Pierced [Pain & Love 2] (BookStrand Publishing Romance)

by Ashlei D. Hawley

  Why was there snow?

  Mallory turned in a slow circle as the cold and wrongness began to sink into her. It was summer, or it had been when she’d gone to sleep. In her short, pink shorts and gossamer-white tank top, she wasn’t dressed for winter. She began to shiver violently.

  “Leigh!” He was the only one who would know what was going on, she knew. But calling for him was doing her no good. He was obviously nowhere around.

  Snow began to fall from the eggshell-colored sky. Diaphanous flakes landed on Mallory’s cheeks and eyelashes, soaked into her hair, and danced in the mist her breath produced.

  Mallory knew she needed to get out of the weather. She was already beginning to lose feeling in her extremities. Her toes were in severe danger of frostbite, as she was wearing her pretty purple flip flops. Not even running shoes, she mourned to herself as she felt spikes of pain in each individual toe that continued to flare as she walked on.

  “Son of a bitch,” Mallory muttered to herself.

  She walked.

  The wind came up and flung Mallory’s golden hair around her face. She should have cut it again, she thought with loathing as she pulled wayward strands out of her watering eyes.

  The shudders in her body became painful with their ferocity. Mallory thought she might cry. The snow fell in greater volume and instead of gentle pieces of ice fluff, they whipped at her like shards of a shattered crystal. Each step sunk her knee-high in snow.

  Mallory wrapped herself up in her own arms and scoured the deserted landscape for anything or anyone that could help her.

  The sky and ice-colored water stretched out, mirror reflections of each other. The white expanses chilled her as easily and fully as the insane weather. The trees jutted up from the shoreline, hungry fingertips grasping at the cloud-shrouded sky. They looked dangerous and fearsome to Mallory, somehow sentient as they appraised her from their rooted roosts.

  “Damn it. Damn it!” Mallory snapped as she stomped her numb feet and succeeded only in coating herself up to her thighs in slushy snow.

  How had this happened, she wondered desperately. How had summer become such a blinding, freezing winter and where the hell was Leigh?

  Knowing that numbness was verging dangerously close to hypothermia, Mallory decided she had to keep moving or die.

  She pressed onward. Her teeth chattered so hard, she feared for her tongue.

  Mallory repeated, “Son of a bitch,” so much it became a gruesome mantra in between the bone rattle of her teeth clicking together. God, she was cold.

  Mallory hadn’t visited the lake in years, but she was familiar enough with the area to be confident in her assumption that she was walking toward the road and not deeper into the far-stretching woods. Trapped in the trees with no way of knowing where or when she’d be able to get out of the snow, Mallory knew with grim certainty that she’d freeze to death in a short amount of time. She didn’t want to freeze to death, damn it.

  Mallory stumbled, no longer able to successfully control how well her limbs moved. She cried out, crouched over in the snow that now felt like fire on her skin. She’d never been so cold.

  Her brain retreated to a different time. She pulled herself to her feet and trudged forward as part of her thinking self found sanctuary in the memories from her high school years. Off the back patio of her family home, there was a hot tub where Mallory and her brother, Luke Jr., spent many fun nights. Either with friends, each other, or alone, the hot tub had served for a source of enjoyment in any season.

  In the winter, as steam rose off the water’s surface and their skin, Mallory and Junior would dare each other to run through the thigh-high snow or roll around in it. The cold was a grasping, greedy thing and would, with malicious speed, seep into their steaming skin and drink the heat out of them until they were squealing and darting back to the blissful warmth of the hot tub.

  There was no hot tub for Mallory to submerge herself in. There was snow before her, behind her, and above her. She was no longer aware of her quaking limbs. Numbness had stolen her brain’s ability to communicate with the nonessential parts of her body. It was an effort of epic proportions every time she forced herself to lift a foot.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said. It sounded like a statement of defeat instead of a determined curse. The words were a testament to giving up, not a measure of her stubborn endurance.

