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  Souls of Fire

  Book One of the Souls Series

  VANESSA BLACK

  Souls of Fire

  Copyright © 2015 by Vanessa Black

  Cover Art by Ravven

  http://www.ravven.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  This book is dedicated to Klaus,

  my love and best friend.

  Without your faith and encouragement,

  this book would never have seen the light of day.

  Thank you. I love you.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 * Petals

  Chapter 2 * Desire

  Chapter 3 * Rejection

  Chapter 4 * Hurt

  Chapter 5 * Discoveries

  Chapter 6 * Regrets

  Chapter 7 * Secret Passage

  Chapter 8 * Refuge

  Chapter 9 * Book of Light

  Chapter 10 * Haven

  Chapter 11 * Legacy

  Chapter 12 * Caisleán an Draíocht

  Chapter 13 * Broken Truths

  Chapter 14 * Moonlight Serenade

  Chapter 15 * Void

  Chapter 16 * Sundrenched World

  Chapter 17 * Sacrifice

  Sneak Peek: Soul of Darkness

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  Prologue

  D arkness was biding its time. There was no need to force that which was ordained. The future was written, no one could change it … no one would dare try!

  Destined to fear, hate and destroy, all mankind had ever needed was a little nudge in the right direction. And Darkness lived everywhere, in the best and the worst of living creatures, hiding patiently in the most remote recesses of the mind.

  Where human nature was frail, Darkness seized power at the right moment, turning its once planted hateful seed into a pit of purest black and opening the souls up to evil. That was all that was needed; just a tiny push … and a model member of society went over the edge, taking down whoever stood in his or her way.

  Thinking of mankind’s inability to grasp the true nature behind evil, anger washed over Darkness once more. Evil was all humans ever talked about, it got all the limelight. Whenever madness ensued, it was because of evil. Darkness was sick of it!

  Why would they not understand? Evil could only do so much. It was not everywhere, Darkness was. It had existed before evil … was the very foundation for it. Without Darkness, evil could never exist! Darkness crept into the purest of souls, into souls in which evil could not penetrate. But Darkness was there, since the dawn of time, waiting…

  And now, finally, the time had come: there would be no more waiting. The end of the world was perceptibly nigh, though humans perceived nothing! Humans … they would recognize the end when it was upon them. But then it would be too late. Then, everything would be dark for all eternity.

  Everything Darkness had longed for was virtually within its grasp. The world was slowly unraveling … mankind’s true destiny gradually unfolding.

  Darkness’ reign had come at last.

  And no power on this earth would stand in its way…

  On a dark night long ago, underneath a blood-red moon, was born a legacy, a foe, a darkness that arrives too soon.

  The world will end in blazing fire, will turn to dust and blow away. Humanity will thus expire, condemned to watch, to hope and pray.

  Charcoal black and red as blood, drawn like moths to the flame, desire rushing like a flood, sending fire through their veins.

  Star-crossed lovers meant to die, born to a dark and twisted fate, taking down with them the sky; mankind’s outcry comes too late.

  Cursed to live aside each other as they are consumed by lust; bound to one another until the earth is naught but dust.

  Thus will come about the end, when the rose is in full bloom; lest another’s heart should mend, beware impending doom.

  Darkness shall fall and cover earth with everlasting night. Say your goodbyes to friends and foes, to love and to the light.

  Chapter 1 * Petals

  I sat on the window ledge of my bedroom looking out at the stormy clouds rolling in overhead. Sitting here on the large wooden window seat, leaning against squashy pillows and all cuddled up in cozy blankets, I always loved to look out at the stormy sky, at trees being swayed and branches being whipped in every direction by the sheer force of unrestrained nature.

  It always looked like a dramatic dance to me. Trees bending over as if in desperation, their branches powerfully yet gracefully reaching out in silent pleas.

  And it usually gave me a strong sense of safety, sitting in the warmth of my room while a storm was raging right before my eyes. A storm, which although so near I could see it, hear it, and smell it in the air, did not have the power to touch me in my beloved sanctuary.

  But today something was off. Today I didn’t feel safe or cozy. I felt afraid and lost.

  “Persephone, dinner will be ready in five minutes. If you haven’t washed up yet, you’d better do it now, Sweetie … Sweetie?”

  It took me a while to get my hazy thoughts clear enough to grasp that I’d been spoken to. Although I hadn’t paid any attention to the actual content, I knew the gist of my mother’s words. I knew them by heart.

  “‘Kay mom, I’ll be right down,” I called toward the kitchen.

  Still not having moved an inch away from the window, my gaze now followed the small glistening drops of rainwater collecting on the windowpane, sliding slowly down the outer surface and dropping out of sight.

