Becoming Red (The Becoming Novels)

by Black, Paula

  ‘What is it then?’

  Connal lifted his eyes to regard her, as though he could weigh just how much of the truth she could swallow. ‘Something much, much older. An indigenous species to Ireland.’ That was not technically a lie.

  ‘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.’ Uncannily though, she wasn’t a million miles off with her hackneyed theory.

  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, 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 palmed the warm metal and brought the neck of the flask to his lips, acutely aware that her mouth had been on it only a moment before. Closing his eyes, he threw back a hard swallow of the fire water, 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, wondered what Little Miss Ivy League Folklore and Mythology would think of him if she knew he’d never left the shores of this pathetically small rock in the Atlantic. ‘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 and Connal swallowed back the husk in his throat. He exploited the fall of her eyes, letting his own roam freely over curves not even the baggy sweats could conceal. Curves his hands had known.

  ‘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, acutely aware his jeans had grown tighter in direct proportion to the length of time he spent eye-fucking her. You’re a dirty bastard, Savage.

  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 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.’

  ‘Not anymore, no. The lake was filled-in in the early eighteen hundreds.’ Connal remembered it well. A failed attempt at damage limitation during MacTire’s notorious reign of terror on the city. ‘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 and seeping things free. 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?’

  He cleared his throat and got back in the game of verbal tennis. ‘They bite. They spread disease.’

  ‘What disease, like rabies?’ Now she swore she could feel her wounds itch with an infestation of something that would turn her into Cujo. ‘Oh God, am I infected? I got a shot ...’ The small dose of whatever seemed ridiculously useless compared to a mutant strain of mythological lycanthropy. She folded her hands in her lap and forced herself not to scratch.

  His steely gaze tracked the press of her hands between her thighs, thoughts suddenly a million miles away from her line of questioning. ‘Yeah, something like rabies. Rave rabies. But you’re good. They got you with a scratch, the bite is the carrier. You’re safe until they get their teeth in you.’

  Her relief softened the lines of her face, absently stroking the stitched ridges of the clawed marks as she thought. ‘Rave? But that’s the drug circulating around the city. Doc Rob and the nurses were talking about it.'

  Connal felt a sudden, irrational wave of aggression towards Doc Rob. Told himself it was contempt for the idiots who bought into the whole ‘Rave is a drug’ bullshit. ‘That’s what they choose to believe. The infection behaves like a drug. I suppose it is a drug, just not one that’s administered in a conventional way.’ Yeah, nothing whatsoever to do with the guy putting his ‘healing,’ trust-me-I’m-a-doctor hands all over her, or the fact they were on first name terms.

  Ash’s head tipped back as she swigged a mouthful
more from the flask, aware that the bottom was probably very close, and shifted her shoulders into a more comfortable spot on the bark. ‘So, let’s say what you’re saying is true, and these prehistoric animals are infesting the streets of Dublin. Why don’t they just call in Rentokil, or whatever, and have them exterminated?'

  ‘These things are smart. They’ve found ways to hide amongst the population, they have people who help them.’

  ‘Help them? Like the WWF or the ASPCA, or whatever it’s called here? They must really love you.’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Connal propped his forearms across his knees and played the twig between his fingers. Ash’s questioning was leading into territory he didn’t think she’d be comfortable with.

  ‘Not exactly like the WWF, or they don’t exactly love you?’ She was fiddling with the lid of the flask, gaze trained on him expectantly.

  ‘Both. Neither ... I don’t know, damnit. My brain hurts.’ His temples throbbed in a grim reminder of just how deprived he was of normal human interaction.

  She waved his pain off. ‘What do you expect? I got attacked by those prehistoric wolf, beasts, whatever. I need answers. Why do you kill them?’

  ‘You could say your grandmother is ... was ... Rentokil in this neck of the woods, and I was contracted to work for her.’

  My grandmother? Ash frowned. 'Why did they attack me?'

