Souls of Fire

by Vanessa Black

  An hour later, I was sitting alone at a small table in a corner of the crowded cafeteria, listlessly munching on a stale half of an onion bagel with cheese and sipping a cup of strong coffee with milk, letting the caffeine run through my system and slowly revitalize my foggy brain.

  I really hadn’t slept well! With any luck, I’d be able to understand most of what the psychology professor would be teaching in class in twenty minutes’ time, I thought. Then again, maybe not!

  I cleared away my tray of half-eaten food after having guzzled down the last dregs of cold coffee ― I was going to need every single drop! ―, and hurried toward the auditorium to my psyche-class, not wanting to be late on the first day.

  Psyche was interesting enough, but the professor, a tiny man with a big belly and a white bushy beard and mustache, seemingly took a sadistic pleasure in confusing new students and went through a lot of material in half the time it would have taken anybody to grasp what was being said.

  So it was with a slightly withered air that I left at the end of the two hour long lesson and headed to the cafeteria for lunch. I got myself a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, which I sincerely hoped would taste better than the stale bagel I had eaten, or nearly eaten, for breakfast.

  Taking hold of the Parmesan dispenser on the counter, where the food was distributed, I shook a substantial layer of Parmesan on top of my spaghetti, grabbed a bottle of water on my way to the cash register, and handed the cashier the necessary amount of money.

  Sitting at the same corner-table I had sat at for breakfast, I opened my bag, pulled out my lesson schedule, and started twirling my fork around in my spaghetti.

  I placed the first coil of spaghetti in my mouth, looked down at my lesson schedule for my next lesson, and nearly choked on my food.

  Professor Aaron Chambers.

  Aaron Chambers

  The name jumped out at me from the page, the letters slowly burning themselves deeply into my retinas. It was the same name, which had brought about such a strange reaction the day before in my bedroom. This time, though, the sensation was a great deal more powerful than before.

  My heart started racing at the same time as a white-hot fire started to burn its way through my entire body, the flames starting at the roots of my hair and eating their way down to the tips of my toes, which tingled in the aftershock as the impression of being burned gradually faded.

  I had never felt anything like it! If anyone had asked me what it had felt like, I would have answered without a second thought:

  “Like being burned at the stake, I imagine.”

  Yet I had managed not to cry out. How I had managed to keep quiet during the overwhelming pain I had just experienced, I didn’t know and didn’t care to guess, but I was extremely glad I hadn’t made a spectacle of myself in front of all the other students.

  Steeling myself, I raised my head and took a careful look around at the other students there. Nobody was looking straight at me, and none of the students appeared to have looked away hastily, embarrassed that they had been caught staring. Therefore, it seemed, nobody had noticed my ‘insanity’.

  Though very shocked by this unexpected occurrence, I calmed down again after a couple of minutes. I was sadly already getting used to the strange reactions my body threw at me of late, and was more and more determined to get to the bottom of them.

  I was beginning to see a pattern. Whatever any of it meant, it had something to do with that name. I definitely reacted every time I laid eyes on it. Maybe I was destined to go to the professor’s class. Perhaps he could explain what was happening to me!

  Taking a deep breath, I opened the door to the ‘Paranormal Phenomena in Today’s Society’-class an hour later, entered, and quietly took a seat near the entrance in the row farthest back from the professor’s desk that was situated in the middle of the fairly small auditorium.

  Due, no doubt, to the rather unusual nature of its content, the class had apparently been surmised to be of little importance to the bulk of the student body, so that a small auditorium had been deemed sufficient. One to two hundred seats sloped downward, divided by stairs, which ran down the middle toward the professor’s desk at the bottom of the room.

  The professor wasn’t there yet as it wasn’t quite time for the lesson to start. In groups of twos or threes, with the occasional loner in between, students began filing into the room, taking seats and talking to each other in excited voices that carried through the room.

  I busied myself with taking my paper pad and pencil case out of my bag and placing them on the small table in front of me, getting ready to jot down any information that could bring light into my increasingly dark world. I glanced at the watch on my wrist. I was way too early.

  Fifteen minutes, I groaned inwardly, feeling stupider by the minute, sitting there waiting, with nothing to do but stare holes in the walls while nearly everybody else was immersed in conversation. Bored in the extreme, the minutes going by like hours, I took a pen out of my pencil case and started doodling on my pad.

  Footsteps echoed off the walls in the hallway outside the open door of the auditorium, their sound a rhythmic “thump”, “thump”, “thump”. The doodle on my page began to blur around the edges as my eyes lost their focus. A ringing sound filled my ears, and everything around me slowed down as if being viewed in slow motion.

  I could hear my heart beat slower and slower, until … it stopped.

  Suddenly, as everything rushed back to normal, my heart started up a frantic beat, my pulse racing desperately through my body. Fire consumed me, slowly and agonizingly eating away at my flesh.

  For the second time in two days, I was in the grip of something so violent, that all I could do was dig my fingers into the seat in front of me, refusing to give in to this sudden urging sensation, my knuckles white with the strain of holding on. The footsteps continued to echo across the hall, “thump”, “thump”, “thump”, in time with my heartbeat. They came closer every second, at length reaching the door.

