by Paula Black
‘You’re absolutely right, Ash. I don’t feel anything.’ His jaw tightened as he looked away and pushed past her to cover the distance to the end of the path. After a time spent tramping in stoney silence, the dirt track opened out into a familiar clearing. Littered with small headstones, the sun was filtering through the trees and refracting through the raindrops. He heard Ash’s sharp intake of breath and the stall of her feet. With its dappled light and birdsong, this was a magical, peaceful place. Which was why Connal had chosen it, that first time he’d come with his grief raw and aching, to claw the soil with his bare hands. With so much wrong in his world, this place had always felt right. The stones were laid out in a rough pattern of semi-circles, ever decreasing, one inside the other, like the embrace of protective arms. He chose a grassy spot at the end of one curve to set down the wolfhound’s broken body. Sat back on the heels of his boots, he rested his hands on the knees of his worn denims, dreads hung around his face, shielding his expression as he spoke quietly.
‘I raised this one from a pup. Just like I raised every one of them, and buried them, every one.’
Connal might have turned to stone, so still was his body in that moment. He could have been any one of the small cut headstones, his impression of a monolith was so damn impressive, but Ash couldn’t draw her focus from the half moon curve of the stones to decode his features. A vast clearing, it was incredible, a bewitching, half done fairy ring. Avalon in the Dublin mountains. The stuff of myths, she could have been a thousand years in the past, transported to magic and beauty in a pattern of celtic carved granite. Compelled, Ash wandered amongst them, deciphering the names from the faces of rock, the hound-designed etchings softly weathered but beautifully preserved. Someone took a lot of time caring for each ... gravestone?
‘Is this ...’ She hunted for the right words in the knot of emotion riding up. ‘Is this a pet cemetery?’
Nodding curtly, Connal dusted down his jeans and hefted the spade into his hands, testing the earth. ‘Not pets, exactly. Guardians.’
‘So many ...’ Ash brushed her fingers over the top of one of the stones, eyes lowered. ‘Why?’ How could someone keep replacing something that they knew would be taken from them?
Connal shifted the dirt as he spoke, the exertion of digging punctuating his words with hard exhales. ‘The ancient people of Eblana kept hounds to guard against the curse of the black lake. It has always been so.’
Her brow knitted, halted from her wandering through the half circles to watch him work. She’d offer to help but that tended to end rather abruptly. ‘The wolves killed them all?’
He paused, the thick sole of his boot levering the bladed edge of the spade into the earth’s resistance. ‘Some. Others died of old age.’
‘But, you said you raised them all, that’s not possible.’ Counting headstones and averaging dog life, her Math teacher would have been proud, if her estimation wasn’t wildly off course.
If she was correct, however...
Forearm braced on the wooden handle, Connal lifted steel-grey eyes to meet her face with more directness than they had managed all morning. ‘I’m old, Ash, old as dirt.’
Of course he was. Because no giant wolf could really be a thirty-something-year-old man. He was some sort of dinosaur and she should have known. Mentally face-palming herself, Ash gripped the curves of the nearest headstone gently, eyes anywhere but on him as she absorbed. Her mind spat out little snippets, conversations that were unclear through the fog of ... The fog. The red fog. She let her eyes meet his briefly as one hand waved in his direction, pointing her words at him. ‘Hey, but the full moon has waned, and you’re still here.’
‘I made a bargain, with your grandmother, a very, very long time ago.’ Subconsciously, his free hand drifted to the eroded silver coin at his neck, playing the metal disc in his fingers, running it along the leather thong that circled his throat. Just another collar.
‘My grandmother? You’re saying she’s old as dirt too?’
‘Older.’
‘Oh my God.’ I am the granddaughter of dirt. ‘Please tell me ... she’s one of you too, isn’t she?’
He shook his head, a trace of amusement at the corners of his mouth. ‘Gods no.’
‘No?’ That was a relief, her grandmother didn’t eat little girls. ‘Then what the hell is she? Fairy, leprechaun, damn will o’ the wisp?’
He popped a brow and scrubbed the palm of his hand over his nape. ‘Your grandmother is ... other, one of the ancients. Nobody really knows what she is, except that she is incredibly powerful, and not here when you need her.’
