The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (9 page)

Ash flinched. ‘What is it
with you people and my coat?’

This time, he didn’t look her
in the eye. Jaw set hard as marble, he had his focus trained on the posters
lining the wall instead, with their symmetrical rows of black crescent moons.
‘Like I said. Bait, Little Red.’

What was this, the dark ages
of male chauvinism? A woman shows a few inches of flesh and she’s a Jezebel
seducing poor innocent men who can’t keep it in their pants.

Eyes narrowed dangerously,
Ash pocketed the knife lest she actually did pluck out those ridiculously
pretty eyes of his with the point. ‘Little Red? I suppose that would make you
the Big Bad?’

Now his eyes lifted to her,
pinned her with a stare of penetrating intensity. ‘Oh, you have no idea ...’

She was really tempted to get
all up in his face and let her knee tell his balls just how his words riled her
beyond pissed. But that would mean touching him, and Ash bottled that thought
before it sprouted flames. ‘How did you even know about the guys? How long have
you been stalking me?’ She took a step closer. ‘Leave. Me. Alone. Just because
they want me and I don’t want you doesn’t give you the right to monitor my
interactions.’

‘You seemed plenty interested
back at the house. As I recall it, you were the one ripping my clothes off.’

She flushed, ashamed and
taken aback by his crudity.

‘Don’t get your knickers in a
twist, angel. I’m probably the only bloke in this city that doesn’t want to
fuck you.’

His blunt rejection stung and
she was regretting aiming her own barbs at his ego even as she hissed her
anger. ‘Where do you get off talking to me like that, you Neanderthal, sexist
pig? You’re implying I was asking for it?’ He all but calls her a whore and he
has the gall to look hurt? Ash wasn’t usually the type to wish people ill, but
right now, she was envisioning all sorts of bad falling down on his head.

‘You have no idea what you
are encouraging here,' he growled. 'You play with fire, Little Red, don’t come
crying to me when you get yourself burned.’

His words were apt, given
he’d set her alight. Again. Ash hedged, her shoulders hunching. To say it
touched on a sensitive spot was an understatement, but she’d done nothing
wrong, enjoying the attention a little. Not like she was walking around in a
dress as skimpy as her best underwear and throwing herself at guys. Even her
insides were angry, raging a churn in her stomach. He barely knew her, where
did he get off calling her a slut? ‘Fuck you,’ she said.

The curse that left his lips
then was more a growl than a word and she shook her head. She was too angry to
enjoy the fact that she seemed to infuriate him as much as he did her. But
somehow, Ash couldn’t turn her tongue back onto the rails of more scathing
‘fuck you’s,’ not when there was this look on his face ...

Light from a passing vehicle
had coloured Connal’s dark grey eyes with a bright glaze of crimson. Ash
blinked. Definitely a trick of the shadows.

She watched him warily when
he made no move to respond, their argumentative banter going silent. Jeez, he
couldn’t have looked more rigid if someone had just rammed a stick up his ass.
She could have sworn she could see the aggression shimmering in the air around
his body. He looked feral. The shadows cut lines across his face, distorting
angles and shaping him until she was squinting, trying to find something
familiar.

Before she could ask if he
was okay, he bolted. Left her standing. Just walked away.
How dare he
.

‘Arrogant, jerk-ass ... grrr
...’ Ash started over on her insults, feeling the irritation roll off her
tongue. ‘Infuriating, tall, giant lump of ...’ There were no words in her head
violently abusive enough to express her frustration. Who the hell did he think
he was? Self-appointed stalker and saviour? She never thought those words could
be used in the same description of someone. He’d been following her all along.
The eyes that she had felt on her had probably been his.

No wonder they burned her.