  Mallory’s fuzzy brain didn’t have room for thoughts of her family aside from random memories that had warmth attached to them. She didn’t remember what she’d been doing before becoming trapped in the freak winter. The thoughts of her family’s dangerous situation had evaporated from her mind, stolen like most of her warmth.

  The only solid tether Mallory found herself able to cling to was Leigh. She felt instinctively that he should know what was happening and help her. It was his fault she was there anyway, wasn’t it?

  Slipping again in the increasingly treacherous snow, Mallory wondered where the wayward thought had come from. How could what was happening be Leigh’s fault? This was beyond Leigh, she told herself, and beyond her.

  Mallory started to feel warmth spreading through her and even though a tiny percentage of her brain screamed a warning, she reveled in the heat. It was less like the fire the freakish snow had flooded her with and more akin to being wrapped in a thick blanket on her comfy couch at home.

  Fighting against the urge to sit down and enjoy the new warm feeling, Mallory started to become desperate. She couldn’t find the road. Her feet crunched over frozen reeds and she realized she was closer than she preferred to the frozen lake. Had she been walking the wrong way the whole time?

  Squinting in the blizzard, Mallory sought the bridge that would indicate the road. The storm had cloaked her in an ever-decreasing dome of impenetrable whiteness. Even the trees which had stood as exclamation points along the shoreline had been rendered in pale shades that made them indiscernible in the storm.

  White ground, white sky, white all around. Mallory knew still that if she stopped moving, she would die, but the knowledge was less relevant by the minute, dissolving into the mush that the rest of her frozen brain was becoming. She pushed herself forward a few more steps, struggling toward where logic insisted the road had to be.

  The snow no longer melted on her exposed skin. She was coated in a layer of ice that cracked and refroze as she shivered.

  Over the screaming of the wind, Mallory heard a sharp shock of sound beneath her feet that paralyzed her with fear. The ice shattered under her as though a battering ram had smashed through it and she plunged down into the black water beneath.

  Mallory thrashed and fought to tear her way back to the surface. The cold water was even more of an assault on her body than the icy wind had been. It clawed at her, the bubbles caused by her flailing hit her like bullets wherever they slid over her skin. She couldn’t hold her breath against the devastating pressure of the freezing water. Air escaped her mouth and water rushed in. Her chest felt like it was collapsing inward. She found the surface, but was blocked by a barrier of ice that felt as thick as cement.

  Mallory’s mind was in a wild whirlwind of screaming panic. She slammed her fists fruitlessly against the ice which kept her trapped within the arctic abyss. It didn’t take long for the strength to leave her limbs, and the fight to be crushed from her spirit. Resignation overtook her and was a weight in her frozen body.

  She began to sink.

  Darkness around, darkness beneath, and darkness slowly encroaching up above. Mallory was sinking, her eyes drifting slowly shut, her limbs relaxing as she lost the fight for her life.

  She didn’t feel it when she hit the bottom of the lake and sank into the mud. She was relinquished to the oblivion. Her mind had accepted the fact, and her body was quickly following suit.

  Mallory died.

  Then, she opened her eyes.

  Chapter Five

  Mallory sat bolt upright in a bed that wasn’t her own. She gasped air into her burning lungs, tr
embling all over. Crying at the pain, Mallory found the tears that slid down her cheeks were frigid drops of ice, remnants of the frozen water she’d drowned in. She remembered it like the most crystallized version of a dream. Every vivid detail imprinted itself on her mind and she shivered violently.

  She was afraid she was going to throw up. Her head pounded like someone with a minimallet was taking aggression out on her temples. She moaned at the agony and clutched her skull, willing the pain to leave her.

  Looking around after deciding the pain was going to stick around no matter how much she mentally pleaded for it to depart, Mallory felt a jolt of some emotion that was too close to abandonment for her to be comfortable examining it too intimately. She wondered where Leigh was. She’d just experienced the most traumatic thing she could imagine and had escaped to find herself alone.

