Souls of Fire (9 page)

I had never suffered a broken heart before, but I was sure that what had happened between us could not warrant such a reaction.

Contemplating it over and over in my head, I could come to only one conclusion: it was my body, not my heart.

My feelings about him hadn’t changed. I was extremely attracted to him, though I knew I shouldn’t be. But my body’s reaction to my feelings was completely over the top!

In what alternate reality could I ever feel this way about such an insensitive jerk, I thought savagely.

Whatever strange bond was between us ― of which I felt positive he knew nothing and probably couldn’t sense if he tried ― I would bet my right arm that the same bond was affecting my body at the moment.

This revelation did nothing to soothe me, though, and I collapsed onto my pillow, my body weakened, my mind exhausted.

A
aron had been feeling strange for days.

Something was wrong.

In a remote part of his mind, a voice whispered; an elusive thought was almost taking hold. However, this thought would steal out of his reach every time his conscious mind tried to pin it down.

It had been ten days since he had so unceremoniously ‘thrown’ the redheaded girl ― he didn’t even remember her name ― from his room.

He hadn’t seen her since; which suited him just fine, seeing as he wanted nothing more to do with her. It was true that he had deeply regretted his behavior toward her and would have taken it back if he could. It was also true that he still wanted her.

But he knew better than to act on want!

He would stay away from her as well as he could. He would see her again, of course, since she had to come to class eventually, but he was sure she would ignore him as he would ignore her.

It was Friday evening, and most of the student body was getting ready to drop in at one of the parties some of the students always threw.

It was only eight o’clock, but Aaron felt strangely exhausted. Taking off his shoes, and vowing to rest his eyes only for a minute, he fell fast asleep.

The room was mostly dark. The only light came from a blazing fire opposite the bed. His fireplace, he realized, looking around the dimly lit room.

Suddenly sensing he wasn’t alone, his gaze shifted to his right and came to rest on the figure lying beside him on the bed.

She was on her stomach, her head resting on her arms which she had folded under, using them as a pillow. Her body lay wrapped in his white bedspread, covering her otherwise naked skin, concealing every bit of her but the part above her breasts.

Her fiery red curls were spread out around her pale delicate face, the color even paler than usual in comparison with her hair which was glowing like embers from being lit up by the dancing flames.

She was so hauntingly beautiful at this moment that it took Aaron’s breath away.

He wondered vaguely if he dared reach out and touch her. He wanted to so badly that his body started trembling!

Afraid to do anything to distress her, he started to pull away his already extended hand when he suddenly realized none of this could be real. Nothing in this world would entice her to share his bed! Not after the way he had treated her.

With the realization that he was dreaming came the notion that he was free to do whatever he wished. She was, after all, only a figment of his dream. Therefore, nothing he did had the power to hurt or distress her.

Delighting in the thought that he could at least touch her in this vivid, realistic dream, that he could have what his body yearned for, which was denied him in reality, he reached out to touch the soft bare skin of her back. His fingertips were a hair’s breadth from her skin when her image shifted right before his eyes.

Her eyes flew open at the same instant as her right hand shot out from under her head and wrapped itself around his wrist, her fingers clawing at his flesh with such desperate strength that the tendons stood out on the back of her hand.

Her terrifyingly distorted face had gone from pale to ghostly white, dark bruises marring the skin under her eyes, making them seem even larger on her suddenly skeletal face.

Her movements had been so sudden, so inhumanly fast, her appearance so appalling, that Aaron was shocked out of his senses. He felt like a kid, secretly watching the horror movie his parents had forbidden him to watch, feeling exhilarated at first and traumatized the next moment; suddenly wishing he’d listened to his parents.

As he sat and stared in disbelief, unable to move a muscle, she turned her whole body toward him.

He only had a moment to wonder about the strange mark on her chest above her left breast ― was it a rose? ― when she opened her mouth, only just managed to get out the words she so desperately needed him to hear, and then disappeared in a swirl of color and motion as Aaron’s dream went up in smoke, and he came crashing back to reality.

Turning on every light in the room in a feeble attempt to chase away the nightmarish image of her, Aaron paced frantically up and down his room; his apprehension for her warring with his inability to believe any part of the dream to be real.

Ignoring his first stubborn impulse to bury the dream in the darkest recesses of his mind, the part of his consciousness that had continuously whispered to him, urging him for days to delve into the mystery of why he felt so strange, finally broke free of its confinement.

Inhibited no longer, it didn’t merely whisper. It shouted!

With a cry so ferocious, Aaron hadn’t believed it possible, his inner voice raged at him to do what his dream image of her had so desperately pleaded with her last breath.

Running from the room as fast as his legs would carry him, he finally listened to his inner voice; governed by the bond between them, it guided him without fail in the direction of her room. Carrying his laboring body along, his feet hit the floor in powerful rhythmic motions.

As each step thumped loudly in Aaron’s ears, in complete synchronicity with his frantically beating heart, his mind replayed the image of her desperate request, the breathless whisper that had escaped her dying lips.

As he rushed toward her, hoping against hope that he wasn’t too late, her last words echoed hollowly inside his head.

