The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (41 page)

Her mind screamed for Connal
while her pleasure came undone at the touch of a stranger, an enemy. Disgust at
her own body’s ecstasy broke down the last remaining fragment of her composure,
exposing raw emotion. Tears welled up on every crest of her dwindling climax.
‘Connal,’ she sobbed.

Her body shuddered, breaths
hitching with the hot tears spilling down her cheeks. She felt him withdraw
from her.

‘Not the sobs of a woman
brought to her knees by the soul-shattering ecstasy of my gifted mouth
,
’
he said, in an
accent
that
was strangely archaic.

Ash kept her eyes tightly
shut as strong hands guided her quaking form over onto her back. He shaped her
hips cautiously, as though he didn’t want her to break. She could have told
him, she was already fractured.

‘God, what did you do to me?’
Ash recoiled up the bed, wrapping herself in more sheets.

‘Nothing that you didn’t beg
me to do, Ash-ling.’

Her denial fell flat.

‘He can’t hurt you anymore,’
he murmured. The back of his hand grazed her damp, flushed cheek. She flinched
and the spurned hand curled into a fist at his side.

‘Who can’t hurt me? Who the
fuck are you? Where am I? Where is Connal? How did I get here?’ The questions
spewed from Ash’s lips in a burst of panic. Disorientated, her gaze darted
about the room to settle on the wolf branded into his bare chest, an exact
replica of Connal's.

‘He bit you.’ The blond giant
motioned to her throat.

Shakey fingertips raised to
skim the marks brought to attention by his words. ‘He really did it ...’

‘Your precious Connal bit you
and he left you for dead.’

‘He left me for …’ She
hesitated. ‘No. You’ve got to be suffering from some sort of head trauma to
even think Connal would leave me. Where is he?’

He paced
out the end of
the bed, the thick, blond braid grazing the bare muscles of his ass as he moved
with the prowling grace of a tiger. ‘You were brought here to save your life.’

Huh?
The naked caveman was really freaking her out now.
‘Brought
where?’ Panic-large eyes scanned the room, cataloguing the flicker of fire in
the wall sconces. It was a cave painting come to life. There was nowhere else
she could really be.
Fomor.
‘Who in Hell are you?’ And it
was
Hell, complete with a rock cavern and a crudely carved bed covered in furs.

‘I am MacTire.’ His arrogance
said it should be obvious. Shoulders set at right angles, jaw kicked high, he
was showing off the physical credentials to go with the title that meant
nothing to Ash. ‘King of Fomor. He spoke not of me?’

‘No,
Mac
. Connal spoke
not of you.’ Her tone was mocking, building up a front from the tatters of her
dignity.

He cut her the kind of
boot-trembling glare that would have sent a saner person ducking for cover, but
anger and shame crept in to melt the ice of her terror. Watching him carefully,
Ash braced herself and ventured the question she both craved and dreaded the
answer to. ‘What happened to him? To Connal?’

He delivered the blow devoid
of emotion. ‘The traitor is dead.’

‘LIAR!
’
Denial ripped
through every fibre of her being. Grief tore her vision to red, a roar in her
head and in her throat dictating the vicious strike of her hand to the face of
her captor. His flesh gave way to the rake of her nails. No alley-cat
scratches, his face bore the jagged stripes of a razor-clawed attack.

Her
razor-clawed attack. Black talons, inches long,
protruded from the ends of her fingers.

Holy shit.

MacTire hissed, low and
menacing. He dragged the flat of his hand down his cheek and it came away
bloodied. Brows low, the corner of his jaw clenched tight and eyes, blacker
than night, bore into her.

Caveman had a temper.

His huge, naked body shook as
he backed away. An accusing finger stabbed in her direction, and the cruel
twist of his lips parted as though to speak, but no words came out.

His eyes fell on the claws at
the ends of her trembling hands
and
MacTire’s mouth curved into a smirk.
‘Well well ...’
He swallowed back the gravel in his voice and those dark irises glinted crimson
in the torchlight. ‘The she-wolf likes to play dirty?’ As his tongue stroked down
one long canine and dragged a sheen across his full lower lip, he left her in
no doubt as to the direction of his thoughts.

On cue, her cheeks flushed
with the shameful memory of where that mouth had taken her only moments before.

‘Brave, taking on the Master
at his own game.’ Fingers traced the slashes down his cheekbone. His hand
paused on the door and he cast her a look that was equal parts lust and
admiration. ‘You should know that I am accustomed to unconditional submission
in
every
facet of my rule.’

The hard-on he sported and
the deepening husk in his voice left her in no doubt. He was getting off on her
defiance.
‘Oh yes,’ he purred, ‘you will be worth the wait.’

A cold smile touched his lips
as he threw something in her direction. Small and silver, it arced through the
air and thumped against her chest, falling into her lap. ‘I am no liar
,
’
he said.

She did not raise her eyes,
only blinked stupidly down at her knees where the object shone.

The heavy door shut behind
him and the clunk of a turning key sealed her inside his bedchamber.

S
he didn’t even hear Mac leave. The thing he’d hurled
at her captured her attention like no words could.

The small disk chimed against
the rings that dangled along the length of cord, each quiet, metallic clink a
strike to her heart as she ran it through her fingers. His flesh would have
been ripped to remove the rings she’d once played with. No one would have got
close enough if he’d been alive. Mac hadn’t been lying. Tears built in her throat
as she brushed the coin that had once rested on Connal’s skin.

