couple of plates in her hands. “Evergreen, you remember what I told you?”
“Yes, Luna. ‘You can’t help anyone if you don’t take care of yourself,’” he quoted sheepishly. “We just got carried away.”
“Eat up. I know it’s your first day as leaders, but you can’t get everything done all at once. Work will still be there tomorrow. I don’t want all of you working yourselves to death. I need you strong,” she reprimanded us gently while she ruffled Jo’s hair and kissed my forehead before she left.
“I thought maybe once we got our titles, we would stop feeling like children. Your mother just showed me otherwise,” Jo mumbled, a frown on his face.
“Celeste will always be a mother hen to everyone. I’m close to fifty, have known her as my luna and friend for almost thirty years, and I still get chided when she finds out I missed a meal,” Evergreen told all of us. “You have to remember that she spent a long time lacking basic things like three full meals and basic health care. She’s healed from all of that, but there are parts of that trauma that will never go away. Making sure the people she loves are fed and healthy is the way she copes with it and shows how much she cares. Goddess willing, I’ll be seventy or eighty, and she’ll still always ask me if I’ve eaten, and I’ll know that she does it out of love.”
“He’s right. Mom’s the same way,” James agreed, for once, not an ounce of his usual comedic self. James’ mom and mine were both born in the pack next door. It wasn’t Guardian Moon back then. It was called Sky Moon. Before they were ten, an alpha came and challenged my grandpa and won through cheating. He slaughtered Mom’s entire pack, except for a couple of dozen women, who were turned into omegas and treated like slaves.
Mom and Aunt Maya both have scars all over their bodies due to their treatment. I didn’t understand when I was little how someone could treat people that way without reason. I still felt shame to this day when I remembered asking Mom if she had been bad. No matter how much trouble they could have caused, no one deserved to be treated this way, let alone before their wolf was there to help them heal.
We finished eating and worked for another hour before we called it a night. We were down to about four hundred human resumes and still had to go through the shifter applications. I told all of them to clear their schedule of anything non-urgent. I wanted to narrow things down by the end of the week.
For the rest of the week, we spent most of the days making sure we looked through all the applications so we didn’t miss anyone. By Friday, about fifty applications were selected to begin the interviews for the human positions including three to replace Evergreen at the main office, and three for the new building. We would be meeting with those first. Once we had heads of department, we would go over the remaining applications with them to see if they had any input, and include them in the interview process. I wanted to make sure that everyone we hired would mesh with both Evergreen and the new heads of department.
“Okay. So we’ll take a look at the real resumes and send out those interview emails and await their reply. I don’t think we can move forward on anything until we have our heads of department,” I said, stretching my body tiredly.
“Cory, should we be removing the anonymity this early in the process?” Evergreen asked.
“How else are we going to set up the interviews?” I asked.
“We could do voice-modulated initial interviews?” he suggested.
“Oooh! Is that like the thing the Scream guy did in the movies?” James asked, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“Yes, but nothing so crude. There are plenty of apps that let you do it. We can choose a gender-neutral voice and get it done. They should be able to understand we want to be as fair as possible and hire someone based on merit.”
"It’s not a bad idea. It’s a good way to avoid issues with other packs this way or other races saying we’re being biased,” Jo answered.
“Okay. Let’s do it then,” I answered, eager to get started.
