The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (82 page)

‘But there is no lake
anymore,’ Ash said, following Madden around the path that encircled the grassy
enclosure of the park. There wasn’t so much as a fountain, never mind a great
black lake of doom.

‘The lake still exists,’
Madden said, ‘but today it lies underground. Three hundred years ago, after the
city was plagued by madness and disease, the superstitious people of Dublin had
it filled in. MacTire had let his men off the leash and Newgate prison was
filled to capacity with deranged prostitutes. They were said to howl like a den
of wolves by night. Browne’s Castle, where they housed the overflow of
thralls,
was said to be haunted by a wild, black beast. The physicians put it down
to rampant syphilis. The religious spoke of depraved acts and demon
possessions. The mad men prophesied the end of the world. Interesting times,’
Madden laughed. ‘You must recall those days as I do, Savage,’ he said, lifting
dark eyes to Connal.

Connal nodded grimly. ‘It was
the last time I stood up to the Morrígan and refused to kill for her,’ he said,
‘and MacTire took full advantage. While I drank my way through every tavern
within the city’s seven gates, he flouted his agreement to keep to neutral
ground and left his wolves to prowl the undefended city. Some fool claimed that
filling in the putrid lake would rid the city of its contagion, but it never
even slowed them down. All it did was incense MacTire. He burned the castle
down in retaliation.' Connal motioned to the elegant facade of Dublin Castle
that shadowed the park. ‘This all had to be rebuilt in the aftermath.’

My God
, Ash thought.
These men are living, walking history
books
. Except she was damn sure the version of history they told wouldn't
be referenced in any library.
They speak of three hundred years ago like it
was yesterday.
She could almost smell the medieval streets. An image of
Connal in breeches and stockings, drunk as a lord, with a powdered wig sitting
askew on his head, simply refused to leave her mind, but then the thought of
his plight sobered her. How hard must it have been for him, an unsung hero and
a traitor to his own race, to be the city’s lone defender.

‘What made you come back?’
she asked him quietly.

‘Edmund Flannery, breeder of
wolfhounds,’ Connal said.

‘Maura’s ancestor?’ Ash
guessed.

‘Yeah,’ Connal agreed, ‘and a
bloody-minded, mulish pain in my ass. He sought me out, dragged me half-conscious
from an inn in Temple Bar, and brought me to the newly opened ‘House of
Industry,’ just up the road from here. Later, it became infamous as the Union
Workhouse. It was established to clear the city of its objectionable destitute
and vagabonds. In reality, it was a place of misery and torture, overrun with
foundling children abandoned on the streets.' Connal hesitated as his jaw set
hard with tension. 'The guards mistook the purpose of our visit. One offered me
the
use
of a five year old child for the price of a copper farthing. He
stripped her naked in front of me and paraded her starved and bruised body like
she was cattle in a market. Then, when I refused, he asked if I’d prefer a
tight virgin boy. I vomited on his feet, before battering him unconscious.
Flannery made me visit that girl’s mother in Newgate. She was
thrall
,
needless to say, and it turned out the girl was just one of nine children she’d
left to fend for themselves. The next day I was back in DeMorgan’s service.’

‘I had no idea,’ Ash said,
resting her forehead on Connal’s broad shoulder.

In Fomor, Mac had painted his
brother as a cold-blooded murderer and a traitor, bent on vengeance against the
people who’d wronged him. In his own way, Connal believed it too, but this was
another side of her beast: a reluctant soldier, forced to do bad things for
good reasons. In that moment, she thought she understood why retrieving the
Skil
meant so much to him. The city was once again undefended, and if Maura was
right, then the wolves were planning a full moon St. Patrick's Day feast that
would plunge the city back into the ravages of the sixteen hundreds. And if
Connal and Ash were both dead, there would be nobody left to stop them.

The Morrígan might have
released him from his vow to kill, but he was still bound by his own
conscience. Neither of them could turn their backs, knowing what was coming.
Connal was right. If this magic knife
really could break the
thralls’
addiction, it could free them all, but that didn’t make it any easier for
her to let him go.

Madden came to a stop and
looked down. Ash laced her fingers with Connal’s and squeezed tight. It looked
so innocuous, a hole in the ground, covered by a heavy iron circle. No one
would have believed it had the ability to steal your man. She loathed it.

