The Curse of the Beta

The first thing I knew was the taste of metal, and the second was that I was naked on a stone floor with no memory of how I got there.

Rain came through the high window of the old kelp store in slow, cold drops that found my shoulders and the small of my back. My clothes lay in a heap near the door, which meant someone had undressed me. My boots were gone. My coat was gone. The silver chain I wore at my throat, the one my mother had given me before she died, had been torn off and left in a coil near the drain. It had melted at one link.

I tried to call my wolf.

Nothing.

Not a stir, not a growl, not the low familiar pulse under my ribs that had been there since I was fourteen years old. I reached for him the way a man reaches for a light in a dark room, and my hand found empty air. I reached again. I lay there on the wet stone and reached until my jaw ached from clenching and sweat ran into my eyes, and the room stayed as silent as the inside of a coffin.

"Right, then," I said, because there was nothing else to say, and my voice came out flat and strange, like a stranger's.

I sat up. The room tilted. I got my knees under me and stayed there, breathing, counting the things I could still feel. Cold. Wet. A cut on my forearm that was not healing. I watched it for a long moment, waiting for the slow draw of skin closing, the small warm itch that had always come before. Nothing happened. The blood ran down to my wrist and dripped onto the stone and made a small dark circle that spread and spread.

Silver. I knew silver the way a sailor knows a storm. It had gone into me somewhere, and whatever it had touched, it had burned out of me.

The window showed a sliver of sky the color of old pewter. Somewhere out past the harbour wall, the sea was working at the rocks with its usual patience. I could still hear the water. That was something. My ears were still sharper than a human's, or they had been a minute ago. I could hear the creak of a rope on the far side of the harbour and the low complaint of a gull and a man coughing in his house three streets away. The wolf was gone but the wolf's habits stayed, and there was a kind of cruelty in that I did not want to look at too closely.

I got to my feet, took the coat from the heap, and pulled it on. It smelled of brine and smoke and, faintly, of someone else. A woman. Not perfume, nothing so easy. Wool and chalk and something clean like rain on stone. I told myself it was the coat and not the scent that made my stomach turn over. The coat was mine. No woman had worn it.

The metal taste came back stronger, and I leaned against the wall and was sick into the drain, and afterward I wiped my mouth and looked at the stain on my hand. It was too dark. There was something in it that was not only blood, a grey shimmer that caught the window light.

The pack house would be waking soon. Agnes would have the bread in the oven and the kettle on, and Bram would be arguing about the boats with whoever would listen, and Marcus would be in his study with the ledgers and the whisky he thought no one knew about. If I walked in like this, they would see. They would smell the silver on me before I got through the door. A Beta who cannot shift is not a Beta. Pack law is not kind about these things. Marcus would have to make a show of it, and I had seen what his shows looked like.

The thought of Marcus was a strange one, and I turned it over while I pulled on my boots. I had known him since we were boys. He had pulled me out of the surf when I was nine and the tide took me, and I had stood at his shoulder at his father's funeral and at his challenge and at every hard thing since. He would want to know who had done this. He would want blood for it. I was certain of that in the way a man is certain of the ground under his feet, and it did not once occur to me to doubt it.

I did not know yet that the ground was a lie.

The door of the kelp store gave onto a lane that ran down to the harbour, and I took the lane slowly, keeping to the wall. The rain had stopped. The sky was going pink over the hills, and the first boats were sliding out past the breakwater with their lanterns swinging. Thomas the magistrate stood at the end of the pier in his good grey coat with his hands behind his back, watching the boats go. He turned his head when he saw me, and something crossed his face, quick as a bird.

"Elias," he said. "You're out early."

"Couldn't sleep." I kept my voice easy. "You're out early yourself, Thomas."

"Customs men in Oban got word of a run," he said. "I'm deciding whether to know about it."

"You always decide the same way."

"I do." He looked at me a moment longer than a man looks at another man in a grey morning. "You all right? You've got a look to you."

"Bad oysters."

He laughed, and the laugh was real, and he waved me on. I felt his eyes on my back the whole length of the pier. Thomas was a good magistrate and a better smuggler, and a good smuggler counts everything twice.

The pack house stands at the top of the village where the hill meets the pines, a long low building of grey stone with a slate roof and a yard full of boats and nets and the smell of the kilns. I went round the back, through the gate that sticks in the rain, and up the outside stair to my own room under the eaves. I washed the blood off in the basin and burned the rag in the grate and put on a clean shirt and stood in front of the little mirror my mother had left me. My hair was a mess. My eyes were the same grey green they had always been, and they looked like they belonged to someone who had been up all night losing something. I practiced a face. The face was not good, but it was a face.

Then I heard her.

The howl came from the direction of the shore, out past the village and the last of the houses, where the shingle runs out toward the island that only shows itself at low tide. It was a woman's howl. I knew that at once, the way you know a woman's voice in a crowd, and it was a first shift, because no wolf who had shifted before howls like that. There is a note in it, a long rising note, part fear and part wonder. It goes up and up and does not know where to land. I had heard it twice in my life, both times at a distance, and I had never heard it this close, and I had never heard it while standing on two legs with nothing in my chest but my own heart going hard.

