The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (52 page)

‘The girl,’ he growled at
Madden’s vacant expression, ‘Ashling. Did she make it?’

The doctor hunkered down,
getting eye level with Connal’s view. His unshaven face was pale in the
half-light, more gaunt than Connal remembered. ‘I don't know
,’ he said,
‘
MacTire took her.’

'What do you mean you don't
know? You're the King's fucking physician.' Connal’s glare was murderous. He
arched back against the binds, teeth bared, cheek ground into the dirt as he
fought to get free. Bottling his frustration, he exhaled, a pain
,
more
than physical, bracketing hard lines around his mouth. Letting his head fall
back against the rock, he tested his binds again for good measure. Not budging.
‘You couldn’t just kill me?’ He rasped drily. Funny, he hadn’t credited his
half-brother with the patience for cold-blooded revenge. But whatever they did
to him now was irrelevant, as long as Ash was alive.

The doctor’s eyes narrowed.
‘You think I haven’t had my hands around your thick fucking throat a hundred
times? You’ve been out for days,’ his voiced trailed to a whisper. ‘That’s a
lot of time to fantasise about killing a man.’

Alarm spiked through Connal’s
initial suspicions. Something about this situation was way off. His question
was directed at MacTire’s men in general, not the doc in specific. Why send a
thegn
to finish him off? Matter of fact, what was the doctor doing in this cell
with him, and wearing nothing but a ragged, unbelted robe?

‘This isn’t MacTire's prison,
is it?’

Madden shook his head slowly
and sat back a safe distance. ‘She was breathing when they took her, that’s all
I know,’ he said.

Connal snarled, bared the
whites of his eyes and kicked back against the rock.

Madden backed up, like he was
putting what little space he could between his life and the rabid anger
directed against it.

‘You brought me here?’ Connal
spat the words like teeth. Slowly, little shards of memory and simple deductions
were falling into place. The Doctor was acting alone. But ... ‘Why?’

‘Before you die, I want the
truth, about my sister.’

‘Your sister?’ The adrenaline
kick was wearing off rapidly, and Connal’s lids hovered at half-mast, the shake
in his limbs now so amplified that it threatened to keel him over.

‘It can wait,’ Madden
grunted. ‘You need to eat, you’re dehydrated, you’re suffering from
hypothermia, you’ve lost a massive amount of blood. I don’t even know how you
survived what they did to you.’

The doctor shuffled forward
to thrust what Connal now saw was a stick towards his chapped lips. On the end
of the branch something pink, bulbous and slimy was skewered alive. Its
undulations told Connal it was the same creature that had kissed his mouth to
consciousness. Eyes peeled wide, his hollow gut retched, lips clamping into a
thin line as his trussed body lurched a retreat across the rocky ground. He
didn’t get far before his skull cracked back against jagged stone.

‘What the fuck is that?’ he
muttered, eyeing the giant maggot-thing and its serrated, sucker mouth with
revulsion.

‘We call them fleshworms.
They burrow underground, live on … well, the name is self-explanatory. They
taste like shit, but they’re surprisingly nutritious.’

Connal shuddered. ‘Think I
preferred MacTire’s torture.’

Memories flashed across his
cortex, of being strung up between the rocks, of the blade butchering through
his rib-cage, of rough hands ripping the organs from his chest, of the last
breath he kissed to her cold mouth before Ash was dragged from his arms, the
black veins of death still vining her skin, limp in the arms of that varg.

If she hadn’t made it, there
would be no reason to go on.

The echoes of agony brought
tears to his eyes. Living through it hadn’t been on the cards for Connal. He’d
burned all his bridges. But what if she’d made it? Hope didn’t dare poke its
head above the trench, for fear of being shot down.

‘These fleshworms are the
only thing that’s kept you alive,’ Madden lifted the forked stick to regard its
impaled victim with clinical curiosity, ‘you could show some gratitude.’

‘My compliments to the Chef,’
Connal replied
drily
.

Jesus, if he took a bite out
of that thing, Connal was going to puke, and if he was telling the truth, that
he’d been feeding him those things while he was out cold, then those were some
vile cookies he had no desire to see. The guy was certifiable. But Looney Toon
or not, he was clearly trying to help. He tentatively rolled his shoulders. The
skin pulled tight across his back, and everything ached like a mother, but his
organs definitely weren’t inside out and, the best he could tell, there were no
open wounds.

‘Maybe they weren’t the only
thing keeping me alive? You patched me up?’

‘Just call me Dr.
Frankenstein.’

‘Why would you help me?’

‘I told you why,’ he bit out.

‘Your sister, right,’ Connal
nodded. ‘How did I get here?’

‘I cut you down and dragged
you. I did what I could, with what I had: a makeshift bone needle, silk thread
from this ... thing,’ he tugged at the ragged lapels of a once scarlet robe,
now grey with dust, ‘a botched job, even for field work, I’m not proud of it.
There will be scars, ugly ones. They broke you bad, Savage, and I’m not all the
King’s horses nor all the King’s men. If
they
find us, eating fleshworms
will be the least of our problems.’

‘You betrayed MacTire?’
Connal’s lids flared with a mixture of disbelief and reluctant respect. ‘You’ve
seen first hand what he does to turncoats.’