  Unable to stand quite yet, Mallory looked around the room, seeking clues that would impart the information she sought on her mind. She realized with a start that even in the full and encompassing darkness, she could see everything perfectly. Not only did nothing in the room suffer the distortion of shape and detail the darkness often produced, Mallory could easily see individual grains of wood on the old dresser, tiny spiderweb cracks on the ceiling, and formerly imperceptible variations of color caused by dust on the bookshelf.

  Without straining, Mallory heard night noises in a veritable orchestra of sound. Something as miniscule as a rabbit moving in and out of its shallow home in the ground lit up on her radar and drew her attention to the shuffling, rustling noise of grasses in the warm wind.

  Holy shit, Mallory thought. She could hear blades of grass rubbing against their neighbors. She became afraid of the thought of loud noises. Would they hurt her apparently super sensitive new ability to hear?

  She heard footsteps on the roof and they sounded like thunder. Mallory snapped her gaze up, caution and concern flooding her. She slid as silently as she could from the bed, intent on not being caught off guard if a threat lurked nearby.

  Mallory was as naked as she had been when she’d fallen asleep and noticed that her skin had become incredibly sensitive. She could feel the subtle changes in temperature as she moved from the warm bedroom to the ever-so-slightly cooler hallway.

  Touching her neck lightly with her fingertips, Mallory realized the two pinpricks left by Leigh’s sharp teeth had vanished. Likewise, the skin on her wrists was pale and perfect. She brushed her hands over the fully healed flesh, amazed that the wounds had been banished from her body.

  Moving through Leigh’s lightless abode was as easy as if she’d had lights blazing to accompany her passage. She didn’t bump into things or become confused. Her eyes didn’t need to adjust even as she entered windowless areas into which no natural light filtered.

  Her instinctive movements seemed to have evolved. She found her way through Leigh’s unfamiliar house with the same ease as her parents’ home, in which she had lived her entire youth.

  Finding a staircase that she assumed led up to the rooftop garden she’d seen glances of before entering the home hours ago, Mallory took the stairs with the same silence she’d managed in her journey through the halls. She pushed the door outward, noticing that even with its thickness and weight it lifted almost too easily. She’d only used one hand, but it had felt as simple as pushing away a piece of paper.

  Leigh heard Mallory moving around below and observed her openly as she made her way across his roof. She had become leaner over the course of her transformation. Her eyes gleamed as they absorbed the small amounts of natural light and utilized them with maximum efficiency. Her golden hair—already a glorious shade—shined like the glow of candlelight it resembled. She couldn’t see it in herself, but Leigh immediately noticed the walk and aura of a predator adopted by the slim beauty. If his heart could beat, it would thunder. She looked incredible.

  “I was alone.” Leigh heard the accusation in her tone, but a cloak of confusion pushed all of Mallory’s other emotions back.

  “I thought it would take longer,” Leigh admitted. It had last time. It had been the first of many indications that she could not stand up to the transformation.

  “How long?” Mallory turned to look at the darkened landscape as she spoke. She didn’t want to look at Leigh for some reason. She wasn’t embarrassed by what had occurred between them, nor was she mad at him for leaving her alone to wake in terror. Something averted her gaze, however, and so she stared at the street in the distance and the trees that disguised the house from the road as Leigh replied.

  “This is the second night you have slept.” He expected her to react negatively to the information, to be angry at the wasted time. Surprising him, Mallory asked the prudent question instead.

  “How long until daylight?”

  “Not long,” Leigh told her. “We don’t have the time to meet the Hunters on their own ground this night.”

  Mallory nodded. She’d anticipated that. She was hesitant to tell Leigh about what had made her mood so foul, but the urge to speak pressed on her until the words rushed out.

  “I had a dream.” She looked at Leigh, and the intensity in her eyes pleased him. She was so strong now. It wouldn’t last, he knew, but he enjoyed her new vigor immensely for the time being.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” he corrected her. “Not quite.”

  “There was snow,” Mallory continued as though she hadn’t heard him. She needed to get the memory out verbally, so perhaps it would stop tormenting her internally. “On the lake. I fell through and I drowned.”

