The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (31 page)

Connal was falling apart,
leaking at the seams of his locked down control. The black pit of regret and
sorrow had welled up inside him and burst its banks. Swallowed by quicksand, a
hundred thousand hands of the dead were dragging him under, baying for retribution.
Only one thing was stopping him from drowning. He felt her arms wrap around
him, holding him together, a lifeline, a link with sanity.

He rocked in her arms, let
her hold him together. She was his touchstone for life in this sea of death and
she was the reason behind the torrent of emotional flotsam and painful memories
that were spewing uncontrollably out of him. She was comfort and innocence.

Would she still be holding
him if she knew the truth of the hell he had unleashed?

He was too far gone to cut
the rope.

W
hen the tension in the car threatened to shred her
nerves, Ash filled the silence with a burden lifted, a story. It was one of
blood and pain, of a happy early childhood before that day came and tore it
apart. It was the story of her mother, a distraction from his old grief with
her old grief, a soft, sad attempt to let him in when she felt so swamped with
emotion it was hard to breathe. Connal listened in silence, eyes on the road,
only the tightened grip on the wheel betraying anger as she spoke.

The true story fell free, for
the first time since the psychiatrists had persuaded her it was all just a
defence, her child’s mind turning her trauma to fairytale terror. The vivid
nightmarish detail she saw in her sleep poured out, filling the car with her
horror. For so long the psychiatric label had stuck and yet, with every day she
stayed in Dublin, it was slowly being ripped away. Nightmares to memories.

Her stepfather. The
newspapers got it so wrong. Their theories of paedophile rings and murder and
suicide were so far from the truth, the truth was a dot. So caught up in
describing the wolf on her stepfather’s chest, Ash only fell silent when Connal
answered an unasked question, confirming that the man who had helped raise her
had been
thegn
, servant to the things that murdered her mother. Bound by
a pact of complete obedience, he had been a scapegoat, willingly shooting
himself and taking the blame for the murder so his masters remained in myth
alone.

The wolves. Psychiatrists had
spent a lot of time convincing her she’d dreamed them up, real monsters for the
hidden monster within a man she’d trusted. She’d never truly bought it. They
were definitely no nightmare now.

The attack? Ash had no new
reasoning for that. The reports would still remain that her mother was the
victim of a deranged man who slaughtered her and then took his own life.

And her grandmother’s
mysterious appearance to sweep her away from danger ... well, a lot of it, with
her new knowledge, was suddenly making more sense than she could ever have
tried to explain away. Knowing her grandmother was ‘Other’, whatever that
meant, cleared up questions she’d never thought to ask.

‘I saw you, you know. As a
young girl, at Anann DeMorgan’s door, in your red coat.’ It was a softly spoken
confession, his eyes sliding briefly to meet with hers before focusing back on
the winding road that demanded his attention.

‘You did?’ That brought her
head up fast, gaze whipping to his, searching eyes that too quickly slid away
from her questions. ‘Did you know why I was brought there?’

‘No.’ His dreads shook, brows
knitted in a frown. ‘She never brought a child to her home before, never spoke
of you. None of it makes sense.’

‘How so?’ None of it did make
sense, she was struggling to keep up with the new world flashing into existence
around her, blanks filled in and lies erased for wild truth.

‘If the wolves targeted your
mother, then she has to have been a
latent
too.’ He shifted gear to
navigate the latest in a series of hairpin bends.

‘You did say it was genetic.’

‘Yes, but every case, up to
now, has been a sporadic mutation in human genes. No Latent has ever survived
long enough to pass the genes on to a child.’ The words hung suspended in the
air like an executioner’s axe.

‘Shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t
mean to frighten you.’ He fisted the wheel until the blood drained from his
knuckles.

Her hand dropped to his thigh
in a gentle squeeze, a small smile gracing her lips as she uttered soft words.
‘No, it’s okay, I need to hear the truth. Go on.’ This is what she’d wanted.
Information. The truth. Of what she was or could be.

He flicked a glance in her
direction, as though he needed to see that determination in her eyes before he
could go on. ‘Carriers of the mutation are infertile, at least until the
changes begin to manifest, sometime in the early to mid twenties. Retinal
anomalies, manic, disinhibited behaviour linked with the lunar cycles.’

Ash shifted uneasily in her
seat as he catalogued the uncomfortably familiar symptoms.

‘
Latents
secrete
pheromones that attract the wolves. If they haven’t already been traced through
eye testing or the psychiatric services, they find themselves drawn to areas
with a high density of male wolves. The Black Lake of Dublin is one, but there
are others. Dubh Lochan in Scotland, Blackpool in Cork, for example. All
conduits through the black waters that lead to Fomor.’

Ash picked at cotton threads
fraying on the knee of his jeans. ‘We were in Blackpool, England, at my
stepfather’s holiday home, when my mother was attacked.’ Damn, pieces just kept
slotting into place around her, a changing labyrinth, a Rubik's cube of
knowledge rearranging her confused actions to clear sense. She’d been crazy at
the full moon, wanton and hungry. Now she knew why. She was ... changing. ‘So
my mother had this genetic mutation, and somehow passed it on to me? What does
it matter?’

