The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (63 page)

He pulled up on the headland,
a short distance from the area cordoned-off by yellow police tape. The stuff
was flapping about in the wind like so many loose strands. The Garda presence
had long since departed. Their search of the coastline would not bear fruit. He
could feel it in his marrow; Anann DeMorgan was gone and it was going to take
something more than a search party to draw her out now. The Morrígan would be
looking for blood, and Connal was just desperate enough to give it to her.

Ash pressed the red button
and the phone beeped, hanging up on the nursing home. Granny had left the
building. She wasn’t surprised. Nothing surprised her about granny anymore, but
alongside her profuse apologies, the nurse had mentioned Connal calling. She
frowned at the phone. So he was looking too. The old woman could be anywhere:
off the side of the cliff like the nurses thought (Ash didn’t think it likely),
or just home. A long shot though it was, she dialed the DeMorgan house, working
the ragged nail on her thumb between her teeth as it rang. Pathetic how she was
reduced to phone calls from the safety of her safe-house prison. It seemed so
mundane, given everything. Granny was some almighty goddess. Shouldn’t there be
some mumbo jumbo to summon the old lady? A phone call just didn’t seem
spiritual enough.

The wall of security monitors
flickered with occasional movements, drawing her eye; a janitor sweeping the
dance floor, a woman changing the bed in what she assumed was a private room.
Only a few walls and this promise of neutral ground stood between her and
death. Not much of a bungee cord to trust her life to. The phone rang and rang,
setting her nerves on edge. Each time the connection cut off, she pressed
redial, until the tone was nothing but white noise over the clamour of her
thoughts.

Then the line clicked over.

Silence. She couldn’t even
hear anyone breathe but a quick check of the display showed she was definitely
connected.

Her brow scrunched. 'Grandma?
Is that you? Hello?'

'Ash?'

Her name in that voice sent
her heart into spasm, flatlining and then hammering so hard she wouldn’t be
surprised if he could hear it. She choked around the syllables. 'Connal?'

'Yeah,’ he said. ‘You're not
in Fomor.'

Is this what they’d been
reduced to? Stating the obvious? Ash wanted to stab the awkwardness and replace
it with easy intimacy and growling laughs.

'No, Mac ... MacTire ...'
Shit, why did she have to say his name? 'He set me up in his place in Form.'

He fell silent and she
realised how that sounded.
Crap
. She hastened to reassure him, words coming quick.
‘I’m alone. He didn’t come with me.’

There was a gruff noise on
the other end and she clutched the phone closer to her ear, feeding on every
sound he made.

‘You don’t need to justify
yourself to me, Ash,’ he said.

She almost whimpered.
Dragging it back, she took a breath, trying to steady the break she could feel
in her voice. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yeah, so am I.’ His tone was
cold, not an apology. Defeat? Resignation? Disappointment? Hurt squeezed her
chest. He was shutting down on her and she could feel them coming full circle,
back to the beginning.

‘Please, at least give me a
chance to explain.’ If she could just touch him, look him in the eyes, she
could make him understand. Maybe hit him with a frying pan. It had worked once.
With the phone glued to her ear, she was pacing, her body thrumming with the
urge to hunt him down. ‘I need to see you. Let me come to you?’

Her ears picked up a faint
shush of movement; his dreads brushing over fabric as his head shook. ‘You need
to stay away from me, Ash,’ he said, ‘for your own good, you need to sit
tight.’

Her bones ached with the
rejection and stopped her pacing dead.

‘What about you?’ she asked.
‘Where will you go?’

‘I can take care of myself,
Ash. Been doing it for centuries before you came along.’

Ouch
. He was striking nerves with vicious precision and
she wasn’t sure he even knew it. If he did, he’d made his point. He no longer
wanted her. He hated her.

The urge to strangle him was
strong, the urge to beg even stronger. Her world was fragmenting. Tears wet the
phone, dripping between the raised digits. ‘Please Connal, don’t leave it like
this between us.’

‘It’s for the best,’ he said.
‘I’m leaving here now. It’s not safe. Don’t follow me, Ash.’ The receiver
clicked as he hung up the phone.

In the hallway of Anann
DeMorgan’s house, Connal’s forehead cracked against the plaster. Hand shaking,
he dropped the handset into its cradle. Should never have answered the damn
thing. He’d only relented to shut the incessant thing up, and in the vain hope
it was the nursing home with an update on DeMorgan. Ash’s voice had thrown him
a curve. It cut deep, knowing she was back in Dublin. Temptation and dread took
root in equal measure. Much as he ached to see her again, he couldn’t stand to
see her pity. Just hearing it in her voice made him weak, when what he needed
now was strength.

