The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (12 page)

She edged out, chin notched
up high, plastered as close to the paintwork as she could get without touching
him, despite his all gentlemanly actions. Tugging on the hem of her jacket, she
toyed with the zip, missing the security of her velvet. Sadly, her crimson coat
had taken as much a beating as she had. ‘You took something from my
grandmother’s house. Give it back.’

He rocked back on his heels
and regarded her. ‘You know you’ve got nerves of steel to follow a guy like me
up into the woods and accuse me of thieving. Then again, you are DeMorgan’s
granddaughter. Ballbreaker
is
in
your
DNA,’ he smirked. ‘I wasn’t stealing from your grandmother. I work ... worked,
for Anann DeMorgan. And before you go calling the Guards, you might want to
take a look at what it is I’ve got in there.’

Oh God ... this was the part
where she looked in the hearse and ended up being one of many dead bodies
dumped in the back. She eyed the door warily, discreetly trying to peer through
the window against the glare of the sun. She saw nothing but a mass of
something. ‘Tell me, then I’ll look. What’s in there?’

Connal eased his ass back
against the side of the Minor and buried his hands in his pockets, kicking at
the dirt with the toe of his boot. He never took his eyes off her. ‘A wolf.’

Ash scoffed. ‘Wolves have
been extinct in Ireland since the seventeen hundreds.’ She raised a sceptical
brow, her gaze judging the lines of his face like the truth would be written
there somewhere.

‘See for yourself.’ He simply
shrugged and leaned forward to pop the lock on the back doors of the hearse.

‘Shit.’ It was the only thing
that came to mind when the tarpaulin fell away from a furry flank. She’d been
half right. He did have a body in there. But it wasn’t human. Her eyes narrowed
in confusion, brow knitted as she lifted her gaze to his and backed off from
the door. A soft breeze lifted the blooming stench of death from the carcass
and she coughed, hand to her mouth holding down the gag that rose in her
throat. She would not hurl her cookies in front of this guy. She’d smelled
worse in her friend’s dorms. ‘But ...’ Ash tentatively pulled on the fallen
corner, trying to tip more of the sheeting away with minimal touching,
breathing in the fabric of her jacket and the flowery detergent that barely
cloaked the scent of the dead animal. She jerked it too hard, snagged it in her
fingers and sent the body on a small lurch, but it was enough. Enough to show
the dainty blade she didn’t realise she’d lost pierced deep into a thick pelted
shoulder.

It was a faint whimper. ‘Oh
wow, I killed it?’

The great brute laughed and
if she hadn’t been too busy gaping, Ash would have smacked him. But uncovering
the blade exposed something else, revealing just enough to show the torn flesh
and mutilated muscled trunk of a neck and ...
Oh God
... Ash spun and
staggered away from the grisly sight, but not before she heard the head hit the
ground with a grass-muffled, sickly wet thud.

A tree provided solace, it
was stable and sturdy and her spine slid easily down it as her legs went a
little weak and she took to the shade to let her stomach calm and the shivers
stop. She may have killed it, but she sure as hell hadn’t hacked its head off.
‘They can’t be real. Honest to God damn real.’
My mother ... Wild dogs?
Homicidal step-father? No. I was right?

He eyed her with peaked
curiosity. ‘You’ve seen these creatures before? I mean, before last night?’

‘I ... yes ... well no, not
really.’
Shut up, crazy, or he’ll be calling the white coats on you
...
‘Not in person,
you know. I’m writing my thesis on these things, debunking the myths and
existence of mythical creatures.’ Her hand went, waving her half-lie into
something that sounded plausible. ‘Yeti’s, Chupacabras, Werewolves ...’ Her
eyes drifted back to the covered body and squeezed shut. ‘There are an
extraordinary number of reports of large, wolf-like, canine creatures all over
Europe. All unsubstantiated sightings -’ she was talking like a text-book, the
way she’d proposed the idea to her professor ‘- and Dublin accounts for more
than its fair share of those.’