  Another loaded question. Connal exhaled, twirled the stick and met her eyes. 'Your red coat didn't help.'

  'They're attracted to red?' That explained all the inappropriate touching ... maybe.

  'They are subterranean creatures, with limitations in colour vision, but they can see red very vividly.'

  'So when you said I looked like bait ...' A blush crept up her cheeks and her hair fell forward with a tilt of her head to conceal the embarrassed infusion.

  'Yeah.' He offered her a sheepish, half smile. ‘I didn’t mean to imply you were ...’

  Her hand went, waving him off as her cheeks blazed. Throat clearing, she launched off again. 'There were two of them. What happened to the other one?'

  He hedged. 'There was only one when I got there.'

  Leaning forward, elbows met her knees and sapphire eyes found metal grey under raised brows. 'Yeah, about that, you were following me.' Again.

  'I was.' His head nodded on his shoulders, a futile longing drawing his eyes to the drained hip flask.

  'Mind telling me why?'

  He levelled her with a penetrating stare. No economy required with the truth on that one. 'Because your grandmother ordered me to watch out for you.'

  Well, damn if that answer didn’t have her brows flying up to totally disappear in her hairline, and then they creased, worry creeping her features in a frown. 'She what? Why?'

  'Because your grandmother has been waging a war against these things for a very, very long time. They won't hesitate to use you to get to her.' He was aware this was steering them back onto shaky ground and he made a move to get up, levering stiff limbs from the forest floor and dusting down his thighs. ‘This thing won’t bury itself.’

  Ash was transfixed as he unravelled himself up from the ground opposite her, and she was focussed on that more than anything he said after. Her grandmother? What was she doing? Issuing garbled commands from a hospital bed? Even when her brain logged onto the fact that she was near eye level with something she’d only ever felt, her frown wouldn’t budge and she sat stupidly looking up at him for a time. 'But ... my grandmother isn’t a threat.'

  'No, she isn’t, is she.’ Connal strode back towards the hearse, bending to fist Blondie’s head up off the forest floor. He tossed the spades out onto the earth and set to work hauling the tarp out of the car.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  No matter how many times Madden took the gross-express to Fomor, he never got used to the horrible, disorientating claustrophobia of it. He was phobic about enclosed spaces. It was akin to dying and being born at the same time, like drowning in tar that engulfed all your senses. Its force, like strangely warped gravity, stretched you infinitely long while simultaneously crushing your bones, churning you into so much pulped primeval slime before finally coughing you out helpless onto the shores of a landscape that was both familiar and unnaturally surreal. Not to mention very bloody dangerous. He might have threads of wolf woven into his DNA, but the natural habitat of all the Thegn was on the surface, walking the earth as men, not down this putrid hellhole.

  Sprawled prostrate on the rough shore, red-tinged waves lapped his body and ran off through his hair, plastering the dark strands to his clean-shaven cheeks. His designer suit was shredded. Ragged remnants clung to shivering gooseflesh. The ambient temperature down in this vast cave consistently ran at least ten degrees below what it was on the surface. Like Hell froze over. He imagined the vulnerability as similar to anaesthesia awareness, having your brain fully online while your flaccid body can do damn all to shield you from whatever sadistic intent the world holds for you. A spineless jellyfish tossed ashore. Never failed to scare the ever living crap out of him. In the fear stakes, being paralysed ranked right up there with the cramped spaces. Limp and useless as a newborn, his eyes stared up, fixed on the roiling, blood red skies stretched out above him. No stars to look up to from this choice gutter, only the black silhouettes of the Raveners soaring above the rugged cliff tops in the distance. Worse than nails on a blackboard, their nightmarish, shrieking cries had a way of clawing their way into your deepest terrors. The Raveners were the Great Levellers of Fomor. From the lowest Varg to MacTire himself, all harboured a healthy fear of the bringers of death. And if those bastard Vargs didn’t come to drag him to the caverns soon, Madden would be nothing but carrion, to be eaten alive by their serrated beaks and barbed claws. Anxiety fixed wild eyes wide on their vast, black wingspans, gauging their distance from the shore. He was loath to move, lest their laser-sharp sight detect his struggle. At least the scent of his fear would not betray him. There wasn’t a breath of wind down here. Never was.