‘It wasn’t on your account,
Savage. Trust me.’ Madden glared back at him, blood suffusing his hollow,
scruffed cheeks.

‘Connal. I’ve gone by the
name Connal these past centuries.’

‘Your name could be Lassie
for all I care. I really don’t give a fuck.’

‘I prefer Cujo myself.’
Connal’s dry laugh turned serious. ‘Thanks, all the same,’ he said quietly,
‘for what it’s worth.’

Madden grunted.‘Yeah, well,
you know what they say. No good deed goes unpunished.’

‘Speaking of good deeds, I
suppose untying me is out of the question?’
Connal asked.
With
sensation returning to bound limbs, cramps were setting into every unnatural
angle of
his
contorted body.

‘Sorry,’ Madden shook his
head, lips tight, avoiding eye contact, ‘I can’t do that.’

‘Figures.’ Connal gave a
short nod, under no illusion that this was all some Good Samaritan act, but
whatever the Doctor’s motives for keeping him alive, he couldn’t bring himself
to resent them. With the tables turned, he’d have done the same. The doc would
take what he needed and then put Connal out of his misery, or die trying.

A
thegn
without the
power to turn wolf was no match for a full-blooded varg, even an injured one,
and a scrimpy knot of silk could never restrain the beast. That he was still
bound meant the wolf had stayed at bay, though, and Connal had a disturbing
theory as to why that was. Not that he was in a sharing mood. Let the doctor
sweat that one out for himself. ‘If you won’t untie me, I need a distraction
from the pain, Doc. You said you wanted answers? So ask. Who’s your sister?’

Madden had no appetite for
sadism. Tying the male while he still had the upper hand was simple
self-preservation.

Coward,
a voice chirped up, and he stabbed the stick further
into the squirming maggot. It burrowed into the hard rock for an escape, and
got nowhere.
I know how you feel, buddy.

Immortality, lived out in
this claustrophobic crawl space, had seemed a grim enough prospect. Being
locked in with a vicious animal added a whole new dimension of fear.

The King’s men had done a
real number on Connal Savage, sliced him like sushi and carved his lungs into
something that wouldn’t look out of place adorning a plate of Chinese food.
Still, he didn’t trust the tie of his robe to keep that male restrained. Even
in his debilitated state, the Savage was a specimen of power, and if he turned
varg? … Well, there would be no such thing as a safe distance.

What the hell had he been
thinking, hiding himself in a cave with a self-confessed genocidal maniac? No
food, no water, no fucking way out. With the Raveners screeching overhead and
MacTire’s men guarding the only way back to the surface, it was a prison of his
own idiotic making. In the cold light of starvation, imprisonment, and the
imminent threat to his life, discovering the truth seemed a paltry reason to
die. But he had to know.

His jaw tipped up. ‘My sister
was Aoife, consort of MacTire and Queen of the Fomorians.’ He fisted the robe,
anchoring the tremor that had drifted into his voice. ‘She was amongst the
first slain on the night of the Blód-Samhain. She and her son, and every other
man, woman and child too weak to flee the horde of untame
you
set upon
them.’ Madden’s brow was etched with the pain of ancient memories. His chest
shuddered. Tousled hair fell into his eyes as he kicked the flailing fleshworm
into the dust and it squirmed away. ‘She died by your hand, you son of a
bitch.’

‘I did not kill your sister,
Healer.’ Connal’s otherworldly eyes shone crimson across the gloom of the cave.

Madden’s hands tightened into
fists, bloodless skin wrapped tight to the knuckles. ‘Perhaps not with your own
hands, but you unleashed those creatures on helpless innocents, on a night when
every fighting male was away from the longphort. They never stood a fucking
chance.’

Connal drew a long breath.
‘I’ve had an eternity to regret what I did that night.’

Madden’s body was shaking,
eyes glassy in the half-light. His breathing had taken on a strange, hitching
rhythm that rose in jagged exhales to a crescendo roar that reverberated off
the walls of the cave and scattered the raveners to the skies.

In that moment, something
snapped inside him, more wolf than
thegn
, all humanity stripped away, he
bared his teeth and the whites of his eyes gleamed with a manic fury as he
launched himself at Connal. Fists cocked back, he rained down his grief in a
volley of uppercuts and body blows that the Savage was utterly powerless to
defend against. Hog-tied and pinned against the rock, Madden used him as a
living, breathing punch-bag to absorb his rage.

Connal’s already broken body
only resisted for a brief time, but still the meaty pound of knuckles to flesh,
and the fresh crack of recently knitted rib fractures gave Madden a horrible
satisfaction, venting the pressure that had mounted inexorably since his
obscene humiliation at the hands of MacTire’s men. For centuries he’d lived
with the black shadow of vengeance on his shoulders. Centuries prostrating
himself at the feet of that son of a bitch MacTire, hoping to throw off the
infernal vows that bound him, allowing himself to be abased at the hands of
creatures who growled and drooled and howled at the fucking moon, and yet had
the gall to call
him
genetically inferior. Everything came pouring out
in a violent tirade, beyond the point where Connal could even feel the blows
and beyond the limits of Madden’s own ability to feel.

Numb … he was numb.