The Black Wolves of Boston (eARC)

by Wen Spencer

  "Oh." He hadn't considered what his biological parents looked like. She had been a tiny, fierce thing. "Obviously I take after my mother."

  Seth pointed at more photos. "Here's Jack. He was state's champion in archery. This is his mom. This is our grandfather. In the library, there's the rest of the family. You can go through the yearbooks and find pictures of all the Tatterskeins back to the late 1900s. Jack might threaten to fire the staff but he won't. These people know how to deal with us. They'll take care of you, just like they've taken care of all the rest of us."

  "Do the teachers know that we're werewolves?" Joshua whispered again.

  "No. They just think we're very eccentric rich snobs. A lot of money and two hundred years of tradition buys a willing blindness to the facts." Seth patted him on the shoulder. "You'll be fine, but if you have any problems, call me. Don't think you're bothering me either. I've spent most my life wishing that you hadn't been kidnapped. I really wanted my older brother back."

  Joshua had thought it odd that Seth and Cabot had made such a big deal about him being Ilya. To him, they were strangers suddenly claiming him as their own. It was weird to suddenly realize that they'd known about him all his life. Most likely they had thought often about him; he would have wondered about Seth if he'd known he had a little brother. Cabot and Seth both had known what his real birthday was. Had they solemnly celebrated it every year? Had they marked his absence at the holidays?

  Considering how they acted toward him, they had.

  "Okay, I'll call," Joshua promised.

  "That includes help with classes."

  The offer surprised Joshua since Seth was a year younger than him. "Really? I'm taking AP Physics C and AP Chemistry."

  Seth took a sheet of paper out of his breast pocket and held it out. "Plus AP European History, and AP Comparative Government."

  "What?" Joshua snatched the paper from Seth's hand. He hadn't paid attention to the classes that the werewolves wanted him to take. He whimpered at the course schedule shown on the paper. "Are you insane? We're three months into the term! What the hell? Do you want me to fail?"

  "You're not going to be graded on those two classes, so don't worry. We didn't want to screw up your grade point average so you can start college classes next fall."

  "Who says I'm going to college?" Joshua had grown used to the idea of his dreams being blown out of the water.

  "The king. He picked those classes. He wanted you to have a better foundation in history, politics and law. It's part of being heir to Boston. When you go to college, you will have to take more of the same."

  "Oh." Joshua frowned at the paper, trying to imagine his future. It was like dealing with a jigsaw puzzle that had been scattered to four corners of one of Decker's messy rooms. When he ran away from home, he'd thought he was giving up college. He'd told himself that it didn't matter because the main thing he wanted was simply to get away from his hometown. Away from the bullies that he'd grown up with. Away from people who thought reading was a waste of time, that fantasy books were "for dorks," and a "good time" was getting drunk as possible. He'd escaped, in a very weird definition of the term.

  "When I go to college," Joshua repeated. He was picking up puzzle pieces and turning them in his mind, trying to see how it fit together. "I can stay here in Boston? I can stay with Decker? I never wanted to live in a dorm. I figured it be like living in the locker room at high school, only worse."

  "You can walk to Harvard from Decker's," Seth said.

  "Harvard?"

  "Every Tatterskein born for the last two hundred years has attended Harvard. I'll be the first not to go. You'll be accepted---that is---if you want to apply. You could go to MIT or Boston University."

  Seth clearly thought of the other colleges as poor second-rate choices.

  "I wanted to go to Harvard." Joshua admitted. "It's just---I thought---we're werewolves."

  "And monsters don't go to college?"

  "Well it seems a little redundant. We're stronger and faster than normal people. Nearly impossible to kill. And extremely rich!" Joshua waved his wallet stuffed full of hundred dollar bills as proof.

  "Brains will always beat brawn," Seth said. "We're rich because we're well-educated, not because we're werewolves."

  "Harvard," Joshua whispered, gripping the idea tightly. He was going to go to Harvard.

  "You can pick any major. The king will want you to audit classes in history and political science but you won't actually be graded for them unless it's a required course for your major. What do you want to be?"

  He had thought that "werewolf" had become the answer to that question. He had believed the word would define him so completely that there would be no room left for anything else. If felt as if an invisible straitjacket had been torn off, leaving him free to be anything he wanted. It was an exhilarating thought. What did he want to be? An architect? A historian? Surrounded by books? A librarian? A bookstore owner? A pie shop owner?

  A pie shop owner?

  "No! No pies!" he cried as he recognized the source of that idea.

  Seth raised eyebrows in confusion.

  "We're not sure yet. We'll figure it out."