The Curse of the Beta のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 41 - チャプター 50

The smoke came out of the crack in the stone and it did not go up into the air. It went along the shelf, low and black and quick, and it found Clara.She was in my arms on the wet stone and the mark on her wrist was white and the line up her arm was white and the smoke went into her skin at the wrist and spread up the arm under the skin the way the silver had spread in mine. She screamed. It was not a wolf's scream and it was not a woman's scream. It came out of her mouth and it went across the island and out over the water, and every wolf on the shore heard it.I held her. I put my hand over the mark on her wrist and the smoke went through my fingers and into her anyway, and the door in my chest swung open and the rope went tight and I was in her head and she was in mine and there was something else in there with us.It was not a voice now. It was a weight. It was a thing that had been asleep under the stone for a hundred years and had woken up and found a body and was filling it, an

The copper wolf on the old Alpha's stone did not come down.It stood there with its yellow eyes going from me to Marcus and back, and its mouth was open and there was a man's voice coming out of it, and the voice was the voice of Father Callum and it was not."You are late," it said again. "I have been waiting since the year of the great storm. I have been under the floor of that chapel and I have been on that wall and I have been in the book and I have been the lock and the record and the man who says the words over the dead. And now I am this." It lifted its head. "Do you know what it is to be a wolf? I do. I have been a man for seventy years and I have been a wolf for one hour and I know more about this pack than any Alpha who ever sat in that chair."Marcus said, "Come down off my father's stone.""Your father's stone." The copper wolf laughed with a man's laugh. "Your father is not in that stone. Your father is under the cliff with a rope round his neck and a hole in his head and

I did not answer Thomas straight away, because a man came up the pier behind him with his hat in his hand and his coat wet to the shoulders and his face grey with the cold.He was not young and he was not old. He had hair the color of wet sand and a narrow face and a way of standing with his shoulders pulled in as if he expected to be hit. He had Clara's jaw and Clara's way of looking at a person as if they were a sum he had not finished working out."Are you the Regent?" he said."I am.""My name is Daniel." He stopped. "I am Clara's father."Thomas put his hand on his coat and did not move."You have been in the chapel crypt since the spring," I said."I have." Daniel looked at the harbour and then at his own boots. "The priest brought me in on a boat at the end of the winter and put me under the floor and told me that if I made a sound he would have my daughter killed. He gave me paper and ink and he told me what to write and I wrote it, and I have been writing it since the spring

Nobody spoke for a long moment.Then Marcus lifted his head and said, in a voice that was almost steady, "Ivo has held the Gamma's rank for twenty years. His father held it before him. He was my father's man and he has been my man and he stood at my shoulder at my challenge." He looked at Agnes. "Are you certain?""I am certain of the chain of keys and I am certain of the schoolyard and I am certain that the priest is not the only man who has been writing things down." Agnes put her keys on the table. "I am not certain of the rest. I am an old woman in a kitchen and I have been wrong before. But I have been watching that man since the spring and he has been in every room of this house and he has been in the study more than the Alpha himself."Nina came in through the byre door with her bag on her shoulder."The harbour," she said. "Thomas has held them at the bar but they are getting round him. Two boats went along the rocks and they are in the cove and there are men on the shore.""H

We found the copper wolf at dawn on the shore below the headland, sitting in the shallow water with its heavy head down and the chain still trailing from its neck, and it did not run when it saw us.It was the priest. It was still the priest. It lifted its yellow eyes to me and said, in that thin cracked voice, "I did not go far. There is nowhere to go."We put the chain back on it and took it up to the byre and put two men on the door and a third man on the roof. Then I went down to the schoolhouse and slept for four hours on the floor with my coat under my head and Clara asleep at her desk with her head on her arms, and when I woke the sun was high and the village was quiet and the whole of the pack was waiting for the moon.The month went by the way a month goes by in a fishing village. The boats went out and the kelp was cut and the kilns smoked and the children came to the schoolhouse and learned the letter W. Thomas held a hearing on the green and the Gamma was declared an exile