‘Well, damn ... So you think she’s, what, had a stroke on purpose?’ It seemed ridiculous but she wasn’t discounting anything nowadays. Ash played a tuft of grass under the toe of her boot. ‘Am I the only one who can die around here?’
Without answering her questions, Connal gripped the handle once more and set about digging the dog’s grave with renewed vigor. His tone was wry when he spoke. ‘Welcome to immortality, Little Red.’ He gestured around the clearing. ‘Where everything and everyone that matters dies, and you get to stay behind and bury what’s left.’ Flexing into every stroke, Connal channeled the force of his frustration into shifting the wet earth.
His movement spurred her from her stall, feet taking the ground slowly, carefully avoiding crossing the marked graves as she tried to gather some thoughts to answer his challenge. But he was right, for the most part. Who in her life hadn’t left her? Maybe it wasn’t death that took them, but choice. Ash couldn’t decide which was worse. Here, now, probably death. She couldn’t fathom the pain it caused to bury the ones you cared for, to leave them with such tenderly carved memorials. He was lying to them both.
‘It isn’t just immortality that does that.’ An exhale took her next words and brought them back as she breathed the fresh scent of turned earth and wet grass. She was correcting her own judgement, as she stood in the cemetery of his past. ‘You feel, Big Bad. This is proof, you can’t hide behind a snarl now. If you didn’t feel, you never would have taken such care to bury your ‘Guardians’. Would you carve these,’ Ash swept her arm out to encompass the number of intricately crafted headstones, ‘for just anyone?’
Crouching down, the pads of her fingertips picked some moss from the indented curve of a stylised hound. They were all hounds. Leashed with exquisite knotwork. ‘They’re stunning.’
Connal screwed his lids down tight on the memories her words stirred. A despairing boy, alone in the world, alone in a cage, pining for his dog, etching his grief and loneliness into the soft limestone of his prison walls. Some things were eternal. He was still that boy, though his prison was wider, still carving death into stone like a convict marking his days. Not for just anyone. For every one that made him relive the one loss he could never come to terms with. Why had he brought her here, to this very private place he had never revealed to another soul? She had looked so vulnerable, so broken by the dog’s death. A subconscious part of him had wanted her to see, wanted to share a part of himself with this woman who stirred up emotions he hadn’t dared feel for centuries, but now that she was here, he found himself retreating into the armoured shell of defensive silence.
The quiet stretched as he turned in on himself and Ash shifted uncomfortably. She was somewhere special, somewhere sacred, she could feel it, the reverence and sadness that came from outside of her bubble of grief. Stood amongst the stones of loving memorial, she was drawn to move through the graves, a strong compulsion tugging at her to see every one of their beautiful devotions. They were enchanting, but one was beyond that. The centre stone that caught her attention with its pristine surface and neat cut surroundings. No weeds marred the bed of short, tended grass as she stepped towards it, dew-glittering green blades inviting her closer and Ash stole a glance at Connal to see him locked down again, immobile and silent, propped on the spade like it could hold him up. Hunkering low, her hand hesitated a breath away from the beautiful carved wolf. HIS w
olf, the one on his chest, graced the face of this headstone, perfect. There were no jagged edges on this as there had been with others, every line was smooth, shaping the beast out into a striking remembrance. ‘Connal? Whose is this?’
‘You don’t touch that!!’
Connal’s shout startled her, ripping a hole in the serenity of the graveyard. The spade hit the dirt with a hollow thump and she jumped at the sound, her heart pounding from normal to freaking out at the snarling fury raising his voice to a roar. Ash skittered away from the headstone, the hand she’d dared reach with clasped to her chest lest she lose it, stumbling back like it had suddenly burst into flames. But he was the inferno, stalking towards her with eyes so dark the shadows were sunlight compared to them.
He was going to kill her.
She backed away from his glowering advance towards the gravestone and could only stand back and watch as he crumpled to his knees in the dirt. With trembling hands, he caressed the stone, as though it were a precious artifact defiled by her touch. Leaning in to rest his forehead against the granite, his dreads fell down to shield the movement of his lips as he crooned the scarcely audible words. ‘It’s ok. Sleep, a leanbh. Nobody can hurt you now.’
