The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (57 page)

‘You will use the stun
bolts.’

Fite gaped in disbelief. The
electrically-charged stun ammunition was used to incapacitate and restrain
rogue wolves. The abomination out on the sands didn’t need containing. It
needed to be put down. ‘Are you fucking insane?’ he spat. ‘She’s killing us out
there. Look what she did to my boy.’

‘I will have her taken
alive.’ The King’s tone brooked no disobedience.

‘You choose her over your own
s
kuldalid
?’
Fite hissed. The tension in his lithe muscles could have crush
ed
diamonds. A pin-drop hush had fallen over the gathered crowd.

‘You challenge the King?’
MacTire’s words were ice.

Fite felt a heavy palm land
on his shoulder as Brandr spoke to his ear. ‘You don’t want to do this, my
brother.’ The male placed a bundle of stun-bolts into his free hand.

Fite’s eyes swept the stunned
expressions of the assembled warriors, before falling again to Tyr’s broken
body. ‘Mark my fucking words, my Lord. That rabid, mutant bitch will be the
downfall of us all.’

‘S
he was in here, Doc. Her scent is all over this room.’

Connal was rifling through
the furs and sheets strewn across the bed, nose buried in a pillow, inhaling
like a bloodhound.

‘But she’s not here now.’
Pulling himself into a stolen pair of MacTire’s leather pants, Madden thought
better of telling the poor bastard whose bed Ash had been sleeping in. When he
looked up, Connal had moved to the dressing table and was picking over a red
brush matted with long, black hairs. There were dresses piled over the back of
the chair. Safe to assume she’d been living in his chambers, then, not just
sleeping there, unless King Goldilocks was a closet cross-dresser. He sized up
another pair of pants and tossed them in Connal’s direction.

‘We have to leave,’ Madden
said. The merest whiff of her and Connal was like a dog with a bone. He just
wouldn’t let it go. Madden didn’t get it. To him, Fomor smelled like the
big-cat enclosure of a zoo. Not bad exactly, so much as pungent, the smell of
territorial animals never meant to be caged together. ‘She’s not here. They’d
have brought her with them to the Contests.’ Likely, she’d be the main
attraction, but Connal didn’t need to hear that either. ‘And before you get any
bright ideas, that’s a fight we can’t win.’

Connal threw him a pointed
look. ‘An hour ago, you were the one gunning for me to take on MacTire.’

‘That was
before
I
knew you couldn’t shift.’ Madden scowled. ‘Any time now, this place will be
swarming with bloodthirsty vargs. We have to hide.’

Connal reluctantly dragged
himself from her scent and they snuck out the door, stealthing through the
tunnels, hugging the walls around corners and speaking in low whispers.

‘How long ‘til the full
moon?’ Connal asked, poking his head around another ninety degree bend and
giving Madden the all clear.

‘You don’t feel the
quickening?’ The doctor followed, frowning as he indicated the next turn.

'Nope.' Connal shook his
head, 'not even a tingle.'

‘Damn,’ Madden was both
aghast and impressed, ‘the collar has that much control over you?’

‘Not the collar,’ Connal
replied, ‘The Morrígan. She’s cut me off. If she hadn’t, no force in the world
could have taken that coin from my neck.’

‘I never realised she had
that degree of power over you.’ Madden had assumed Savage and the Morrígan were
allies, united by a common enemy.

The big guy shrugged. 'I was
her slave. That was the bargain I struck. When she first took me on, I was so
volatile, I had so much anger inside of me, I couldn't control it. So she did.'

Madden regarded the male,
wondering what sick conditioning that would have involved. Physical pain,
torture, almost certainly. Connal’s expression was unreadable. The doctor
cleared his throat and changed the subject. ‘The full moon rises in just a few
hours. We can hide out in the Masters’ Temple until it’s time, then we’re home
free.’ He forced a smile and pushed off from the wall.

Connal stalled. ‘I won’t
leave without her.’

It was Madden’s turn to
shrug. He ran his thumb along his bottom lip, choosing his words carefully. He
opted for blunt truth. Why change up their honesty run now? ‘You may not have
the luxury of a choice, Savage. You can’t shift. That makes you just a man
against a pack of wild dogs. In my book, that’s suicide.’

A growl, just the other side
of human. ‘I can’t do nothing, I have to try.’

The man was stubborn, he had
to give him that. Balls of fucking steel. Admiration swelled up behind Madden’s
breastbone. He coughed to clear the tightness. ‘And if you find her? Then what?
In two days time, you’re both going to die aboveground. Have you considered
that maybe she’s safer here? Until you’ve brokered a deal with the old lady?’

‘Would you leave Liath down
here with these animals?’

That shut him up.

They continued to the temple
door in a silence that should have been strained, given the circumstances.
Instead, it was comfortable and accepting. It was awkwardly not awkward. As
they were about to enter, Connal held him back.

'Just show me the hideout,’
he said
.
‘You stay there. I'm going to do a little hunting. If I'm not
back by full moon, you go without me, understood?'

