The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (29 page)

I
t was her fault, all of it, and as her eyes caught on
Connal’s broad-shouldered form crossing around the back, a bound Setanta held
in his arms, the tears fell fresh, blurring the hard, unfeeling set of Connal’s
features to rainwater. He looked so cruel, and sullen, moving like a soldier,
all duty and efficiency as he secured Setty in the back.

It couldn’t be real.

Ash desperately clung to that
idea. Where she had sought sanity and clarity, now she ached for this all to be
a delusion, a cruel acid trip from something she’d taken. The silence in the
hearse was too heavy to be imagined, it was a stone weight sitting in her
throat, a corkscrew twisting her stomach into cramps of grief that stabbed with
every sobbing breath. She couldn’t stop crying. Something had changed since
she’d hit Dublin soil and the ice she normally encased herself in wasn’t so
quick to freeze her over. And now, she was blaming Connal. The asshole lit
fires in her emotions and she couldn’t get beyond the heat. Grief was burning
her through and all she could do was leak the ragged tears of her melted ice.
Ash pulled the canine-gnawed sock through her fingers when he moved to slip
into the driver’s seat, wet lashes fanned down as she toyed with the holes in
the fabric. No way in hell could she look at him, her sadness was too raw, it
left her vulnerable to him. He could hurt her.

The growl of the engine
drowned out the tear-rough rasp of her exhale and she wiped at the water tracks
marking her cheeks as the large car moved away, too soon turning onto a
familiar stretch of road. Last time she’d driven this, it had been alone and
bubbling over with annoyed curiosity, stalking a guy who stalked her and stole
her grandmother’s car. Last time she’d driven this, Ash had had her whole
perspective changed, her nightmare had been dead at her feet and buried beneath
them and she’d been fucked into the ground by a man she’d since tasted and
touched until she knew his body better than her own.

His body, she knew. The rest
of him was still a little foggy.

Connal coaxed the hearse onto
a thinner, less used path into the darkness of trees and she scowled, trying to
track the way, looking for something familiar to mark where they’d dumped the
lump of nasty beast. If he put their pup anywhere near that thing, she would
unleash a whole load of hurt on his ass. Pity she didn’t have a frying pan handy.
A pathetic laugh escaped her on a trickle of hot tears, so overloaded on the
mess of emotion that nothing was making any sense.

Blinking to clear her vision,
Ash lifted her head and really looked as the car pulled to a stop at the side
of the dirt track. This place was desolate. All trees and undergrowth, green
and dewed from the light rain that had fallen to coat everything in pretty
shimmering droplets.

It looked too nice to be a
graveyard for monsters.

She followed the movement of
his body, the dip of the car as his weight left it, and the silence was jagged
and sharp with hiccupping breaths she fought to swallow. Fuck, she wished he’d
just talk to her. She needed him, to touch her, or kiss her, or reassure her,
or, hell, she’d take a glare and an insult at the moment if it meant he noticed
her. He hated her.

Connal hesitated, fingers
curled around the car door handle, a breath trapped in his chest along with the
dense tangle of thoughts that refused to coalesce into any kind of meaningful
conversation. Whatever it was she needed from him, he didn’t have it to give.
His well was dry, parched roots shrivelled up, retracted so deep inside of him,
they were as good as dead. No tears, no pain, no loss, no anger. There were
only so many bargains you could strike against a soul before it became a blunt
instrument.

Cracking the door, a chill
breeze blew across the enclosed silence. The leafy undergrowth crushed under
the soles of his feet as he emerged into the gloom of the day. Heavy raindrops
fell from the trees to splash his shirt as he circled the car, popped her door,
and waited. The tense silhouette of her body didn't move, just sat staring at
the pale hands wrung in her lap, plucking at the baggy sweatpants she’d
borrowed from him in the frantic aftermath of finding the body. A hitched
breath escaped her lips and he knew she was crying. How had they come to this?
His hand dropped from the door to fall limp at his side. Needing to put his
empty hands to some purpose, he walked to the rear of the car.

The back doors of the
Cadillac swung wide on their bundled up cargo. He'd wrapped the dog in one of
the sheets from his own bed, counting the times he'd kicked that damn mutt off
the mattress. The fabric moulded to the beast’s haunches, a ghostly outline in
white, marred by the tell-tale rusty smears that bled a map of violence through
the thin fibres. Tugging back the edge of the sheet to reveal the dog's head,
his palm shaped the powerful curve of the animal's skull. It was a familiar
touch, and though he knew the body was cold, the brush of coarse, silvery hair
against his skin gave the illusion that life lingered still. He almost fancied
he saw the muscles twitch as they would when the dog, asleep on the rug in
front of his fire, dream-chased some imaginary foe.

It was a cruel trick of the
light, the scene shrouded in unearthly stillness, quiet as the grief that hung,
a mute stone in his chest. Throat tight, voice a rasp, Connal dropped back on
his hunkers, whispering words in a lilting mother tongue to the animal's now
deaf ears. He spoke to the stillness of roads rising and the wind at his back,
of sunshine and of soft rain falling. 'Peace,’ he murmured, ‘until we meet
again, old friend.' He patted the dog's flank and drew the sheet back over its
head, then heavy of hand, he lay the shovel atop the pile, gathered the limp
bundle into his arms and stood. Kicking the doors closed, he caught his own
reflection in the glass and the sadness in his eyes was ancient as stone,
equally cold and impenetrable. Through the rain-spattered window of the car, he
felt her stare on him, and knew what it was she saw that made her flinch away.
Monster. He gave the open passenger door a wide berth as he stepped around it,
didn't look at her as he spoke the clipped words. 'It’s wet. Stay in the car,
if you prefer. I can take it from here.’