Madden levered off the
manhole cover and the three of them peered down into the murky depths.

'I assumed we'd be going back
to the basement, in Form,' Ash said, her nose scrunching at the slight taint of
sewage. 'Still, forced to choose between this, or the stench of all those gym
socks, I think I'd take the rat-infested sewer.' She had to make light of this
god awful situation. Otherwise she'd ugly cry, and that would
not
be
Connal's last memory of her.

Madden shook his head. 'The
conduits only open during full moon, when the tides swell the waters to the
surface. Travelling outside of that window requires something extra: a blood
sacrifice to the black lake.'

'Figures,' Connal said drily,
drawing a penknife from his jacket. 'Who do we need to bleed?'

'We use raven blood,' Madden
said. He’d already begun to crumb the stale bread as bait, and a cluster of
large, black birds had materialised in the park, as though from nowhere.

'We have to kill a bird?' Ash
asked, her lip curled in disgust. 'Why a raven?'

'Because it's the Morrígan's
sacred symbol,' Connal answered, 'one of the creatures whose form she assumes.'

'Next best thing to the blood
of the Goddess herself,' Madden explained. 'It's said she cursed the black lake
with her own blood.'

'She wasn’t the only one,’
Ash said. ‘Isn’t it Elatha's blood in the waters that makes the red fog at full
moon, the fog that lets the wolves overcome her curse and breathe on the
surface?'

The two men stared at her,
impressed.

'What?' she said,
defensively, 'I paid attention during my survival course in Fomor. I wasn't
trying to kill people the whole time.'

They both laughed.

‘You’re right,’ Madden said,
‘the story goes that the Morrígan trapped Elatha’s essence in the black lake.
As a moon god, his influence is more powerful when it’s full, hence the fog
waxes and wanes, like the tides.’

'Just a thought ...' Ash
said, her eyes on the knife in Connal’s hand.

They looked at her
expectantly.

'Raven blood is the next best
thing, you said, but if you need a substitute for the Morrígan's blood to open
the conduit, why don’t we just use mine?’ she shrugged. ‘I’m at least half
DeMorgan. Then the innocent bird gets to terrorise worms for another day.'

Before they had a chance to
object, and before she could even begin second-guessing what she was doing, Ash
snatched the penknife from Connal’s hand and sliced into her palm. The blade
was so sharp she didn’t feel the cut until she moved to make a fist. Then it
stung like hell.

Both men leapt towards her
with a shout but she was already bleeding into the manhole when Connal yanked
her away and bound her palm in a strip from Madden's shirt. She looked up,
startled and afraid, to see his eyes wide with panic.

'Connal! What ... ?'

Madden cut her off, his hands
biting into her arms, shaking her. 'Stupid girl! You're wolf-blood too. Spill
that on sacred ground and ...' He was wild, pale and terrified, and the bottom
dropped out of her stomach.

'You start Armageddon.'
Connal finished his sentence weakly.

Horror dawned and she whipped
around to face the manhole.
She’d only bled a few drops, surely not enough
.
Connal turned with her, brushing the doc's hands off her and they all stared,
waiting.

No horsemen rode up from the
small channel, the ground didn't quake and the clouds didn't breathe fire.

‘What’s supposed to happen?’
she asked.

‘How should I know?’ Madden
replied. ‘It was the Morrígan’s prophecy.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ Connal
muttered.

Ash started to feel the
ridiculousness of their situation: three idiots in a park at night, staring
into a sewer, waiting for the world to end.

But it didn't.

The ravens shrieked and
scattered to the sky and her head jerked up to watch them. When she looked back
down, wisps of red fog crawled out of the hole, fingers of crimson mist
reaching for the sky.

'Is it supposed to do that?'
she whispered. Connal was holding onto her uninjured hand with a death grip,
but she managed to shuffle forwards to watch the manhole.

‘Yes,’ the doc nodded, ‘maybe
we got away with it, because you’re only half-wolf.’

‘Can we get on with opening
the conduit, so?’ Connal asked. ‘Any time before the world ends would be good.’

