Becoming Bad (The Becoming Novels) Read online

  A growl of accord rumbled down the line. Their hatred of Connal Savage united them.

  ‘Has the celibate fucker, Doc Madden, been to see her?’ Fite asked, gnawing on what looked big enough to be an ox’s thigh bone.

  ‘Celibate fucker? Isn’t that an oxymoron?’ Tyr smirked.

  Fite cut him a withering glare. ‘The thegn doctor is the fucking moron. He let the girl escape. If Savage hadn't bitten her, she might have been lost to us forever.’

  MacTire pulled rank. ‘Madden was punished for the mistake and bore that punishment honourably. It is done, and we will speak no more of it.’ Fomorian justice was swift and brutal. Anything less would lose face in the men's eyes. There were no saints amongst this rabble, and no room for grudges.

  Fite scowled, but knew better than to push.

  Tyr, as always, broke the uncomfortable silence. ‘Has anyone actually seen Madden since we left the shore?’

  ‘Probably crawled back above-ground to lick his wounds,’ Rún spoke as he tipped the horn to refill MacTire’s cup, ‘poor bastard.’

  The King merely nodded, scrubbing a hand over his nape. This was the way of things. Family brooked no favouritism when his men walked such a thin line between order and barbarity. And as brother to MacTire’s former queen, Aoife, Madden was technically family, though it was regrettable the boy turned out defective and was forced to enter thegn life. Regardless, MacTire reserved the harshest punishments for those closest to him.

  It was no different in the case of his blód-brother. Connal had it coming; he’d have known when he brought Ashling to Fomor, even if it was to save her, that mercy wasn’t on the cards. The coin cut into his fisted palm.

  Call it divine retribution, a mate for a mate. Ashling was his.

  He stuffed the collar into a pocket and two-handed a joint of meat, forcing himself to chew through the tough flesh. There was no absolute necessity to eat. Fomorians had the blood of the gods in their veins. They did not age or die, save by mortal injury, such as having your head severed from your body.

  Or your bones picked clean by the raveners ...

  MacTire dropped the meat and drowned that image in a long draft of ól. They might not age, but they bled, and hurt, and scarred like any mortal, and they still felt the primal desires of thirst, hunger and lust. And so they ate meat their bodies did not need and fucked human women incapable of carrying their cubs. Anything to fill the interminable hours of incarceration.

  The sound of cattle lowing broke through the revelries.

  ‘There goes dinner,’ Brandr laughed. A pair of steers was being led through the caverns, en route to be butchered and spit-roasted for the celebrations. Their meat traversed the black waters on the hoof. Inanimate objects didn’t travel well. Even living things came through in a state of temporary paralysis, which was why larger animals, such as beef cattle, were reserved for special occasions.

  ‘We’re killing the fatted calves, I see,' the King said. Ironic, given he’d already slaughtered the prodigal brother ... He drained his cup once more and refilled, obsidian eyes trained on the door of the banqueting hall.

  ‘I tell you,’ Brandr said, ‘lugging fifteen hundred pounds of mature beef steer out of the tide before the raveners get to you requires balls of steel.’

  ‘I should know,’ Rún smirked, ‘I’ve dragged your ass out of there often enough.’

  Brandr clapped his félag on the back. ‘Aye, and I yours, my blód-brother,’ he laughed.

  The brand on MacTire’s sternum burned as he silently observed their banter.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to see how the thegn smuggle livestock through the streets of Dublin. That requires ingenuity,’ Fite pointed a bone in Brandr’s direction. ‘I mean, how do you parade an animal that size through a city nightclub without drawing attention?’

  ‘Put it in a dress and lipstick?’ Tyr’s innocent face trembled laughter that was contagious. The entire skuldalid, MacTire excepted, cracked up. ‘Seriously. Why don’t we just farm them here?’ the boy asked.

  ‘And what would they graze on?’ Fite’s voice took on a serious edge, ‘pastures of bone and blood? The raveners consume all, Tyr.’

  All drank deep and were silent.

  ‘Besides,’ Brandr cracked a smile, ‘we Fomorians are hunters to the core, not farmers. And if I am not mistaken, the prey has just arrived.’