‘And you’re out to prove to
the world that these things don’t exist?’ His brows popped, incredulous as he
motioned to the very real, grisly and blood-matted proof. ‘How do you do that?’
He challenged. ‘Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.’

A scoff in the back of her
throat emphasised her disbelief, clouded the doubt. ‘It’s the twenty-first
century, not the Dark Ages,
D
ude. When I hear hooves, I’m going to think horses,
not unicorns and bloody centaurs.’

‘Jesus,’ he peeled himself
away from the tree trunk supporting his spine. ‘Whoever lobotomised your sense
of wonder did a real number on you, Little Red.’

Now that stung, and Ash had
to shake off the hurt before she could speak, reciting something that allowed
her to make sense of her own nightmares. ‘I believe what I can see with my own
eyes, I believe all mythical creatures have logical explanations, grounded in
the real world. That
thing
is an animal, just a wild animal. What’s so
crazy about that?’

‘You want to know what I
believe?’
h
e countered
.
‘
A
creative mind
is a powerful illusionist. Sometimes you have to open up, look beyond the smoke
and mirrors, to see what’s really there, not what you want to see, not the
comfortable explanation for what you can’t comprehend.’

Her voice tremored, breaking
at the end as her theories spun out to shape the truth in front of her, shaking
her to the foundations. ‘There is a perfectly rational explanation for what
that thing is,’ and she’d find it, she had to, because if not ...
my
nightmare has come to life.

‘These creatures are very
real.’ Connal approached as you might a spooked animal, slow, deliberate,
reaching into his back pocket, holding her frightened gaze. ‘You want a drink?’
He sank down on his ass a safe distance from her and drew out
a
hip
flask, offering it like it was an olive branch. ‘You look like you could use a
stiff one.’

Her fingers shook as she
reached out and carefully took the flask from his hand. A stiff one? Yeah, but
what her head went to could no way in hell fit in a flask. Ash’s gaze fell for
a second as her thoughts directed her eyes. And then her throat was burning and
she coughed up whatever she’d just swallowed.

‘God! What is in here?’ It
tasted how paint stripper smelled. With a bit of smoke thrown into the mix. But
it was warm, and she took another swig before handing the flask back, her eyes
travelling past him to where a corner of the tarpaulin just showed. She
couldn’t see the head. Ash settled back into the bark and exhaled. ‘That’s not
a normal wolf under there.’

‘It’s whiskey, very good
whiskey, and no -’ he turned his head, his expression hidden from her, and
reached out to snap a twig from a nearby tree, taking to scratching random
patterns in the dirt ‘- technically, it’s not a wolf at all.’

‘What is it then?’

Connal lifted his eyes to
regard her. ‘Something much, much older. An indigenous species to Ireland.’

‘You admit it’s not a
werewolf then? There was a full moon when ...’ Trailing off, her fingers sought
out the ridges of stitches lining her flesh beneath the jacket, startled eyes
jumping to his. ‘Holy hell! Am I going to turn into one of those things?!’ She
sought reassurance that she wouldn’t be eating from the mutt’s bowl three
nights of the month.

He let out a short laugh and
his eyes shot to hers, brows betraying his incredulity. ‘Werewolves don’t
exist. You said so yourself.’

Her eyes rolled so hard she
thought she heard her brain protest. ‘That makes me feel so much better.’

‘These creatures may have
propagated the myth.’

Ash slumped back with a sigh
and waved her fingers for the flask, drinking deep now she was prepared for the
choking burn. ‘If it’s not a wolf, why did you call it that?’

He hesitated, as though
gauging his words carefully. ‘They look like wolves, and ‘Fomorian’ doesn’t
exactly trip off the tongue.’ He held out his hand for the flask with a wry
smile.

Her brain tweaked, perking
up. Finally, something she knew. ‘Fomorian? As in semi-divine creatures, first
inhabitants of ancient Ireland, preceding even the Gods?’ It was a fight not to
look at him as though he was the crazy one as she passed the thing over, focus
trained on his mouth and the way his lips looked ridiculously soft compared to
the stubbled skin around.