  Tentative fingers twitched in the strange, rough sands that washed up on the red-stained shore. The texture reminded him of the powdered coral lining the beach of a tropical island, except this stuff was black, like volcanic sand. Madden had once made the mistake of examining a handful at close range. What he saw sickened him. The tiny shards were recognisable to his trained physician’s eyes as the crushed fragments of bone. The grisly sand had filtered through his fingers as he’d stood, horrified, gaze scanning the blood red horizon, struggling with his memories of the massacre that had produced such a vast and dominant feature of this macabre landscape.

  They were memories that reeked of blood and terror, his people fleeing before the Savage’s horde of Untame. Somewhere here, in this mass, unmarked grave lay the scattered remains of his mother and his two beloved sisters. It shamed him that the strongest of the race, himself amongst them, had retreated from the chaos to seek refuge in the caves, leaving their dead and injured strewn across this wasteland, at the mercy of the Raveners. Not a soul amongst them had proposed going out there. He could still feel MacTire’s arms, physically holding him back, when he screamed to go to his sister and the baby. Though he’d resented the restraint at the time, and they had never spoken of it again, long years of reflection had brought him to the conclusion that the King had saved his life that day.

  From the time he’d made the grim connection with the sand, whenever the sea spat him onto the shore, Madden had lain purse lipped, for fear of ingesting the salty water whose unusual taste he now recognised as carrying the distinctive tang of blood. But this morbid reminiscing was doing sweet damn all for the panic rapidly threatening to swallow him whole.

  He had just closed his eyes to try to relax, a surreal sunbather without a sun, focused on breathing and attempting to meditate himself into a Zen state when ominous black shadows darkened the red glow behind his lids. He felt the remains of his shirt torn from his chest and he hesitated, frozen in dread anticipation that the Raveners
had found him and his number was finally up. He mustered the courage to look his nemesis in the eye, cracked his lids, only to find himself staring up into the grotesque faces of two of MacTire’s guard dogs. Man, he was never so happy to see those ugly bastards. But gratitude was not an emotion you expressed in Fomor. Ever. Least not if you valued keeping your cock and balls attached to your body in any way nature intended.

  ‘Hey, Hey!! Less of the manhandling, you idiots, I’m not one of your Thralls.’

  Varg one drew back a fist accessorised with a wickedly sharp set of knuckle blades. He punched into Madden’s face, the razor tips coming to an abrupt stop only millimetres from saucer-wide, dilated pupils. The beast snarled, saliva dripping down an unholy set of daggered fangs. Terror wasn’t an emotion you really wanted to express here either.

  As least when they got above ground, the Fomorians had the decency to cloak their hideous appearance in human form. Down here, there was no need for the pretence. MacTire, of course, and his Skuldalid, were the exceptions. Madden suspected it was less about them being more civilised than the common Vargs, and more about MacTire being a vain son of a bitch.

  ‘If you’re done playing chicken with my eyeballs, you gobshite evolutionary reject, use your own and see what I am.’ Madden mustered enough strength to slap a hand to his pecs and rip what was left of the shirt aside, bringing the Vargs’ attention to the symbol of the Thegn-wolf carved in the centre of his chest.’

  ‘That’s right, Tweedle-dumb and dumber, I am your Master’s eyes and ears up there. Don’t see him taking kindly to you mutilating those eyes, do you?’

  Madden’s lips curled into a sadistic grin and the creature growled its fetid breath right into his face. ‘No offence, baby, but I never kiss on a first date, and you could really use a breath-mint.’ Varg two poked at the Celtic symbol in his skin with the point of a blade and grunted in the other’s direction.