Pain & Love 2
Pierced
Mallory Wright has been revealed as a psychic to a group of fanatical Hunters determined to target and destroy humans with paranormal talents. To draw her near to them, the Hunters have taken her immediate family hostage.
A centuries-old vampire who has avoided civilization for the better part of recorded history, Leighton Garrett comes to Mallory with an offer to save her family. He will turn her, giving her the strength to face the Hunters and reclaim her father, mother, and brother. However, Leigh’s offer is contingent upon Mallory vowing she will kill him and reclaim her humanity when her goal is reached.
During their mission together, it becomes harder for Mallory and Leigh to define the line between duty and destiny. In the end, the vampiric lovers are confronted with confusion and choices that have the capacity to keep them together forever or lead to both of their heartbreak and destruction.
Genre: Contemporary, Paranormal, Romantic Suspense, Vampires/Werewolves
Length: 47,462 words
PIERCED
Pain & Love 2
Ashlei D. Hawley
ROMANCE
www.BookStrand.com
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A SIREN-BOOKSTRAND TITLE
IMPRINT: Romance
PIERCED
Copyright © 2014 by Ashlei D. Hawley
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63258-296-6
First E-book Publication: September 2014
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2014 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
www.BookStrand.com
DEDICATION
For my family and friends. You are the first line of support and defense in the sometimes-difficult world of writing. Thank you.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
About the Author
PIERCED
Pain & Love 2
ASHLEI D. HAWLEY
Copyright © 2014
Prologue
Mallory Wright worked to make her private space relaxing and serene. She’d been avoiding life in the quaint, heavily wooded little town that she called her home for too long. There was seething life beneath the outwardly boring streets, and she needed to find a way to get herself back into it. She was a helper, and there were people out there who needed her help.
Mallory thought the best way to get her mojo back, so to speak, was to invite a psychic experience about the tragedy that currently consumed her. She’d lost friends recently. Perhaps seeing them happy, even if it was a memory from the past, could be the motivation she needed to get back out and help people like them, people who were being hunted.
Incense burned and candles flickered lazily in the guest room of Mallory’s apartment. The space was not reserved for people who visited her, but for her psychic experiences. She had a large pillow that rested against the far wall of the room, and two small tables on which she burned her scented candles and incense. The scent she favored was jasmine, and it helped to coax her visions as much now as her meditation did.
Sitting with her legs crossed, Mallory breathed deeply and evenly. She closed her eyes and leaned back, going through the process she’d perfected with a thousand nightly experiences. Though she usually cleared her mind in hopes her talent would seek out someone who needed her help, Mallory this time focused on thoughts of her friends, Tyler and Reyna. She wanted to see them, to remember them, so she could begin to get over them.
The vision took her with unexpected force. Mallory’s subconscious was flung through darkness, where light that may have been cast from stars flickered at the edges of her astral sight. Mallory let the power take her, knowing that if she fought, she could lose her grip on the vision and her last available link to the friends she mourned.
Her bare feet landed on sand, and a tingle of excitement worked its way through Mallory’s entire being.
Rushing through streets she’d visited once before in a vision, Mallory sought the prince of a foreign world. She would know him as soon as she looked upon him, just as easily as she would have known his human form. She saw the vibrantly colored buildings of Tyler’s world and felt the warm glow of the hazy pink sun on her shoulders as she ran. Mallory couldn’t get over how awesome it was to see a sky that looked like the petals of a stunning pink lotus flower in full bloom, but the sky wasn’t her focus. She was searching for a prince.
When she found him, Mallory’s heart was flooded with happiness and overflowed in joyful tears. She’d never expected to encounter the scene before her.
A stunning woman in flowing skirts as brilliantly colored as the buildings that made up the small city held a tiny child against her hip. She laughed with the prince as he pointed out a lumpy orange fruit covered in fine green fuzz and said a word. He was trying to teach her, Mallory realized, because the woman repeated the word back to him, earning her a smile from him and applause from the child.
Mallory recognized her voice. The realization hit her like a baseball bat to the face and she sobbed her happiness. It was Reyna! Reyna and Tyler, who died on Earth, had been reborn on his world and reunited to live out their life together. And if Mallory wasn’t mistaken, the child who clung to Reyna’s changed and amazingly beautiful body was Reyna’s once-lost daughter, Judith. They were together again, and living happily on Tyler’s world. Mallory felt she could sit down and cry her joy for hours. She’d never been so relieved to see anything in any vision she’d ever received.
