The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (2 page)

The residents she passed as
she followed the nurse down the corridor were old husks sat in even older
chairs, folding into the pattern of the fabric until the chairs breathed and
their oxygen tanks rattled. Ash offered smiles to the ones that looked up,
listening to their faint heartbeats in the bleeps from their mechanical
guardians.

‘Anann?’ The nurse had
stopped beside a large chair facing the windows of the sun-dappled
conservatory.

Its occupant muttered in
answer and a gnarled hand fell twitching over the arm of the blue floral chair.

‘She may not be all that
welcoming, dear,’ the nurse explained, ‘and the stroke has affected her speech.
Don’t expect too much. Just press this button if you need us.’ Her lined face
crinkled up in a smile and Ash nodded, taking a deep breath.

‘Grandma?’ The word felt
foreign, but the woman in front of her was familiar. Her memories were
accurate, down to the taloned fingernails and wrinkled features. Hard and sharp
as a hawk, the stroke had only softened one side of the old woman who sat
staring out of the window. ‘Grandma?’

Vexation flickered in that
gaze as it swung to pin Ash with a frown that was all eyes.

‘It’s Ashling.’

There was no recognition that
she could discern, but her grandmother’s focus was on her.

‘I don’t know if you remember
me, I was very young.’

‘Rayvn,’ the old lady
mumbled.

She thought she’d misheard,
but her grandmother’s fingers managed to move enough to snag a loose-hanging
curl that had escaped Ash’s messy bun.

‘Rayvn,’ she said again.

‘I’m not Rayvn, Grandma. I’m
Ashling, her daughter.’ It made Ash happier than it should have, that she
looked like her mother.

As the news seeped in, her
grandmother’s eyes widened, her hand slipped from the black curl to grip Ash’s
forearm with surprising strength. Her mouth struggled to form words, hissing
syllables that warped with her mounting frustration. Squeezing the crinkled
hand in her own, Ash pressed the button to call the nurse.

‘What is she saying?’ she
asked quietly.

The uniformed woman bent to
the old woman’s ear. ‘I believe it to be
Dubh Linn
, Miss. She says it a
lot. The ravens are a trigger.’ She gestured at the birds littering the lawn,
their black feathers glossed with green and blue under the sun.

So, not her mother’s name,
merely the birds, Ash thought, feeling deflated.

‘The feathery buggers are
always about. They agitate her,’ the nurse smiled.

Ash’s mouth curved in
response, hiding her disappointment. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting,
some revelation, some sense, but it was clear she wasn’t going to get it. The
grandmother she’d known had deteriorated into this, and pitying her was helping
no one.

What are you even doing
here, Ash? She doesn’t know who you are.
Her inner dejection cut off at the old woman’s screech, a garbled flurry
of sound rushing from her mouth as the knotted knuckles of her fingers dug into
Ash’s hand. ‘Connal, Connal Savage, Connal,’ she repeated insistently.

What..?
‘Who?’ Ash asked, struggling in the old lady’s iron
grip.

A burst of energy bleeped
through the machines with her elevated heart rate and the nurse quickly hustled
to ease Anann’s clawed grip from Ash’s arm. ‘I think it best you go, dear. It
won’t help for her blood pressure to rise, it could push her into another stroke.
We’ll look after her.’ Ash was dismissed with another glance, her grandmother’s
attention back on the birds outside, stumbling her two-word vocabulary to her
reflection in the window. There was no one home again. And Ash had never felt
more alone.

Ratatatatatatatatat...Ratatatatatatatat...
Bzzzzzzzzz ... Bzzzzzzz …

Ash surfaced from her
nightmare with a jerk, lashing her arm out to ward off the attack of the giant
creature pounding on her door. Okay, maybe not pounding. Her head was thumping
and the knocks at the door came in quick, gentle succession interspersed with
the rumble of the ... doorbell?

Yeah, doorbell.

No freaky thing trying to
gain entrance to the house, just a regular old alert to company.

Ash stretched out, pushing
her feet onto the worn floorboards, wavering a second as her senses aligned
with reality. Wading through the occult paraphernalia littering the halls of
her grandmother’s house, she peered through the covered peephole and unbolted
the front door with a curious smile. She didn’t even get a ‘Can I help you?’
from her lips before the hoop of a leash was pushed into her hand and the
flustered smile of the woman on the doorstep changed to an uptilt of surprise.

‘Oh ...’ Huffing a blonde
strand from her face, the woman paused, gathering some semblance of thought as
she bounced a small boy on her hip. ‘Hi, I’m really sorry to be doing this to
you ...’

‘Ash. Ashling DeMorgan.’

‘Ashling, right. I’m Liath.’
Just a name by way of introduction. ‘I gotta go, and I can’t leave the mutt in
my house alone for one more shift. He’s like a bull in a china shop, and he
eats more than an elephant. I’ll drop over with what’s left of his food when I
get off this night shift, but I really can’t keep him another day. I’m sorry.’

Ash nodded along through the
exhaled rush of words, trying to fathom who the hell the woman was and why she
suddenly found herself owner of a small fluffy horse that slobbered kisses to
her hands, its large paws clawing at her hip as the beast pounced up to reach
her face with the drool-drenched rasp of an excited tongue. Batting at the ...
fuck
is it a dog?
Ash pushed the creature down sternly, flicking laces of saliva
from her skin with an amused shiver.