  Hot on the heels of the cattle came the other live commodity regularly trafficked through the black conduits. Thrall girls, and the occasional male for those whose preferences ran to cock. As with the livestock, it was a one-way ticket; Humans could never know of their existence.

  Once bitten though, they came more than willingly ... and they came too ...over and over, in shuddering ecstasy. The eitr in a wolf’s saliva was potently addictive to humans, like sexual heroin. The naked girls filtered through the crowd now, exuding their special brand of blatant sexuality, craving their next fix of teeth in flesh. As they moved they were picked off, possessive arms circling waists, bare buttocks slapped, breasts fondled. They were dragged into laps, thighs hitched to straddle hips, laid out across the tables like food. As the night progressed, the great hall would be transformed into a stadium of fucking, with the vargs as gladiators, taking down their prey in a wet, slapping orgy of rutting flesh.

  Delicate female hands snaked over MacTire’s shoulders to toy with the piercings in his chest. A low growl bubbled up from his throat.

  ‘Will you fuck me, my Lord?’ The thrall’s lips pressed to the blond scruff of his jaw, her hair spilling across his neck as she crushed her breasts to his back. She tugged on his metal, a symbol of the King’s royal blood, and one he had ripped from his own blód-brother’s flesh out on the sands ...

  ‘Find another,’ he said gruffly, detaching the thrall from his back. She wasted no time, sliding into Brandr’s waiting lap. MacTire pushed away from the table and strode from the hall with purpose. There was only one female who hardened his cock this night, and she was waiting for him in his bedchamber.

  ‘Goddamn.’ Madden fired the stones against the rock face and they pinballed around the small cave where he was holed-up. Marooned in this freezing hellscape of blood and brimstone, and you think he could start a fire? No joy. He kicked at the painstakingly gathered pile of driftwood tinder and drew the silky robe tighter about his shivering body, but without its sash, the damn thing just flapped open again. No doubt, the great hulk of macho boy-scout slumped in the corner could have whipped up a blaze with a click of his arrogant fingers, were he alive. Madden had given up checking his vitals days ago. He doubted the big bastard was ever going to come round, and if he did, the doctor was going to have to pray that his knot-tying excelled his, lets-face-it, non-existent fire-starting skills.

  How he’d even dragged that mammoth body across the sand before the harpies got to them was a minor bloody miracle. He was deranged, should have just taken his punishment like a good runt and grovelled his way back into the King’s favour. The Lord and Master loved nothing more than a good ass-kissing.

  MacTire's blurted confession about Aoife had rendered Madden temporarily insane. Just as sure as they’d eviscerated Connal Savage, the King’s claim had ripped everything Madden thought he’d known of his world inside out and dumped it on its head.

  A dark shadow passed across the entrance to their cave and Madden huddled into himself. There was no sun to mark the days and nights in this subterranean pit, only the diurnal plummet in temperature that piled an extra helping of misery on his already pitiful state. The Raveners seemed to like it. As the chill descended, the gargoyles stirred to life, stretching their immense wingspans across the blood-red sky. They knew he was in here, had smelled him out the first night. They were simply biding their time, playing cat and mouse with the infinite patience only an immortal could fathom.

  Yep, he should have swallowed his damn pride. Not like his precious dignity was going to fill a growling stomach, and hiding out on the high ground wasn’t going to get
him the hell out of Fomor either. It was going to get him killed.

  AWAKENING

  Dead to the world, she lay sprawled. Hair, midnight silk, fanned across his sheets, the curve of her spine hollowing out to the luscious mounds of her ass. Exquisite. Her thighs spread for him, just enough to gift a glimpse of her sex. Even comatose she tortured him. ‘I have waited long enough. I will have you.’

  Tugging at the wolf’s-head buckle of his belt, MacTire wrenched the strap, shucked the leather down his thighs and loomed above her. Broad, heavily muscled and naked, he was fully aroused. Prowling up the bed, canines throbbing, his mouth mapped the contours of that perfect ass in growled breaths.

  Head cocked, claws traced the triskelion inked on her shoulder, hooking raven strands across her nape to expose her throat. Razor-sharp, they grazed the thud of her heartbeat. Proof of life. Her scent was a feast of ripe sexuality, begging to be plucked and sucked and … Fuck, his cock was hard as a bat. His body pounded, ravenous. Too-long denied, his teeth tested the tender skin of her throat. ‘You are mine, little raven. You have always been mine. I will have you.’

