The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (46 page)

A punch of human instinct hit
her with a warning. The fist of pressure halted her so hard she tripped onto
the step below. Mac snatched her to him before she tumbled the rest of the way
down and Ash clung on gratefully.

Haunting, a symphony of cries
worked up the spiralled staircase to knot in her throat until she choked on the
sounds. She glanced at Mac, but his face was cautious.

God, she was screwed. She was
going to get eaten.

'This is your idea of a
history lesson?' she asked nervously. She'd take her sleep-inducing professor
any day over this.

He coaxed her forward and the
darkness enveloped her, stroking around the flickering light of a solitary
sconce. The howling from below was thunderous. How had she not heard it before?
Mac seemed unaffected, and so she pressed on.

When her bare feet touched
the bottom step, silence reigned. Not a sound, not a whimper or growl, the
sounds just cut off. It was so very dark. Not even her glow-in-the-dark eyes
could adjust to the cluster of pitch black. Her skin pricked with sensation,
like fur just under the surface. Power stretched inside her and perked up,
lurking, wary and curious. This room had her attention. Or something inside it
did.

‘What the hell are you
keeping down here, Mac?’ she whispered, backing away from the eerie sound of breathing
that seemed to encircle the room. The air was stale, with a scent reminiscent
of wet dog.

'Strange, I've never seen
them so subdued.'

'Them?' Mac's confusion did
nothing to reassure her. There was a flash of movement and the sound of stones
skittering across rock. ‘Not that I don’t love the dark, Mac, but could you
please hit the lights?’

Light flowed as Mac removed
the torch from its bracket and cast the flames in the direction of the
stirring. Thick bars climbed up from the cavern floor, illuminated in the pool
of the torch’s rays. Inside the bars, spheres glimmered into existence,
hundreds of them, soft red on a black canvas, twin floating beacons. She lifted
a hand and the orbs shifted. She waved and the motion was tracked by laser
sights. They were eyes.
Shit.

The fire spluttered and Mac
stepped away, re-igniting the torch on the flinty ground. It sparked off like a
match to a dynamite fuse, speeding on an invisible track that circled the
centre of the cavern. Ash squinted, adjusting to the brightness. Behind the
metal, massive furred bodies prowled, sinuous and lean, walking the semicircle
of their cage. And every eye-shining gaze was fixed on her.

Ash bit back a scream at her
nightmares come to life. These were the things she saw when sleep took her.
Living, breathing … Death. Heart in her mouth, she backed away, throwing a
terrified glance Mac's way.

‘The untame are what remain of
the original of the species,' he said quietly. 'We keep them contained, here,
in Fomor. They have no conscience, they are pure animal, and work on basic
survival instincts.’

'Can they get out?'

Mac shook his head. 'You're
perfectly safe. Besides, I think they like you.'

Ash was close to losing it
and the bastard was smiling.

'What do you mean?' she
asked.

'Look at them, clamouring for
your attention.'

She dared to look. Pressing
forward, the shaggy monsters slipped thin muzzles between the bars, swiping
purple tongues in her direction. Ribs showed through thick fur, brown and
mottled grey. They were beautiful, in their own terrifying way, wildly
different to Connal, and yet so similar.

'They don't play puppy like
that for just anybody,' Mac said.

She couldn’t speak, just
stood blinking dumbly at him until he stretched from his lean against the wall
and unfolded his arms. He moved off the bottom step and the wolves exploded
against the bars, battering themselves against the cage with snarling, snapping
jaws. Ash nearly choked on her own heartbeat as she jolted away from the bars,
terror a cloying thickness on her tongue. She wanted to claw at her own skin
and hide, would have bolted for the exit if Mac wasn't solidly in the way.

'You see? They are trying to
protect you, from me.' The King stepped back from her and the beasts calmed.

The rigid chill up her spine
did not.

'Fite is wrong,’ Mac said,
‘you are one of us. The untame recognise their own.'

She narrowed her eyes at him,
voice steady despite the tremble in her bones. 'I am not one of them.' She
protested, but something inside her, the thing with claws and fur, begged to
differ. 'What is this, some kind of test?'

'No Ashling. I only sought to
show you ... perhaps this was a mistake.'

She shoved him aside and went
for the steps. 'No shit, Mac. Get me out of here.'

M
ac pushed open the door to his chambers. The heat of
him crowded against her spine as he motioned her in, thawing the icy layer of
fear still clinging to her skin. The passages of the wolves’ termite-mound
dwelling looked so similar, Ash hadn’t realised they’d come full circle. Her
head was in the pit, facing nightmares in the flesh.

He inspected the lock she’d
jimmied earlier and turned his shrewd gaze on her. ‘The lock was for your own
protection, Ashling.’ His voice tugged her into the room.

She twitched up one eyebrow.
‘My protection? I won’t be your prisoner, Mac.’

The bed was a no-go for
seating. She glanced at it and dismissed it. She’d been in that bed with him
before, and that had ended … interestingly. Ash lowered herself gingerly to a
fur rug and crossed her legs, bringing the folds of the robe over her knees.
She prayed she wasn’t sitting on someone’s brother. Even after seeing the
hell-wolves up close, it troubled her, more than she let on, that this place
was filled with pelts. She understood the need for warmth, for clothing from
whoever’s fur it was, but the underlying tone of violence unnerved her.

Black eyes narrowed on her
and an inhuman growl rumbled up a human throat. A protest to the distance
between them. But he said nothing as he sat on the edge of the bed.