A
sh kicked at the cobbles and her boot heel scraped
over the ground with a loud crack, like gunfire, aggressive as what was
building up inside her, but not half good enough to make it dissipate. He’d
wound her up something good, and she was struggling to maintain a level of
composure that wouldn’t reduce her to messy, angry tears in the middle of the
street. Home, she had to get home, and then she could dissolve. All the fear,
all the anger, and helplessness, at Connal and the blond asshole who thought
she was just a hot foreign piece of ass for him to take by force, was just
simmering there under the surface. The latter, she could have handled. A little
more force on the blade threatening to spear his jugular and Ash was pretty
sure the guy would have backed off. The former? She was out of her depth and
floundering for sense in the not so clear cut emotions that he riled up inside
her. The man was a blowtorch hissing relentless heat against her carefully
glaciered feelings and striking the exposed, thawed out emotions with a stick.
Prodding her where she didn’t want to be prodded. Especially not by him.

Who the hell did he think he
was? That seemed to be the universal question today, she’d asked it so many
times and was still no closer to the answer. Her feet were kicking the ground
as she walked. Scuff, step, scuff, step, scuff, step. Angry and stubborn, she was
in her own head as her body wandered on without her until she looked up and
realised she had absolutely no idea where she was.

Ash had somehow turned from
the street, into the middle of nowhere. The buildings looked dark, the streets
swollen with shadows. There was no one. She couldn’t even hear the laughter
anymore. Ash had her internal GPS all out of fritz, and she blamed Connal and
his heated stare for burning her systems down.

She spun to get her bearings,
the night suddenly closing around her as her panic surged up for the second
time in short hours. Pivoting on her heels, she swallowed down the anxiety and
felt around for the anger. That would surely keep the fear at bay until she
sorted herself, but she couldn’t seem to find a measure of calm anywhere. This
night was just too much.

She breathed deep, caught the
faint scent of seawater and salt musk, heard the distant thud of the music from
clubs nearby. Good. She hadn’t turned off too far from the main thoroughfare.
Her head cocked, tipping curls of thick black hair to bar her vision as she
listened. There was something else, and she was hoping, praying that it was her
newfound stalker.
Better the evil you know
. She drew the blade from her
bag, just in case. When nothing leapt from the shadows, Ash shook the noise off
as lingering adrenaline and kicked herself into walking on. She must be close
to home by now.

There it went again!

This time when Ash turned,
there was nothing to block her vision of what was crashing towards her, but her
brain still convinced her it wasn’t what she saw. Her throat opened up in a
scream and she jerked violently to the side, knocked into a spin that reeled
her brain around in her head like she was trapped in a tumble dryer. There was
a tearing of fabric and then three burning gouges screamed through her body in
blinding, white-hot pain. She’d spun into the attack, turning too soon, or not
soon enough, to avoid the damage. Her pretty blade didn’t look silver anymore,
whipped out in furious panic and stained red before her brain even realised
she’d made contact. Ash panted, her legs tottering her into a drunken run, away
from the throb of agony riding around her shoulder, away from whatever the fuck
it was, all golden fur and sabre fangs snapping inches from her face as she’d been
forced off to the side by its razor blow. Some kind of feral wolverine had
crept up on her and tried to take her out.

It was not what she thought
it was, it was not, was not! If she let herself believe that it was, Ash knew
without a doubt she’d be just as crumpled as she’d been when she’d seen the
brand on the chest of her stalker. She daren’t look back, she could hear the
thing coming back for her. Her dazed, pain-gripped brain prayed for her stalker
now.

A rattling hiss of a second
growl startled her as she staggered past a side-street. There was a flash of
movement in her peripheral and next she knew she was tossed onto her ass at the
side of the road, staring at her attacker. The creature yelped, its golden fur
bleeding a spot of red as it tangled with a giant white mass of hairy. Shit!
Another one? She’d heard of packs of wild dogs coming into cities and running
people to ground, but this?

She didn’t know where the
heads were, but she could hear the teeth as they went to town, ripping into fur
and flesh. All she could do was stare. She could run, and get the hell away,
but she was rooted to the spot, fascinated and terrified and bleeding the
colour of her coat until the shredded fabric couldn’t even be seen against the
torn-up skin beneath.

