I strengthened my tight black-purple mini skirt and turned my look at Professor Flaura again. The Academy uniform looked good on me and it made me feel quite confident.
“Gwen?”
A male voice echoed in my mind. Another intruder?
“Gwen!”
The voice insisted. I turned around, and then I saw the man.
He was sitting at a desk close to the classroom door, dressed in a black-purple leather jacket and worn-out jeans. He looked gorgeous with his brown unruly hair and three-days beard.
“Hello, handsome,” I almost let slip out. I forced myself to behave and instead I put on my most beautiful smile and I playfully batted my eyelashes. Nothing bad with flirting with a good-looking guy, however, I had decided that I would not cross the red line and date one while in the Academy.
And then I froze. Something was wrong with him. Not with his appearance, nothing was wrong with it, he was like the incarnation of Loki. Something was wrong with him inside. It was like there was nothing below his perfect appearance, like there was nothing inside of him; like he had no soul.
“How can that be? Everyone has a soul,” was my first thought, naïve and ignorant as I was. In my 18 years of life, I had not met yet a single living person with no heartbeat.
“Are you alright?” he asked, and I hoped he had not read my thoughts about him.
“Oh, yes,” I mumbled as if I had just gotten out of bed.
A shiver went down my spine. His thoughts felt cold as charity, but what freaked me out the most was that I felt no sentiment, no feeling being transferred to me through his thoughts.
That was freaking weird. How could that be possible? I fixed him with a stare trying to delve into his mind. I could not.
“You are so delicious. I am going to take you home and have lunch with you,” he said telepathically.
“That is never going to happen!” I cried out and I rushed to cover my mouth with my hand, thunderstruck and embarrassed for the words that slipped out of my mouth.
“What did you just say?” Professor Flaura fixed me with his gaze, surprised by my behavior.
“I’m going to feast with your sweet blood tonight and I’m going to drain you out until the last drop.”
Terrified, I drew my chair back and stood up. The sound of a chair scraping against the floor made him turn his head and stop signaling his thoughts to me.
Much to my relief, a student that was sitting at the desk in the back of the classroom was now walking toward us. Arthur’s blue eyes flashed with anger and he had his fist clenched beside his body when he came to stand by my side.
“Is everything alright, Gwen?” Arthur asked and gave the bully a stiff once over.
“I hope so,” I replied after a moment of hesitation. “Where did you come from?”
“None of your business” the weirdo retorted as he sank deeper in his chair.
“Oh, yes, it is,” Arthur smirked. “In fact, we all must leave the classroom now. There is a gas leak and we must evacuate immediately. There is an extremely high danger of explosion and fire. You don’t want to get grilled, do you?”
“Is that true? Are we really in danger?” I wondered, trying not to give away my puzzlement.
My hands started shaking with terror and my heart raced wildly. I shivered as I got a closer look at the other man. His dark brown eyes flashed with anger under his furrowed brow, and I could clearly see a throbbing vein in his neck which made me feel even more insecure and perplexed about the situation I had unwillingly found myself in. That guy scared the heck out of me.
I was afraid. No, not just afraid. I was terrified and all I wanted was to get the heck out of there and get back home. I knew that was impossible and that made me panic even more.
“I’ve been here for less than a day and this place is freaking me out!”
The young student who I had fun with a few minutes before ran out of the classroom, freaked out of fear of the supposedly gas leak. Professor Flaura and the rest of the class followed him. I could not blame them.
“You need to leave this place,” Arthur said to the black-haired man.
“Okay,” the man responded after a few seconds silence, “I’m leaving. That does not mean I won’t have what I want,” he said as he stood up on his feet and walked toward the exit. Right before he got out, he turned around and stared at me in a way that made me feel chilled to the bone.
“You’ll be mine before dawn cracks,” I heard him saying into my mind.
Horrified by the unspoken threat, I did not realize that I had grabbed Arthur’s arm, squeezing it fiercely. It was that touch that opened the door to his soul to me.
It was like my touch had penetrated the soft fabric of his purple-black suit and had reached the depths of his heart. What appeared to be cold was, in fact, radiating warmth and caring. I was still holding his left arm in a tight grip when he slipped his right arm protectively around my shoulder. Suddenly, a stream of spinning images filled in my mind and my heart raced frantically as the images carried a blast of sentiments in me. Pictures of men, women, and children, some of them dressed in modern clothes, others in garments that resembled old paintings of past centuries, whirled in my mind. Anger, terror, happiness, grief; all kind of emotions whipped my soul simultaneously.
“Don’t be afraid. I won’t let him hurt you,” he whispered in my head.
Panic-stricken by the uncontrollable flow of memories of