‘I am not one of those
creatures, Mac.’

‘No. You are so much more.
Humanity has empowered our species to be greater than the sum of the two. We
have the strength of the beast and the intelligence to tame it.’

‘And yet you’re almost
extinct. You said your ancestors spliced themselves with humans? Why not solve
your ‘shortage’ by doing it again, with those monsters?’

‘If only it were that easy,’
Mac exhaled. ‘We can’t do it alone. You might say we had divine intervention
the first time.’

‘The hand of God?’ Her brows
rose in incredulous arches.

‘Not God, though some call
her a goddess. We brokered a deal with the Morrígan.’ Elbows propped on his knees,
half of MacTire’s face was concealed by his hair. His voice dropped an octave,
angry. ‘We are no longer on bargaining terms with your grandmother.’

‘My grandmother …’
The
Morrígan
… DeMorgan. Lightbulbs flashed.
Ancient, Other.
Connal had
told her these things. They’d been strange at the time, and now …

‘My grandmother is the
Morrígan?’ She’d only ever read of the shapeshifting Goddess of Battle. The
Morrígan supposedly fought alongside the Tuatha Dé Danann to trap the
Fomorians, that much she knew. She prophesied the end of the world. Ash really
couldn’t see her frail grandmother being up to that task.

‘Well,’ she laughed
nervously, ‘it’s not everyday you learn you’re related to a deity.’

‘Your
grandmother
poisoned my brother against his own people. She trained Connal to contain us
and hunt us to the verge of extinction. It was never supposed to be this way.’
He came off the bed like a big cat, fluid and powerful, muscle bunching under
tawny skin, and then he dropped, gracefully folding his massive frame onto his
knees in front of her. Mac reached for her hands and she flinched, but he
merely brushed his fingers over her own. ‘You must see, Ashling, I had no
choice. Connal knew it too. He brought you here, to save us all.’

‘I don’t want to be your saviour.
I just want to go home, back to my nice, boring life.’ Confusion battered
around her skull so much she could have been an arcade game. Nobody was who she
thought they were.
Fuck, I’m not who I thought I was
. She was changed.
Her thoughts were a mire and she was sinking in the truth of it all. Because
if, damn it all, if she was one of them, then she was trapped here, a prisoner
of her new biology. His prisoner.

‘There’s nothing for you
above-ground, Ashling. Your home is here now. You are safe, with your own
kind.’ His voice was deceptively soft. He sounded like he cared and touched her
like she could break, or he was stopping himself from breaking her. There was
an intensity in the energy around him, reinforcing his point.

He was not going to let her leave.

‘You can’t keep me prisoner.
This is barbaric. I’m not one of you. I’ll be fine, back in my world. With the
humans.’ Denial, rough and polluting, tried to swallow the truth. ‘There is a
way back. I saw those men, wolves, when the doctor took me to the club. They
were there.’

‘The black waters can only be
traversed during full moon. You have been victim to the Morrígan’s curse once,
would you wish that upon yourself again?’

Her emotions shifted and the
primal energy within her responded, its claws pressing cuts into her fisted
palms. ‘What am I?’

‘You are incredible.’ Strong
fingers wound in her hair, bunching it at her nape. He leaned in close, drawing
an inhale along her skin and she shuddered, protesting the rein he had on her
hair. ‘I can help you, teach you,’ he said.

‘Don’t touch me.’ Her words
were ice to the heat of lust in his voice.

His nod was short. Coal eyes
bright with the sting of yet another rejection, he rose from her.

Sensing his tension, Ash
hoped to deflect his attention away from her. ‘Connal said there were others
like me, other girls. He called them latents.’

‘Not like you, Ashling. You
are unique.’ Mac paced a small way from her. It made her nervous when he
prowled. ‘It’s true we hoped to find a solution to our problem, but those women
were weak-blooded mongrels. None could withstand the potency of the bite, or
carry a child to term. If the
eitr
didn’t drive them insane, it
transformed them into that female you saw back there.’

Yeah, she’
d
seen
them at the club too, a bunch of mindless, sex-driven addicts. ‘Why were they
weak-blooded?’

‘Because they are the
defective issue of
thegn
matings with humans.’

‘
Thegn
? Like the
doctor?’ That bastard stole her blood and lured her back to Form on the
pretense of helping her. She had a couple of words for him next time they met.
‘But Connal said they were celibates.’

‘Sworn not to taint the
Fomorian bloodlines, yes. But, fallible and subject to temptation on rare
occasions, like the best of us.’

She scowled, knowing damn
well he was referring to Connal, and what he’d allegedly done to that girl.

‘Is that what I am? The
love-child of some monk’s broken vow?’ Even as a child, Ash rarely questioned
her paternity. It hurt her mother to speak of it. Little wonder, if she was the
result of a one-night-stand, or worse, with some horny priest who couldn’t keep
it in his pants. She’d assumed if her mother hadn’t wanted to tell her, she was
better off in the dark. ‘Do you know who my father was?’

‘I cannot say with certainty,
but my every instinct tells me he was one of us, a pure-blood wolf.’

‘Are you telling me one of
your men raped my mother?’

‘We are not the monsters you
think us. We are a proud and ancient race fighting for survival, and desperate
times call for extreme measures. Fomorians inhabited Ireland before any others;
We have as much right to our homeland as they do. Is it wrong to desire
freedom?’

‘Will you grant me mine?’ she
challenged.