“Save … me.”

Aaron sprinted up three flights of stairs in the girl’s building. The bond that continued to guide him had grown weaker and weaker as the minutes flew by, threatening to break off at any second and leave him utterly helpless in finding her, thereby condemning the girl to death.

Although, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that the moment he no longer felt the connection he would already be too late because it meant that her heart had stopped beating.

Vowing not even to entertain such a notion, he pushed on down the hall, feeling the tiny spark of the bond going out just as he reached her door.

Refusing to give up on her, frantically trying and failing to open the door which she had obviously locked, he let the panic he felt completely take over his senses, willing his adrenaline-flooded body to do the only thing he could think of that might still save her ― if it wasn’t already too late.

Retreating as far as he could, he inhaled deeply, and then charged straight for her door, crashing into it, and taking it down with the force of a raging bull, showering the hall and her room with an array of wooden splinters.

How long had it been since he had felt her spark go out?

Seconds? Minutes? He no longer knew!

Running toward her unmoving, deathly pale body, he tried to block everything else from his thoughts as he concentrated single-mindedly on what he needed to do.

Feeling for a pulse, his heart skipped a couple of beats when his senses confirmed what he had already felt to be true:

Her heart was no longer beating!

Aaron couldn’t let her be dead!

The sound of her pleading last words haunted him. It would be his fault if she was dead. Because he had hesitated!

She had used the bond between them and had cried out for help. He had been her only hope.

And he had failed her!

Beside himself at this very thought, he clutched at her, pulling her upper body toward him, starting to fill her lungs with air and massage her no longer beating heart.

A minute went by, then another. More minutes passed.

Nothing.

No intake of breath.

No heartbeat.

No spark!

Completely overwhelmed by everything that had happened that night, and left with a sense of loss so acute, so painful, that he could hardly breathe, Aaron hugged her body to his, no longer concerned about appearances.

Holding her close, he rocked her gently, mourning the loss of a life he hadn’t come to know and the rupture of a link he hadn’t come to understand, and now never would; and knowing deep down that he could have prevented this tragedy if he had only been braver and had acted more decidedly.

As he bent down and placed a gentle kiss on her cold lifeless lips, tears of regret rolling silently down his cheeks to glisten upon her beautiful white skin, he felt it.

A spark!

It was so weak and had flickered so unsteadily that, for a moment, Aaron thought he might have imagined it. Then he felt it again.

It was still very weak, but he could tell it was getting a little stronger. Touching his fingers to her wrist, he could at last feel a pulse. Aaron let out a long shaky breath of relief.

Although he had been able to feel the tiny spark through their connection, he had had to make sure by feeling for her pulse. He still didn’t trust this other strange and utterly alien sense!

Knowing it would take only minutes for someone to come to her room, having of course heard the thunderous crash of the door being smashed to pieces, Aaron had to figure out what to tell people when they came to investigate the source of the noise.

Even as he came up with a hopefully convincing story, the first students arrived in the doorway, looking at the ‘scene of the crime’ with shocked and reproachful looks on their faces, as if smashing down female students’ doors was one of his favorite pastimes and something he did with relish.

“Professor Chambers?” one of the two girls standing in the entryway asked uncertainly. “What happened? Did you run down the door? How … why
…
?”

“Is she dead?” the other one interrupted in an incredulous voice.

“No, she’ll be fine,” Aaron countered in a confident voice.

“One of the nurses got an anonymous call a few minutes back; the caller said this girl had swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills in an attempt to kill herself,” he lied wildly.

“I happened to come upon the nurse just as she was trying to figure out what to do, and told her I’d get to the girl right away and take care of her. I had to break through the locked door in order to get to her in time. But her pulse is steady, and I’m taking her to the hospital straight away,” Aaron added, hoping his story didn’t sound too much like the flimsy excuse it was.

Lifting her gently off the bed, he carried her past the gawking girls into the hall. Turning back toward them, he added:

“If you would be so kind as to let the janitor know, he’ll probably want to replace the door as soon as possible.”

“As for the pills she swallowed, I’m taking the empty container with to show the doctors what she took. So, there should be no need to go through her personal belongings,” he added as an afterthought, trying to keep anybody from snooping around her room, while supplying the girls with a reasonable explanation for the conspicuous absence of any evidence that would back up his story.

The girls nodded their understanding and kept on staring at his back as he headed slowly down the hall toward the stairs.

Having realized on the spot that he couldn’t take her to the hospital, he walked from the building, carefully disappearing into the dark shadows, so that nobody watching would be able to tell in which direction he headed.

Under normal circumstances, the hospital would have been the first and only place he would have taken her to, seeing as she had nearly escaped death, was still very weak and seemingly dehydrated, and most importantly, had not yet regained consciousness.

For all he knew, she could be in a coma. Although he had no idea what to do to help her, he was absolutely certain of one thing:

No hospital could help her!

It was true that the doctors could restore her weak and dehydrated body.

They would ask a lot of questions, of course, none of which he would be able to answer to their satisfaction; because he couldn’t tell them about an anonymous call no one could confirm, or that she had taken pills they would be unable to trace in her system.