Madden glared at his smirk
but he started murmuring, foreign words in a lilting, Gaelic accent.

The sound of lapping water
responded to his incanted words.

Ash squinted as the sound
grew louder. The ground beneath them warped and shuddered, battling to contain
something that wanted out. From their circular, man-sized peep-hole, Ash
watched the water bubble up and churn in the channel.

‘Oh, shit!’

She lurched back, pulling
Connal with her, a second before the sewer erupted into a grey-ish geyser and
fell to spread out around their feet. She was stood in an ankle-high puddle of
god-only-knew-what and the water still reached out, as though trying to claim the
park that had locked it away for so long. Madden stared at the surging
phenomenon like he'd never seen it before, motionless and gaping. Ash tugged
his arm to get him out of the worst of the filth but already the water was
soaking into the ground and the choppy waves sounding down the manhole were
calming to wet whispers. She peered in again, wafting her hands through the red
fog. The channel glistened crimson.

‘Does that mean it’s
working?’ Ash asked.
I didn't start the apocalypse?

‘It’s working,’ Madden said,
shock colouring his voice. ‘But it’s never done that before. Your blood must be
particularly potent.’ His dark eyes shone with feverish excitement. ‘The
conduit is opening.’

I should hope so,
was her first thought. Fast on its heels was,
no,
if it opens, he’s gone.
Ash wanted to be selfish, she wanted to beg him to
stay and then chain him up somewhere so he couldn’t run off to be heroic.
Connal’s thumb ran across her fingers and she glanced down to see her hand
white-knuckling around his. He just smiled and kept hold of her when she tried
to let go.

She turned her gaze back to
the risen waters swirling at the brim of the manhole.

‘How do I get back, once I
have the
Skil
, Doc?’ Connal asked. He sounded so sure he was coming
back, and Ash clung to that.

‘You’ll need a blood
sacrifice for the conduit.’

‘I’ve met the birds in Fomor.
Don’t think they’d take kindly to making blood donations,' Connal replied.

Ash snorted a laugh at his
words, trying to imagine a ravener at a blood drive.

Madden threw him a droll
stare. ‘The blood is kept in sacrificial jars in the temple.’

Connal kissed the top of her
head. ‘Can you keep Liath going until I get back?’ he asked Madden.

The doctor’s face was lined
with determination and grief. ‘I fucking hope so.’

Ash’s breath hitched then.
Their time had run down. The conduit was open. She hadn’t time to get her
breathing under control before she was gathered into powerful arms and mashed
into a broad chest that smelled of Connal. Her arms locked around his narrow
waist as she inhaled the warm comfort of him. Connal’s head dropped to her
shoulder, face buried in the freed waves of her hair and his breath skittered
roughly over her skin. She’d hold him forever if she could, but he had to go
and they both knew it.

He pulled back first, his
lips finding hers in the sweetest of kisses and she sank into it with a
desperate groan. His hands cradled her face and he kissed words to her mouth.
‘Wait for me, Little Red. I'm coming home to you.’

Ash refused to cry.

His palms slipped from her
cheeks. She squeezed her eyes shut and was surrounded by a warm weight. It
settled across her shoulders, and when she reached to touch it, her hands
grasped the leather edges of his jacket. It drowned her and she shrugged her
arms through the holes, cuddling it to her.

‘Keep this for me. I’ll be
needing it soon,’ Connal murmured close to her ear before he stepped back.

Ash opened her eyes and her
vision was filled with him. One last look. The world dropped away and only
Connal existed. His dark hair was tousled, sticking up where it was still too
short. His eyes were bright, metallic grey and shimmering with echoes of
moonlight. His face was set with determination, but the curve of his
kiss-swollen lips was soft. He was trying so hard to reassure her. It wasn't
working. She’d torn his shirt beyond repair in the bathroom and he was
bare-chested in the evening air. She shivered. The stylized wolf brand in his
skin may have marked him as one of them, but it would offer him no protection.
The wolves had proved what they thought of that. The scars that ridged his
flesh, marred his nipples and raked over the broad expanse of his muscular
chest were a reminder of what had happened the last time he'd gone down there.
Ash was glad she couldn't see his back. The memories there would have made
allowing him to do this impossible.