He was dead. No one could
have taken that from him.

She wavered, imagining she
could still feel his skin beneath the necklace, the warm pulse of his blood as
she fisted his nape. Eyes scrunched shut, she locked herself in her head, let
memories wash over her. Through the salty drip of her tears, she figured she
could still taste him.

Her love was dead and she had
fucking claws that only grew as her breath turned rough with waves of encroaching
anger. Ash was volatile. Bones cracked and she cried out. Joints popped and her
spine arched. She was dying. Something had broken inside her heart and her body
was playing out the agony. When pain ripped through her back, Ash fell forwards
on a raw scream. Suffocating, her forehead hit fur.
Breathe, Ash,
breathe...you’re not really breaking, nothing is breaking...

‘I
can’t
breathe.’
Bringing the sheets around her nakedness, Ash swung her legs over the side of
the bed, Connal’s coin clutched to her heart. She had to get out, but when she
stood, her head swam and shame burned her cheeks as she swiped between her
thighs. As though that could erase the reality of what she’d done. What she had
allowed to be done. However she tried to fix her thoughts into believing it had
been forced pleasure, a mere biological response, Ash couldn’t shake the fact
she’d enjoyed it.

She dug her nails into her
palms, hard, tried using the sensation to curb the disgust crawling bile up her
throat. It didn’t work. Panic was settling in her chest like lead. She was
locked in, and from what the myths said, so far underground that time itself
stopped. A living stasis. A Neanderthal cave for her cell.

‘I need to get out of here …’
Forcing her limbs into action she stumbled around the spartan surroundings. The
air had been sucked from the room by MacTire’s revelation and she hunted it,
out onto a large, rock-face balcony. It spread out beneath her, suspended and
reaching into the vast landscape of Fomor.

Hell, for sure.

As far as she could see, a
red sea spread, waves lapping grotesquely against a shingle beach. Jagged
mountains, black and twisted like termite mounds, rose up in the distance.
Curiosity carried Ash towards the edge, the dizzying height dropping her to her
knees in a crawl. The same termite-mound structures were her neighbours,
reaching for the pitch skies with gnarled peaks. Beautiful as only death and
despair could be, it was a wasteland of limited colour.

She was well and truly lost.

Wind rushed up from beneath
the ledge, howling at her, pummelling her back into the rock wall and tearing
at her breath.

Its cease was as sudden as
its start, a knife popping her bubble and letting the air roar into her lungs.
Utter silence reigned, save for the harsh rasp of her breath and the click of
her nails on the stone. Except she wasn’t moving, her hands were buried in her
hair, holding her head together.

Oh shit ...

There was something here with
her.

The clacking came closer and
she glanced around. Nothing. There was a rustle, a shuffle of … wings?

If it was a ravening beast
come to devour her, it could
damn
well
choke on her.

A beak, curved and wicked,
hooked over the ledge. Wings, giant and black arched out to block the skyline,
showing every feather tip to be taloned. And the face … the face was nothing
she’d ever seen. It was feminine, she thought, something about the angles not
right to be male. A skull under a black, leathery skin, waxy and hairless, with
deep pits for eyes. Eyes that watched her as an eagle watched its prey before
dropping out of the air to devour it. A raptor, the likes of which shouldn’t
exist.

Ash screamed and the thing
returned it,
open
ing
its jaw
on a howling shatter of noise. It
was a thousand sounds echoing through a base screech that chilled her soul.

Burrowing her spine back into
the stone, she had nowhere to go as the one monster was joined by its ugly
brethren. The one closest to her moved and Ash flinched, her arm shooting out
to ward off its advancing as it stepped in that tell-tale click of talons to
rock.

‘No!’

The word was out of her, not
at all authoritative, but the giant bird-thing halted, cocking that weirdly
human head at her. The others mimicked it, silent, watching. She shooed it
again, but this was no pigeon to fly when you got too close. This thing leaned
into
her touch, craned a vulture-like neck so the tip of its beak could rest on the
back of her fluttering hand. When her arms drew back, the creature hopped
forwards on feathered legs, its torso hunched, the same dark skin drawn taut
over a skeletal form. Ash held her breath when the others swarmed in around her
and
braced
herself for an agony that never came.

They were still, inches from
her, waiting for something. Expectant.

Her fingers shook as they
tentatively reached out to brush feathers, careful not to catch on the razor
tips. How did she end up in these situations? She couldn’t help herself,
whether it was burying her hands in Connal’s fur, or his dreads … pain choked
her, was swallowed down … or fisting handfuls of these feathers, Ash knew she
would always be drawn to touch a thing of dangerous beauty. It was a weakness
she hadn’t known she had.

The wing arch ran like silk
through her fingers, those eyes on hers slumberous and calm. A leathery head
drooped onto her shoulder and her throat closed up with a heart-hammering fear.
It was a purely physical response, a reflex, because somewhere in the calm that
settled on this surreal encounter, Ash's mind had disconnected from the fear.

The power of the creatures
was undeniable. And yet, here she was, stroking death, and taking comfort in
it. Tears stung her eyes and her hands buried deeper into the inky plumage.
Brushing up against her own mortality somehow made her feel closer to him. To
Connal. Because he was dead. And she wasn't entirely sure she didn't want to
follow.