Damnit. Those were the exact
words he’d used when she walked away from him in the bath, weren’t they? Their
torrid night of intimacy seemed like it belonged in a different story now,
erased by the frozen rain of grief, a chasm of distance opened up between them
on the fault lines of the mutt’s death. The night that blazed a chemical
alchemy of lust had left them with nothing but fool’s gold come morning. Two
strangers brought together by cruel circumstance.

Without waiting for her
answer, Connal tramped off through the wet woods with his burden, fully
expecting her to wait in the car. He had smelled her fear, as well as her
tears, in the confines of the vehicle; scent their only communication as they’d
driven in silence to this isolated spot in the mountains. The rain had stopped,
but the breeze scattered showers of droplets from the drenched canopy of leaves
overhead. The soil would be waterlogged and claggy to dig.

Cracking branches underfoot
alerted him to Ash’s approach. He could feel the anger in her stomping approach
and it made him weary. Passing him, she spun on her heel and blocked his path.
Hands planted on her hips, she stared him down.

‘You think this is all my
fault! I know you do. For leaving Setty outside.' Tear-streaked cheeks suffused
pink to match the rims of swollen eyes that were bright with defiance. She’d
finally cracked. 'God knows the guilt is chewing me up, but how was I supposed
to know this would happen, Connal? Obviously this is just another dead body to
you.’ She motioned to the sheet-wrapped bundle with a trembling hand. ‘To be
shovelled into the mud of just another unmarked grave. One more dirty secret
disposed of. I suppose I’ll be next?’ she asked. ‘Unlike you, I am not some
robot. I’m hurting enough here already, without needing you to punish me with
your cold shoulder. I loved that stupid, loyal dog. He led me to you, when you
needed me. I won’t let you bury him up here alongside the creatures that ripped
him apart.’

Connal froze in his tracks,
lowered the weight in his arms enough to regard her with a mixture of confusion
and incredulity.

‘This is not your fault, Ash.
None of this has been your fault. The dog was doing what it was trained to do,
what the wolfhound breed has been trained to do for millennia.’ A trained guard
dog, just like Connal. He and the dead mutt in his arms were no different.
Sure, he survived, this time, by the skin of his teeth and the arrogance of the
wolves who underestimated the depth of his reserves, but it might just as
easily have been him, bleeding out on the stone steps of his apartment. At
least he was giving the dog a decent burial. Who would take the time to do the
same for him? Would she? He knew in his heart he wouldn't want that for her.
She was so brittle, not made for this life to which he himself had become so
inured. He looked at Ash again with new eyes, seeing something of himself, his
old self, reflected back. It was something he had missed before and suddenly,
he found himself questioning the intensity of this woman’s emotions for an
animal she’d only known a few days. When it came to transference, he’d written
the book.

‘This isn’t really about the
dog, is it Ash? Any more than it’s about you researching mythical creatures for
your thesis. This is personal. Spit it out, before you choke on it. Who did you
lose?’

Bristling with annoyance, she
struggled to hide the defensive tone in her voice. ‘Why wouldn’t it be about
Setanta? He died protecting us, protecting me, and you don’t feel anything
because it’s what he was meant to do? What would you even know about loss, when
you feel nothing at all?’

‘You’re absolutely right,
Ash. I don’t feel anything.’ His jaw tightened as he looked away and pushed
past her to cover the distance to the end of the path. After a time spent
tramping in stony silence, the dirt track opened out into a familiar clearing.
Littered with small headstones, the sun was filtering through the trees and
refracting through the raindrops. He heard Ash’s sharp intake of breath and the
stall of her feet. With its dappled light and birdsong, this was a magical,
peaceful place. Which was why Connal had chosen it, that first time he’d come
with his grief raw and aching, to claw the soil with his bare hands. With so much
wrong in his world, this place had always felt right. The stones were laid out
in a rough pattern of semi-circles, ever decreasing, one inside the other, like
the embrace of protective arms. He chose a grassy spot at the end of one curve
to set down the wolfhound’s broken body. Sat back on the heels of his boots, he
rested his hands on the knees of his worn denims, dreads hung around his face,
shielding his expression as he spoke quietly.

‘I raised this one from a
pup. Just like I raised every one of them, and buried them, every one.’

Connal might have turned to
stone, so still was his body in that moment. He could have been any one of the
small cut headstones, his impression of a monolith was so damn impressive, but
Ash couldn’t draw her focus from the half moon curve of the stones to decode
his features. A vast clearing, it was incredible, a bewitching, half done fairy
ring. Avalon in the Dublin mountains. The stuff of myths, she could have been a
thousand years in the past, transported to magic and beauty in a pattern of
Celtic carved granite. Compelled, Ash wandered amongst them, deciphering the
names from the faces of rock, the hound-designed etchings softly weathered but
beautifully preserved. Someone took a lot of time caring for each ... gravestone?