  I didn’t really know why I had this strange sense of unease, this inexplicable feeling of no longer being safe; or more importantly, this mind-numbing fear I just couldn’t seem to shake. I couldn’t put my finger on it. It felt as if the world I knew and loved was slowly but irrevocably beginning to spin out of my control.

  I didn’t even know what to be afraid of. All I knew for certain was that this feeling had not developed over any length of time. It had crept up on me seemingly overnight as if something had happened, as if some cataclysmic event had occurred to set it off.

  Oh man, cataclysmic event? Okay, I’ve officially lost it!

  I threw off my cuddly white woolen blanket and got to my feet. I let out a long sigh and left my room to go downstairs for dinner.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you, Persephone,” my mom was grinning from ear to ear, looking at me expectantly, obviously waiting for some kind of response; probably hoping that I would be out of myself with curiosity.

  Not wanting to hurt her feelings or be made responsible by my dad for my mom complaining about my mood swings to him throughout his favorite television show later in the evening, I made my mouth turn up at the corners as much as I possibly could ― which wasn’t much ― and let some curiosity seep into my voice.

  “Really? What is it?”

  “I know you said you didn’t want us to make a big fuss about your birthday,” her voice trailed off.

  “But?” I asked in a resigned voice, already knowing this wouldn’t end in the way I’d hoped, and knowing there was nothing I could do about it once my mom had ganged up on me. Even though I hadn’t glanced in my father’s direction, I knew he represented the other part of the ‘gang’. My dad didn’t have to say anything on the subjec
t for me to know he’d automatically take my mother’s side.

  “Well, I just thought we could at least have some birthday cake for dessert. That hardly qualifies as a ‘fuss’!”

  I’d spent the better half of the past week trying to explain to my mother that I didn’t want a big party. Even though my mom had gone on and on about the importance of not missing out on things I would regret having missed later on in life, I’d tried to get out of throwing a birthday party or of being presented with a surprise party. Therefore, I was actually relieved to hear the surprise was only a birthday cake and nothing more. Cake I could do.

  It was only the idea of throwing a big party that I just couldn’t warm up to. It was my eighteenth birthday, a birthday that deserved a greater celebration than just any birthday. But the thought of having lots and lots of people there that didn’t care about me in the least just didn’t seem so thrilling.

  I preferred to have just this little celebration at home, surrounded by the people that loved me, instead of having a million people around that didn’t give a damn.

  “Okay, I give up!” I cried, throwing my hands up in front of me in a playful gesture of surrender.

  “Cake is fine,” I added with a smile.

  Actually, my birthday was almost over. I was born at eleven p.m., so my birthday had already started yesterday. Seeing as my parents had to get up early for work and, therefore, went to bed timely, I always celebrated it the day after so that they could celebrate with me.

  My dad was a sales man in his late forties. His once dark brown hair had started to go grey a couple of years back and was gradually thinning out. He was a man of medium height and medium build, not too fat, nor too thin. His face was kind, and his brown eyes had a soft warmth about them. To the casual observer, however, there was nothing remarkable about him.

  My mom was in her mid-forties and waited tables in a high-class French restaurant in town, always a little stressed out when coming home from a hard day of running around for hours at a time and never failing to complain about her aching feet. She normally worked the early shift, even helping out in the kitchen long before opening hours so that she could be home earlier to do her housework during the light of day.

  She had long straight dark-blonde hair, blue eyes, and a nice body for her age, which probably came from walking to and from tables for hours on end.

  I loved my parents dearly and was grateful for everything they did for me, but I had never really been close to them in the sense of fully understanding them or confiding in them about my dreams or about the things that moved me.

  I was very unlike my parents in many ways. There was a barrier separating us, an invisible line that kept me from telling them about my life, my dreams, my fears. Somehow, without even attempting to let them know me better, I’d always known they wouldn’t really understand me.

  My parents loved me very much and would have done anything for their ‘little girl’, but that didn’t mean they knew me at all.

  As different as my thinking was from theirs, so were my looks. I had fair skin, was rather tall, and had a slim build. I was not too skinny, though, and therefore, didn’t lack feminine curves. Although I didn’t work out and was not really the athletic type, my height and the fact that I had long legs seemed to work in my favor.

  According to my parents, my hair and eyes had been the biggest surprise to them upon my birth. Apparently I had glimpsed this world with thick curly hair the shade of gleaming red flames and the brightest emerald eyes imaginable. Both my mother and father had been at a loss to uncover, which one of their family members had ever had such fiercely red hair or exactly that shade of emerald-green eyes; or more accurately: which family member had even remotely red hair or green eyes.

  As the months after my birth went by without a change to either my hair or my eyes, they had allegedly just accepted this little ‘abnormality’ in their families’ bloodline and hadn’t thought about it from here on after.

  My hair was now so long that the thick red curls fell slightly past my waist. I didn’t have any of the freckles which usually accompany fair skin and red hair.

