Serafina and the Splintered Heart Read online

  At that moment, memories of her life began to flow slowly through her like a quiet river. She saw herself eating supper with her pa in the workshop, and lying on Biltmore’s highest rooftop with Braeden as they counted stars in the midnight sky, and running happily through the forest in panther form with her mother and Waysa. She saw herself sitting in front of the fireplace in Mr. Vanderbilt’s library as he told her stories from his books and travels, and sitting quietly at morning tea with Mrs. Vanderbilt, who had recently announced that she was with child.

  Then she remembered her friend Essie, one of Biltmore’s maids, helping her lace up the beautiful golden-cream gown that Braeden had given her for the Christmas party. She remembered looking at herself in Essie’s mirror, seeing a twelve-year-old girl with sharp, feline angles to her cheekbones, amber-yellow eyes, and long, shiny black hair, and thinking, for the first time, she was going to fit in just fine.

  The memory of the Christmas party swirled around in her mind. She could so vividly remember the softness of the candlelight, the scent of the wood on the fire, the smile on her pa’s face, and the warmth of Braeden’s hand on her back as they entered the room together. It was a moment of peace and triumph, not just because she and Braeden had defeated their enemies, but because she felt like she truly belonged.

  The last night she remembered at Biltmore, she had been making her rounds through the house on a winter evening. The memory came to her in snatches. She was the Guardian, the protector against intruding spirits and other dangers. Everyone else had gone to bed, and she had the darkened corridors of the house to herself, just like she liked it. She stepped out onto the formal back patio, which the Vanderbilts called the Loggia. The sheer white curtains in the doorway glowed in the moonlight as they fluttered in the cold winter breeze. She looked out across the grounds of the estate toward the forest and the mountains in the distance. The full moon was rising over the peaks.

  All was still in the house, but then she felt an unusual movement of air around her and a disturbing chill ran up her spine. The hairs on the back of her neck went up. Suddenly she sensed something behind her. She spun around, ready to fight, but all she could see was a black and roiling darkness where the walls and windows of the house should have been.

  Something struck her chest with piercing pain. A storm of wind swept around her. Her mind filled with confusion. She fought with tooth and claw, growling and hissing and biting. Blood was everywhere.

  But then it all went black, and the memory faded.

  She stood now beside her own grave in the pale light of the moon in the center of the angel’s glade and looked around her. She was miles from home. What a strange and haunted place to find herself crawling from the ground! The loose dirt was tracked with human footprints and what looked like shovel marks. There was no gravestone, just a mound of dirt. She reckoned that whoever buried her didn’t want her found. Had someone attempted to murder her and then hide the body?

  She looked up at the stone angel. “What did you see that night?”

  But the angel didn’t answer. She stood on her pedestal of stone as mute and immutable as she always did. The angel was old and weathered, mottled with dark moss and green patina. She had long, curling hair and a beautiful face, with tears of dark sap streaming down her cheeks. To Serafina her face seemed to be filled with the silent wisdom of knowingness, as if the angel held inside her the fate and fortune of those she loved, and it was all too much to bear. The angel held her mighty, finely feathered wings above her, and she gripped a long, sharp steel sword in her hand. It was the very sword that Serafina had used to cut and destroy the Black Cloak.

  The angel stood in the center of a small clearing of bright green grass. The leaves on the trees and bushes around the angel’s glade stayed green all year round, never drying in the summer’s sun, or changing color in autumn, or falling to the ground in winter. The angel’s glade was a place of eternal spring.

  The north side of the glade led deep into the rest of the old graveyard, which had been taken back by the encroaching forest long ago, with vines covering many of the headstones and stringy moss hanging down from the black limbs of crooked trees. The graveyard stretched on for as far as Serafina could see, endless rows of tilting, toppled, half-buried monuments marking the graves of hundreds of dead, rotting bodies and lost souls. A gray whispery mist floated listlessly through the graveyard, as if searching for a place to linger. As Serafina peered across the graveyard looking for signs of movement, she hoped that she was the only body that had crawled forth from the grave tonight.

  Finally, she said to her buried companions, “Sorry to be gettin’ on my way so soon, but it turns out that I was just a-visiting for a while.”

  She walked to the other side of the angel’s glade, which led into the natural part of the forest that she knew so well. Looking into the trees made her think about her catamount mother. She had learned so much from her mother. They’d run through the forest together and hunted together. She’d learned the sounds of the night birds and the movement of the woodland creatures. She wondered why her mother hadn’t sensed her and come to her like she had so many times before.

  It began to sink in that her pa hadn’t come for her, either, and neither had Braeden.

  No one had come.

  She was alone.

  Fear began to well up in her mind. As she thought about what might have happened to the people she loved, her heart felt heavy in her chest. She didn’t know what had attacked her or how long she’d been gone. She wondered what the people of Biltmore would think when she walked into the mansion covered in graveyard dirt, but her true fear, deep down, was that they wouldn’t be there at all, that she’d find the house empty, full of nothing but shadows.

  Anxious to get moving, she headed into the forest, following the path that would take her to Biltmore. She had to get home.

