Serafina and the Splintered Heart Read online

  “A lot has happened since I fought against you,” Rowena said, her voice somber and weary. It was clear to Serafina that she, too, had suffered.

  “What do you mean?” Serafina asked, moving toward her. “You’ve corrupted Braeden, haven’t you? You’ve pulled him to your side.”

  “No,” Rowena said again, her voice edged with fierceness. “I haven’t.”

  “But he’s not who he was before,” Serafina said.

  “None of us are,” Rowena said.

  “He no longer cares about his animals, he’s lying to his aunt and uncle, and I told you, I saw him wearing the Black Cloak! You’ve taken him!”

  Suddenly, Rowena turned, looking around her toward an accuser she couldn’t see. “You think you know him?” she snarled. “You think you can see what’s inside his heart, whether he’s good or bad, strong or weak? You don’t know anything about any of us, cat. You’re such a little fool!”

  “But I don’t understand!” Serafina screamed at her in reply.

  “You think you’ve lost your friend? Is that it?” Rowena scoffed. “You don’t even know what friendship is!”

  “And you do?” Serafina snarled.

  “I’ve seen it!” Rowena hissed.

  “What are you talking about?” Serafina cried in confusion.

  “Sometimes you’re blind, cat, with more teeth and claws than sense,” Rowena shouted as she grabbed a flask from her cache. “I will show what I’ve seen!”

  Rowena hurled the glass flask toward the sound of Serafina’s voice. It crashed against the trunk of a tree and exploded with a great blast of whirling smoke and a bright, blinding haze. Then Rowena threw another flask and it shattered against the ground, its darkened blue contents rising up in a great swirl. Then she threw another, and the whole world felt as if it were shifting beneath Serafina’s feet. Serafina felt cold air all around her, and then the world disappeared.

  Suddenly, Serafina found herself standing inside Biltmore, the air strangely cold. The French doors to the Loggia were open, the sheer white curtains glowing with the light of the full moon and fluttering in the cold winter breeze.

  It’s the night I was attacked, Serafina thought.

  She stepped slowly out onto the Loggia, the long, beautiful outdoor room with its carved columns and sweeping archways looking out onto the forest and the mountains and the radiance of the stars above.

  These aren’t just my memories…It’s like I’m here, living through it all again.

  This was her home, her place in the world. She was Biltmore’s Guardian, watching over the people she’d sworn to protect.

  She ran her eye along the Loggia’s stone railing looking for any sort of creature that might be hiding there. She checked the vaulted ceiling sweeping over her head, looking for shadows that didn’t belong. And then she gazed out across the canopy of the forest, her eyes scanning for danger in the distance.

  But then she sensed a presence with her on the Loggia. The hairs on the back of her neck rose up as a dark shape emerged from the shadows behind her. She heard a tick-tick-ticking sound followed by a long, raspy hiss. She turned just in time to see something coming toward her.

  She ducked and leapt aside, then shifted into panther form. Her lungs filled with air and her muscles bulged with power. Her claws sprang out. She roared into an attack even as the hissing folds of the Black Cloak swept over her head and plunged her into darkness.

  She twisted her spine around and bit into the attacker’s shoulder with her long fangs. Her panther heart hammered in her chest, driving her with dire strength. She clawed viciously at the attacker’s side. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel him fighting to capture her in the cloak, pulling it over and around her. An ice-cold darkness soaked into her bones. The awful stench choked her. She fought through the dark rippling void as the Black Cloak engulfed her. She could feel her sharp panther claws slashing through the fabric, shredding it. The sound of the ripping cloth filled her ears. She kept twisting and swiping and striking, swatting wildly with her paws, fighting for her life, like she was drowning in cold black water. The slithering cloak wrapped itself around her, tightening like a coiling snake, even as it wrenched her soul away from her body and sucked her into its dark folds.