She’d expected an outburst, the rage of his emotion biting at her skin as he took her out, but the storm never hit her, and the tense brace of her body slumped as his did. He fell and she started, as though she could take his weight, before she realised it had been on purpose. The charge of male coming at her had been derailed to a kneeling prayer on a patch of grass and Ash teetered, uncertain if she should stay or run for the hills. It was one thing that made her stay.
A great mountain of a man looked broken, so small in front of the short headstone, unhinged and rocking with the buffeting force of emotion she’d seen unleashed at even the threat of a touch to that stone.
She couldn’t leave him, not when he looked so close to the insanity she’d felt take her own mind. One step, and then another, fuelled to motion by the need within her to comfort, to touch, his pain making her heart hurt. ‘Connal?’ A warning, approaching a beast as distressed as he was with no announcement would get your hand bit off. Fingertips brushed through the thick coiled dreads of his hair, gently stroking the fur soft ropes, a rhythmic comfort that eased him into her touch.
Voice rough, Ash swallowed twice, trying to clear it as her palm closed over his shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry, Connal ... I ... I didn’t know.’ How was she to know? It was clearly not just a dog in there. God, who then? A wife, the one true love of his life, his soulmate? Do you really want to know? Folding herself down to her knees, Ash let a tentative question pass her lips and braced herself for the explosion. ‘Who is it?’
‘My son, my baby son,’ he rasped.
Oh God, way worse than a wife ... She choked a little, struggling to build up the blocks of ice she thought she’d had left. ‘What was his name?’
‘Quillan, his name was-’ the words came out anguished, throat closed up around the knot of pain that choked him. ‘-Quillan. It means cub.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Shifting on her knees, Ash curled a little closer, offering her touch as comfort, hand tightening, leaning into him. So he didn’t feel so alone. ‘It’s a beautiful name.’
‘I held him in my arms. Only the once.’
Ash’s heart broke clean in two at that. A parent’s loss, she couldn’t imagine the anguish. A daughter’s loss however ... Softly voiced where her lips pressed to his shoulder, she uttered something, a distraction for him perhaps, an admission for her. ‘My mother.’
Out of the blue and his body stilled.
She continued. ‘They aren’t just the subject of my thesis. They’re the subject of my nightmares.’ She swallowed the tears that bobbed in her throat. ‘The wolves took her from me.’
Beating his forehead against the smooth stone, his face contorted with torment as he choked out a confession. ‘Oh God, Ash, I have done terrible things, unspeakable things ...’
He was falling apart, leaking at the seams of his locked down control. The black pit of regret and sorrow had welled up inside him and burst its banks. Swallowed by quicksand, a hundred thousand hands of the dead were dragging him under, baying for retribution. Only one thing was stopping him from drowning. He felt her arms wrap around him, holding him together, a lifeline, a link with sanity.
Vining around him, Ash closed him into her embrace, held him against her body, and cooed reassurance to his ear as they rocked. ‘Hush now, my beastie, it’s in the past. He sleeps, he’s at peace. They’re at peace.’ At a loss, she could only murmur as he broke in her arms. Sympathy was wet on her cheeks, his agony her own, tearing open wounds she’d thought long closed. Her face buried to his nape as she wept. Terrible things, he said. The bastard wolves deserved it. Unspeakable things. They were evil, their deaths were justice, why couldn’t he see that? He hurt for his son, for what he had to do and she clung to him, hoping to be even a measure of light in the darkness that tore him apart.
He rocked in her arms, let her hold him together. She was his touchstone for life in this sea of death and she was the reason behind the torrent of emotional flotsam and painful memories that were spewing uncontrollably out of him. She was comfort and innocence.
Would she still be holding him if she knew the truth of the hell he had unleashed?
He was too far gone to cut the rope.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
When the tension in the car had threatened to shred her nerves, Ash filled the silence with a burden lifted, a story. It was one of blood and pain, of a happy early childhood before that day came and tore it apart. It was the story of her mother, a distraction from his old grief with her old grief, a soft, sad attempt to let him in when she felt so swamped with emotion it was hard to breathe. Connal had listened in silence, eyes on the road, only the tightened grip on the wheel betraying anger as she spoke.