  Serafina followed the path through the darkened forest at a quick pace, down into a ravine dense with ancient maple and hemlock trees. Her legs felt strong and steady beneath her as she weaved between the great trunks of the forest’s oldest inhabitants.

  A chorus of tree frogs, peepers, and insects filled her ears, and the scents of primrose and moonflower wafted past her nose. The evening flowers stayed closed during the day, but opened with their sweet smells at night.

  Everything seemed unusually vibrant to her tonight, like her body and her senses were alive with new sensations.

  The forest grew thick with rosebay rhododendron bushes glimmering in the silver moonlight. Hummingbird moths hovered over the white and pinkish blooms, dipping into the recesses of the flowers and sipping out the nectar within. It almost felt as if she could hear the beat of the moths’ wings against the night air.

  Fireflies floated in the darkness above the shiny green leaves of the laurel. Soft flashes of lightning danced on the silver-clouded sky behind them, and a gentle thunder rolled through the darkness, moving on the rising heat of what felt like a summer breeze.

  “This is all so strange…” she said to herself, looking around her in confusion as she traveled. The last night she remembered, it had been winter, but the air felt strangely warm now. And these plants and insects didn’t come out in winter. Had the magic of the angel’s glade somehow extended out into the rest of the forest?

  When she glanced up at the moon, what she saw stopped her dead in her tracks. The moon was not all the way full, but large and bright, with the light on the right and the shadow on the left.

  “That’s not right,” she said, frowning. That night she was on the Loggia the moon had been full, which meant what she was seeing now was impossible.

  She knew that the moon was only full one night a month, then it would wane for fourteen nights, with the light on the left side, getting smaller and smaller until it was dark for a single evening. Then it would wax for fourteen nights, with the light on the right, until it was full once more. Then it would start all over again.

  The moon was the great calen
dar in the sky by which she had marked the nights of her life, wandering through the grounds of Biltmore Estate by herself. The steady phases of her pale companion, the slow sweep of the glistening stars, and the curving transit of the five brightest planets had been her silent but loyal confidants for as long as she could remember. They were her midnight brothers and her dark-morning sisters. She had spoken to them, learned from them, watched them as a girl sees the members of her family moving around her.

  But tonight she looked at her sister the moon in confusion, a thumping urgency in her temples as she tried to figure out the meaning of what she was seeing. The moon was lit on the right side. That meant it was waxing, getting larger each night. But if the moon had been full the last time she saw it, how could it be waxing now?

  It was as if she’d fallen backward a night in time. Either that or something equally unimaginable: She’d been underground for more than an entire cycle of the moon.

  “That means twenty-eight nights have passed, maybe more…” she said to herself in astonishment.

  The breeze whispered through the tops of the trees as if the hidden spirits of the forest were nervously discussing that she had discovered the universe’s ruse. Time flew forward. Time flew back. Nothing was as it seemed. People were buried underground and people came back. She was in a world of many in-betweens.

  Another set of flashes lit up the sky and danced silently among the clouds, then the thunder rolled on, echoing across the mountainsides.

  She had always been able to see things other people could not, especially in the dark of night, but tonight there seemed to be a special magic in the forest. It felt as if she could actually see the evening flowers slowly opening their petals to the moon and the glint of starlight on the iridescent wings of the insects. She felt the caress of the air as it slipped through the branches of the trees, around her body, and against her skin. She sensed the stony firmness of the earth and rock on which she stood. The tiny droplets of dew on the clover leaves around her suddenly glistened, and a moment later, the white light of the distant lightning shone in her eyes. Water and earth and light and sky…It was as if she had become intermingled with the faintest elements of the world, as if she were in tune with the slip and sway of the nocturnal realm in a way that she had never been before.

  She continued walking, but as she gazed through the trees she spotted what appeared to be a crease of blackness in the distance. She tilted her head in confusion. Was it a shadow? She couldn’t make it out. But as she narrowed her eyes to look at it, she realized that whatever it was, it was moving, not toward her or away, but hovering in the air, like a rippling black wave.

  The skin on her arms rose up with goose bumps. She couldn’t help but wonder if what she was seeing was related to the black shape that had attacked her at Biltmore.

  She knew she should leave it alone, but she was too curious to turn away. She slowly moved closer until she was maybe a dozen steps from it, then she stopped and studied the black shape. It appeared to be about five feet long, floating of its own accord a few feet off the ground, like a long banner held in the breeze. And it was utterly black, blacker than anything she had ever seen.

  Suddenly, a wind swept through the trees. A gust kicked up from the forest floor, swirling small tornados of leaves around her. The branches hanging above her began to creak and bend, like the swaying limbs of old, twisted men, their long, twiggy hands dangling down onto her head and shoulders. When the cold mist of a coming rain touched her face, she realized that a storm was near. And then she spotted a dark figure making its way toward her through the trees.

  Serafina sucked in a breath in surprise and dropped to the ground to hide. She scrambled beneath the base of a half-toppled tree where the spidering roots had pulled up from the earth and created a small cave. Pressing herself in as deep as she could go, she peered out through the small holes between the roots.

