Chapter 4: Her First Shift

Father Callum's chapel stands at the top of the village where the road turns and the pines begin, a small stone building with a bell tower that has never had a bell in it since the roof was mended after the great storm. I walked Clara up there at noon with the wind at our backs, and she did not speak to me once on the whole climb.

She had been waiting for me at the schoolhouse gate with her shawl already on and her jaw already set, and when I told her that the Alpha wanted her at the chapel she had said, "And if I do not wish to go to the chapel?" and I had said, "Then he will come down here instead, and you will not like that half so much," and she had looked at me for a moment and then gone inside to fetch her coat.

The chapel was cold. The fire in the little iron stove had been lit and had gone out again, and the tall windows let in a white flat light that fell across the wooden pews and the worn flagstones and the stone font by the door that has a chip out of its rim from the year the sheep got in. Father Callum stood at the altar with his hands folded and his thinning sandy hair combed flat and his kind green eyes going from me to Clara and back. Marcus stood to one side with his hands behind his back. Bram was there, and the Gamma, and two of the older wolves I had known all my life, and Nina in the back pew with her hands in her lap and her face doing nothing at all.

"Miss Clara," Marcus said. "Thank you for coming."

"I was given to understand I had little choice."

"You always have a choice. I am merely offering you the one that keeps you safe." Marcus came forward and his voice was warm and easy, and I watched him the way Agnes had told me to. "You have been given a great gift. A first shift at your age is rare. A first shift on the island itself is rarer still. There are things you will see and hear in the coming days that will frighten you, and there are people in this world who would use those things against this village. I am asking you to swear before God and before this pack that you will keep our secrets, and in return we will keep yours."

Clara looked at him for a long time. Then she said, "What secrets do I have?"

"Everyone has secrets, Miss Clara."

"And what will this oath cost me?"

"Nothing you are not already paying."

She thought about it. She had a way of thinking that showed on her whole face. Then she said, "I will swear to keep what I have seen to myself. I will not swear to be silent about what is done to me or to anyone in my care. Ivy is my student. If she is harmed I will speak, oath or no oath."

Marcus smiled. It was the warm smile, the one that had been at my shoulder for twenty years, and he said, "That is a fair condition. Father Callum, if you would."

So she swore, and the priest said the words and she repeated them, and her voice was steady and clear in the cold chapel, and when it was done Marcus took her hand and said, "Welcome to the Cragmoor Pack, Clara. You will be watched over." And then he turned his head and looked at me, and his look said the thing he had said in the study. If you feel anything, come to me first.

We came out of the chapel into a wind that had turned cold and a sky the color of a wet slate. Marcus walked with Clara down the hill and talked to her about the village and the school and the price of herring, and she answered him in short, careful sentences, and I walked behind them with the Gamma and did not say anything at all.

Halfway down, Marcus stopped and said, "Elias. I want the two of you to go out to the island tonight. The tide is low at seven. She should see where it happened while it is fresh in her mind. The stones there are old and they will tell her more than I can. Take a lantern and take the boat."

"The island at night," I said. "Is that wise?"

"She has a Beta to watch over her. Unless you are telling me you cannot do it."

"No," I said. "I can do it."

"Good." He clapped me on the shoulder and his hand was warm, and then he turned and went on down the hill, and Clara and I stood in the road and watched him go.

"He wants me out on that island at night," she said. "A man I met yesterday, who has my schoolteacher swear an oath in a cold chapel, wants me out on an island in the dark. Do you think that is a strange thing to want?"

"Yes," I said. "I do."

"Then why are you taking me?"

"Because he is my Alpha," I said, "and because I would rather be out there with you than have him send someone else."

She looked at me then, and her eyes went over my face, and something in her own face changed a little. "You are honest," she said. "For a man who tells poor lies."

"I'm full of surprises."

We went out at seven. The tide was out and the sand was hard and ribbed under our boots and the island lay ahead of us black against a sky that had not yet gone fully dark, and Clara walked beside me with the lantern in her hand and her shawl pulled tight, and neither of us said anything until we came to the shingle and the water was running in the narrow channel between the shore and the island with a sound like something being poured out. I carried her over the channel on my back. She was lighter than she looked and she held onto my shoulders with both hands and said nothing, and when I set her down her face was very close to mine and the lantern light was on it and I felt the rope pull tight again, and I stepped back and picked up the lantern and said, "This way."