A loud whimper cut through
the air, a chainsaw buzz of growls turned on in the animal storm that was
rolling in blood in front of her.

It was as though she had
slo-mo reactions. She looked to the tussle of animals, fighting over the right
to eat her, and locked eyes with the white beast. It must have been native
Dublin, because nothing she had ever seen had eyes like that. Its blood-red
gaze fixed on her from the ravage of fighting. It didn’t look away, and for
precious seconds, neither could she.

It was that look, and the
kick in the teeth rip of a machine gun snarl that finally set her feet into
motion. With sawing breaths and screaming muscles, she fled, legging it hell
for leather in the opposite direction.

Only a backward glance told
her that those red eyes never ever left her.

O
w ... owowowow.’
Wuss, you’re a goddamn wuss. Put
some alcohol on it and be done with it.
Ash winced. The thought of putting
anything on it made her want to cry, and the tears welled up even as she fought
them back with a vicious head shake and tried to clear her watery vision enough
to look at the damage. The lacerations were deep, long and thin, raking from
her nape to curve slashes down her arm. She shouldn’t have spun, not while his
pitchfork or whatever the fuck it was, had still been in her skin. But it was
twist or lose her goddamn head. And the cuts throbbed like she couldn’t
believe; the pain had taken on a life of its own and was slowly weeding through
her system. Her knees ached. She’d hit the ground hard and as she tried to come
up with something to tell the nurses, traipsing into the Accident and Emergency
room at too-damn-early-in-the-morning, she watched the bruises paint themselves
over her skin. Falling down the stairs wasn’t going to cut it.

‘Can I help you, Miss?’ The
nurse’s blonde brow creased, her expression bright with concern and ready to
pounce Ash into a chair if she swayed one more time.

She steeled her spine, took a
grip of her pain, and forced herself to walk up to the desk. It wasn’t even the
injury making her lightheaded. It was the hospital. Another demon, dragging her
weaknesses kicking and screaming into the light. The shrinks had brought her to
a place just like this after the whole trauma, to ‘recover in peace’ while they
ran checks for signs of abuse and neglect. Even then, young and afraid, and
rattling off fairytale stories of wolves, she hadn’t been stupid, and she
remembered telling them, ‘it wasn’t Mummy, Mummy didn’t hurt me.’
This
,
clean and sterile and buzzing with the heartbeat of death and pain, had slowly
removed the shards of fairytale stabbing through the truth of her childhood
memories.

Shaking off the shiver that
crept up her spine, Ash turned on a smile slightly agonised and a whole lot
nervous. ‘I ... I walked into a dog fight. One of them got me pretty bad, and I
don’t know about rabies shots and whatnot, but I think I’d really, really like
one.’

She wasn’t surprised when the
nurse lost her eyebrows in her hairline and looked her over with the ‘oh God,
another addict’ look. But disapproval cleared into full-blown concern as the
woman noted not all the red on Ash was the coat. ‘A standard question, Miss,
and I mean no offence … Have you taken anything recently?’

Ash answered in the negative.
She didn't do drugs, hated taking anything that could affect her perception.
She figured leaving out the few drinks she’d had at the pub wasn’t going to
change the outcome. No way on earth had she hallucinated the giant hairy beasts
out of alcohol. The pain in her arm and the tears in her flesh were all too
real.

‘Alright then. Perfect. We’ll
get you looked at right away, I’ll take care of you myself.’ Ash followed where
the nurse led. Silently.

True to her word, after she
had assessed and questioned, peering over-curiously at her nails, and seemingly
not finding what she searched for, the nurse didn’t leave her long in the
waiting room. The place was packed for so late, with weaving drunks and
slobbering maniacs yelling at the walls. One guy was handcuffed to the bench of
chairs, nails half black, chipped polish or nail bed bruises rising from the
cuticle. He bled from a gash in his forehead as another railed at him from
across the room, a jagged shard of glass poking from his forearm. A bar fight
no doubt, but the energy in the place was almost a madness. They were mainly
women, with skin bloodied from scratch marks, makeup out of place and clothes
barely there and torn.

