Chapter 1 #2
He was exactly what I’d pictured, which wasn’t a surprise.
He’d been on magazine covers and such, wearing suits worth more than my salary, looking like a model.
And very much like the alpha werewolf he was.
If he’d interviewed me instead of Maia, I’d have probably seen the sense in their concern about me being afraid of werewolves.
He smiled at me, though, and it wasn’t a sharp-toothed predator smile, but a friendly one.
“You must be Landon. We’ve been looking forward to your arrival.
Our last head of IT was in a bad spot and had to go home to Mexico, but it sort of left us in the lurch.
Maia said you’ve come all the way from Boston? ”
“Yessir, Boston. But I was ready for a change.” My brain took up a chant in the background: don’t talk about your personal drama, don’t talk about your personal drama. “No snow will be nice,” I finally said instead.
He laughed at that, nodding. “I hear you. Most of the pack came out of Idaho, and it’s a world of difference.”
I knew that, technically. I’d read it in the articles about Fyse and Crescent.
But it was odd to see them all in person and think that these confident, cosmopolitan wolves had come from rural Idaho, and a pack that had refused even the most basic technology, and then they’d freaking invented the magical version of an online superstore that should not be named.
They’d arranged for magical textbooks in online versions and print-on-demand, making the study of magic accessible in a way it had never been before, and gotten insanely rich doing it.
“Can’t say I miss the giant puffy coats,” Maia said, sighing. “Being able to dress in whatever I want all year? Yes please.”
Ajax laughed. “Well, we’ll see how Landon feels about that when it does get cold. It might not snow, but that doesn’t mean it’s warm all the time.”
“I’ve got all the wool coats I’ll need,” I promised. “After Boston, it’s definitely going to be better. Anything short of Maine would be.”
He bowed his head in concession, but then his phone rang. He sighed, muttered something that sounded like Japanese to me, and Maia winced and led me out of the room. “He’s working on a merger. Maybe. I have doubts, but you know how it is.”
I looked at her, then back at his office, and bit my lip. “Honestly? Not even a clue, and I’m kind of glad for it. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate not having been called tech-monkey yet, but I’d rather be that than have to worry about everything to do with running a whole company.”
She laughed uproariously at that, shaking her head.
“Well, hopefully no one will call you that. Tech-cat, maybe? But if anyone is a problem, come to me. This isn’t a regular human company where the bottom line matters more than people.
We formed as a pack, and we’re damned well going to stay a pack. ”
And that was . . . nice. Cats didn’t really have packs, but it was a nice thought, people sticking together. Being loyal to each other.
I could get behind that.
“Okay,” she announced, chipper as ever after hours of introductions. “Time to take you to your own lair. You share a floor with the rest of the techies. IT, the programmers, and the people handling our servers. And the servers themselves. Is that offensive?”
“I don’t see why it would be. Those people need IT services most often, so having us nearby makes the most sense.”
She beamed at the response and took me out into tech central.
She introduced me to the tiny woman who was in charge of keeping the website up and running, her team of programmers in a bunch of cubicles laid out in a bullpen.
I’d never had anyone happier to see me. “I’d hug you if I did that kind of thing,” she said.
“We’ve got a pile of scrapped computers that need repairs and parts, and your boys are trying to keep up with it, but they’re disorganized as hell.
It’s like the ticket system just sends into the void suddenly. ”
Maia frowned. “You didn’t say anything.”
“Not your problem,” the woman said. “We’ve been making do, and I knew you’d get a new person in.”
“Is the former head of IT’s email address still running?”
The programmer blinked. “You don’t think . . . ”
“That they were having all tickets run through them? Yeah. It’s not unheard of, if they came from a smaller company than Crescent.”
She huffed a long-suffering sigh and nodded. “I’ll see if I can find it. And then I guess we try to find a more sensible way to handle tickets.”
“If you can get me access to the system and their email, I can handle it.” I told her. “My last company, on the handoff to a new head of IT, deleted the previous guy’s email, and they were just being sent into the void, so they were gone.”
