The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (53 page)

‘Y
ou’re not dead.’ Madden rolled the giant wall of
muscle onto his front. ‘You don’t get to be dead, asshole. You don’t get to
saddle me with that shitty guilt-trip for eternity.’ The six hours of festering
remorse had been quite enough, thank you. He’d had it with staring at the ugly
purple and black imprints of his own fists on the guy’s skin. ‘Now rise and
fucking shine, Savage, Connal, whatever the hell your name is.’

Connal groaned, face mashed
to rock, pain blooming in florets all over his body. Pre-passed-out memories
emerged from the haze like spectres. Damn, when exactly had it become Groundhog
day for getting handed your ass? The game was getting old, fast. ‘Is it morning
already?’ He rasped, spitting blood into the dust. ‘If you’re planning to fuck
me over again, you could at least buy me breakfast in bed,’ his stomach
growled, ‘and I don’t mean those putrid maggots.’

Madden straddled his back,
tugging on the ties binding Connal’s wrists and ankles. ‘Bastard,’ he said,
‘you had it coming, for Aoife, and for all the others.’ He yanked so hard
Connal’s shoulders popped in their sockets. ‘Don’t make me reconsider untying
you. There’s plenty of rags left to make a gag for your big mouth.’

‘Gags and restraints? That
what raises your flag,
T
hegn
?’
Connal moaned at the instant relief flooding into numb hands and feet. 'And
where are my damn pants?'

'Clothes don't travel well on
the ride to Fomor.'

Dragging himself to a sitting
squat, Connal rubbed at the abrasions on his wrists and eyed the doctor with a
sneer. ‘Yeah, right. I always said celibacy was a breeding ground for
perversion.’

Madden sat back and cut a
glare in Connal’s direction. ‘You think it’s a fucking life choice?’ His fist
planted on the
thegn
mark on his chest. ‘You think I enjoy being branded
the runt of the litter, lower than the dogs and animals? A genetic reject, too
flawed to be allowed to procreate. What the hell would you know, Pureblood?’

‘I know enough.’ Connal’s
statement hung in the air between them.

Madden grunted. ‘Don’t think
it makes us BFFs, murderer.’

‘I am a murderer, but I did
not kill your sister, or her child. You seek the truth about your sister, then
hear it. I owe you that much, for saving my life.’ Connal closed his eyes and
let his head fall back against the rock. ‘The child, Quillan, was mine.’

Madden sucked in a breath,
but remained stock still, anticipating every word.

‘I loved your sister, if you
can believe an animal like me capable of love. I knew nothing of the child
until the night of the Blód-Samhain, when she came to me. She’d bribed the
guards. The longphort was all but abandoned, because of the raids. She’d paid a
man with a horse and cart to take us to the village where I lived as a boy. She
hoped they might offer us work, and protection for the child.’ The recollection
was slashed like a wound across Connal’s expression.

‘She came to me that night,’
Madden frowned, ‘it was my initiation. She said nothing about leaving.’

‘She’d have been signing your
death warrant if she had,’ Connal said, and they fell into a stony silence that
stretched out into the Fomor night. Eventually Connal cleared his throat and
continued.

‘I suppose MacTire got
suspicious, or somebody tipped him off. Whatever, he stayed behind when the
other men left and followed Aoife to the arena. The red-haired warrior was with
him.’

‘Rún, the scarred one,’ Madden
nodded.

'Yeah, but he wasn't scarred
back then. MacTire produced a blade and dragged Aoife away. Rún bolted the cage
and they left me, trapped in there. I’d have gladly cut off my own hands to get
to them, had I the means. I still hear Aoife's screams in my sleep. Every night
they haunt me. To this day.'

'He killed her.' Madden's
face had drained of all colour, pale as moonlight, ghostly against the darkness
of the cave. His lips pressed into a thin line. ‘What of my nephew?’

‘I was too late. They were
beyond help. There was nothing left of her.’ The words lodged in Connal’s
throat. ‘The bastard left her to the untame and they ripped her to pieces. I
could only hope she was already dead before … Fuck, I’m sorry, she was your
sister, you don’t need to hear this.’

‘Yeah, fuck,’ Madden
breathed, dragging a dirty palm down his face. He paused for a long moment
before gathering his emotions. ‘I accept you didn’t kill them, but I need to
know the rest, about the massacre, 'cause I think I missed the part where you
become a genocidal sociopath.’

Filthy and naked, muscles
corded, dreads hanging between his knees, Connal wouldn’t have looked out of
place in one of those dioramas of pre-history, complete with wooly mammoths and
sabre-toothed tigers. He rested his spine to the rock and stared up at the roof
of the cave. ‘The Morrígan came to me that night, with promises of raising the
dead. And I was just desperate enough in that moment to buy into her lies. She
rose the dead alright, but instead of bringing Aoife and Quillan back to life,
she raised the army of untame and set them free ...'

‘Enough.’ With that one word,
Madden dead-ended Connal’s retelling of the grimmest night of their history.
‘You embraced your hatred. I get it.’

