The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (77 page)

Maura arched a brow. ‘Would
you tell that to the hordes of innocent young girls and boys who have fallen
victim to their predatory appetites?’

‘The Fomorians have been
victimised too,’ Ash countered.

‘I don’t doubt the Morrígan
had good reason to incarcerate that shower of dogs.’

‘She didn’t just lock them
up. She used Connal to try to exterminate them.’

'Every war must have its
soldiers, even the just ones. Connal is a hero, regardless of what propaganda
MacTire may have brainwashed you with. And there was never a hero lived that
wasn't some other man's enemy. You must choose your side, Ash DeMorgan, and
choose wisely. You can't have them both.’

‘What can’t she have both
of?’

Connal’s frame filled the low
doorway into the cottage. The sun was behind him, and the hound at his heels
was licking his fingers. Ash recognised her red t-shirt knotted around the
pup’s neck like a bandana.

Maura had the decency to look
guilty, but she masked it quickly, patting down the wild curls of her hair and
turning to Connal with a warm smile. ‘She can’t have both my rhubarb crumble
and my coffee cake,’ she hedged.

Connal barely missed a beat
before he responded, but Ash caught the momentary hesitation.

‘Of course she can have
both,’ he smiled and commanded the dog to stay. She obeyed with a whine while
he slid into the chair beside Ash and, beneath the table, ran a hand down her
thigh. ‘In fact, I insist. I like my woman with some meat on her bones.’

Ash desperately wanted to
answer Maura, to tell her that she didn’t want them both, that she just didn’t
want anyone else to have to die. Not MacTire, not Connal, and not her. But the
moment had passed.

‘Here was I,’ Maura said
cheerfully as she cut huge wedges of pie and plated them up with dollops of
whipped cream, ‘thinking the pup had got her teeth into you, and we’d find you
sprawled helpless out there in the mud, but I see you brought the bitch to heel
in the end.’ She gave Ash a pointed look, but Connal didn’t notice.

‘Don’t I always, Maura?’ he
grinned and stabbed his fork into the rhubarb crumble. ‘I’ll make a true wolf
hound of her yet.’

‘I hope you do,’ Maura
replied, ‘in spite of her blindness.’

Ash couldn’t shake the
feeling that the older woman was talking in subtext, intended for her.

Connal swallowed another
mouthful of pie. ‘What have I missed while I’ve been gone?’ he asked, ‘apart
from your heavenly baking, Maura.’

‘You were gone a whole month,
Connal. Word got about that MacTire had put you to death, and with the Morrígan
gone to ground, the
thegn
have gotten brave. The next full moon falls on
March seventeenth. That’s St. Patrick’s Day,’ she offered Ash by way of
explanation. She opened a drawer and pulled out a folded newspaper. Spreading
it across the kitchen table she jabbed a finger at the relevant article. ‘Look
at this. The theme for the Dublin parade is Fomorian legend. They’re staging a
re-enactment of the legendary battle with the Tuatha Dé Danann. Hardly a
coincidence. I believe MacTire is planning this as a show of defiance. There
will be crowds of thousands, tourists and locals, and with so many in costume
and fancy dress, the wolves will be able to hide virtually in plain sight. It
will be carnage.’

It will be a street orgy of
epic proportions, Ash thought as the newsprint blurred before her eyes. ‘When I
was in Fomor,’ she said shakily, ‘Mac boasted he had free run of the city, and
intended to use it.’ She recalled the repressed sexual aggression she’d
witnessed at the Contests. All that animal hunger let loose on the city? They
could never get a leash on it.

‘I’ve been breeding the
hounds in preparation,’ Maura said, ‘but I knew it would be nowhere near
enough.’ She clasped Connal’s hands across the table, ‘but now you’re back,
thank the Gods. They won’t dare leave the neutral ground of Form.’

‘But you struck a truce with
MacTire,’ Ash protested. ‘He won’t do this, not now.’ Not after everything that
had passed between them.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’
Connal said softly.

Madden popped the trunk to
retrieve his medical bag and was greeted by the lingering stench of Doyle’s two
day-old piss. ‘Dirtbag,' he growled. He’d drooled down the back of Madden’s
favourite suit too, the night before last, when he brought Doyle here, having
beaten the guy senseless outside the DeMorgan house.

Cigarette smoke wafted from
behind the sheds where Paddy, the security guard, had slipped out of camera
sight to light-up. Old Paddy didn't know it, but this part of the building was
a CCTV dead-zone, a deliberate move by the
thegn
to mask what they did
here. With all the comings and goings at the hospital, poor Paddy's mind had
been wiped so often he was going soft in the brain.

Sucking in the crisp February
air, Madden’s cracked ribs grated, making him wince. The knuckles on both his
hands were still raw and throbbing, and his right eye swollen almost shut. The
thegn
healed faster than a human, but nothing like as fast as a full-blooded
wolf.

Bigger, better, faster,
stronger.

Yeah, like he needed any more
reminders of his inferior genetics. Still, beating the crap out of Doyle had
been a headrush, and he was only getting started with the bastard. Doyle would
never hurt his family again.

He took the stairwell with
splinted breaths, punched in the entry code and shouldered through the heavy
door into the gloom of the basement.

The bowels of the psychiatric
institution were as antiquated as the procedures once carried out there.
Soundproof and secure, the windowless corridors, padded cells and treatment
rooms had long been abandoned by the human staff, all of whom were too young to
remember the place even existed. The
thegn
had sealed it off in the late
nineteen-thirties and used it ever since to hide away those
thralls
deemed unfit for human society: the ones for whom the
eitr
in
a
wolf's saliva proved potent enough to drop them over the edge of sanity.

