The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (73 page)

‘Keep it,’ he said, his large
hand closing around hers. ‘You never know when you might need to find
sanctuary.’

‘What about you, Mac?’ The
wolves had turned on him once, they could do it again. ‘Please, take this,’ she
tugged at the coin around her wrist, trying to pull it free. ‘You told me once
it might offer protection. Perhaps, if you need to leave Fomor ...’

Connal’s head shook in her
peripheral vision, and Mac’s hand stilled hers. ‘The coin was only ever meant
to be worn by one man, but thank you, Ashling.’

‘No,’ she pressed, ‘I’m the
one who should be thanking you.’

His head was shaking. She
pulled at the end of his braid and reined him to a stop. ‘No, listen. You
didn’t have to come. You could have left me to them. You didn’t have to go
against your pack, your family, for someone you’ve known only a few weeks.’ He
was frowning, the pads of his fingers playing over the trail of veins in her
wrist. She let him, her hand fisting his braid. ‘But I’m really grateful that
you did.’

‘I had to.’ The proud wolf
she’d known in Fomor, the leader, the ruler, the pain in the ass, had lost all
his arrogance. Dejection was written in the tense lines of his body, and yet he
vibrated with power and purpose.

His eyes hit anywhere but her
and Ash tugged his hair again to get his attention.

‘Thank you, MacTire.’
Affection was carved out plainly on her face. ‘For everything.’

She was acutely aware of
Connal watching them from the corner of his eye, his body half-turned to afford
them some privacy. Her heart swelled with love for her Big Bad and Mac seemed
to sense it. He stepped back, piercing her with his black-as-sin eyes as he let
his fingers drift from her skin.

‘I will see you again,’ Mac
said. ‘In spite of all
Fite’s barking, you are welcome in Fomor any time.
I’ll just have to leash him more securely.’ There was that smirk, arrogance
bleeding into his features. She laughed.

‘Yes, you will,’ Ash replied,
‘and you have to bring Knutr up to see me, so ...’
So we’ll see each other
again.

The King brushed a kiss to
her knuckles and released her, tilting his head towards Connal. ‘Brother,’ Mac
said. A tic twitched in Connal’s jaw, but he didn’t correct the title. ‘We
still have a truce, yes? You won’t be hunting my men off the streets?’

‘If they behave, I won’t have
to.’ He shoved a hand through the dark, ragged cut of his hair. ‘I don’t want
to.’

Mac nodded. ‘I’ll take that.
Truce?’ The King’s hand stuck out between their bodies and Connal took his
forearm in a firm hold.

‘Truce.’ Connal agreed,
shaking himself free of Mac’s hold. Ash caught a look of uncertainty on his
face that drew her to move up beside him. She ran her fingers under his shirt,
soothing circles to the small of his back, where the muscles were tensed harder
than steel.

As the King backed towards
the conduit, his coal eyes drank her up, taking her deep, unblinking, like he
was going blind and she was the last thing he wanted to remember in perfect
detail. Ash’s hand lifted in a small wave, her throat tight, and his lips
curved. He bowed, and then, MacTire, like his brothers before him, surged into
the conduit and vanished from the earth.

B
acks to the lockers, eyes on the swirling black water
of the conduit, Ash and Connal waited out the last minutes of the full moon.
The basement was eerily quiet without the bustle of wolves filling it. Even the
longing cries of the
thralls
outside the door had died to silence. Ash’s
ass was numb from the cold floor. She was ready to slump in exhaustion when
Connal drew her down, laying himself out as a mattress between her and the hard
tile. Ash covered him and tucked herself in, her hands gliding under his shirt
to stroke his warmth. He exhaled a contented purr, strong arms banding her to
his chest.

She was never letting him go.
Here, like this, close and so together, was how they were supposed to be.
Distance wasn’t an option. He made her heart beat in tandem with the steady thud
of his, he made her blood surge with life, he was the bones of her and if the
moon waned and her grandmother left them to die, at least she wouldn’t be
forced to live without him. Ash sighed and burrowed in.

She felt her muscles go lax.
A deep fatigue crawled over her and laid heavy down her spine. It pinned her
limbs and added weight to every movement until even breathing had a pressure to
it. It had crept up on her. First, she’d merely been tired, but now, she was
hooked up to an energy drain and her strength was leaching away into the
atmosphere.
What the ...?

‘Connal?’ Her fingers
wouldn’t curl; they were flat and spread out on his ribs. She couldn’t grip
him.

‘Hmmm?’ He sounded miles away
and
,
close as she was, she didn’t have the energy to reach
him.

The first tremble was merely
a shiver. She cast it off as the taint of panic working through her system. The
second shook her head to toe. Her skin quivered, her nerves on a Magic Finger
bed, taking her body in a fit of uncontrollable shaking.

‘Oh God, Connal, this doesn’t
feel right. I don’t feel right.’ Maybe the Morrígan’s curse would take them
after all. Maybe she really had lied.

‘It’s just the waning moon,
Ash. Nothing to fear. It will pass.’ Connal’s deep voice was a soothing rumble
beneath her and she forced herself to relax into the quakes, concentrating on
the inhale-exhale of his breathing.

‘Why is this happening to
me?’ she asked.

‘It’s a withdrawal. The
opposite to the quickening you felt when the moon was rising.’

‘Full-moon DT’s?’ Ash laughed
through chattering teeth and the amusement was warped.

‘I’m shaking too. See?’