‘I hate working the Full Moon
shifts, I’ve been bitten twice already,’ a passing nurse said to her colleague.

‘It’s an insanity,
lunar-tics, all of them.’

‘At least weed mellows them
out, this Rave drug ...’ There was disbelief and a tinge of horror to their
laughing voices.

‘Miss?’ Ash’s head jerked up
so hard she twinged the base of her spine. The gentle nurse who had admitted
her smiled, a new strain around her eyes as the waiting room filled. ‘If you’d
like to come with me, we’ll get you sorted.’

The place was sterile, Hell
for any bacteria and the depths of Hell for Ash. Clean was good, hospital clean
was freaky. Ash perched on the bed in her butt-flashing hospital gown, eyeing
the implements as she waited. She waited some more, until the silence was
interrupted by Burly and Stout in uniforms. They were efficient if a little
hurried, their radios spazzing out of control every couple of seconds. She’d
bunched the pillows up behind her in case any one of them saw fit to stand at
her back. Her panties were not flattering. She answered as honestly as she
could with what she remembered. The cops had just looked at each other until
she felt like she was wasting their time. Even as the words came spilling out,
she was aware she risked losing any witness credibility she’d had. She was
going to blame her loose tongue on the painkillers they hadn’t given her yet.
Even to her it sounded crazy. The cops had left on a promise to call her if
they found anything. Ash highly doubted they would.

The clock ticked around
slowly, every minute feeling like an hour and leaving her alone with her own
head.

What the hell was that, Ash?
I mean, seriously. That was NOT what we thought it was, right?

She was officially insane.
She’d always talked to herself, but this switched her shit up into the turbo
stream of crazy-ass. Her nightmares were walking the real world with her now.
No longer content to prowl the darkness of her sleep, they were infecting her
waking hours with their ice-pick claws.

‘No, it was a pack of dogs, a
rabid pack of dogs.’

‘Excuse me?’

Shit. She wasn’t alone. The
curtains had drawn on her one-man conversation to admit a tall, clean-cut
member of the male doctor variety.
Jeez, where is all this tall coming from?
Ash had to look up ... and up to meet the newcomer’s eyes. If she stayed in
Dublin any longer, she’d be getting a crick in her neck. They made their men
TALL.

‘I was talking to myself.’
Not the best first impression. She seemed to be stuck in a rut of terribly bad
first meets. ‘But not in a lunatic way.’

‘That’s good to know.’ He
laughed and she relaxed a little. Normal. He was perfectly normal. A refreshing
balm after the crazy in the waiting room. ‘I’m Dr. Madden and my nurse tells me
you got into a bit of a scrape.’

His eyes were too gentle, and
she had to look away as she answered. ‘I walked into a dog fight, they were
scrapping and I got caught up in it.’ Ash was sticking to that story if it
killed her. She would not be sleeping in a padded cell talking about her
nightmares come to life.

‘You should be careful. I’ve
heard it takes practice to safely walk these streets.’ He hummed and ahhh’d,
his fingers gently probing the swelling around the lacerations. ‘These are
pretty deep, you’ll need stitches, but they’re clean and there are no signs of
infection, so we’ll dose you up with some antibiotics, give you a rabies shot
and bandage the injured area to give it time to heal.’ He spoke calmly, simply,
no over-technical doctor’s terms that would rocket up her wariness. That was
good.

‘Will do, Doc,’ Ash said.
‘Load me up.’

He nodded, bid her an ‘I’ll
be back once you’ve been stitched up’ and exited her cubicle with a silent
gait.

She let out a hard exhale
wishing they’d given her a little more painkiller to numb her while she waited.
Her head flopped back on the not so soft pillows and she idly braided her hair,
watching the clock hand tick around the face. When a skinny guy in scrubs
passed through the curtains with a trayful of implements, Ash tried to
hypnotise herself into not thinking. About the pain. About her near misses.
About fangs and fur and hands all over her. About Connal. The stitches had
barely begun weaving through her flesh when she realised she was trying to do
the impossible.