  She shivered in spite of the warm summer air. The death experience had been different from her previous time, easier, Leigh noted. Everyone had one during The Turn. Sometimes, the death took them and the transformation remained incomplete.

  “Mine involved big cats,” Leigh confided nonchalantly. “And running. And blood. You will never forget it. Cherish it as a reminder of your strength. It takes most of those we try to change.”

  Mallory looked at him then, and some of the resistance she’d been trying to build against him broke and slid away. He wasn’t being a thoughtless, uncaring prick as she’d expected. He’d experienced something similar. She was warmed by his praise of her strength. It chased away the last chill that remained of her experience.

  “If we can’t go, we need to plan.” In agreement with her statement, Leigh nodded.

  “We’ll go to the basement. There is no in-between now. You must stay out of the sun or you will burn to death. You understand?”

  Mallory hesitated, feeling the first of what she knew would be many upsetting reminders of what her life would be like after The Turn. She told herself she’d be turning back, that the sun was not forever out of her reach. She’d feel it on her skin again.

  After she killed Leigh, as she’d promised.

  Captured by his alluring gray eyes, Mallory caught a breath in panic as she wondered how she’d ever be able to do it. She’d made her vow, but had she realized the terrible depth of that commitment?

  Leigh stared back, impassive. He didn’t know what thought Mallory was entertaining, but the struggle was plain on her face.

  “I won’t have the chance to miss it for long.” Leigh considered Mallory’s words and the indefinable ache he heard beneath them.

  “No, but until then, I would be very put out to see you burned.”

  “That makes two of us,” Mallory agreed. She smiled and it lit up the night. Leigh found it amazing that a newfound creature of darkness could shine so brightly. Why should she fear the sun, he wondered, when she rivaled its radiance?

  Shaking himself of the thoughts, Leigh returned Mallory’s expression with less casual joy and more cocky amusement. He had to work for it. She was so beautiful, so wonderful that it was an effort to keep up the indifferent, arrogant disguise.

  “We’ll retire below and await the coming night.” As Mallory began to descend, Leigh couldn’t help himself from grabbing her by the forearm and pulling her back toward him.
The chill of contact surprised him. Wasn’t such a connection supposed to bring a rush of heat? The sweeping feeling was arousing as hell, but it simply wasn’t what he’d expected.

  “We’ll get them back.” Mallory’s eyes filled with tears at his insistence. The drops hovered on her lashes. The temperature was of water dredged from the cold, heavy heart of the ocean. When they slipped down her face, they traced fingertips of frost over the skin. Leigh touched the paths of dampness with his free hand, his fingertips gentle and curious.

  “Most of us don’t cry,” he murmured.

  “It’s strange,” Mallory admitted. “They feel so cold. Not like normal tears.”

  With no way of knowing how to respond to that, Leigh released Mallory’s arm and nodded for her to precede him down the stairs.

  “Why don’t I feel weird naked?” She’d completely forgotten her nudity, she realized. Even with how wonderful Leigh’s nakedness was, she hadn’t even registered it as abnormal.

  Leigh chuckled and it rolled over Mallory’s skin, suddenly making her the most aware of her nudity that she’d been since stepping into the warm evening air.

  “We are natural,” Leigh responded as he followed her down. “We are elevated beyond humanity. Separate, we are more comfortable in our skin than any among mankind could hope to be.”

  “Excluding nudists,” Mallory interjected teasingly as they reached the lower floor. Leigh was surprised at the laughter she coaxed out of him with the statement.

  They moved to the basement and Mallory admired the space.

  Leigh had filled the room with care. It was where he spent all of his daylight hours, after all. The floors were richly carpeted with the best, softest material he could buy. The carpet was dark brown and matched the trim he’d applied to the walls himself. The area had drywall applied from ceiling to floor. No pipes were exposed. No concrete or brick offended the eye. He’d painted the walls and ceiling a lovely cream and had added trailing vines of powder green. He was instantly on guard. What if Mallory laughed at the decorating skills that in Leigh’s own mind occasionally marked him as effeminate?