The island is not big. A ring of shingle, a hump of black rock, and in the middle a flat grey stone the size of a cart that the old people called the wolf's table, and beyond it the low broken walls of something that had been a building once. There is a hollow in the stone of the wolf's table the shape of a bowl, and the old people said the Alphas of the old time poured something into it at the turn of the year. Nobody knew what.

Clara went straight to the stone. She set the lantern down in the bowl and stood looking at the walls, and then she walked round the stone and out to the edge of the rock and looked down at the water.

"It was here," she said. "I don't remember much of it. I remember coming out here on the sand because I could not sleep and I had walked down to the shore to think. I remember a pain in my back like a knife and a sound that came out of me that I did not recognize. I remember lying on this stone. And then I remember looking up and seeing the whole village lit and small and far away, and thinking that my eyes were wrong, because I could see a man in a window three streets off holding a cup." She turned to me. "I could not see a man in a window three streets off before that night. I can now. I can see the shape of a rabbit on the hill in the dark. I can smell the salt and under the salt there is something else."

"What else?"

"Something sweet. Like a flower that has been left in a room too long." She looked at me. "It comes from you."

I did not answer. I stood with my bad arm at my side and the lantern light on her face and the wind coming off the sea, and the rope between us pulled so hard that I had to put my good hand on the stone to steady myself.

"There is a door," Clara said. "In the wall, under the water, down by the south side. I saw the top of it when the tide was low yesterday. It has a mark on it. A crescent, like a new moon. My grandfather had that mark on a ring."

"Clara. Do not go near that door."

"Why?"

And the truth came out of me before I could stop it. "Because there are things on this island that are older than my Alpha and older than the pack and I do not know what they do. Because I heard you howl from the pack house two days ago and I have not been able to get it out of my head since. Because I have no wolf in me, Clara, and I am standing out here in the dark with a woman who can see in the night and I do not know what I am for anymore."

She was very still. "What do you mean, you have no wolf in you?"

"Exactly that."

"You are one of them. You are all of them. You are the Beta."

"I was the Beta." The wind took the words and I said the rest of it anyway. "Silver in the blood, two nights ago, and the wolf gone out of me like a candle out in a draught. That is why Marcus has me watching you and that is why I cannot feel what I ought to feel when I am near you, and the healer says the only thing that can draw it out is a mate, and my mate is not the one who told me so."

She did not move away. She came one step closer, with the lantern light on her chin and her blue green eyes fixed on mine, and she said, in her schoolteacher voice, "Explain it to me again. Slowly. I want to hear all of it."

So I told her. I told her about the kelp store and the melted link and the silver taste and Nina's books, and while I was talking she lifted her hand and put her fingers on my bad arm, over the sleeve, and the touch went through me like a hot wire. Her eyes widened. She opened her mouth to say something.

And then the stone under our feet began to hum.

It was a low sound, below hearing almost, a sound you feel in your teeth and your knees, and the lantern in the bowl of the wolf's table shook and the flame went flat. Clara caught my arm with both hands. The hum went up through the rock and into her and she gasped and her head went back and her eyes went wide and blank, and her mouth opened and a voice came out of it that was not her voice.

It was a man's voice, deep and cracked with age, and it said three words in the old tongue that I did not understand, and then in the common speech it said, "Not yet."

Clara's knees gave way. I caught her and went down with her on the stone and held her against my chest with her hair across my mouth and her breath coming hard, and the hum went out of the rock the way a wave goes out, and the lantern came up, and the island was just an island again. She was shaking. I held her and said her name and she did not answer for a long moment, and then she said, into my shoulder, "There is something in me. It spoke."

I looked up and out across the water at the village and the pack house on the hill with its windows lit, and at the top window of the pack house there was a shape standing in the dark looking out at the island.

It was too far to see a face. But I knew the shape of the shoulders and the way the head was held, and I knew that Marcus was standing at his window in the dark and had been watching us the whole time, and I had told him I would bring her to the chapel and I had told him nothing about the door under the water or the silver on my arm or what the healer had said in the corridor. He had asked me to come to him first. I had not come to him at all.

Clara lifted her head from my chest. Her eyes were her own again, and they were wet, and she said, "That voice knew my name."

"What did it call you?"

"It did not call me by my name. It called me by my grandfather's name." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "It called me Andrew."