He brought the neck of the
flask to his lips. Closing his eyes, he threw back a hard swallow, exhaled and
extended the thing back in her direction. ‘You do know your mythology, even if
you don’t believe in it.’

A shrug. ‘Harvard. Folklore
and Mythology.’ As if it was the most normal thing to study in a place known
for much grander degrees.

‘Harvard. Cambridge, Massachusetts?’

‘You do know your Ivy League.
You’ve been there?’

He shook his head. ‘What is
it they say? You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.’

‘I’m not a man.’ Slightly put
out, Ash turned her attention to the dull grey shapelessness of her sweats,
picking at a loose thread on the knee.

‘Yeah. I noticed.’ The words
came out on a growl.

‘Well ...’ Gathering where
they’d left off, before her schooling had come into the mix, Ash tried and
failed to ignore the heat of his gaze as it sculpted her form in steel. She
inhaled and spoke on a sigh. ‘You just can’t be serious. You expect me to
believe these ancient myths are actually roaming the streets of Dublin, and
it’s not all over Prime Time?’ Her head shook, eyes landing on him warily.

‘Believe what you want.’ He
drew his knees up a little higher towards his chest.

Poking seemed to get him
talking, like he answered just so she’d stop asking. She would trade the flask
for answers. ‘Why the full moon? That was a coincidence?’

‘No,’ he took what she
offered and drew deep from the flask, ‘the high tide washes them up to the
surface.’

‘The surface of what?’ Her
head cocked in question, watching him discreetly through her lashes.

‘You know how Dublin got her
name, Harvard girl?’ His smile was questioning, challenging.

Ash bristled and arrowed a
scowl at him. ‘
Dubh Linn
, the black lake,’ even as the words took off,
something drew her back. A puzzle piece trying to fit in with the angle all
wrong. Is that what her grandmother had been trying to tell her? Those two
small words had been some of the woman’s only communication since the stroke.
That and Connal Savage’s name. That Ash was repeating them now? It made his
answers a little more believable. ‘You’re saying these things live in the
water?’

He quirked a brow, impressed
at her knowledge. ‘Not exactly in it. Beneath the water. The black lake is a
conduit.’

When she dragged up the
swamped knowledge she had of the Fomorians, it was of a story within a story,
of creatures cast from the land by the
Tuatha Dé
and exiled, driven out
to dwell beneath the sea and never lay threat to the islanders again.

‘But there is no actual black
lake in Dublin City
,
’
she
said.

‘Not anymore, no. The lake
was filled-in in the early eighteen hundreds. The black waters are all
subterranean now, beneath Dublin Castle.’

She stole the flask back,
warmth spreading down her limbs and tingling under her skin until she buzzed.
Dublin Castle? Hadn’t her would-be rapist said that was near that club, Form?
‘Let’s say for a moment that you’re not completely off your rocker, and there
is some rare species of wild dog with a habitat close to the source of this
underground black lake. You killed this animal. What does that make you?’

‘I suppose that would make me
a hunter.’

She was edging into a freak
out. Everything was digging little holes in her carefully arranged mental
armour. She was confronted by two things from her past she never thought she’d
have to face again. It could be no coincidence that she had found them
together. She couldn’t find the sense in it, this man and his hunting. He wore
a mark that had let these
wolves
into her home once upon a time and she
was having a rough time fitting him in the same mould as her stepfather. Connal
was anything but passive, he killed the things, he didn’t invite them in for
dinner. ‘That wolf on your chest. What does that mean? What are you?’

He stared intently at her.
Blinked slowly. When he opened his eyes, he had shut down. No entry,
cul de
sac
, turn back now if you know what’s good for you. ‘Nothing you want to
know about. Trust me.’

And that was the issue. She
didn’t. Not quite. Ash pressed on, going around the tattoo. She could always
drive back to it later. ‘So, you hunt these creatures. Why?’