  The only marking on my white skin was a birthmark on the left side of my chest, placed on the rise of my breast, above my heart. It was light brown in color with an almost reddish hue and was as big around as a quarter.

  I’d often stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror in my room trying to distinguish some kind of shape that would render it interesting, but had never been able to see anything in particular. It was just a formless birthmark which happened to be located at exactly the right spot on my body to be a constant burden to me.

  I’d never been able to wear anything even remotely sexy for fear of having everybody laugh at the ugly birthmark on my chest. I’d always tried to hide it from my fellow students, wearing only T-shirts or high-necked sweaters.

  Tomorrow would be different, though. Tomorrow I was going to start my first semester at college. I had been accepted to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. It had been quite a shock to find out they had actually accepted me! Though I’d applied as one of the top students of my year, I had never really envisioned being so lucky.

  Tomorrow a new chapter in my life would start, and I had made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t hide anymore. Ugly as I would always think my strange birthmark to be, I would no longer let it rule my life. I would not let it continue to inhibit me. Of course, I wouldn’t dress in anything tacky from now on, but I would wear low-cut clothing that showed at least a little bit of cleavage. Even a little bit of cleavage was enough, though, to have my birthmark in plain view.

  The next morning I stood in front of my mirror and looked at my reflection through droopy eyes. I hadn’t slept well. All night long, I’d tossed and turned, and just couldn’t seem to settle down enough to drift off to sleep.

  I was terribly nervous about going to college. I didn’t know if any of my former fellow students from my home town of Woodstock, Vermont, were going to Brown University, seeing as it was an elite college. Even if they were, it made little difference, as I didn’t have any friends among them.

  Actually, I didn’t have any friends. I’d always seemed too strange to the other kids for them to want to get to know me. I never really got along with any boys my age, and girls my age had other interests.

  Unlike them, I didn’t constantly obsess about boys, and although I was very pretty, I didn’t give my appearance any particular thought.

  Of course, I did try to look nice for school, but I didn’t make as big of a fuss as other girls did. I managed to look good without trying, which made the other girls who tried too hard angry, and made popular boys ask me out ― which, of course, made them even angrier.

  I did my homework most of the time and studied hard when it was required, so I did very well in school. But other than being a means to an end, enabling me to go to college one day, my studies meant little to me and didn’t fulfill me.

  I lived in my own little world. A world of fantasies and myth, of heroes, fairy tales and horror stories, monsters and demons, fairies and angels. A world made up of every story I had ever read, of every moment I had ever dared step into the pages of an unknown world full of every unimaginable beauty and horror.

  A world made up of images so heartbreakingly beautiful and real to me that I couldn’t believe having only pictured them in my imagination.

  More than anything, I longed to lose myself in the books I read, to leave everyday life behind and be part of something important, something meaningful. My own life in comparison seemed strange and forlorn to me. This normal life, without any of the glorious images I pictured in my mind while reading, didn’t hold much pleasure for me.

  I craved the unexpected, the impossible, the unimaginable. In short: I was lost in my own little world of stories in which no one really existed but me, so that I had nobody to share it all with.

  Ultimately, that might also have been the reason why I had never felt the
least bit attracted to the opposite sex ― boys just hadn’t felt real to me.

  This will just have to do, I sighed internally, looking at the outfit I had selected for that day. There really wasn’t anything wrong with my looks, but I felt so nervous and insecure at the thought of all the strangers I would meet, students as well as professors, that I wanted to look nothing short of amazing on my first day at college. Too bad, I would have to settle for looking pretty.

  I was wearing an airy white ruffled cotton blouse cut out in a square, showing part of my white delicate shoulders and the skin above my breasts along with the birthmark I no longer wanted to hide. The blouse reached down to a little past my hips. Its long flowing sleeves hugged my wrists and then widened, letting the laced cuffs spread out to the middle of my long pale fingers.

  My thick fiery curls sprung up around me in an untamed manner and spiraled downward to come to rest against the hem of my favorite pair of low-cut stonewashed blue jeans, which I wore on top of a pair of candy-apple red high heels.

  As I was blessed with a nice rosy complexion and very long dark eyelashes despite my red hair, I didn’t need to put on any makeup.

  My full lips had a nice rosy color as well, but I liked them a little redder, so I grabbed the dove-grey bag I had already slung around my shoulder and stuck my hand inside, shuffling around books, pens, used and unused tissues and packs of chewing gum until my groping fingers finally found my favorite lipstick.

  I puckered my lips in front of the mirror and applied a thin layer of crimson to them. Placing the lipstick back in my bag, I was turning away from the mirror, when I caught a glimpse of my birthmark out of the corner of my eye. I whirled back around to look at it more closely and gasped.

  It can’t be! I thought, my heart beating loudly in my ears. A sound like rushing water was drowning out every other sound but that of my pulse.