‘No.’ Connal lifted pale eyes
that shone, tortured, out of his dirt-smeared, unshaven face. ‘I tried to stop
it, but I was hopelessly outnumbered. In the end, it was useless. Their
reanimated corpses couldn't be killed. The carnage spread like wildfire. Once
the creatures had annihilated the longphort, they cut a swathe through the
satellite camps; relentless, they killed every living thing in their wake,
until they’d herded the last remaining men down into the caves.'

'Exactly as the Morrígan had
intended.' Madden's tone was caustic.

'Yeah. She bled into the
black waters and worked her magic to seal her curse on the prison that is now
Fomor.’

Madden eyed the man across
from him warily. ‘But all these years, you’ve been her assassin. You’ve killed
your own people.’

Connal nodded slowly, dreads
falling over his face. ‘I’d struck a bargain. Where else did I have to go?’
Broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘You think MacTire would have welcomed me
back into the pack? I was a slave, and now I was a pariah. Killing was all I
knew. I struck a bad bargain, my duty became the price.’

Madden stood, arms bracing
the narrow mouth of the cave as he breathed the still air from the perpetual
darkness. ‘As a
thegn
, I do have some understanding of servitude, and of
duty.’ Those were two things Madden understood all too well. Turning back, he
looked his enemy straight in the eye. ‘We are not so different, you and I,
Connal Savage.’

Dreads shook about Connal’s
head. ‘I have never understood you
thegn.
You’re not bound by the
Morrígan’s curse. You’re free to walk the earth as you please and to mate with
humans. You're stronger than a human, and smarter. You hold positions of power
all around the world, possess the killer instincts to rule this planet, and yet
you choose to grovel to a handful of primitive beasts. Haven’t you ever
considered that you were the evolutionary success? That the wolves were the
ones marked for extinction?’

Madden’s eyes widened at the
blasphemy spilling so easily from the man’s mouth. He sank back on his heels,
his voice dropping to a hoarse whisper. ‘Never out loud. Not unless we wanted
our tongues cut out. The
t
hegn
have
been indentured for so many thousands of years, it’s woven into our DNA.’

‘There have to have been
rule-breakers,
t
hegn
who
desired freedom?’ Connal was looking at him like he could see right through
Madden’s impenetrable mask.

Unnerved, he cleared his
throat. ‘Sure, there’ve been transgressions, always dealt with severely. No
one’s ever dared challenge MacTire’s higher order.’ Madden felt heat suffuse
his cheekbones. ‘What about you? Did you rebel?’

‘Against her? Hell yes. I
rebelled countless times, but every time I did, she made innocent people die.
Guilt always dragged me back, and in time, well, it’s as you say: you do
something long enough and you start to find ways to justify your actions. I’d
lost the will to fight my way off the path destiny chose for me. There was no
reason. Until now.'

'The girl.' Subconsciously,
Madden found himself gravitating closer to the man, shifting until they were
side by side, backs to the cave wall. ‘You fell hard, huh?’

'Yeah,' he exhaled.

Madden turned his head to the
silhouette of Connal's hard jaw. 'You really love her that much? Enough to die
for her?'

Connal nodded, picking
absently at the scabs on his chest where MacTire had torn out his piercings.
His body was healing fast, the hastily stitched wounds knitting into jagged
pink lines, but his skin was still streaked with dried blood, evidence of
exactly what he’d been prepared to endure for her. 'It would seem so.'

'Enough to give her up?'
Madden asked.

A growl echoed off the walls.
'I'm not that generous.'

'Then you're planning to get
her back.' Madden’s interest was piqued.

'Honestly? I hadn't thought
beyond getting her to safety. I gambled on a one-way trip.'

'But now?'

'I got her in here. I have to
find a way to get her out.'

'You know she can't live on
the surface. She's wolf now. Your bite has activated her latent genetics.'

Connal cut him a sidelong
glare. ‘Yes, I was witness to a pretty graphic demonstration.’ His gaze fell
back to the patterns he was scratching into the dirt with a rock. ‘If I can get
to the surface and explain the situation to Anann DeMorgan, she can help.’

‘Do you think she’d help
you?’ Both their eyes were trained, not on each other, but on the picture that
was slowly emerging from Connal’s etching. He’d said he liked to carve, clearly
a diversion carried over from his slave days. Made Madden wish he had his tin
whistle, anything to occupy idle hands and an overactive mind.

‘She warned me I’d be forsaken
if I so much as touched her granddaughter. So no,’ he dragged the sharp edge of
the stone in a sweeping curve through the soft rock, ‘I don’t believe she’ll
lift a finger to help me, but it’s Ash I’m bargaining for, not myself. I
already sold my soul. I am bound by my word and by the collar the Morrígan put
on my throat.
’

‘You’re not bound by it now.’

‘Huh?’ Connal’s head bobbed
back up and Madden motioned to his neck.

‘The collar, that silver coin
you wore. It’s gone. MacTire must have ripped it from your throat when he had
you tortured.’

Connal’s hand reached up to
touch his bare throat, where the coin had once sat. ‘So it is. That complicates
matters.’

Madden brows raised in
question.

‘I no longer have the
Morrígan’s protection. I get to shrivel up and die after full moon, just like
all the others. Sweet.’