Becoming Red (The Becoming Novels)

by Black, Paula

  ‘Bravo, my son! By Balor’s cock, I swear we will beat the human weakness out of you yet.’

  ‘That’s good, that’s good, right? Not dead, not trapped in a cellar with a dead thing, nope.’ Ash exhaled a long shaky sound. ‘Just a man,’ guy-beast ... The bars shifted in her hands, popping under her weight until she stepped back and the door came with her, a whisper of hinged movement over ragged, pained breathing. There was nothing between them now but air, no protection she could hide behind, just the wide expanse of the cell and a large bleeding male.

  God, he was cut up. A date with Freddie Kruger and a body massage by Edward Scissorhands would have resulted in less damage, and as she teetered over the invisible line the door had left, Ash’s heart clenched a painful spasm. Her insides were being pulled taut, straining against the hold her fear had on her, yet drawn forward by a longing to ease him of suffering she had caused. And she had caused it. He’d stayed behind for her. To get her out of a ... was she actually going to admit it was a trap she’d willingly walked into? Yes, he’d got her out of a trap. Just go slow and don’t freak him out. If he furry hulked out, she’d be a goner.

  She took the step, shaky and weak as it was.

  ‘Connal?’ Slow and steady Ash, hushed tones. ‘Big Bad?’ That stupid name he had for her used to bristle her hackles up and now, she just wanted to hear his retort, hear ‘Little Red’ on his lips.

  Are you completely insane, Ash? The man is one of them and you’re stepping into his cage like he hasn’t just been a snarling lump of fur and claws. And fangs, don’t forget the mouthful of fangs. Oh shut up, Fear.

  Another step turned into four determined power strides, crossing to his side like she wasn’t a terrified rabbit and sinking to her knees on a relatively blood-free spot of concrete. Ash stuck her hand out, hovering it over his head, ready to descend into the figurative pit of Wolf Spiders. God, what if he was just playing with her? What if he got hairy again and tore her arm off for being near him?

  Suck it up DeMorgan. He’s half dead and not moving anytime soon. Her fingertips brushed through the wooly-soft coils of his dreads and she sobbed out a trembling exhale. Touches tentative, Ash brushed her fingers along his stubbled jaw, palm cupping the rough-sculpted bruise of his cheek, trying to avoid anything that looked ... Hell, all of him looked like it hurt. Her stomach roiled as she passed her hand in a hover over his shoulder, not quite daring to touch the mangle of clawed flesh that stripped over his side. Bubbling breaths expanded the cage of his ribs, short and stuttering and Ash’s eyes went wide.

  She was losing him.

  Her cell was tugged from its makeshift pocket in the cup of her bra, fumbling fingers touching 911 on the screen, and listening for the dial tone. She waited for it to start, to connect her to someone, anyone who could help. The paramedics, the fire service, fuck, she’d take a vet at the moment, they’d probably be more help. The line went silent and the two tiny bars of signal she had had up top had disappeared to tell her that it was searching ... she waited and it kept searching, finding nothing and connecting her to nobody. No signal in this bomb-shelter of a vault and no way to turn him in for Area 51 experimentation, even if she wanted to.

  She just wanted someone to help her help him. Useless phone stashed away, Ash leant back over him, stroking the least torn parts of his body with careful attention, as though her touch could make the reedy thread of his pulse stronger, or stop the gurgling in his lungs that grew wetter with every breath. Connal was burning up under her fingers, and it was no heat of passion that flushed his skin the way it did. Feverish. Clammy, and sticky with blood and sweat, she could feel him leaving her. A sob rolled up her throat, her eyes stinging and overflowing as her vision blurred with tears. She fisted his dreads gently.

  ‘No! Goddamnit, no! I forbid it, you cannot die, Big Bad. You cannot! Connal! Fight, it’s time to fight, now. Please ...’

  'Time to fight, dog.'

  He rose to his feet, the spill of unravelling chain links the only outward expression of the rage that bubbled up from the tarry well of despair that was the remnant of a child's soul. He ground his teeth. The 'fight' only served his captors, they fed off it, used it, as sure as they cannibalised the flesh of the dead. It was all he had left in this destitute existence and he guarded it as a treasured, secret possession.

