The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (30 page)

‘Is this ... ’ She hunted for
the right words in the knot of emotion riding up. ‘Is this a pet cemetery?’

Nodding curtly, Connal dusted
down his jeans and hefted the spade into his hands, testing the earth. ‘Not
pets, exactly. Guardians.’

‘So many ...’ Ash brushed her
fingers over the top of one of the stones, eyes lowered. ‘Why?’ How could
someone keep replacing something that they knew would be taken from them?

Connal shifted the dirt as he
spoke, the exertion of digging punctuating his words with hard exhales. ‘The
ancient people of Eblana kept hounds to guard against the curse of the black
lake. It has always been so.’

Her brow knitted, halted from
her wandering through the half circles to watch him work. She’d offer to help
but that tended to end rather abruptly. ‘The wolves killed them all?’

He paused, the thick sole of
his boot levering the bladed edge of the spade into the earth’s resistance.
‘Some. Others died of old age.’

‘But, you said you raised
them all, that’s not possible.’ Counting headstones and averaging dog life, her
Math teacher would have been proud, if her estimation wasn’t wildly off course.

If she was correct,
however...

Forearm braced on the wooden
handle, Connal lifted steel-grey eyes to meet her face with more directness
than they had managed all morning. ‘I’m old, Ash, old as dirt.’

Of course he was. Because no
giant wolf could really be a thirty-something-year-old man. He was some sort of
dinosaur and she should have known. Mentally face-palming herself, Ash gripped
the curves of the nearest headstone gently, eyes anywhere but on him as she
absorbed. Her mind spat out little snippets, conversations that were unclear
through the fog of ... The fog. The red fog. She let her eyes meet his briefly
as one hand waved in his direction, pointing her words at him. ‘Hey, but the
full moon has waned, and you’re still here.’

‘I made a bargain, with your
grandmother, a very, very long time ago.’ Subconsciously, his free hand drifted
to the eroded silver coin at his neck, playing the metal disc in his fingers,
running it along the leather thong that circled his throat. Just another
collar.

‘My grandmother? You’re
saying she’s old as dirt too?’

‘Older.’

‘Oh my God.’ I am the
granddaughter of dirt. ‘Please tell me ... she’s one of you too, isn’t she?’

He shook his head, a trace of
amusement at the corners of his mouth. ‘Gods no.’

‘No?’ That was a relief, her
grandmother didn’t eat little girls. ‘Then what the hell is she? Fairy,
leprechaun, damn will o’ the wisp?’

He popped a brow and scrubbed
the palm of his hand over his nape. ‘Your grandmother is ... other, one of the
ancients. Nobody really knows what she is, except that she is incredibly
powerful, and not here when you need her.’

‘Well, damn. So you think
she’s, what, had a stroke on purpose?’ It seemed ridiculous but she wasn’t
discounting anything nowadays. Ash played a tuft of grass under the toe of her
boot. ‘Am I the only one who can die around here?’

Without answering her
questions, Connal gripped the handle once more and set about digging the dog’s
grave with renewed vigour. His tone was wry when he spoke. ‘Welcome to
immortality, Little Red.’ He gestured around the clearing. ‘Where everything
and everyone that matters dies, and you get to stay behind and bury what’s
left.’ Flexing into every stroke, Connal seemed to channel the force of his
frustration into shifting the wet earth.

His movement spurred her from
her stall, feet taking the ground slowly, carefully avoiding crossing the
marked graves as she tried to gather some thoughts to answer his challenge. But
he was right, for the most part. Who in her life hadn’t left her? Maybe it
wasn’t death that took them, but choice. Ash couldn’t decide which was worse.
Here, now, probably death. She couldn’t fathom the pain it caused to bury the ones
you cared for, to leave them with such tenderly carved memorials. He was lying
to them both.

‘It isn’t just immortality
that does that.’ An exhale took her next words and brought them back as she
breathed the fresh scent of turned earth and wet grass. She was correcting her
own judgement, as she stood in the cemetery of his past. ‘You feel, Big Bad.
This is proof, you can’t hide behind a snarl now. If you didn’t feel, you never
would have taken such care to bury your ‘Guardians’. Would you carve these,’
Ash swept her arm out to encompass the number of intricately crafted
headstones, ‘for just anyone?’

Crouching down, the pads of
her fingertips picked some moss from the indented curve of a stylised hound.
They were all hounds, leashed with exquisite knot work. ‘They’re stunning.’

Connal screwed his lids down
tight on the memories her words stirred. A despairing boy, alone in the world,
alone in a cage, pining for his dog, etching his grief and loneliness into the
soft limestone of his prison walls. Some things were eternal. He was still that
boy, though his prison was wider, still carving death into stone like a convict
marking his days. Not for just anyone. For every one that made him relive the
one loss he could never come to terms with. Why had he brought her here, to
this very private place he had never revealed to another soul? She had looked
so vulnerable, so broken by the dog’s death. A subconscious part of him had
wanted her to see, wanted to share a part of himself with this woman who
stirred up emotions he hadn’t dared feel for centuries, but now that she was
here, he found himself retreating into the armoured shell of defensive silence.