  She saw inside the cloak a black, swirling, horrible world, but then it all began to change. Her claws had slashed through the cloak’s fabric. It could no longer hold what it had captured. The ruptured cloak hurled the inner reaches of its dark void out into the world, and her soul with it.

  A boy came running on two strong legs out onto the Loggia and charged toward the attacker. As the attacker turned, the hood fell away and Serafina saw the face. The attacker wasn’t Braeden. And it wasn’t Uriah. It was Rowena.

  Barking a vicious snarl, Gidean leapt upon Rowena, knocked her to the ground and tore into her neck. Braeden, fighting strong, grabbed her and tried to hold her down.

  Serafina had already wounded Rowena, but she was still far too strong. The sorceress threw wicked spells, one barrage after another, that gashed Braeden’s face, tore at his legs, and threw him against a column.

  Gidean lunged for another attack, biting into Rowena’s side. She struggled frantically and escaped the dog, then turned to flee. Braeden clutched the shredded Black Cloak and pulled it from her just as she dropped over the railing’s edge and disappeared into the dark of night.

  Serafina lay wounded in human form on the stone floor of the Loggia, unable to move. Rowena’s spells had torn her chest and stomach with gaping wounds. When she tried to take in a breath, a lightning bolt of pain shot through her ribs. She tried to move her bloody arms and legs, but they lay uselessly around her. All she could do was watch the dark red pool of her own blood spread slowly across the floor. She knew she was going to die.

  The black fragments, the inner darkness of the Black Cloak that had been riven by her claws, floated all around her in the Loggia and began to drift with the wind.

  She tried to tilt her head to see if Braeden had survived the battle, but her neck moved in a painful jerking motion. When she finally managed to look over, she saw a terrifying sight: it wasn’t Braeden, but the body of a black panther—her—lying wounded on the floor beside her, the panther’s flesh torn in the same way hers was, her sides bleeding and her bones shattered.

  Both she and the panther were moments from death.

  She knew it was the end.

  She tried to look for Braeden, but she could not see him.

  “Braeden…” she gasped, blood gurgling in her throat.

  Finally, he came into her view. Her heart leapt when she saw that he was still alive. But his head dripped with long, jagged cuts, and he dragged his leg behind him. She watched as he knelt beside the panther and put his hands on her sides, closing his eyes as he infused the cat with his healing power. He caressed the cat’s head and spoke to her in words that Serafina couldn’t hear, running his hands down the length of her long, furred body.

  When he was done with the panther, Braeden moved quickly over to her.

  “Braeden…” she tried to say again, but her voice was so weak she knew he couldn’t hear her.

  As he frantically examined her wounds, she could see how badly she was hurt reflected in the grimace of his face.

  “I don’t know what to do, Serafina…” he said as he ripped his shirt apart and tried to stanch her bleeding with it. He couldn’t heal humans the way he could animals.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t want to go…Please say good-bye to my pa…”

  But with a heavy grunt of pain, he gathered her up into his arms. “Hold on, Serafina…” he told her, a fierce determination in his voice.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and tried to hold on to him the best she could, but she could feel her strength waning, her consciousness drifting into a swirling black void.

  Braeden carried her outside into the darkness, struggling on his bloodied leg, but unwilling to give up.

&nb
sp; “Stay with me, Serafina…” he said as he carried her, and she clung to the sound of his voice.

  As blood dripped down onto her shoulder and neck, she didn’t know whether it was his or hers. They were both shaking, bleeding, and terribly wounded, holding on to each other with their last hope. But Braeden kept moving, carrying her through the darkness.

  He took her down into the gardens and set her on the ground outside the master rosarian’s shed. Then he shouldered open the door, stormed in, and came out with supplies—old wooden apple crates, a hammer and nails, and other tools. He quickly made a crude stretcher-like box with shallow sides, and dragged her body into it. Then he fastened the end with a rope, called Gidean over, and the two of them began dragging her across the ground toward the trees.