  His body had developed despite the starvation. He had no appetite for dog flesh. Hunger fueled the ferocity of the fight and that was desirable. Maturity kicked in regardless to fill out muscles already honed in the pit. His neck thickened, tightening the iron collar the smith had forged to fit his skinny throat the day he was taken.

  The routine was familiar as the cycle of the sun's rise and set. The two guards hooked their long metal staffs into the links of his iron collar and dragged him from the cage, the length of the poles ensuring a safe distance against any physical attack as they led him to the arena. It reminded him of those forked branches used to pin the striking head of a venomous serpent. There was a time he might have gifted them a snarl, just to see the flare of terror in their eyes and feel the iron chafe his throat as they strained their grip to put distance between them and their prize dog fighter. Today such petty victories over his captors held no lustre for him. Let them jeer from the safety of the stands. The arena unleashed something feral he hadn't known existed inside of him, and that had been the point, hadn't it? The reason he was put there. Not that he'd understood it then.

  The sun's rays cut a glare across sensitive retinas as they hauled him into the arena. The air filling his lungs was rank with the sweat of the animals whose blood stained the sands crimson. No glorious amphitheatre this. Just a pit, a filthy, flea-infested dog pit. Kill or be killed. Yet with his appearance, the rough-hewn benches encircling the sands rumbled, thunderous with the stamp of frenzied feet, the wild expressions of both male and female equal in their savagery, baying for blood, eclipsing the snarls of the leash-strained Untame, scarlet shawls waved aloft. Yet amidst the heaving crowd, his eyes were drawn to the still, female form. Robed and hooded, she was watching him intently from behind a swathe of hair the colour of a ripe cornfield.

  Ash knelt there until her knees went numb and she couldn’t feel her thighs, her ass tingling and her fingertips bloody from soothing him. He’d calmed some, his breathing stronger, his heartbeat thudding more regularly. But he was still on fire and he hadn’t gained the consciousness she hoped for, his eyelids flickering violently, caught in some internal nightmare he couldn’t wake from.

  ‘Shhh, Connal ... shhhh ...’ She hummed when he groaned, panting through whatever pain gripped him, crooning nonsense until he calmed again and the tension in his powerful muscles slumped to relaxed. He hadn’t stopped bleeding and her previously clean spot on the floor was now sticky with congealed blood. Lowering her mouth to his ear, Ash rested her forehead against his dreads a moment as she whispered, ‘I’ll be two minutes, tops, Connal, ok? I just need a moment to ...’ She needed a moment to get out of all the blood. It was clinging to her skin, squelching through the fabric of her stockings to slick her skin and she thanked God she hadn’t worn white. She couldn’t have handled that. She saw her mother in the darkness of every blink, spilling her life in crimson waves until it spread out so far Ash couldn’t escape its stain. And now she was sat in it.

  Peeling off the floor with one last look at her unconscious stalker, she left him, muscles cramping as blood rushed into dead legs and she stood, unsteady and exiting the cage with as much grace as a tranquilised rhino.

  Now that she was standing, she needed to find a bathroom, and with a quick look at her cell telling her signal had still not been sought, perhaps some other sort of communicating device, a landline or laptop or something. She couldn’t be completely cut off.

  Bathroom needs came first, locating the unusually neat section behind a double thick drape of hanging black, and stepping onto the black marble square that differentiated it from the rest of the cellar domicile. It was ... surprisingly
nice, for a single guy. Tidy and matching, with luxurious red and black towels folded into a small cubby and an old, but clean, copper tub taking up the centre space. A shower was bracketed away in one corner, red tiles delineating a rectangle section for the modern cubicle. It was the fanciest thing she’d seen in the whole place. Discounting the vault door, that was. She refused to admire that though.

  Needs satisfied, stockings binned, dabbing blood from her skin in a quick sponge bath and leaving hot water running into the kitchen’s portable basin, Ash ventured back out while it filled, hunting a landline that proved to be as non-existent as the Abominable Snowman.

