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“An hour, tops. Though I probably should have chosen someone slower to run from,” he said, scrunching his nose with a smile on his face, reminding me of how his daughter did the same when we were little every time she was trying to figure something out. “Email me everything, and I’ll take a look. I have some ideas that might be handy,” he finally said, making me snap out of my memory.
“So you accept?” I asked, doing my best to keep the nerves from my voice. Mr. Roswell chuckled at my question.
“You’re basically giving me a multi-billion dollar playground of my own design and allowing me to choose who gets to play in it. I wouldn’t be able to call myself a genius if I turned it down,” he answered.
‘YESSSSS,’ James yelled in my head, making me flinch, and Tenoch shook his head at the noise.
“That’s great to hear. I’ll have everything in your inbox right away. As for the selection process, we had some ideas.” I said, motioning to James, who choked on his cake and spilled crumbs all over my lap.
“Sorry. That’s my queue.” James grinned, swatting the crumbs off my lap until I slapped his hand away. “So we want to be able to allow you to hire who you like, but we also want to hire the best there is. To achieve this, we’ll allow you to take anyone from this division that you choose and any shortlist you may have. The rest, we want to do a blind selection,” he explained. James may be clumsy and occasionally immature, but this was his idea, and Jo and I thought it was brilliant. “We want you to build a submission application that will provide us with people’s resumes without names, gender or species,” he finished.
“That can be risky. What about security? We need to be able to do backgrounds on who we’re hiring. I’d be uncomfortable bringing people that close to the pack and giving them access to some of our technology,” Mr. Roswell argued with a frown.
“I agree, but this is just for the initial selection. We want this to be an unbiased selection as much as possible. We can complete our due diligence once we pick the best resumes for our new division. For one, you’re right. We don’t want strangers so close to home. Anyone hired will be brought on under the condition that they have to join the pack. Aside from the rigorous background check we will do, Alpha Helios and Gamma Theodore have agreed to let us use his gift to make sure they aren’t coming into the company and pack with any ill intent.”
“Interesting. So I would also be in the dark about who’s applying until we’ve gone through the first round of purging?” Mr. Roswell asked, his face finally looking impressed with James.
“Correct.”
“Are we allowing humans into this new division?”
“Eh, no,” I answered. “This will strictly be a division for technology to defend against supernatural threats. It will be staffed with only non-humans. Which type, doesn’t matter, however.”
“Very well. I’ll come up with something that allows us to ask this without alerting the humans, but will still keep us in the dark. It’ll work out well since I do have a few in this building I’d like to bring with us, so their positions will need to be refilled. We can grab some humans that show promise from the selection.”
“Right on!” James said, looking more excited than I’d seen him in a while. I couldn’t help but smile. This went better than expected. I thought I was going to have to push harder than this to get him on board.
“Was there anything else that you need from me, Alpha? I have a few thoughts on how to do it, and I think I can have it done by tomorrow.” I could practically see him twitching to leave and get started.
“No need to rush. The job post won’t be going up for another week. But, if you have that shortlist, please bring it by any time,” I said, standing up and shaking his hand.
“Sounds great, and please call me Evergreen,” Mr. Roswell said before he left.
“That’s going to be weird,” James said.
“Yeah. Though I guess that’s something we’re going to have to get used to as we deal with the ones not retiring with Dad.”
“I can’t wait for the ceremony. Everyone is coming and we might finally find our mates. Mom said that every pack member and six other packs are showing up.” James said, rubbing his hands together.
“It’s mandatory for every pack member to be here at the swearing-in of the new Alpha,” I reminded him. “And we’ve already searched all the nearby packs.”
“Yeah, but that was years ago. Maybe our mates came of age since,” he countered, unwilling to lose hope.
He has a fair point, Tenoch said.
I don’t even know if I should get my hopes up, I grumbled back.
“Let’s go grab lunch,” I told him, changing the subject.
“Hey! Maybe we get to see Evie again. I haven’t seen her in years. I feel like she abandoned us,” James suddenly added as he walked into the elevator. I followed behind him, saying nothing. Evie was always a confusing subject for me.
Evie was Mr. Roswell’s daughter and a distant cousin of James. The genius had definitely passed from father to daughter. We all grew up together. Her, James, Bells, Jo and me. We were so close when we were little. We did everything together, but something changed sometime in our sophomore year, and I never figured out what that was.
We all knew she was a genius since we were little, but it never affected us. In fact, it worked for us since she also skipped first grade and ended up in the same classes as us. Then in tenth grade, Evie skipped another two grades ahead. When she became a senior, she just stopped hanging out with us. That whole year, she ignored us. Her excuse was that she needed to study, but I knew high school classwork was child’s play for her. At the end of the year, she graduated valedictorian and left to study at MIT. We hadn’t seen much of her since.
Something pulled her away from us, made her push us away, and I could never figure out why it bothered me so much. It was like she left a gap in our circle of friends that no one had been able to fill. Even a decade later, we still talked about her and remembered the shit we pulled on our parents, and it often left me wondering if she ever thought about us too.
Jo called us during lunch and asked us how the meeting went. He was certain that Mr. Roswell would retire, as he had plenty of funds to do so, but I was counting on that temptation to have a blank canvas in the new office to play with to convince him to stay. His mate was a doctor for the pack and she wasn’t planning on retiring anytime soon, so I knew it wouldn’t be too much of a sacrifice for him to stay.