Madden felt their haunted
eyes on him as he walked beneath the glare of the fluorescent strips, flashes
of movement catching in his peripheral vision as their gaunt faces appeared in
the viewing panels set into the cell doors. If they cried out, he didn't hear.

One cell stood open. Inside,
a
thegn
had his back turned to Madden while he manipulated an intravenous
drip into an emaciated girl’s arm.

‘Hey Killian. I’ll be in my
usual room, doing research,’ Madden lied, ‘I’d prefer not to be disturbed.’

‘Afternoon, Doc,’ the
white-coat called over his shoulder as he wrestled to control the flailing
girl’s arm. ‘Sure thing. Anyone calls, I never saw you.’

‘Appreciate it,’ Madden
smiled and turned into another corridor.

His presence was nothing out
of the ordinary. He’d been coming here for years, after all, to perform his
experiments, though this would be his first time experimenting on a guest. With
a grim smile, he stopped at one of the hundreds of identical solid metal doors
and unlocked it. Steel cabinets and a white butler's sink lined one wall. The
floor was white tile, sloping into a central drain designed for easy clean-up,
and the centerpiece to the room was Doyle. Strapped into a lobotomy chair,
leather bands restrained his head, chest, wrists and ankles.

Madden bolted the door and
checked the viewing window was obscured.

Doyle grunted incoherently.

'Don't fret,' Madden said
over his shoulder as he turned to fill a basin of ice-cold water at the sink,
'we won’t be disturbed here. Plenty of quality alone time, together.' He turned
and tipped the basin over Doyle’s blond head. ‘Now wake up, Asshole. This won’t
be any fun if you’re comatose.’

Doyle gasped and tried to
recoil, but was held fast by the straps, his eyes widened by the sudden
realisation he was trapped.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Madden
said, rummaging in his medical bag for the vials he’d brought. He went to
unlock the supplies cabinet and got to work. When he finally turned back to
Doyle, he was brandishing a hypodermic syringe filled with a cloudy blue
liquid. ‘You know what this is?’ he asked, flicking the glass to release the
air bubbles.

Doyle eyed the syringe
warily, blinking wet lashes.

‘Cat got your tongue, Doyle?
I’ll tell you then. It’s
eitr.
Pure, unadulterated Fomorian wolf
saliva.’ Madden held it up to the light and it shimmered, opalescent. ‘Some
years ago, MacTire allowed me to harvest it from his men. We were stupid enough
to think we could alleviate the suffering of the poor souls incarcerated here
in this hell-hole. I’d hoped administering small doses might ease the cravings
and prevent the insanity. It was a solid theory, except it didn’t work.’ Madden
frowned. ‘All it did was delay the inevitable.’

‘That’s your weakness,’ Doyle
retorted scornfully. His voice was distorted by the swelling from his injuries.
‘You actually care about the humans. You think a tiger has a fucking conscience
when he takes down a deer?’ he spat. ‘Those pathetic girls are prey, nothing
more. You and that pussy MacTire ought to get that into your thick heads.
You’ll live longer.’

‘The King and I are no longer
on speaking terms,’ Madden said coldly, ‘thanks to you.’

‘Not my fault you fucked-up
with the DeMorgan girl,’ Doyle whined, ‘I didn’t order your punishment, MacTire
did. Thought the King would’ve given his golden-boy a pass. I was only cleaning
up your mess, Doc.’ His attempt at a smile came off as a sneer. ‘I did you a
favour. Have you heard, though? It was all for nothing. Turns out the DeMorgan
bitch is a freak of nature,’ he laughed and shrugged in his restraints. ‘Oh
well, a dead freak of nature by now.’

‘You took my son hostage,’
Madden replied, injecting a note of threat into his otherwise calm demeanour.
‘You threatened his mother.’ Madden put the syringe between his teeth and
yanked a rubber tourniquet around Doyle’s upper arm, knotting it tighter than
necessary. ‘You betrayed our trust. Explain to me exactly how that was doing me
a fucking favour.’

‘Your human whore pulled a
gun on me in Form. Crazy bitch could have kicked off arma-fucking-geddon.’

‘You should show some
respect.’ Madden back-handed his captive and waved the needle in front of his
eyes. ‘Do you have any idea what this volume of
eitr
, injected directly
into the
bloodstream, will do to a
thegn
?’ he asked coolly. ‘One
wolf bite can induce the most powerful orgasm imaginable. This syringe contains
the equivalent of hundreds of simultaneous bites.’

‘You’re bluffing,’ Doyle
replied, but there was fear in his voice, ‘you can’t know what effect that shit
has on a
thegn.
’

‘It’s true, I’ve never
actually used so high a dosage, but I am a man of science. I have a curious
mind.’

‘It’s forbidden,’ Doyle
stammered.

‘True enough.’ Biting a
thegn
was taboo amongst their people, but Madden wasn’t bluffing. He’d been
desperate enough to try anything to activate his faulty genetics, and faced
with a surplus of unused
eitr
, the temptation had been too much to
resist. ‘But do you know
why
it is forbidden?’

Doyle had no answer to that,
but he looked distinctly uneasy, squirming in the chair.

‘Even a single bite is
excruciatingly painful to a
thegn.’

His captive looked doubtful.

‘Oh there is the same mind-blowing
orgasm humans and wolves experience. But that’s just at first. Then comes the
priapism. That’s a massively swollen,
liable-to-make-your-cock-turn-gangrenous-and-fall-off hard-on, in layman’s
terms.’ Madden smirked. ‘Then,’ he continued, watching Doyle’s face turn the
colour of sour milk, ‘once the
eitr
gets into your cells, it’s going to
react with the wolf DNA tethered there, fooling it into thinking you can shift,
when you and I both know you can’t. That’s when the fun really starts. Picture
that creature from the movie Alien, bursting its way through your chest.’