  Frustration rode her hard as she stomped her fear back into the bathroom, gathering the plastic, steaming basin and a few of the black towels into her arms. No vet was coming to help, no doctors. Ash would do what she could, and forced herself to take her makeshift care kit back to the man, the creature who now needed her to save him.

  Nudging her foot to the bars, the door swung wide, opening up the cage to her as she struggled in with the weight of the basin. ‘Connal?’ He moaned. Still alive. Her heart beat easier as she set down the water, flattened a towel over the patch of drying blood she’d been knelt in and sat at his side. Another towel was lowered carefully over his bottom half, eyes averted, cheeks fever-hot. ‘He’s dying and still manages to be smoking ...’ Ash may have hated him just a little in that moment and she dunked a towel into the hot water at her side before brushing the sodden cloth over the bloodied flesh of his face, working from the top to clean. She didn’t know enough about infection and such serious injuries to know whether the fever was a result of something setting in or his body attempting to heal itself, but she couldn’t sit by and let him be dirty in his own blood. And maybe the clean warmth of the soft fabric would help ease him some more. She just ... she didn’t know what else to do and she was flailing for an anchor, a sense of purpose. She could feel herself drowning.

  ‘It’s going to be ok, it is, you know. You kill, well I guess you kill things that are like you, don’t you? Point is, you kill things. You can’t die. Please don’t die on me. Not like this ...’ Her words rambled as her hands moved the fabric over the breadth of his shoulders, into the curve of his throat, patting at lacerations that looked too deep and too ragged to ever heal. She thought she was being gentle, stroking jagged flaps of skin until they were smooth to the rest of his body. God, it was like trying to organise a bag of grated cheese until every individual piece was flat.

  Time was measured in basins of water, it took six before his skin was clear of old blood and was only slightly leaking rivulets of fresh, bright red. The towels had been rinsed more times than she could keep up with and she passed the freshest one over the worst of the wounds once more as it bled. Her heart was leaden, her stomach turbulent, gorge rising every time she saw the skin peel up when she cleaned too hard and he’d whimper in agony.

  How much help she was really doing was anyone’s guess, but she figured she couldn’t really hurt him any more

  She was wrong.

  Two seconds later and it was chaos in a cage as his body exploded into a bone-snapping, teeth-snarling, enormous mass of lethal fur. One wrong touch, ripped skin caught in wet towelling, and she’d unleashed the beast inside of him into a fury of agonised howling, forcing her to fight frantically with the bars of the cage as the latch shut and locked, as sure as the vault door. Unbreakable. Fuck. It had triggered it. Giant beast meant lockdown. She had to get out, she had to get out, she had to get ... out! Clawing at unrelenting metal, her nails tore and bled as she went into a screaming meltdown, a frenzy of hysteria smashing down on her until she was submerged in the past and seeing herself snapped into unidentifiable pieces of Ash by the beast’s giant jaws. It didn’t matter that it was Connal, didn’t matter that she’d been so close to it before, what mattered was that it was conscious and in pain and snarling at her like she’d shot it somewhere precious.

  It crumpled as fast as it had swiped at her, eyes brutal scarlet, bright with fever as its massive head turned towards her. Sad eyes, scared eyes. It growled and she cowered back against the bars, one huge paw spreading its finger like digits in a swipe in her direction, but the motion fell short as a cry slipped from her tongue on a sob.

  ‘Please no! Connal, no! It’s Ash, I’m Ash ...’

  If it could have slumped anymore, it would have, the burst of pain-charged energy dissipating and leaving it boneless and whimpering on its side again. It huffed a grunt, shaking its bestial, canine head, jaw dropped to the concrete on a long sigh and she pulled away from the bars a little. Unwrapping the vice hold she had on the metal, Ash got the distinct impression it was trying to keep as still as possible. She inhaled on the beast's exhale, calming herself on the pattern of its life, channelling the quiet into something that would slow her tears and stop her heart from galloping right out of her chest. It wasn’t easy. Every fibre of her being was screaming at her to get out, fight had taken a nosedive off the edge of a cliff and flight was driving the truck that had hit it.