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As though the power knew she’d been given exactly what she needed to see, Mallory was whisked back through the star-filled darkness and back into her own body. Tears dripped off of her chin and she buried her face in her hands to finish her crying jag. The voice of her power, which always indicated what time her visions took place in, whispered, “Present,” in her mind and solidified all of Mallory’s great feelings.
Feeling she’d accomplished far more than she’d hoped with her vision, Mallory fairly bounced out of her apartment and into her sleepy, twilight-shrouded town. She’d begun her healing process, moving on from the grief she’d been paralyzed in. The last thing she felt she needed to do was go to the house where Reyna and Tyler had been murdered by the Hunters. She would say her final good-byes, make her promises to continue on with her mission, and leave that place of sorrow with its memories of death and pain. There was life and love on the other side of the galaxy, and Mallory was ready to get back to her life now that she knew it.
She hopped into her car with a smile plastered on her face and drove into the quickly coming night.
Chapter One
Leighton Garrett had been born in a time when an individual was not given a name at birth but rather earned one through deeds or the unique aspects of one’s personality. He had a long, enduring memory but, amusingly, one of the things he’d forgotten had been his original name. He’d chosen Leighton for himself centuries ago. He liked it so well that even to protect himself, he’d not changed it again for hundreds of years. He figured as long as he varied his last name a bit, he’d be safe enough. Garrett was a recent change, a name he’d taken only in the past two decades.
His youth—which due to extraordinary circumstances had lasted nearly 400 years—had been a wild whirlwind cycle of feeding hungers, experiencing excitement, and slaking lusts. Then, he was unfortunate enough to love. He’d thought to bring her into his world. He’d failed, she’d died, and Leigh had withdrawn from the world.
Leigh remained in the night, wondering why he didn’t simply meet the sun and end his diminished existence. He still fed his hungers, though he was never satisfied. Lust still burned through him, a constant ache that he refused to gratify as a sort of penance. He lived—as you’d call it living—and searched for something he couldn’t define.
Leigh knew it when she was reborn. He’d seen evidence of it before in the faces and spirits he recognized in other humans over and over again. He could admit to himself that he’d looked for her face for centuries. He’d stopped over a century ago, resolved to suffer her loss for the rest of his existence.
More than two decades later, Leigh experienced a unique feeling, as though he’d been pierced by a thousand needles that had pumped ice water along every nerve ending. He’d felt recognition burst through him like fire, and experienced more emotion than he’d encountered in hundreds of years.
Leigh had ceased hoping, if hoping was what he’d been doing, that she would ever return. And yet, she was finally in the world of life again.
He watched her grow and the night was no longer so empty. Sometimes she would stand at the edge of the woods that butted up to her family home and stare through the trees, right at him, he’d often felt. The darkness and the closeness of the trunks guaranteed he was invisible to her eyes, but he was not so sure about the rest of her.
She had a talent. He’d known it almost as soon as she entered the world. He’d never gotten close enough to divine exactly what it was, but he knew she was a unique human, magical in some way. Many ways, he actually discovered.
She had an angelic voice and often when she took her night swims in the summer and autumn, she blared the radio over the patio and sang along. She sensed him, he knew that, and he learned to shield himself against her prying. It was fascinating to him. He guessed accurately that she was a psychic.
Before she travelled away to college, leaving her family home for the first time to live elsewhere, Mallory Wright had gone to the edge of the woods and spoken softly to him.
“I know you’re out there.” Her eyes followed her words into the darkness, seeking. “I don’t know what you are, but I still feel you. I always have.”
Mallory hesitated and Leigh observed how beautiful she’d become—with a glorious spill of hair the yellow of candlelight that tumbled over her elbows and electric blue eyes that pierced the shadows and seemed to find him unerringly.
“I’m leaving now,” she continued in a voice that implied she was beginning to feel increasingly foolish. Leigh was sensitive to her moods and emotions, and felt the discomfort, verging on embarrassment, coursing through her as she spoke. “I just kind of wanted to let you know so you don’t stick around…” She trailed off, and her expression told Leigh she wondered why she spoke to trees and silent shadows. She turned away with a careless little wave and a self-deprecating chuckle.