  She drifted in and out of consciousness as Braeden and the dog pulled her through the forest, Braeden dragging his bloody leg behind him.

  When Braeden finally reached the graveyard, he dragged her to the foot of the statue in the angel’s glade and begged for the angel’s help. “Take care of her!” he shouted, his voice cracking. “You have to save her!”

  As Braeden pulled away from her, Serafina reached out with her last strength and grasped his arm. “Don’t leave me here,” she whispered hoarsely. “Don’t leave me…”

  “I’m not going to leave you, Serafina,” he told her. “I promise you, I will never leave you!”

  As she lay dying, with the blood seeping from her body, she looked up at the stars above her head and thought it was the last time she would ever see them. Her body was getting cold now. Her limbs were numb. The pain was receding. She could feel her life slipping away from her, her eyes closing for the last time.

  Then she heard the sound of digging. She saw the blurry image of Braeden frantically digging a hole in the ground in the middle of the angel’s glade.

  The last thing she saw was Braeden dragging the crude coffin that contained her lifeless body into the bottom of the grave he had dug. His only hope was to bury her in the place of eternal spring.

  “Take care of her,” Braeden begged the angel. “I will find a way to put her back together again!”

  And then Serafina saw no more.

  The darkness that followed was so black and so long that she did not stir.

  Finally, a girl’s voice came into the darkness. “You must return now.”

  When Serafina opened her eyes, she found herself standing in the forest bog by Rowena’s lair just where she had been. A warm summer breeze drifted through the trees. The vision was over.

  Rowena was standing there alone. Her voice was filled with emotion when she said, “Now you know what friendship is.”

  Serafina, realizing that Rowena, too, had seen what Braeden did on the night of the full moon, looked at her old enemy in amazement. “And so do you…”

  “And so do I,” Rowena said.

  Serafina sat down on a log and gazed absently at the things around her. All she could think about, all she could feel, was the vision. She knew now that the Loggia was where she had died. Died…Was that what happened? She’d been buried, that much was certain. But she wasn’t truly dead, was she?

  Had Braeden saved her?

  She thought about what he must have gone through. He could never let anyone know what truly happened or the horrible thing he’d done. He had dragged the bloody body of his best friend through the forest and buried her. And he hoped that she was still alive when he did it.

  In the days that followed, he must have been filled not just with the sadness of losing her but with a terrible guilt. As he lied and covered things up, deceit must have mixed with anguish. His body had been hurt and his heart torn as cruelly as hers.

  After months of sorrow and healing, he must have just been finally finding his way back into the world when she crawled from the grave and began to haunt him. She remembered how her presence had upset him. He had seemed so frustrated and hopeless.

  Her vision of the night of the full moon was over, and she finally knew what had happened to her.

  She thought about her body lying in the grave in the angel’s glade all those nights.

  She thought about the young black panther she’d seen running wild in the forest.

  And then she thought about her whisper of a spirit crawling from the grave and creeping through the gardens back to Biltmore.

  Three, she thought. Three pieces. My human body, my panther body, and my spirit. My trinity was split.

  And as horrible as that was to imagine, and as difficult as it was to accept, everything finally began to make sense in her mind.

  She knew from the stories of the mountain folk that there could only be one black panther in the forest at a time.

  And it’s me, she thought. It’s still me. I’m the black panther running through the forest.

  And I’m the dead girl lying in the grave.

  And I’m this lost spirit finding her way through the living world.

  On the night of the full moon, she and Braeden had fought an epic battle against Rowena. And they had lost.

  She had lost.

  The damaged Black Cloak had torn her asunder and flung her pieces out into the world. Time and space, body and spirit, dream and waking, were all a-jumble now.

  She was not exactly dead. She was not exactly alive. She was not spirit or body. She was all these things and none, thrown to the winds of chaos, like the black shapes still floating in the forest and destroying everything they touched. They were the torn inner remnants of the Black Cloak.