'The underground caverns are
vast. You'll never find her, Connal, and if you do, you'll have to go through
an army of pissed vargs to get to her.'

‘I have to do this, Doc.’

‘Then I’ll come with you.’

‘No. This is my fight. You’ve
already saved my ass once.’

‘Twice.’ Madden’s mouth
turned up in a grin. ‘You know what they say, third time’s a charm.’

Connal glowered. ‘I had the
raptor covered.’

Madden snorted and patted
Connal on the back. ‘Sure you did.’

‘Look, Doc. My hands are so
bloody, the stains will never wash off. I won’t add your blood to that tally.’

The tightening across
Connal’s shoulders told Madden he was deadly serious, so he made light and
bumped his fist to Connal’s chest. ‘Awe shucks, Savage. I’m touched. Truly.’
That earned him a glare that carried no heat.

‘Screw you, Doc. If I don’t
make it, somebody needs to look out for Liath, and the kid, right? So stick a
cork in the heroics and wait this one out on the bench like a good boy.’

‘You’re an asshole, you know
that, Savage?’

‘I’ll take that as a
compliment, coming from you, my friend.’ Connal clamped a hand on Madden’s
shoulder and inhaled.

They were all out of banter.

‘Just be safe, you son of a
bitch.’

C
onsciousness crept up on her, imposing on fractured
dreams. Her lashes fluttered, blinking in a dark so deep she wasn’t sure if her
eyes were really open. She didn’t dare move her head. It pounded, a hammer
striking her temples, and when she shifted aching bones, sweat-damp skin stung
as it brushed the cold floor.

Ow, ow, ow.

Hit-by-a-truck in pain, Ash
was feeling sympathy for Frankenstein’s Monster, if being ripped apart and put
back together felt anything like this. She stretched tentatively and was
rewarded with a metallic jangle. What the hell? Raising a hand to her face,
bleary eyes adjusted enough to see the thick clamps shackling her wrists, and
the chain stretching from one hand to the other. It clinked and tugged at her
throat as she rolled into a sitting position. Ash froze, taking inventory of
what she could feel: damp stones beneath her ass, a lot of aching, a cold
circle heavy around her throat …

Oh hell no! They’d collared
her?

She pulled at the chain
hooked through the loop on her neck, but only succeeded in choking herself. As
she coughed in air, Ash looked for the events leading to her imprisonment. The
last thing clear in her head was her disgust at the violence. She’d been so
angry, she’d all but screamed for it to stop. After that? She got nothing but
vicious static.

How long had she been out
this time? She felt worse than that time her ex dumped her and she’d gotten
intimate with an entire bottle of vodka. Maybe they’d drugged her. There were
no windows, no lit wall brackets. The pitch black was disorientating, no sense
of space or time.
For all she knew, the full moon could have passed
already.

God, what if she’d missed it?
Panic leached from her pores in a cold sweat. Without the full moon, she
had no hope of escape, and she wasn’t sure she had it in her to wait, or
survive, another month. The contests had changed something, broken something.
That was the pain. She felt broken.

She shuffled forwards as far
as she could go and hollered croakily. ‘Hello! Is there anybody down here?’ The
darkness slowly softened as her eyes adjusted to the lack of light. Bars carved
out her portion of jail.

Raising her voice, she tried
again, forcing a plaintive, feminine note into her tone. ‘Let me out of here!
Mac? Anybody. Please.’ Begging seemed to work in the past and she was panicked
enough to try it now.

Only her own voice echoed
back at her.

Slumping down the wall, she
analysed her cage, strained her ears for sounds of anyone she could plead with.

There was movement, but it
didn’t sound like help. A strange snuffling occupied the shadows, like the
rapid inhale-exhale of air through flared nostrils. Something was sniffing her
out, and she was grateful there were bars between her and whatever was on the
other side. Sounds followed the heavy breathing. Child-like and eerie, the song
drifted from the corner of the neighbouring cage.

The horribly familiar tune
from her childhood set her hackles bristling with its creepy lyrics. She did
not want to die with Sesame Street’s
One of These Things is Not Like the
Others
stuck in her head.

Inching forwards in a chained
shuffle, she strained to see into the shadows.

‘Hello?’
Way to go, Ash,
make yourself the victim in a cheesy horror movie.

The humming stopped and she
paused. When it started up again, she took a breath. That’s when the shadows
moved and the bars rattled under a heavy impact. A face burst into existence,
pressed, snarling through the cage with wild, white eyes and ragged hair. Ash
collapsed back with a startled scream. Her heart thudded erratically and
adrenaline raised tension in her skin. She actually growled before the shock
melting over his face silenced her. His snarl became the tremble of dry lips
and the confused scowl of a lost child stared through the bars at her.

‘Ravyn.’ The face retreated into
the shadowed corner. Ash pushed onto her knees. Her chest was tight as she
listened to his mumbled words. ‘No, no, no, no … the Ravyn is no more.’ He kept
saying that. But he couldn’t mean … Her knees scraped the ground as she
shuffled forward, straining the chains to their limits. He was singing again.