“Bye, then.”
Mallory left and, as he always did, Leigh followed. He’d protected her throughout her childhood when he was able and continued to do so. As a kid, she’d been a klutz. As an adult, she simply seemed to be unlucky. Leigh never made his presence blatantly known. He often wondered if she managed to avoid near misses and accidents on her own during the daylight hours when he couldn’t look after her.
He saw her with men and it made him jealous. Often after a date—and she was a gorgeous woman, so she had plenty—Leigh would have a talk with the man she’d seen. He pushed lovers away from her and didn’t feel particularly guilty about it.
The one man his powers of persuasion hadn’t worked on became a stalker. Mallory had been in jeopardy and Leigh felt no remorse when he killed the twisted man.
Leigh continued to watch from the shadows, even when Mallory graduated with a degree in law enforcement to follow the footsteps of her adored father and then withdrew from most of society. She got an apartment in her hometown and visited her parents often, but she never returned to the woods and neither did he.
Leigh had often wondered why he never presented himself to her, but parts of him knew without revealing it to the rest. He’d killed her once by trying to make her like him. She couldn’t survive as a vampire, and he knew he couldn’t be with her again without feeling the urge to keep her with him eternally.
Now he was facing her fully for the first time and he’d put on a cocky, mysterious cloak to hide the fact that he was quaking in her presence.
She’d been crying for a week. Leigh felt it against his skin, like he was constantly damp even though when he touched his flesh he felt no true moisture. Her sadness was tight in his own throat. She’d lost, and now she was in a position to lose more. He’d come to his conclusion the night before, and now he was ready to offer his assistance—at a price.
Mallory Wright wouldn’t have heard a common intruder bumbling through the dark space of the home she’d once owned and used as a safe house to protect others like her. Others who were special, with talents ranging from slightly abnormal to absolutely paranormal. The last people who stayed here had been honest-to-goodness aliens. She was so distracted thinking about Tyler and Reyna, who’d died in the home, she didn’t even suspect she was no longer alone.
When a glorious, exotic man had appeared from the shadows, Mallory at first thought he was one of the Hunters, one of those who’d threatened Mallory and her family and had killed her friends. The closest thing to her she could use as a weapon was a heavy vase, and she grabbed it. If he was a Hunter, he wasn’t taking her as easily as he anticipated.
“Who are you?” Mallory asked suspiciously. She didn’t release her hold on the vase. He moved from the shadows and if Mallory wasn’t scared to the point of nearly wetting herself, she might have drooled. He was tall and large with a muscled chest and brawny arms that would have made a professional weightlifter envious. He looked like a Viking or a gladiator—all dangerous, powerful, and predatory. His eyes gleamed in the darkness, and Mallory saw they were gray like morning fog. His hair was a shock of black darker than the shadow
s he moved through and it fell to barely above his shoulders in thick waves. He was sex in black leather boots, and he was still moving toward her.
“Who are you?” Mallory repeated, raising the vase threateningly. The man stopped moving, bowed low, and replied, “I am Leighton. Leigh for short, per your pleasure. I am a vampire and I come with an offer to help you reclaim your family from the Hunters.”
His words chilled Mallory down to her marrow. She dropped the vase and it thudded on the floor like thunder.
“The Hunters don’t have my family,” she refuted in a trembling whisper. Leigh arched one night-black brow in her direction and a slip of fang peeked from beneath his full upper lip as he asked in a voice that dared her to argue, “Don’t they?”
Mallory looked at the man and felt her heart thud like a stallion’s hoofs against her chest. This was the essence she’d felt in her youth. She sang to him, she thought stupidly. At night by the pool or when she was driving with the windows down. She hadn’t been sure he’d actually existed—psychic abilities notwithstanding—and now he stood before her telling her something her idiotic brain was having a hard time chewing and swallowing.
“You swear?” Mallory asked, feeling like a moron. Would she ask him to offer his pinky to vow the truth next?
He smiled at her and she felt her skin would wiggle its way off of her body from the shivers it inspired. She asked herself if those were legitimate fangs she was seeing. What was he, she wondered.
“I do,” he murmured. “I have a unique proposition for getting them back if you are interested. What is your name?”
Pierced [Pain & Love 2] (BookStrand Publishing Romance) Page 1