  The man, or creature, or whatever it was, moved toward her through the forest with a slow and deliberate pace, like a predator hunting for prey. It stalked on two long, gangly legs, its back hunched over and its head hanging down, its shoulders swaying one way and then the other as it gazed from side to side. Even as hunched as it was, the creature was very tall, with long, crooked arms dangling in front of it like a praying mantis, and the elongated fingers of its spindling hands like white, scaly talons, tipped with sharp, curving, clawlike fingernails. It moved with steady purpose, scraping its feet through the leaves of the forest floor, the movement of its bones sounding like cracking branches.

  What kind of godforsaken thing is that? she thought, cowering in her hole. Is it some kind of vile creech that crawled from the grave the same way I did?

  The creature came closer and closer. As it stepped within a few feet of her, Serafina couldn’t keep her body from trembling. Her only hope was that the creature wouldn’t see her hiding beneath the roots at its feet.

  She could hear its breathing now, the slow wheezing, ragged, hissing breath, like a wounded animal, and she could see it more closely than she had before. A white haze lingered about its body like the smoke around a dying campfire, and straggly gray strands hung around its head like the stringy hair of a rotting corpse. When the creature turned and she saw its face, she gasped. The creature’s face had been slashed with a savage wound that oozed with the blackish, festering blood of an injury that never healed. She couldn’t tell whether the creature was a mortal man or a hellish fiend, or some combination of the two, but its sharp, pointy teeth chattered with anticipation as it scanned the forest, swaying its head back and forth as it crept forward with its dangling claws.

  At first it seemed as if the creature was going to pass her by, but then the thing stopped, standing right over her.

  Its talon-like hand grasped one of the roots of the toppled tree beneath which she was hiding. Serafina sucked in a startled breath and held it, too frightened to exhale. The creature looked one way into the forest and then the other. It seemed like it knew she was there, that it sensed her presence, maybe smelled her, but it had not yet detected exactly where she was. She held her breath like a trembling rabbit in her little den.

  The creature opened its mouth and a low, vibrating, guttural sound emerged. Then Serafina began to actually see the white air rushing from its lungs. It wasn’t just an exhalation or a long scream, but a storm. The air around her began to twist and turn, the leaves swirling up, the branches on the trees bending and cracking. The air exploded with blowing rain. The terrible noise coming from the creature’s mouth was getting louder and louder as the storm rose up all around.

  The storm-creech peered down into the mound of roots where she was hiding. Its silver-glowing eyes looked straight at her, shocking her with a blast of fear. The creature’s talons closed into a fist, crushing the roots that it had been holding. Then it began tearing the roots away with both hands, its teeth chattering as it ripped its way toward her.

  As the creature attacked, Serafina reflexively tried to shift into panther form to defend herself, but it didn’t work. For some clumsy reason, she couldn’t change. She tried again, concentrating on envisioning herself as a panther, but she couldn’t do it. She remained in her human form.

  Not knowing what else to do, she cowered down. She tried to stay out of the creature’s reach as it ripped the roots away. She thought about leaping up at the thing and fighting it with her bare hands, but it seemed far too powerful. At the last second, just as its claws touched her, she scrambled out of the roots on her belly and darted out the other side.

  A storm raged through the forest. The pelting rain roared around her. The wind blew so hard that her hair and clothes pressed against her face and body. It felt like it wasn’t going to just blow her away, but tear her into little pieces.

  But she couldn’t let the storm slow her down. The creature was right behind her. She had to get out of there. She ran headlong into the swirling rain and just kept running.

  When she looked over her shoulder, she
expected to see the creature charging up behind her, grabbing for her, but it wasn’t. It was in the distance, still ripping at the roots where she’d been hiding.

  Confused, but relieved that she’d managed to escape the wretched thing, she quickly turned to keep moving, but she nearly ran straight into an eerie black shape similar to what she’d seen before. She stopped abruptly, recoiling from it like it was a venomous snake.

  It floated right in front of her now, so sharply black that it seemed like an impossibility. The light of the moon and stars disappeared into it, and she could see nothing on the other side of it. Rain fell in, but did not come out. It was like a tear in the fabric of the world.

  The sight of it tightened her chest. Her skin buzzed. She backed away and ducked into a thicket of bushes to hide.

  When the black shape drifted in her direction, she caught her breath in surprise. She couldn’t tell if it was drifting on the winds of the storm or was actually drawn to her in some way.

  The roiling black shape floated slowly closer. She thought that the thick foliage would protect her, but the leaves and branches snapped and hissed as the black shape touched them, bursting them one by one, as it moved toward her.

  She frantically squirmed away, but the edge of the black shape touched her shoulder. The searing pain felt like she was being slashed with a burning, white-hot blade. She screamed in agony and wrenched herself away.

  Driven by blind fear, she clambered out of the thicket and ran. She spotted a rocky area and sprinted for it. When she saw the drop-off of a steep mountain slope, she jumped.

  She hit the ground hard and rolled down the earthen slope, her shoulders and legs thudding against the rocks and trees as she fell, then sprang to her feet and fled.