The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3)

Box Set Trilogy

Book 1: Becoming Red

Book 2: Becoming Bad

Book 3: Becoming Blood

JESS RAVEN & PAULA BLACK

www.ravenandblack.blogspot.com

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Published by Raven & Black.

Copyright 2013 Jess Raven and Paula Black

All rights reserved.

This book or any
portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without
the express written permission of the authors except for the use of brief
quotations in a book review.

The
Becoming
Novels
are
a work of fiction. Names, characters, places
and incidents other than those in the public domain are the products of the
authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Should you find
yourself lost in the Becoming world, please remember there is a glossary at the
end of the book to help. You can access it from the interactive table of
contents. Beware though, as it has some spoilers.

The Becoming Novels: Book One

JESS RAVEN & PAULA BLACK

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading
fairy tales again.”

C.S. Lewis

“Alas for those girls who've refused the truth: The
sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth.”

Jack Zipes

Tossing her carry-on across
the back seat, sea legs from the flight had Ash sinking into the seats of the
tobacco-musted taxi. It was steadying, even with her head all off-kilter. Arriving
back in Ireland after so long felt like stepping into her past.

‘American?’ the driver asked
in a thick Irish accent, his eyes settling on her through the rear-view mirror.

Ash nodded, though that
wasn’t strictly true. She’d moved to the States from here when she was nine
years old.

‘Here on business or
pleasure?’ he enquired.

‘I’m here on a family
matter,’ Ash replied. Breaking eye-contact, she turned to watch the city streets
flow by like liquid through the rain-dropped windows. She could have been in
any rainy city, but no other place made her feel this young, this unsettled, or
this scared.

Just one portentous phone
call, and she was back to the beginning. The mail had fallen from her hand,
bills and precious job offers forgotten with the news that her grandmother had
suffered a debilitating stroke requiring nursing home care, and Ash was her
only point of contact. She’d very nearly dropped the phone as memories of those
bizarre months spent in her grandmother’s care as a child came crawling into
the light.

She was that small girl once
more, with a mass of black hair escaping from the blood-red hood of her
cape-coat as she was taken away. A holiday gone wrong, the press had said. A
homicide-suicide that resulted in a small girl being whisked away in the dead
of night to hide on another land, far from the gore that imprinted the soles of
her white slippers. She still couldn’t stand the colour. It absorbed too much,
was never as pure as it seemed and could be corrupted so easily.

She’d been corrupted, by
nightmares and mental ‘delusions.’ But she knew her stepfather hadn’t been man
enough to take his own life, and that the ‘people’ who really killed her mother
were still out there, abandoned by authorities too eager to blame it on a dead
man. While they may have given up all those years ago, she still found herself
searching the shadows in her head for some semblance of truth, for a look at
the real face of who, or what,  took her family from her.

Her grandmother was the only
family she had left now. Granted Power of Attorney and in charge of the old
woman’s affairs, Ash had got on the next plane to Dublin in a haze.

Her reflection blinked in the
glass of the cab’s window and she re-focussed to watch the shadows beyond
lengthen. Darkness reached for the car in a flash under a streetlight and a
slow terror crept up her spine. No reason for it, she thought, closing her eyes
and berating herself. No reason at all. The newspapers had played with words:
kidnapping, suspicious deaths, child slavery; the same things the doctors had fixed
into her head after she’d been retrieved from her grandmother’s arms. They were
the only logical explanations. Yet the darkness still stirred, trying to
convince her, from the cage she had the shadows locked in, that she had it
wrong, that those words were lies.

When she blinked again, the
dial above the car’s radio read an hour on, the fare had greatly increased and
they were stationary, parked up outside a large facade of brick and an unkempt
garden. Black metal gates branched around the property in a Celtic knot of iron
protection. With overhanging weeping willows and a deflowered blossom tree, the
place looked as absent as its owner apparently was. Pressing a handful of
colourful notes into the driver’s palm, Ash slid from the seats and stepped
into the cold Irish air. Her cases followed silently, the driver surely a mute,
eyeing her warily as though she was to be distrusted when he was the one being
all weird and mysterious. She assumed her solicitor had sent him. The woman had
said she’d arrange the transfer and get her settled into the house. For now,
this hulk of brick and iron was hers. It had been home once, however briefly.
She’d endeavour to find that in it again.

Ash waved the cabby off,
winning the battle to trundle her cases up the path to the door, a mess of
exhaustion and trepidation. Every second she spent in this country brought her
past into a haze of light, a light she thought had been turned off through
years of therapy. Childhood memories, happy or otherwise, had never proved to
be the most stable of experiences for her to draw from. She could never truly
decipher what was real and not.

‘You got me back. You always
said you would.’ Spoken to the sudden whip of wind that whistled its agreement
through strands of her hair, Ash huddled into the warm, red velvet of her coat
and fished the keys from the envelope the driver had given her.

From the parking lot, it
looked like any other nursing home: old brick under white paint, with one floor
and a sloping roof. Bars on the windows protected the glass from the outside
and kept the insiders in.
Tír na nÓg
. The name struck Ash as ironic.
Naming a place for a mythical land of eternal youth, when the inmates were more
living-dead than living seemed like a sick joke.

‘Your grandmother is right
this way, Miss DeMorgan. She’s had a good morning. You picked a nice day to
come in. The sun makes her calmer.’ The middle-aged nurse, with her little cup
of pills ready for administering, was all cheer.
Lying through her teeth, no
doubt,
Ash thought. To say that medical institutions made her uneasy was an
understatement.