Todos los capítulos de The Curse of the Beta: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

I left Marcus's study with his words still warm in the air and went straight down to the boats, because work was the only thing I knew how to do with a fear in my chest.The Gamma's men had the nets out on the shingle, and Bram was mending a tear in one of them with his fingers going too fast and his tongue between his teeth. He looked up when I came down the slip. "Elias. Marcus says you're to watch the schoolteacher.""Marcus says a lot of things.""He says she's dangerous." Bram said it the way he said everything, hopefully, as if danger were a thing you could be introduced to. His hazel eyes were bright. "He says she shifted on the island, right where the old ones are buried. That's not right, is it? A first shift on the island. My father always said the island was for the old Alphas."I took the net from him and found the tear and began to work it closed. The cord was rough on my fingers. My fingers had always been quick. "Your father said a lot of things too, Bram.""But is it t

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 dead man's name was Peter, and I had known him for a liar and a drunk since I was a boy.He had come to the village the spring my mother died, a lean man with a grey beard and a way of standing too close when he talked, and he had carried things for Marcus's father in a boat with no name painted on it. Then he had gone, the way men like that go, and nobody had spoken of him in years. Now he was lying on the shingle with his chest carved open and his lips pulled back from his teeth and the tide coming in to take him."We cannot leave him here," I said.Marcus did not answer. He was still looking at the word. His copper red hair had come loose from its tie and the wind was pushing it across his forehead, and the beauty mark near his lip was dark against the pale of his face."Marcus.""I heard you." He crouched again and put his hand on the dead man's shoulder, and he did it gently, the way you would touch a sleeping child. "Peter. You stupid, thieving, drowning fool." He straighten

I did not go down to the harbour that night. Clara put her hand on my arm and said, "If it is a man with a lamp and a boat, he is gone before you get there, and if he is not gone, he is waiting for you, and either way you are a man with one good arm and no wolf." So I walked her to the schoolhouse door and stood in the yard until I heard the bolt go across, and then I went up the hill and slept like a dead man.In the morning the weather had cleared and the wind had gone round to the west and there was work to be done. The kelp harvest waits for no Alpha and no curse. The weed comes in on the spring tides in great black ropes, and it has to be cut and dragged up the shore and spread on the flat rocks to dry before it rots, and then it goes to the kilns to be burned down to ash for the soap works at Glasgow and the glass works at Leith. It is dirty work and cold work and the whole village does it, human and wolf alike, and on a dry morning after a storm the shore below the village look

I caught her at the channel.The tide was coming in and the water was running over the sand in a thin sheet, and Clara was standing at the edge of it with her lantern in one hand and her shawl slipping off her shoulders, and out on the shingle beyond her the steady light I had seen from the hill was moving out toward the island."Clara," I said, and she turned and put her hand up flat."Quiet. He is going out to the island and I want to see where he lands."I came up beside her and put my hand on the lantern and pushed it down behind my leg. "Put that out. He will see it."She cupped her hand over the vent and blew it out and the dark came back, and we stood together at the edge of the channel with the water running cold round our boots. Out past the sand the light went on, steady and slow, and it stopped at the shingle of the island and went up onto the rock and disappeared among the broken walls."Who is it?" I said."I do not know. I saw it from the schoolhouse window. I have been