  Ash was lost in dreams, cushioned by the spongy damp of moss under cheek, her body ravaged, caught up in an erotic replay of trees and dirt and the powerful male at her back. She could stay there forever, basking in the dreamy wisps of sensation, but a blade was slowly ripping open the veil of sleep. It beckoned to her with sharp kisses, coaxing her to surface from a darkness heavy with sensuality, the pool of her dream lusts only deepening with the threat of pain.

  'It's you,' she sighed. Her body bowed, exposing her throat in surrender to the kiss of his teeth, moans of submission falling to the cloud-soft plush of the … not moss … pillows. His touch radiated fire, their bodies grinding a language all carnality. Her core clenched and she undulated off the mattress, guiding him, begging him to sink deep inside her.‘Yes. All yours Connal. All yours. You have me.’

  His answering growl was her only warning. A fist yanked her hair as teeth clamped hard on the flutter of her captured heartbeat.

  ‘We do not speak that name within these walls.’

  ‘Who ...?’ She rasped, whimpering as her spine curved again, not on a grind, her fantasy had crumbled, but in a struggle.

  A kick split her thighs wide, permitting a hand to explore her swollen flesh, glossing fingers in her arousal.

  ‘So fucking wet … for me,’ he murmured, a groan escaping his throat as the rage retreated, only to coalesce into the animal that was his lust. ‘It is me you desire.’

  Her heart hammered as his grip tightened in her hair.

  ‘The cur who poisoned you will not bother us again.’

  Oh God. Her body was so obedient in its panic, it gave this stranger exactly what he wanted. Her resistance excited him. She fought the stroke of his hands as he kneaded her flesh. Ash recoiled, only to have her wrists caught and her thighs pinned by his until she stopped thrashing out her terror. She lay still when he rode his fingers through her soaked folds.

  Even when he sat back and released her to pull her hips up, she couldn’t move. Ash was displayed to a gaze that stroked darkness to her most intimate flesh, and it only made her wetter. Her body didn’t know whether to fight or fuck. Spine tightening, she went rigid as her captor’s tongue curled a shivery lick to her ear. ‘Struggle for me, My Queen. You will come harder in the end.’

  Ash jerked violently in protest. This was not a dream. This was not some sordid fantasy she'd thought up in a sex-blissed stupor. She was wide awake and there were no dreads tickling her skin, only a matted blond braid of hair pouring over her shoulder as she lay prone and vulnerable at the hands of a stranger.

  He was NOT Connal.

  And yet her body burned like he was. Traitor.

  She was riding the same high that took her when Connal's bite had hurtled her into orgasm. She'd tasted it and her body was aching for more. It gave him power. This stranger at her back was mastering her need, her craving for Connal kept bright by his male presence.

  Wrong. It was all so wrong.

  ‘Please.’

  Connal’s last words rang in her ears, an ‘I love you’ that had tipped her into darkness. That was the last thing she remembered, before light had been thrown on her dreaming mind and the binds of sleep had become literal.

  She was pinned, naked and pleading for her captor to release her, not only from his hold, but from the desperate ache that would not stop.

  Her denial was vicious; the heat remained. There was no dim on the carnal switch he’d turned to high, only panic, fear, and a maddening arousal that licked her higher with the graze of his teeth against her skin. It left her begging for the bite that would send her flying.

  The part of her that was molten for this stranger was all animal. It turned her hands into claws and it snarled around blunt teeth. It arched and cried to get him closer, as her body flailed a dichotomy of pure fear and desire. She found herself pleading for two things that should cancel each other out and left her begging up to interpretation. ‘Please ...’

  ‘She begs. Perfect.’

  A claw raked her skin, from nape to lower back, and his sleek tongue lapped in its wake, rocking a shudder down her spine.

  ‘I can taste your fear, and the hunger that wars against it. Your blood is inside me, Ash-ling. You are in me, your body wants this. Surrender your mind.’

  His hand slipped between her thighs once more, and this time, the tip of a claw hooked into delicate skin, circling her pulsing clit. Ash bit down hard on the whimpers that rose and fell with the kick of her curves, muffled into the pillows.

  ‘You will come, Ash-ling, you will come hard, whether or not your mind permits it. I control your body now. I tell you when.’