  Still stunned, she looked over at Rowena. “How did you show me this vision? It felt so real. I remember walking onto the Loggia that night and standing at the rail, but once the cloak went over my head, I was torn apart. I couldn’t have seen all those things you showed me. Those couldn’t have been my memories alone.”

  “No,” Rowena said softly, lowering her head. “Your memories, my memories, the light of the moon, the slip of the stars…it’s everything that happened that night, the print of our movement on the thread of time.”

  Serafina began to reply, but she was unable to find the right words, and she was still trembling from the experience of it. “It was startling,” she said finally.

  “What I did is called scrying,” Rowena said. “It provides a vision of past events, a glimpse into the thread.”

  “And you have seen it before?”

  “Yes,” Rowena said, and Serafina could see that it had affected Rowena as powerfully as it had affected her.

  “You attacked me on the Loggia,” Serafina said, trying to connect everything together in her mind. “You tried to kill me with the Black Cloak.”

  “And I almost succeeded,” Rowena said.

  “You probably thought you had me as good as dead.”

  “I did, indeed,” Rowena admitted, obviously annoyed. “There was no way you should have been able to survive that.”

  “I reckon I’m not quite as easy to kill as you figured, either.”

  “Apparently not,” Rowena said with a ghost of a smile.

  Serafina frowned in confusion and looked up at her. “But…you still showed me the vision…”

  Rowena turned away, hiding her expression.

  “But why?” Serafina asked. “Why did you show me that?”

  “Because you were starting to annoy me with all your mewling-weepy-crying about Braeden.”

  “But I have always been your enemy, and yet you showed this to me…You helped me.”

  Rowena shook her head. “Don’t flatter yourself, cat. I’m not trying to be your friend. I just showed you what happened. The truth is the truth. The past is the past. It cannot be changed. But things have changed now.”

  “What do you mean, things have changed?” Serafina asked, sensing that there was far more on Rowena’s mind than she was saying. But Serafina’s thoughts kept going back to what happened on the Loggia. “The cloak was torn…” she said, trying to grasp what she had learned.

  “You’v
e been splintered…” Rowena said.

  Serafina had seen it, experienced it, but when she heard the word splintered spoken out loud, her mind recoiled from the sound of it. It seemed too awful to comprehend, that her heart, her soul, had been splintered from her body, and now she was in three pieces.

  “How do I fix this?” Serafina asked. “How do I get back?”

  Rowena shook her head. “You don’t. You’re just a spirit now, harmless as a fly, and soon you’ll begin to fade, if you haven’t already. You can’t last in this world, and then you’ll be gone. We all go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”

  Serafina looked at her in surprise. It was the passage she’d thought about when she saw the dust in Essie’s room.

  “So that’s why you thought you could show me the vision…” Serafina said.

  “I’m not stupid, cat,” Rowena said. “I know your claws too well.”

  As Serafina made her way through the forest back toward Biltmore, one thought dwelled on her mind: before she faded away, she had to help Braeden. She didn’t know to what extent the Black Cloak had drawn him into its power, but she had to save him, even if she couldn’t save herself. She had seen the violent storms in the forest, the claw-handed storm-creech, and the floating black shapes. Something was driving these evils toward Biltmore, something so powerful that even Rowena hid from it. Was it some dark force in the forest? Or someone inside Biltmore itself? Or was it Braeden using the Black Cloak?

  When she arrived at the estate, strong winds were blowing through the trees. She felt light on her feet, like if she lifted her arms she would actually float away and become a flurry of drifting air. She was tempted to try it, to keep learning her new skills, but she dared not test the power of the gale, lest she never return.

  Crawling through a small shaft in the back of Biltmore’s foundation, Serafina found her way back into the house.

  Her pa was working on some sort of electrical accoutrements with many copper coils, wires, and bulbs for the summer ball. She wanted to watch him, just be with him for a while, but she knew she shouldn’t.