‘It makes you different, Ash,
an unknown quantity.’ He paused to overtake a tractor in the road, before
turning back to meet her eyes with a dark expression. ‘Did you know your real
father?’

Her head shook, a veil of
raven curls cascading to cover her features. ‘No, my mother had pictures but,
it hurt her to show them. I stopped asking.’ Ash had learned young that
anything to do with her biological father made her mother cry. And only faint
impressions lingered. A new silence travelled with them along an evening road
and she watched the shadows lengthen, stretching out dark fingers to catch at
them as they sped up. Driving into nowhere, winding upwards, her thoughts were
as confused as the bends in the road, taking them into a sudden stop that
halted her mind’s turnings to a soft, smiling question. ‘Where are we?’

‘Johnny Fox’s, the highest
pub in Ireland.’ Cutting the engine, he shifted in the seat to offer her a
crooked smile, rough fingers tucking a stray curl behind her ear. ‘I don’t know
about you, but I could use a drink. Putting it politely, today has been a
triple A, gold-plated mind-fuck.’

Mind-fuck, indeed ... Ash
crossed her legs under her, perched on a chair at the heavy wood table by the
fire, half watching Connal at the bar with a brunette, half trying not to dart
her head around, checking out every single person in the place like they could
be looking to eat her. It was a pretty pub, old, fragranced by the smoky musk
of burning peat. She exhaled, dropping her face into her hands, and just took
the quiet to breathe.

Palming the two glasses of
Guinness, Connal thanked the bar girl and tread the old floorboards back to
where Ash was sitting at the table.

‘You look good in my clothes,
Ash, all wild and windswept. Don’t we make a fine pair.’ Connal laughed
huskily, folding his broad frame into the wooden chair designed for a much
smaller man. There was dirt under his nails as he slid the glass of stout in
her direction, callused fingers brushing her hands where she’d laid them on the
table.

A scoffed agreement. She was
pretty sure she looked homeless and he looked like a model for some new grunge
trend. All male and completely gorgeous, decorated in flecks of mud and clingy
moss. Even the red rim of his tears couldn’t detract. Bastard. She took the
glass with a murmured ‘thank you’, flexed her fingers to stroke along his, a
shy smile offered in his direction.

Lifting his glass, he tipped
it to hers, a smile creasing the corners of his eyes. ‘Tears, wine and the
company of friends ... a thirteenth Century cure for depression and sadness.
Sláinte!’

A clink of glasses, a curve
of lips that didn’t quite touch her eyes. ‘To Setanta, the biggest cuddle monster,
the most loyal sock chewer, our guardian always ...’

‘To the mutt.’ He replied,
the words tinged with sadness and then, as the old poem said, they drank deep
and were silent.

A breath in the silence,
breaking it. ‘What’s going to happen to me, Connal?’

‘I don’t know.’ His large
hand reached to cover hers across the table. She was trembling.

‘I mean, if they win, if they
take me. What will they do to me, apart from the obvious?’ She couldn’t begin
to imagine what their ‘breeding’ entailed, but it looked too much like
something from Animal Planet in her head to make her ... Comfortable was not
the right word.

‘Same as happened to the
others, the ones that walked willingly into Form or refused DeMorgan’s offer of
Sanctuary. They disappeared into their underworld, never to be seen again.’

‘They’ll kill me?’ Of all the
worst case scenarios, this was probably the best. Her fingers curled into his
and he ran his thumb over the Celtic engravings on the band of her mother’s
ring.

‘They will bite you, to test your
response to the
eitr
.’

‘And that will make me a sex
slave? Like the girls at the club.’ Ash’s nose crinkled, working that thought
through her head and encountering only disgust.

‘That’s one possibility,’ he
ground out the admission through clenched molars, ‘but there are worse
outcomes. Some humans can’t take the high, they’re driven to insane violence.
It’s no coincidence Jonathan Swift built an insane asylum right at the site of
the Dubh Linn.’

Oh joy, she’d either be a
mindless fuck-zombie, or a homicidal human Cujo. ‘Is there a door number
three?’

‘There’s a slim chance you
might actually have enough wolf blood in you, that you could take the
eitr
and it would activate your latent genetics.’ He stared daggers into the pine
table, unable to face her with the fury in his eyes. ‘That’s what they’re
hoping for.’

‘To turn me into one of
them?’ Electric ran through her body in a jolt of emotion. She was freaked, a
touch of abhorrence threaded through her tone before she could reel it back and
tamp it down. And then a knock on her internal door poked her to her
realisation. He was one of them and she’d all but implied that of all desirable
things to be, he ranked somewhere beneath toe fungus. Sheepish, she kept her
gaze on their hands, her delicate fingers woven through strong callused ones in
a tight grip.

He met her eyes full on. ‘It
could make you fertile, capable of bearing their progeny. As to whether you
would become wolf, nobody can answer that question. It’s never worked.’