The quiet stretched as he
turned in on himself and Ash shifted uncomfortably. She was somewhere special,
somewhere sacred; she could feel it, the reverence and sadness that came from
outside of her bubble of grief. Stood amongst the stones of loving memorial,
she was drawn to move through the graves, a strong compulsion tugging at her to
see every one of their beautiful devotions. They were enchanting, but one was
beyond that. The centre stone that caught her attention with its pristine
surface and neat cut surroundings. No weeds marred the bed of short-tended
grass as she stepped towards it. Dew-glittering green blades invited her closer
and Ash stole a glance at Connal to see him locked down again, immobile and
silent, propped on the spade like it could hold him up. Hunkering low, her hand
hesitated a breath away from the beautiful carved wolf. His wolf, the one on
his chest, graced the face of this headstone. There were no jagged edges on
this as there had been with others, every line was smooth, shaping the beast
out into a striking remembrance. ‘Connal? Whose is this?’

‘You don’t touch that!’

Connal’s shout startled her,
ripping a hole in the serenity of the graveyard. The spade hit the dirt with a
hollow thump and she jumped at the sound, her heart pounding from normal to
freaking out at the snarling fury raising his voice to a roar. Ash skittered
away from the headstone, the hand she’d dared reach with clasped to her chest
lest she lose it, stumbling back like it had suddenly burst into flames. But he
was the inferno, stalking towards her with eyes so dark the shadows were
sunlight compared to them.

He was going to kill her.

She backed away from his
glowering advance towards the gravestone and could only stand back and watch as
he crumpled to his knees in the dirt. With trembling hands, he caressed the
stone, as though it were a precious artifact defiled by her touch. Leaning in
to rest his forehead against the granite, his dreads fell down to shield the
movement of his lips as he crooned the scarcely audible words. ‘It’s okay.
Sleep, a leanbh. Nobody can hurt you now.’

She’d expected an outburst,
but the storm never hit her, and the tense brace of her body slumped as his
did. He fell and she started, as though she could take his weight, before she
realised it had been on purpose. The charge of male coming at her had been
derailed to a kneeling prayer on a patch of grass and Ash teetered, uncertain
if she should stay or run for the hills.

The great mountain of a man
looked broken, unhinged and rocking with the buffeting force of emotion she’d
seen unleashed at even the threat of a touch to that stone.

She couldn’t leave him, not
when he looked so close to the insanity she’d felt take her own mind. One step,
and then another, fuelled to motion by the need within her to comfort, to
touch, his pain making her heart hurt. ‘Connal?’ A warning. Approaching a beast
as distressed as he was with no announcement would get your hand bit off.
Fingertips brushed through the thick coiled dreads of his hair, gently stroking
the fur soft ropes in a rhythmic comfort that eased him into her touch.

Voice rough, Ash swallowed
twice, trying to clear it as her palm closed over his shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry,
Connal ... I ... I didn’t know.’ How was she to know? It was clearly not just a
dog in there. God, who then? A wife, the one true love of his life, his soul
mate? Do you really want to know? Folding herself down to her knees, Ash let a
tentative question pass her lips and braced herself for the explosion. ‘Who is
it?’

‘My son, my baby son,’ he
rasped.

Oh God, way worse than a wife
... She choked a little, struggling to build up the blocks of ice she thought
she’d had left. ‘What was his name?’

‘Quillan, his name was-’ the
words came out anguished, throat closed up around the knot of pain that choked
him. ‘-Quillan. It means cub.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ Shifting on
her knees, Ash curled a little closer, offering her touch as comfort, hand
tightening, leaning into him. So he didn’t feel so alone. ‘It’s a beautiful
name.’

‘I held him in my arms. Only
the once.’

Ash’s heart broke clean in
two at that. A parent’s loss, she couldn’t imagine the anguish. A daughter’s
loss however ... Softly voiced where her lips pressed to his shoulder, she
uttered something, a distraction for him perhaps, an admission for her. ‘My
mother.’

Out of the blue and his body
stilled.

She continued. ‘They aren’t
just the subject of my thesis. They’re the subject of my nightmares.’ She
swallowed the tears that bobbed in her throat. ‘The wolves took her from me.’

Beating his forehead against
the smooth stone, his face contorted with torment as he choked out a
confession. ‘Oh God, Ash, I have done terrible things, unspeakable things ...’

Vining around him, Ash closed
him into her embrace, held him against her body, and cooed reassurance to his
ear as they rocked. ‘Hush now, my beastie, it’s in the past. He sleeps, he’s at
peace. They’re at peace.’ At a loss, she could only murmur as he broke in her
arms. Sympathy was wet on her cheeks, his agony her own, tearing open wounds
she’d thought long closed. Her face buried to his nape as she wept. Terrible
things, he said. The bastard wolves deserved it. Unspeakable things. They were
evil, their deaths were justice, why couldn’t he see that? He hurt for his son,
for what he had to do and she clung to him, hoping to be even a measure of
light in the darkness that tore him apart.