  Darkness took me.

  Slowly I opened my eyes and tried to get my bearings. I felt drained, as though I had run a marathon or two. The last couple of days had been so full of terrifying sensations that I was utterly exhausted.

  As my eyesight slowly returned and objects began to come into focus again, I gingerly raised my head off my arms, where it had rested during my spell of unconsciousness, and took in the room.

  I hadn’t been out of it for long. Barely two minutes had passed, it seemed. The other students had all sat down in their seats, and most of them had quieted down. There were, however, still occasional whispers to be heard, indicating that the professor had not yet started his lecture.

  I took a moment to evaluate my emotional state. I was still a little shaky but otherwise okay. I didn’t seem in any immediate danger of blacking out again as far as I could tell, and the violent pull I had once again experienced felt different.

  Different … but not gone!

  Why hadn’t the feeling gone up in smoke like the last time it had happened? Yesterday, actually … had it really only been yesterday? It seemed much longer ago than that!

  I took another moment trying to pin down the sensation. It did feel different from before. What had started out as a sudden and violent attack on my body, now felt like a powerful steadily flowing stream, winding its way from my consciousness to another’s, which I felt but couldn’t quite locate.

  Though I didn’t have the slightest idea how I knew what I sensed, I recognized without a doubt the pattern of someone else’s consciousness. The feeling, although quite strong, didn’t come with an instruction manual, though, and having never dealt with anything out of the ordinary my entire life, I couldn’t, for the life of me, tell to whom this consciousness belonged. I was certain of only one thing: the person in question was in the auditorium this very moment.

  My gaze roamed the room and ultimately came to rest upon the figure standing behind the professor’s desk, leisurely extracting
papers from the depths of a black leather suitcase and arranging them on the large empty desk.

  My initial reaction was that Aaron Chambers did not look like a professor at all ― weren’t professors, by hazard of occupation, supposed to be stuffy, tweed-wearing, in short, boring members of society? Aaron Chambers was none of the above!

  He was tall, with thick and dark, almost charcoal-black hair that fell in soft waves, partly covering his brow and leisurely resting against the sides of his face which was unlike any I had ever seen.

  I had seen a great deal of good-looking men, celebrated models and movie stars. But none of them could hold a candle to this beautiful man.

  He was breathtaking and charismatic, the faintest stubble covering his strong, finely chiseled jaw.

  He was wearing tight-fitted jeans over running shoes and a white shirt, the topmost buttons casually left open. The layer of clothing, though hiding the exact shape of his body from view, was ineffective at concealing the small bulges that formed on his sleeves and pant legs whenever his strong, muscled body was in motion.

  His powerful appearance, as well as the confident manner in which he handled himself, immediately commanded admiration and respect; and probably had half the student body ― mostly female ― fancy itself in love with him within minutes of first laying eyes on him.

  Constituting no exception to this phenomenon, I at once felt the overwhelming power of the attraction slamming into me with the force of a raging bull.

  OH MY GOD! I thought, completely ignoring ― in light of my current state of mind ― the misgivings I usually had about using this particular phrase, as I wasn’t sure if I believed in God. Not that I begrudged anyone else the solace in belief. I, myself, just wasn’t certain.

  Although, if there were a God, I thought, it would explain such gorgeous creations as the one before me!

  My heart skipped several beats, my stomach feeling as though a million tiny butterflies were frantically beating their beautiful colorful wings against the inside of my belly, desperate to escape their confinement.

  While the fluttering slowly subsided, I kept my head down, not wanting to meet anyone’s gaze while trying to assess how long it would take my glowing cheeks to return to their natural pale color.

  How embarrassing!

  I felt like a common teenager. Face as red as the lipstick my mom never let me buy, and a fit of swooning on the way! Granted, some people would say I was still a teenager, being only eighteen years old, but that’s not how I would define the word. How could this guy manage to make me revert to the emotional state of a teenager in under a minute?

  What am I, a silly giggly little girl? By all rules of nature and in the spirit of maturity, it shouldn’t be allowed!!!

  I raised my head again, feeling more comfortable about meeting other people’s gazes as I felt my cheeks returning to their normal state. Never having felt particularly attracted to the opposite sex, I felt the impact of this sudden allure even more acutely.

  I was at once determined to defy the attraction I felt, an attraction so powerful that it frightened me. To feel this strongly about a man I had never met face to face and to whom I had never spoken even a word, went against my better judgment. This kind of hormonal enslavement I would never accept, I thought savagely.

  For one and a half hours, I sat in class, my shoulders aching more with every endless minute that went by.

  I was so tense, trying to ignore Professor Chambers while at the same time trying to follow his lesson ― a task not easily accomplished ― that I would probably need a whole week worth of massages to get my muscles to relax again.

  Not in the least inferior to his amazing looks, his deep calm voice had a mesmerizing sensual quality to it that threatened to pull me under.

  As if in a daze, I got through class somehow, catching bits and pieces of the lesson, vaguely noticing in a remote corner of my mind that Professor Chambers’ attention wandered at times, his gaze sweeping distractedly over the students, as if in search of something or somebody, seemingly growing nervous by the end of the lesson.