The true story fell free, for the first time since the psychiatrists had persuaded her it was all just a defence, her child’s mind turning her trauma to fairytale terror. The vivid nightmarish detail she saw in her sleep poured out, filling the car with her horror. For so long the psychiatric label had stuck and yet, with every day she stayed in Dublin, it was slowly being ripped away. Nightmares to memories.
Her stepfather. The newspapers got it so wrong. Their theories of pedophile rings and murder and suicide were so far from the truth, the truth was a dot. So caught up in describing the wolf on her stepfather’s chest, Ash only fell silent when Connal answered an unasked question, confirming that the man who had helped raise her had been Thegn, servant to the things that murdered her mother. Bound by a pact of complete obedience, he had been a scapegoat, willingly shooting himself and taking the blame for the murder so his masters remained in myth alone.
The wolves. Psychiatrists had spent a lot of time convincing her she’d dreamed them up, real monsters for the hidden monster within a man she’d trusted. She’d never truly bought it. They were definitely no nightmare now.
The attack? Ash had no new reasoning for that. The reports would still remain that her mother was the victim of a deranged man who slaughtered her and then took his own life.
And her grandmother’s mysterious appearance to sweep her away from danger ... well, a lot of it, with her new knowledge, was suddenly making more sense than she could ever have tried to explain away. Knowing her grandmother was ‘Other’, whatever that meant, cleared up questions she’d never thought to have.
‘I saw you, you know. As a young girl, at Anann DeMorgan’s door, in your red coat.’ It was a softly spoken confession, his eyes sliding briefly to meet with hers before focusing back on the winding road that demanded his attention.
‘You did?’ That brought her head up fast, gaze whipping to his, searching eyes that too quickly slid away from her questions. ‘Did you know why I was brought there?’
‘No.’ His dreads shook, brows knitted in a frown. ‘She never brought a child to her home befor
e, never spoke of you. None of it makes sense.’
‘How so?’ None of it did make sense, she was struggling to keep up with the new world flashing into existence around her, blanks filled in and lies erased for wild truth.
‘If the wolves targeted your mother, then she has to have been a Latent too.’ He shifted gear to navigate the latest in a series of hairpin bends.
‘You did say it was genetic.’
‘Yes, but every case, up to now, has been a sporadic mutation in human genes. No Latent has ever survived long enough to pass the genes on to a child.’ The words hung suspended in the air like an executioner’s axe.
‘Shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean ...’ He fisted the wheel until the blood drained from his knuckles. Way to break it to her gently, Savage.
Her hand dropped to his thigh in a gentle squeeze, a small smile gracing her lips as she uttered soft words. ‘No, it’s ok, I need to hear the truth. Go on.’ This is what she’d wanted. Information. The truth. Of what she was or could be.
He flicked a glance in her direction, needed to see that determination in her eyes before he could go on. ‘Carriers of the mutation are infertile, at least until the changes begin to manifest, sometime in the early to mid twenties. Retinal anomalies, manic, disinhibited behavior linked with the lunar cycles.’ She was shifting uneasily in her seat as he catalogued the uncomfortably familiar symptoms. ‘Latents secrete pheromones that attract the wolves. If they haven’t already been traced through eye testing or the psychiatric services, they find themselves drawn to areas with a high density of male wolves. The Black Lake of Dublin is one, but there are others. Dubh Lochan in Scotland, Blackpool in Cork, for example. All conduits through the black waters that lead to Fomor.’
Ash picked at cotton threads fraying on the knee of his jeans. ‘We were in Blackpool, England, at my stepfather’s holiday home, when my mother was attacked.’ Damn, pieces just kept slotting into place around her, a changing labyrinth, a Rubik's cube of knowledge rearranging her confused actions to clear sense. She’d been crazy at the full moon, wanton and hungry. Now she knew why. She was ... changing. ‘So my mother had this genetic mutation, and somehow passed it on to me? What does it matter?’