The phone started to ring
again, a shrill vibration through the silence of the empty house. This time, he
ignored it. He couldn’t protect her. Not this time. Not like this. MacTire
could at least give her that. He pushed away from the wall on a ragged exhale.
This old house was full of painful memories. He had to get away.

The Morrígan’s wards were
down, and in his absence, the
thegn
had been crawling all over the
place. He’d thought it chaotic when the old lady lived there. Now? It looked
like a tornado had ripped through its innards. Only a matter of time before the
wolves came too, looking for Ash. The phone continued to ring, even as he
shrugged into his leather jacket and gathered up the few items he needed for
the ritual. That was good, because for as long as it rang, he knew Ash wasn’t
doing something stupid, like leaving the only place left on earth that offered
her protection: the heart of the wolves’ den. Connal slipped Ash’s silver ring
onto his little finger and fastened her pendant around his neck, his big hands
grappling with the delicate fastening. Designed for a feminine throat, on him,
the chain, with it’s circular triskelion of intertwined ravens, was more of a
choker. If she agreed to bargain with him a second time, the Morrígan would
require a token. He turned his back on the old house with its battlefield of
strewn papers and artifacts, and as he did, it struck him as a fitting shrine
to the brief, violent passion he and Ash had shared there.

T
he wall held up Ash’s spine when her legs wobbled in
the aftermath of the call. He’d actually hung up on her, severed the connection
with an almost physical cut. Ash was still reeling when she saw it, a flicker
of movement on one of the monitors that, up until now, had been still. The
black waters had moved.

She snapped upright, her
heart thumping painfully in her chest as she trained her attention on the bank
of screens. The surface of the conduit was still, the basement empty. Nothing
weird there.

Perfect. Her nerves had her
hallucinating.

And then the pool retched.

Spread across the floor, the
figure was unmoving. She was frowning as she closed in on the monitor, eyeing
the tall breadth of male playing at being a rug. His hair was light, she could
tell that much, but his face was turned away from the camera.
Please be Mac,
please be Mac.
An ally would be much appreciated on this side since Connal
and her grandmother were currently either hating on her or MIA. Ash watched for
signs of life. The ride over was paralysing, but he should have flexed or
twitched by now.

Eventually he did.

Her body seized,
rabbit-in-headlights tight with fear.

Metal-tipped claws dragged
across the basement floor, slipping for purchase in the accompanying Fomor
gloop. The body wormed. Stab after stab of claws to slick concrete had her
worst nightmare scaling the floor towards the showers.
Fite.
Not Mac,
not Mac at all. God, had they found her so soon? She was glued to the screen,
trapped in a breath-catching, adrenaline-surging, heart-in-throat web of panic.
What had happened to their search of Fomor? Had they got to Mac? If they hadn’t
believed him ... Nauseated, her imagination was inventing all sorts of
interrogation scenarios. Years of watching gladiator movies and nights ogling
TV Vikings brought the ideas to vivid, gory light. Would they have turned
against their own leader? Simply to kill her?

They just might.

Fite was pushing to his feet.
He was shaky but upright and that was a bad sign.

Bad became worse. Ash froze,
eyes glued to the screen. If she blinked, she feared the world would
fast-forward and she’d be out of time.

The waters were heaving.
Great, roiling belches of pitch liquid regurgitated warriors at an alarming
rate. Four wolves lay spewed on the floor. Two more rounded a corner,
bare-assed, free of slime and pulling open lockers. Already the prone men were
starting to gather their limbs under them and crawl to the showers. From what
the grainy screen showed her, Fite, freshly showered, now wore a
perfectly-tailored leather suit. Lethal and structured, he was treading the
floor, back and forth; a commander waiting for his troops. Her eyes watered
with the strain of not blinking, and she gave in, a quick flash down of her
lashes before she was zeroed back in on the screen.

Sonofa-!

Fite was bent in
conversation, head close to the man she recognised as the bartender who served
her that first time in Form.
C
owering under
Fite’s
intense stare, he looked
smaller than she remembered, less like a deranged kidnapper. Their lips were
moving, their body-language animated, but she couldn’t hear them.

Where was the damn volume?

Quaking fingers pressed at
buttons, fumbled with dials. Nothing yielded any sound and she was no master
lip-reader. Fite was invested in what the bartender had to say though, in
between barking orders in the direction of the lockers. Heads popped up, shirts
were pulled on faster, clothed bodies forming a semi-circle around the two. He
was relaying whatever information he’d received, face stern when the others
became animated. They reminded her of beagles before a hunt, all excited energy
and perked ears, thrilled by the expectation of a kill. The bartender had given
them something to get them juiced. Fite looked to be issuing commands, the word
‘DeMorgan’ on his lips so much she could read it.