She shook her head in wonder, then turned to look to her left. “Hey, Lucas?”
A good-looking young man with ink-black hair stood from a cubicle and wandered over, offering both Maia and me an easy smile. “ ’Sup boss?”
“This is Landon Smith, the new head of IT. You’re with him this week, for as long as he needs to get his section untangled.
Help him get into Gomez’s old email and sort this mess out.
” She talked like a drill sergeant from a movie, and despite his laid-back demeanor, he didn’t hesitate to return it with a sharp nod.
“Sure thing. Be back as soon as I can.”
“Right then,” Maia said, clapping her hands and rubbing them together. “You might think we’re completely incompetent given this, but I think you’ll like your setup, promise.”
She turned toward the other side of the building and motioned for us to follow her. The other side of the elevators looked like a long hallway with a few doors on either side, and not much else.
Then she opened the first door on the left, and inside was . . . well, it looked almost like a warehouse, full of computers and parts and frankly, it looked like heaven.
Finally, we were off to the races.
Between the shelves were a dozen or so desks, each with someone sitting at it, working on something. One on a laptop, sighing in frustration, another carefully disassembling a desktop tower. They all looked up when we came in.
“This,” Maia announced, motioning to me, “is your new boss. Landon Smith.”
Shit, that felt weird. I was the boss. Well, the boss of some people. Eleven people, to be exact, who all stood and came over to shake my hand, welcoming and pleased to meet me. Not a single annoyed expression in the bunch. Frankly, I felt a lot of relief.
“Think you can figure out where all the repair tickets are going?” one of them asked.
Maia grinned back. “He already has.”
“Well, we haven’t checked that hypothesis yet.
It’s just a guess.” I shook all their hands and hoped they weren’t going to expect me to remember their names right away.
I could tell from the smell that half of them were wolves, and wondered why Crescent had hired outside the pack for my role, but since no one seemed mad about it, there had to be a good reason.
We worked through lunch, and it turned out that my predecessor had indeed routed all repair tickets through their own email address.
It was a matter of minutes to change that over, sending them to a central address, so that whoever was there at the time could assign them and respond or mark them up however necessary.
Maia showed up at one with two enormous boxes that smelled like meat and bread and vegetables. Sandwiches. She’d brought us all lunch, since we’d been working through.
For half an hour, we all sat around eating sandwiches, chips, and some of the biggest pickles I’d seen in my life, talking and joking like we’d been a department together forever.
Sure, they had been working together for a while, but I wasn’t left out at all.
Not treated like some distant boss that no one wanted to hang out with.
It was awesome.
“I don’t get it,” Lucas said, looking his sandwich over. “Nothing blue in it. Why is it called The Weary Blues?”
“They’re all named like that,” the girl next to him said. “Mine’s called the Caged Bird.”
“But yours is chicken,” he pointed out. “So bird kinda makes sense, at least.”
“I couldn’t say why they named it that, but The Weary Blues was the name of Langston Hughes’s first poetry collection,” I said.
Everyone looked up at me, so I turned back to my own sandwich, pretending I hadn’t just outed myself as a giant nerd.
“So they’re, um, probably all named for poems, or poetry? ”
“Huh,” Lucas said, looking his sandwich over, like maybe it made more sense, even though it totally didn’t. Then he shrugged. “Well, it’s delicious, so that’s what really matters, right?”
Everyone laughed at him, and he grinned. Clearly, this was a man who’d been class clown in his day. I still wished I could have ever had that confidence.
“Hey Landon,” he said. “You want to come to trivia night tonight? A couple of these losers will be there, but obviously you’re on my team.”
There was some jeering at that, but overall, everyone seemed amused. Pleased.
“You should come,” the girl with the chicken sandwich—Julia?—said. “Maybe Lucas’s team won’t come in last for a change.”
They laughed again, and this time, I laughed with them. This wasn’t so hard. I knew I’d made the right decision for myself, but I was starting to feel like maybe . . . maybe things didn’t have to be hard at all.