  What she’d had before with him felt raw and on the surface. The beast’s watching eyes got heavy, flickering as it fought against the pull of unconsciousness once more. The pain of movement had taken its toll, wrenching open wounds, spotting fresh blood to its matted coat as its chest heaved. It was under, the physical strain of staying awake softening into relaxed, hopefully pain-free, oblivion. Ash lost all control of her legs, knees buckled, thighs quaked, she took to the floor in a limp heap of relief. She was still alive, Connal was still alive. The beast inside of him was real, she hadn’t been imagining it the first time, he was one of them.

  Her nightmare.

  Her saviour.

  How could he be both?

  It was insanity.

  She should want the thing dead. Yet there went the ache in her heart that felt pity, and sorrow and an emotion she was struggling to name. She still wanted to soothe him. To touch the man within through the pelt of the beast.

  Slowly, Ash reached for the towel she’d dropped in her freak out, grasping a clean corner as she shuffled forwards on her knees, creeping to the beast’s head and dropping hers down to look at the one eye she could see. It didn’t even flutter.

  Safe, she was safe, it wouldn’t hurt her, not really, it was Connal. She was just touching Connal. Seriously, Ash, you’re very convincing. The beast rolled a little and she started, ready to jump back, relaxing only when its head butted at her hand, urging her to keep sweeping the towel down the back of its neck. It was still out cold, but zoning into her touch.

  Gathering what little bravery she’d stored up over the years, her hand replaced the towel, tentatively, feeling as though it was a forbidden thing to sink her fingers into the thick pelt behind the drooped ears that twitched as she murmured his name. Ohhhh, it was so luxuriously soft, white and slightly curled, pure of the stain of blood. The beast whimpered a rough cough, back paws kicking slightly, flank twitching as she massaged its ears and cautious fingers smoothed along the top of its muzzle. It really was magnificent up close, mad scary but beautiful in its ferocity. She cooed low in her throat, its restless shifting making her nervous, flexing its paws to reveal dagger claws before it relaxed and they retracted. Her heart stopped every time. Her breath froze and for a moment in time she’d be a statue of fearful female.

  But she never removed her hands. She petted and stroked and twirled her fingers through the white pelt like she would if it had been Connal’s hair.

  ‘Exquisite.’ Ash breathed the word as she impulsively tunnelled her hands through the unmatted fur, gentling over the patches of blood until it calmed again, going still, breathing easier. A dream, a nightmare. Irresistibly soft, and ferally honed. At odds with everything she knew of these creatures, this one needed her and she had to answer the voice inside her that told her this was where she was meant to be.

  ‘Exquisite.’ She purred.

  The guards restrained him as the two robed women inspected
his body, yanking down the chain of his collar, forcing his jaw high, as though punishing him for the female's appreciative gaze. The veins in his neck stood out against the strain of the asphyxiating hold, his wrists tightly bound, feet shackled, averted eyes gifting him only a glimpse of flaxen hair with the texture of spun silk.

  He had grown accustomed to being displayed for the pleasure of visiting chieftains and nobility, a prize animal to be prodded and goaded. Normally, a healthy dose of fear kept their admiration at a distance, but not this time. Connal stiffened as a soft palm stroked the bristled line of his jaw.

  ‘So, my dearest sister, this is the notorious male whose name is wetting the lips of every bitch in the longphort? The wolf raised by men.’

  ‘In the flesh.’ Her companion formed the word slowly, as though it were a slice of erotic poetry, something to be savoured on her tongue. ‘Isn’t he divine, Cáit?’

  The flame haired woman withdrew her hand and raked his body with heavy-lidded, lascivious green eyes. ‘Indeed, Aoife, a God in chains, truly, a magnificent specimen. So impressive in the arena.’

  Aoife lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper that was edged with giddy amusement. ‘Even more impressive at close quarters, wouldn’t you say? So dark and wild. So different from MacTire.’

  MacTire. It was a name he had heard fall from the mouths of the guards. He would not soon forget the name of the golden-haired bastard who had him tortured with the branding iron. His eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly and he tensed as fingers stroked his abdomen, mapping indentations of muscle that ripped the strength under his skin to perfect, honed lethality.