  I had kept a low profile all during class, sitting behind a row of girls which had kept me hidden throughout the lesson. Once the lesson was over, I decided to take my time and wait until everybody had filed out of the auditorium.

  Carefully keeping my back turned to everyone else, I slowly put away my pencil case and pad and put on a good show of roaming through my bag in search of something important. When I could no longer discern any noises around me, I got up, grabbed my bag, and headed toward the door.

  I got within two or three steps of the door leading to the hall, when Professor Chambers suddenly stood in the doorway facing me. It seemed he had already left but had turned back for something.

  I wanted to run and hide, but hiding wasn’t an option anymore as he had already noticed me standing there. I could have hurried past him into the hall ― the door was certainly wide enough for two people to pass each other ― but that would have meant coming physically closer than I felt comfortable with.

  Desperately fighting the urge to look at him, I stood my ground, gazing at the floor … and lost the fight.

  Our eyes met.

  His were the prettiest shade of blue I had ever seen. I felt hot and cold at the same time. A chill ran down my spine, and flames erupted, setting my body on fire.

  Rendered speechless, I stared at him, feeling terribly awkward and shocked beyond measure.

  His face was the mirror image of mine; it was obvious he was at a complete loss for words.

  Gradually, as my body got over the most recent shock of sensations, I became aware of the same strange feeling I had experienced earlier in class. Closing my eyes briefly, I could again sense the peculiar stream flowing between my consciousness and … the consciousness in front of me. There was an undercurrent of violence to it. Like the violent pull that had taken hold of me before.

  My eyes snapped open, staring unbelieving at the stranger opposite me. My mind was blank. I couldn’t think straight anymore; couldn’t wrap my thoughts around a concept so utterly alien to me.

  What the hell was going on? I didn’t believe in such things! I couldn’t even explain what ‘such things’ were! I didn’t have the slightest inkling of what any of this meant, nor how to deal with it. Hadn’t I come to this class in order to get some answers?

  It was supposed to get better, not weirder by the minute! I thought, as the rest of my mind spun around in confused patterns, trying frantically ― and failing abysmally ― to regain a hold on the reality I knew, understood, and accepted … the reality that was about to be shattered.

  I couldn’t take any more. My mind screaming at my spellbound body to break free, my muscles finally obeyed, carrying me in a headlong sprint right past the professor, who stood left behind, his face a mask of confusion and shock.

  I quickly headed for the cafeteria. Lunch was over, but the cafeteria was open until eight p.m., selling sandwiches and other cold refreshments in between eating hours.

  I swiftly grabbed a sandwich, two large bottles of water, a plain yoghurt and an apple, went through the cash register and headed for my room, walking carefully so as not to drop my yoghurt and the apple which I had piled unevenly on top of the sandwich I was holding in my left hand.

  Reaching the safety of my room, I carefully put down the food and water, feeling relieved to be free of the load. It hadn’t been heavy, but awkward to transport without a bag to put it in, my book bag being already full.

  I managed to put the food and water in the refrigerator, and then sank down onto my bed, emotionally exhausted, and wanting nothing more than to disappear inside my room for the rest of the day.

  Already lying flat on the bed, and too tired to get up again, I kicked off the black sneakers I had put on this morning ― my red high heels being too uncomfortable to wear too often ― and pulled a quilt I had brought from home up and over my body.

  I curled up into a ball, snuggling into the
cover, and fell asleep in a matter of seconds.

  Darkness had fallen, bathing the room in inky black shadows. As my eyes gradually adjusted to the dark, areas of grey sprang up between the black where the shadows were less dense, making it easier for me to make out my surroundings.

  Dimly I realized this was not my room. Along with this realization came the sudden comprehension that I was dreaming. As in most of my dreams, though aware of it being merely a dream, my surroundings felt very real to me.

  Suddenly, glowing coals in a big hearth opposite me that I hadn’t noticed before, set fire to the wooden logs piled on top, gradually bathing the room in a warm, soft light and heating up my freezing body.

  The rising flames in the fireplace threw long shadows against the walls where the light reflected off the furniture and other decorative items throughout the room.

  I was in a room I felt sure I had never seen before. I was about to look around more closely when I realized why my body had felt so icy.

  I was naked, lying on a king-sized bed with no idea where I was, what I was doing there or how I had gotten there in the first place.

  All of a sudden, a large hand, equally strong and beautiful, reached for me out of the darkness beside me. The fingers stretched into my long tangled tresses and wound themselves around strands of my hair, finally cupping the back of my head and leisurely pulling me forward.

  The face before me was in shadow, even though I lay bathed in light; by all rules of nature, the fire in the hearth should have bathed him in light as well. Yet these rules did not apply to the realm of dreams. His face and body remained obscured.

  I didn’t need any light; I knew without a doubt whose fingers were tangled in my hair, whose warm breath I could feel on my face, and whose soft full lips were but inches away from touching my own.

  I could already taste the sweetness of his mouth, my body tingling pleasurably in anticipation. He inched closer, any second now I would be able to feel him, my mind picturing the exact shape and color of his sensual lips. Closer … closer …