The longer the guy worked,
the more Connal filled her head. Arrogant and stalkery and too sexy for his own
good, out there somewhere. Hopefully he thought she was dead. Was he worried?
Her brows pulled down and she ground her teeth. Mr. Scrubs glanced at her,
tugging the wire through her skin a little more gently. As though he was the
cause of her suffering. After everything, he was ice cream and rainbows on her
level of distress.

Connal. She spat the name in
her head, breath hissing between her teeth as Mr. Scrubs pulled too hard and
tied off the end of the thread. Connal was the king of her confusion, the
reigning leader of her irritation and sole holder of her anger. She blamed him
for her being here, for pissing her off and getting her lost.

Her room was empty once more,
the curtain falling back into place and the squeaky wheels of a clattery tray
leaving her alone with her internal grumblings.

When the Doctor returned holding
her file, she couldn’t even muster up a smile. ‘You’re not from around here,
are you?’ he asked.

She shook her head, drawing
the length of her hair over one shoulder, self-conscious under the new scrutiny
of his gaze. He smiled, brightly, and she blinked.

‘We won’t keep you too long,
Miss.’ He was so professional, but there was something in his eyes that
unsettled her. Call it a long night, call her paranoid, but he wasn’t looking
at her with a doctor’s eye anymore.

Ash scowled and he stepped
back in confusion. She’d been making guys do that a bit today.

‘I’d just like to run through
some simple neurological tests, Miss DeMorgan. Routine checks after any trauma.
Could you hold out your hands please, palms down?’

Ash’s fingers trembled as the
doctor examined her nail beds, before lifting his head to look her in the eye.

‘That’s quite a shake you’ve
got. Do you drink a lot of coffee, Miss DeMorgan? Or are you simply terrified
of me? I won’t bite, I assure you.’ His smile was meant to be reassuring, but his
eyes were still unnerving. Ash couldn’t pinpoint it. The doctor’s hand clasped
her right wrist, seeking her pulse, which kicked to a gallop at his touch.

‘I drink a lot of energy
drinks, guzzle them like a monster truck does fuel, otherwise I’m barely functional
in the day.’ She listened to the voice that told her not to divulge that the
vivid dreams keeping her awake at night were the reason she was dead on her
feet without hourly jolts of caffeine.

Yeah. He’d definitely been
looking at her strangely, because now, he was back to cold, clinical
professionalism and whatever she’d seen in his eyes was gone. He scrubbed a
hand over his clean, too chiselled to be natural jaw.

‘Interesting.’ He released
her hand and turned his back to her. ‘I’m going to dim the lights so I can
examine your eyes.’

The cubicle fell into
darkness, save for the intense beam of the ophthalmoscope. He swept the light
back and forth across each of her eyes in turn, before leaning in close. It
burned her retinas and she felt the prick of tears as she fought the urge to
blink while he examined the back of her eye. His mouth was so close to her ear
that she heard his sharp intake of breath.

‘Fascinating.’ He murmured.

She frowned.

‘Do you see well in the dark,
Miss DeMorgan?’

‘I ...’ She figured maybe
she’d taken it for granted, that it had been there all along and it had been so
normal for her she hadn’t given it a second thought. But now that he mentioned
it, she recalled her foster parents finding her reading her book of fairytales in
the dark after a nightmare, flicking on lights she hadn’t been aware were off.
‘I never gave it much thought.’

‘Were you aware of the
retinal anomaly affecting your eyes?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘
Tapetum lucidum
,
sometimes referred to as eyeshine. Your eyes glow in the dark when a light is
shone on them, Miss DeMorgan. Rather like a cat’s eye. It is a trait possessed
by many nocturnal hunting animals that affords them exceptional night vision.
Amongst humans, however, such a finding is vanishingly rare. There have only
ever been a handful of unsubstantiated cases in the medical literature.’