Black Tie and Tails

Joshua Tatterskein’s life has been strange. He’s become a werewolf, lives with a three-hundred-year-old vampire named Silas Decker and a ginger kitten called Trouble. Then things get even weirder when he encounters a talking penguin who wants to hire him for a job. Joshua just wants to graduate from his new high school. The school is owned by Boston’s werewolf pack, and while the teachers might not realize the owners are wolves, all the kids with special abilities—the Goths—know. The good news is the Goths are happy to help Joshua, but the bad news is one of them has gone missing.

Silas Decker has been waking up earlier than normal—very odd after three hundred years of being dead to the world when the sun is up. He enjoys the change – but what does he have to do for it to continue?

Elise Grigori’s day starts bad: her angelic family has discovered that she’s dating Jack Cabot, Thane to the Wolf King. It gets worse when Central Office calls to say that her cousin Francis is missing from his Vermont monastic retreat. He’s a Power, God’s strength manifested in flesh, which means he’s a walking nuke. His car is in Boston, which is very bad news for Boston.

Seth Tatterskein is just trying to hold his life together until he’s old enough to leave the Wolf King’s castle in New York and return to Boston as its Prince. His departure requires keeping his emotions in check—not an easy thing to do when your brother starts texting things like, “What kind of penguin talks?”

Chapter One: Joshua

“Pssst, hey, kid, over here,” someone whispered from among the flock of sleeping penguins.

Joshua knew he was dreaming because he couldn’t read the sign in front of him; the letters kept crawling about, refusing to let him understand the message before him. It had been a night full of nightmares, obviously brought on by the fact that in the morning he was going to a new high school.

His earlier dreams had started at the Tatterskeins’ private school, Blackridge. In one he’d listened to the statues at the front gate talk about his real mother and father. Later, he ran through the hallways naked, late for a test in a class he’d forgotten to attend. But then his nightmares progressed to old familiar landscapes. The halls of his old high school. The barn where the prom committee gathered to hold a fundraising haunted house. The cornfield where his classmates had died, and he’d become a werewolf.

Joshua had had a very bad senior year so far. There was little wonder why he was worried about the six months that were left until he graduated from his new school.

In the weird omniscient dream way, he knew that that he was on a school field trip at an aquarium. There were other students scattered throughout the building, but currently he was alone in the vast dim space in front of the exhibit, trying to figure out what type of penguins were huddled on the bare rocks on the other side of the pool of water.

“Hey! Wolf boy!” the voice said louder.

“Hello?” Joshua looked around.

All the details deepened. He was in was a big room with spotlights aiming light onto a fake rock island up against a wall painted black. At its foot was a deep tank of water with a gleaming blue floor. A dozen penguins stood on the rocks, seemingly asleep on their feet.

“Over here.” One of the penguins waved a wing at him. “Are you blind or deaf or both?”

“You?” Joshua pointed at it. “You…you…you’re a penguin.”

“You—you…” The bird mimicked him. “You’re Captain Obvious!”

“Wait. Penguins can’t talk. What are you?”

The penguin hopped up and down as it shouted at him. “I’m a penguin! A penguin! You are a wolf. Penguin. Wolf. Can we just move on here?”

“Okay, okay, I’m coping here,” Joshua said. “What do you want?”

“You’re the new puppy, right?”

“How—how do you know that?”

“Oh, freaking hell.” The penguin hopped up and down angrily. “There are only three black wolves on the planet and you’re too short to be the Thane. It means you’re either the prince or his brother. Everyone knows that the prince is still in New York City. It stands to reason that you’re the one that she told me about. The new one.”

“Not everyone knows—none of the teachers at school knows I’m a were…Who told you—you’re a penguin…”

“We covered that!” the penguin shouted. “You’re the new puppy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good! I want to hire you.”

“Wh-Wh-Wh-What?” Joshua stammered in surprise.

“Hire! Employ. Engage. Retain.” The penguin listed synonyms. “Geez, were you dropped on your head as a kid?”

“Hire me?”

The penguin lapsed into Spanish, squawking out what might have been curse words. “No te hagas el pelotudo! Sos un bolundo!”

Joshua had taken Spanish as a foreign language but those were words he’d never been taught. “Hey, cut me some slack. Until a month ago, I didn’t know anything about any of this weirdness. In my old boring world, werewolves and vampires were horror stories—and penguins couldn’t talk!”

“He will cover you with his feathers,” someone called out from the darkness. The voice echoed weirdly, as if the person was shouting from the bottom of a well.

Joshua jerked around to scan the dark aquarium behind him. “Hello?”

“Under his wings you will find refuge!” the person shouted, still hidden from Joshua’s sight by the dark. It was a distinctive deep voice of a large man hoarse from shouting. “His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.”

Joshua glanced back at the penguin. It stood watching him with evil red eyes. Its “wings” were stubby little things. There was no way that Joshua was going to be fit under them. There were two ways to interpret “cover you with his feathers.” He had enough problems dealing with being covered with fur. Besides, he had the odd feeling that the speaker was in more need of protection than Joshua.

It was probably better not to get involved with flightless birds that could talk. His life had been weird enough since Halloween. Joshua headed away from the exhibit, trying to ignore the quiet “Sos un boludo” muttered behind him.