  She trembled. Whoever this man was, he kept her on an edge of pain and riding the primal sensation of claws in her flesh. He commanded her ecstasy and it contemplated obeying, tense and winding in her core.

  Lust snapped up her spine when the palm of his free hand connected with the soft cheek of her ass and she cried out. Her hips jerked, tilted up for him, arching into the next strike.

  She fought her own reactions, the miscommunication between her brain and her body fizzling with static. Need shot through her veins, the feather-light brush of his lips whispering to her bruised skin. His touch had her thrashing. Half a fight for escape, it was a futile plan, as though she could tear herself from something he controlled. There was no wiggle room as his hands clamped her hips, she had to submit to the wicked tease of his teeth, grazing the curves of her ass, nipping at slap-tender flesh. A throaty hum left her lips. He had her lust on a leash and it panted for him, obedient and wanton.

  And then he put his mouth on her and she was ruined. Hot and greedy, he sucked starved, savage kisses on her slick flesh. He dragged her closer to the edge of control as he brutalised her sex with an attack of sensation too powerful to ignore, too animal to fight off, too raw to want to fight off. Liquid arousal overflowed, feeding the wet tongue-rasp of his hunger as she rode his mouth in a hard grinding circle. The torment spiked her high and left her hovering on screams. Closer … closer ... ‘Please ...’ Somehow she knew: She wasn’t begging for freedom now.

  Her mind screamed for Connal while her pleasure came undone at the touch of a stranger, an enemy. Disgust at her own body’s ecstasy broke down the last remaining fragment of her composure, exposing raw emotion. Tears welled up on every crest of her dwindling climax. ‘Connal,’ she sobbed.

  Her body shuddered, breaths hitching with the hot tears spilling down her cheeks. She felt him withdraw from her.

  ‘Not the sobs of a woman brought to her knees by the soul-shattering ecstasy of my gifted mouth,' he said, in an accent that was strangely archaic.

  Ash kept her eyes tightly shut as strong hands guided her quaking form over onto her back. He shaped her hips cautiously, as though he didn’t want her to break. She could have told him, she was already fractured.

  ‘God, what did yo
u do to me?’ Ash recoiled up the bed, wrapping herself in more sheets.

  ‘Nothing that you didn’t beg me to do, Ash-ling.’

  Her denial fell flat.

  ‘He can’t hurt you anymore,’ he murmured. The back of his hand grazed her damp, flushed cheek. She flinched and the spurned hand curled into a fist at his side.

  ‘Who can’t hurt me? Who the fuck are you? Where am I? Where is Connal? How did I get here?’ The questions spewed from Ash’s lips in a burst of panic. Disorientated, her gaze darted about the room to settle on the wolf branded into his bare chest, an exact replica of Connal's.

  ‘He bit you.’ The blond giant motioned to her throat.

  Shakey fingertips raised to skim the marks brought to attention by his words. ‘He really did it ...’

  ‘Your precious Connal bit you and he left you for dead.’

  ‘He left me for …’ She hesitated. ‘No. You’ve got to be suffering from some sort of head trauma to even think Connal would leave me. Where is he?’

  He paced out the end of the bed, the thick, blond braid grazing the bare muscles of his ass as he moved with the prowling grace of a tiger. ‘You were brought here to save your life.’

  Huh? The naked caveman was really freaking her out now. ‘Brought where?’ Panic-large eyes scanned the room, cataloguing the flicker of fire in the wall sconces. It was a cave painting come to life. There was nowhere else she could really be. Fomor. ‘Who in Hell are you?’ And it was Hell, complete with a rock cavern and a crudely carved bed covered in furs.

  ‘I am MacTire.’ His arrogance said it should be obvious. Shoulders set at right angles, jaw kicked high, he was showing off the physical credentials to go with the title that meant nothing to Ash. ‘King of Fomor. He spoke not of me?’

  ‘No, Mac. Connal spoke not of you.’ Her tone was mocking, building up a front from the tatters of her dignity.

  He cut her the kind of boot-trembling glare that would have sent a saner person ducking for cover, but anger and shame crept in to melt the ice of her terror. Watching him carefully, Ash braced herself and ventured the question she both craved and dreaded the answer to. ‘What happened to him? To Connal?’