‘You want me to take your
dog?’ Ash asked. She could feel the pull of confusion furrowing her brow and
tried to wipe the frown away before Liath looked back up.

‘Not my dog, Mrs DeMorgan’s
dog. He’s yours now.’ Her smile was sympathetic as she brushed back a lock of
dark blonde hair. ‘I just can’t cope anymore, not with Josh.’ She jostled the
little boy in her arms and smiled when his face lit up with giggles.

Ahhh
, so this was her grandmother’s dog, the one that
alerted the neighbours to something being amiss. Ash tugged gently on the lead,
encouraging the pony-sized canine to seat himself beside her.

‘At least he’ll be good
protection. With the crime in this city, you’ll want all the protection you can
get. If he was smaller ...’

She’d be keeping him
. Ash read the silence. The woman dipped a little,
shifting her weight, jade green eyes roaming Ash head to toe with a purely
feminine look. Ash stepped into the silence she’d left hanging.

 ‘Well ... umm ... thank you
for the dog.’ Awkward didn’t begin to cover it. Liath was way too interested,
too curious, looking her over. Did she have drool on her top? She brushed at
the length of her braid self-consciously. ‘You said you have to go?’ Ash was
getting uneasy. Too much staring, not enough talking.

‘Oh feck ... yes ...’ Spurred
from whatever had gripped her curiosity, Liath turned on a practiced, bright
smile. Pushing down the upturned hem on her uniform, she cuddled the little boy
close as she about-faced with a soft spoken good luck and goodbye.

A wave and a crunch of stone
underfoot later and she was off into the dark Friday evening, leaving Ash with
the mammoth puppy and finger waving back at the small-handed wave the cherubic
boy offered from his perch at his mother’s hip.

‘Now, what to do with you,
huh, boy?’ She scratched the top of the dog’s silky grey head, unclipping the
leash and ushering the loping animal into the bowels of the house she now
called home. He disappeared and she secured the locks before seeking him out.
If her neighbour, Liath, feared leaving him alone, she could only imagine what
he could break in the craziness of her grandmother’s house.

‘What are you chewing, boy?’
The silver beast raised his massive head and pulled out all the stops on the
puppy dog look. Big brown eyes implored her to let him gnaw on the fluffy
slipper dangling from his mouth, his kill spilling its foamy innards. Her lips
curved, laughter twitching at the corners as she watched him from the door. She
moved slow and dropped down beside him, tunnelling her hands through his fur.
Ash got lost for a while, rhythmically petting the creature. God, she must be
lonely if she was planning on keeping the giant lump.

She was still cooing over the
dog when a flash of scarlet caught her eye through the window. To anyone else
it would have been nothing, but to her, it was the lure fishermen threw out,
and she got nice and hooked.

A girl, around Ash’s age, was
fighting to free the bright red spike of a stiletto from the gridding where it
was trapped.

The shoes were whatever, the
colour was … brilliant. Hypnotising, it danced for her eyes. The dog’s eyes
followed her creep to the curtains where she drew one back, stealing a closer
look. The way the shadows ate up the red only to reveal it seconds later had
her mesmerised.

‘I’m going completely
insane,’ she muttered to the animal at her side.

Doe-eyed and beautiful, the
owner of the shoe cursed loud enough for Ash to hear it through the glass. Her
friends were a bit away, keeping a close eye on the fight with the manhole but
clearly too tipsy to want to linger long.

‘I should be like that,’ Ash
told the dog, ‘out there, dolled-up to the nines with fake nails and barely-there
clothes, freezing my ass off, and tottering drunkenly into every man I meet.’

Yeah ... Party!!

Not ...

Instead, she was enthralled
by the colour on the bottom of the girl’s shoes and planning a night in with an
equine-sized canine and some mind-numbing TV.

She didn’t need people around
her.

She kinda needed those heels.

Ash shook the thoughts off as
the girl wrenched the shoe free and whipped her head up in triumph. Her gaze
locked to Ash’s in a clash of Bambi brown and startled sapphire. Just that
split second of haughty disdain had Ash dropping the curtain faster than a
breath. That girl probably didn’t have a scrap of awkward in her closet. But
she had damn nice heels. So Ash didn’t have a lot of tumbling party nights out
with girlfriends. She could, if she wanted them.

Shrugging off a wistful sigh,
the spell from the red-soled shoes was broken. Ash resisted the urge to watch
the colour
tap tap
down the street, falling instead into the plump
squishy cushions of the couch with a huff and scrolling down until she hit a
Spartacus re-run and drowned in a sea of buff men in loincloths.

An island in a sea of heaving
bodies,
C
onnal sat on the barstool and felt the beat vibrate
through the soles of his boots. He’d been coming back to the club every night
for the past week, but that didn't mean he had to like it. Anann DeMorgan had
charged him with locating the new
latent
, and odds were the one he sought
would eventually show up here, in
Form
. Once they reached sexual
maturity, the pull of their latent genetics inevitably lured the women to where
the highest concentration of potential mates was to be found. Not that they
ever knew what really attracted them to Dublin’s fair city.