I went to the window. The tide was out. The island lay black and wet across the sand with the sea pulling away from it, and on the shingle a shape moved, low and pale, and then the shape stood up and it was a woman with her hands in her hair and her breath coming in clouds.

And then she looked at the pack house. Across all that distance, across the sand and the rocks and the wet grass, she looked straight at my window, and I felt it in my teeth.

I do not know how to explain what happened in that moment, so I will only put down what I felt. It was as if a rope had been tied to something deep in my chest and the other end of it had been thrown across the shore and pulled tight. My hands shook on the windowsill. The empty place where my wolf had been ached, actually ached, the way a lost tooth aches. I wanted to go down to her. I wanted it with a violence that frightened me, because I had never wanted anything that way in my life, not food, not rank, not the sea, and I did not even know her name.

The howl stopped. She stood very still on the shingle. Then she turned and walked, quick and unsteady, back toward the village, and the feeling in my chest eased off by slow degrees like a rope being paid out.

I stayed at the window a long time. My breath had fogged the glass. I wiped it with my sleeve, and my sleeve came away with a spot of grey on it, the same grey shimmer as before, and I stared at that spot until the door behind me opened.

Agnes stood there with her white braid over her shoulder and a bowl in her hands. She is seventy years old and she has cooked for three Alphas, and she can see through a wall if the wall is hiding something she wants to know.

"You missed breakfast," she said. "And you look like a drowned cat."

"I was out."

"On the shore? Chasing a howl?" She set the bowl down on the table. It was porridge, with a curl of honey on top. "That was a first shift, that was. A late one. The whole village heard it."

"Someone new?"

"Someone old," Agnes said. "You know her. The schoolteacher. The one who came back in the spring with her books and her city manners. Clara."

Clara. I turned the name over and it fit the shape of her in the way a key fits a lock, and I did not like how glad I was to have it. The schoolteacher. I had seen her once at the market, a woman with champagne blonde hair pinned up and a basket on her arm, arguing with a fishmonger about the price of herring. She had won the argument. I remembered that and nothing else, and now I had a name and a howl and a rope tied to my ribs, and I had no wolf to help me make sense of any of it.

"Eat," Agnes said. "You'll need it."

I sat down and ate because it was Agnes and because my hands wanted something to do. The porridge was good. It was always good. Halfway through the bowl I said, "Agnes, if a wolf took silver and lived, what would the pack say?"

The old woman was quiet for a moment. She picked up the rag from the hearth and folded it, and she folded it again, and she did not look at me.

"The pack would say nothing," she said, "if the Alpha said nothing. And the Alpha would say nothing if the Beta asked him sweetly." She put the rag down. "Is that what I'm to understand from the state of your arm, Elias?"

I put my sleeve down over the cut. "It's nothing."

"Nothing," she said. Her warm brown eyes were steady on mine. "Nothing does not smell of silver in my kitchen. Nothing does not leave a streak of it in my basin." She took the empty bowl and set it in the sink. "You watch your Alpha today. Watch him close. There is a thing in this house that has been eating at it for a long time, and I am too old to be the only one who sees it."

Before I could ask her what she meant, the yard below filled up with boots and voices. Bram came in from the boats with his curly auburn hair wet and his cheeks red, calling for his breakfast, and two of the Gamma's men came in behind him arguing about a net. Then the kitchen door opened again and Marcus came in, and the room got quieter the way it always did, and he smiled at Agnes and clapped Bram on the shoulder and poured himself a cup of tea, and I sat at the table with my arm aching and watched him and thought, He is my Alpha. He pulled me out of the surf. He would want blood for this.

He turned from the fire with his cup in his hand and looked at me, and his light brown eyes went over my face in a slow, friendly way, and then he said, "Elias. You look terrible. Come to the study, I've something for you."

He said it warmly. He said it the way he had said a thousand things to me since we were boys. And I got up and followed him out of the kitchen, and behind me I heard Agnes set the kettle down hard on the stove, and the sound of it went through me like a struck bell, and I did not know why.

The study door closed. Marcus set his cup on the desk and leaned against it, and the beauty mark near his lip caught the firelight, and he said, "A woman shifted on the shore this morning. A late bloomer. The schoolteacher. I want you to watch her for me."

"Watch her," I said.

"Guard her. She'll need it, her first days." He smiled at me, warm and easy, and then he said the thing that took the ground out from under me. "And Elias. If you feel anything when you're near her, anything at all, you come to me first. Before you tell her. Before you tell anyone."

The fire popped. I stood there with my arm full of silver and my wolf gone and my chest still aching from the pull of a woman I had never met, and I looked at my Alpha, my friend, the man who had pulled me out of the surf, and I said, "Why?"

Marcus picked up his cup and drank and did not answer me right away.

"Because," he said at last, "I know what it looks like when a wolf finds his mate, and I will not have this pack torn apart by it again."

He said it kindly. He said it the way a man says a thing he has said to himself many times in the dark. And I stood in his study and understood, for the first time in my life, that my Alpha was afraid.