He was. When she focussed
beyond her own tremoring body, she could feel it. Her frustrated breath skipped
over his collarbone. ‘I have so much to learn. Everything’s happened so fast.’
She was Dorothy in the hurricane, all spun about and landing in a different
world. She still had trouble wrapping her head around the fact that her
nightmares were real and she was a mythical monster, in love with another
mythical monster.

Bristling stubble and warm
lips seared a kiss to her jaw, sealing promises to her skin. ‘I will teach you
everything I know
,
’
he
murmured.

She nodded, turning to
intercept his nuzzling path and capture his mouth with hers. ‘Yes, Connal.’ Ash
sucked at his bottom lip. ‘We have forever, right? We get to grow old as dirt,
together.’ Excitement thrilled through her, so strong she couldn’t feel the
shakes over the buzz. Happily Ever After was a fairytale, but if werewolves and
goddesses were real, why not that too? She was brimming with hope.

‘You are Fomorian now, as I
am. Semi-divine blood can live for millennia, potentially.’

There was something different
in his voice that she couldn’t place. She pushed her palms against his ribs and
lifted herself up, getting them eye to eye. Her strength was slowly seeping
back. Ash smiled and crinkled her nose tenderly to his. ‘I get to spend
eternity with you, Big Bad.’

She was met with silence.

Insecurity prodded at her and
she sat up, resting her ass on his thighs. Connal seemed less than enthused
about a future spent together. Ash’s skin burned with embarrassment. Flustered,
she was back-pedalling to clamber off him. God, had she sounded that pushy? Or
maybe he could see the plans she had, the dreams in her head that had them
shacked up with a litter of wolfhound puppies. Setty would have liked that. She
scrambled to reassure him. ‘If that’s what you want, I mean. I’m really untidy,
and I sing loudly in the shower and I ...’

He had her wrists pinned and
her body trapped between his thighs before she could completely pull away. One
hand cupping the side of her face, Connal’s eyes were dark with passion,
metallic grey and intense. ‘For as long as you are insane enough to want me,
Little Red, I am never letting go.’

Beaming a smile, her fingers
carded into his hair and she hauled him close. ‘That is a happily ever after I
can live with.’ They fit together seamlessly, her mouth melting over his lips,
yielding and demanding. She played her tongue in a dance with his, teased her teeth
on the soft flesh of his lower lip. Ash would never get enough of kissing him.
The taste of him was a masculine rush, consuming her senses. They pulled back,
foreheads touching and their breaths rasped in the space between them.

‘That’s assuming we can avoid
any number of violent ends,’ Connal murmured. ‘No Fomorian in history has
cheated death much beyond a thousand years.’

He was being
Worst-Case-Scenario-Guy and she scowled, laying her fist into his shoulder.

He grinned at her.

Ash rolled her eyes and took
his grin in a rough kiss. ‘Then we shall be the first, she said. ‘There is a
first for everything. Nobody is hunting us now. Mac is on our side. Plus, we
have my grandmother’s protection.’

Connal lost the smile and
stiffened, just the slightest change, but she was wrapped around him like a
second skin, and it translated through.

Ash frowned. ‘You meant what
you said to Mac, right? She’s not still going to insist you hunt them down, is
she?’ She hadn’t considered the price Connal had to pay for their freedom. She
was considering it now, with a huge dose of foreboding on the side.

‘No. My guard-dog services
are no longer required.’ He intertwined their fingers and pulled her up from
the floor as the
thegn
arrived, laden down with fresh piles of clothing.
A
thegn
to a locker, the wolves’ basement was being restocked. ‘We
should go,’ Connal said.

They trekked through the club
and, as dawn broke, they were leaving, along with the small crowd of
thralls
doing the walk of shame. Streaked make-up, torn clothes and well-used bodies,
the group drifted apart, finding their bearings through the disorientation of a
full moon hangover. Connal led her in the direction of her grandmother’s house
and she fell into step beside him. The street-cleaning trucks and delivery vans
were out, but otherwise the town was deserted.

‘Those poor girls. What
happens to them after the full moon?’ Ash asked.

Connal’s thumb smoothed over
her knuckles and her step picked up. Like this, she could pretend they were
just another couple, walking through the peace of the early morning. If it
weren’t for the conversation.

‘They return to a semblance
of life,’ Connal told her, ‘some manage to hold down jobs, or drift through
college, but their motivational drives are all focussed on the next hit of the
full moon. They become emotionally distant from their families and friends.’

She hummed in thought. ‘It’s
no wonder people assume it’s a drug.’

‘The effects of the
eitr
are similar to a drug.’

That she knew all too well.
She remembered the violent, cosmic ecstasy of being bitten by him. It had been
transcendent. ‘There were
thralls
in Fomor too,’ she said. ‘They don’t
ever come back, do they?’ So many ‘Missing’ posters pasted up around Dublin,
Ash doubted those girls were ever found.

‘No.’ His jaw was tight, his
thumb stopped its stroking, and she knew he was bracing himself for an
outburst. But the
thrall
weren’t his fault.

Ash shook her head, her hair
catching in the morning breeze and tickling her face. She pushed it back,
thinking. ‘It’s not right. There must be some way to break the addiction.’

‘None that I know of.’ He
raised her knuckles to his lips and she smiled. ‘I just tried to keep the
numbers in check,’ he said.

Ash frowned. ‘But if you’re
not patrolling the streets any more, then come full moon, there’s nothing to
stop Mac’s men from biting anyone they want. It’s going to be carnage.’ It
would be more than that, it would be Dublin - Population:
Thrall
. Now
she knew she was safe, her mind had opened up to worry for the rest of
humanity.