“I thought you might be,” he said, nodding.
“And you built this campfire for me?”
“Well, not exactly,” he said. “You can see in the dark. So in a way it’s more for me than you. But I thought you might like it.”
“I love it,” she said.
“Look at all those stars up there,” he said, gazing up at the sky. “They’re really putting on a show for us tonight.”
She glanced up in the direction he was looking, but she’d seen plenty of stars in her life. What interested her now was him, the quiet, peaceful expression on his face and the way his eyes seemed to be taking in the sky above. She still couldn’t believe he was home. It felt almost too good to be true, like it wasn’t even real.
“Lean back,” he said, “and take a look.”
As she lay with her back on the ground beside him, her shoulder pushed up against his and she felt the warmth of it against the coolness of the night.
“Look at Orion the Hunter up there,” he said, pointing toward the constellation. “Do you see how the three stars of his belt are pointing toward that one bright orange star over there?”
“I see it,” she said, following his pointing finger.
“That’s Aldebaran, the Leading Star. Now follow it a little farther in that same direction and there’s a small bluish cluster of stars. Do you see it?”
“Yes, I see it,” she said.
“My uncle told me that in Greek mythology those are the Seven Sisters of Pleiades,” Braeden said. “But the Navajo called them dilγéhé, and the Persians called them Parvin. Everyone has a different name for the Seven Stars.”
As she looked up at the small cluster of stars, she saw the seven he was talking about, but her feline eyes began to pick up the sparkling dots of light with more and more clarity. There were indeed six or seven particularly bright blue stars gathered together, but there were also hundreds of smaller, fainter stars sparkling in between them, all glowing in a hazy, bluish light, as if all the varied, dancing stars of the cluster were of one living spirit.
When she pulled in a long, steady breath, it felt as if a whole new kind of air were filling her lungs.
“A few days ago,” Braeden said, “I was arguing with my uncle about why I had to go to New York. He could tell I was frustrated, so he told me a story he knew from the Bible. A guy named Job was mad at God because he couldn’t understand why certain things happened the way they did. God said that the world was the world, beyond Job’s comprehension and control. ‘Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the belt of Orion?’ God said to Job. ‘Can you bring forth a constellation in its season and guide the Bear with her cubs?’”
She wasn’t sure she agreed with or even fully understood what he was trying to say, but she liked the way Braeden’s voice sounded when he recited the words.
“I think the part about the bear is talking about Arcturus,” he continued, his shoulder brushing hers as he pointed to one of the other stars. “It’s that really bright reddish one over there. Do you see it?”
“I see it,” she said.
“But this is what amazes me,” Braeden said. “My uncle said that the Book of Job was written two thousand five hundred years ago. That means that way back then those people were looking up at these same seven stars, just as we are now, giving them names, telling stories of their origin and their powers. And the Persians were doing the same thing, and the Vikings, and the Navajo out West, and the Cherokee here in these mountains, and people all over the world, for thousands of years.”
“That is amazing,” she said, taken with his spirit of wonderment for the world. Where did it come from? Where did he get all the energy? By all rights, he should have been dead tired, and frantically worried, but he seemed to be brimming with the fullness of life.
As they huddled together in the crisp autumn night, the stars of Pleiades and a thousand others reflected on the smooth, mirrorlike surface of the lake, seeming to scatter it with glistening diamonds.
She wasn’t sure why or how, but deep down into her living, breathing soul, she didn’t feel nearly as anxious as she had earlier that day, or in the days and nights before. She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t jittery. She felt more content in this moment than she had in a long time.
Letting her mind wander, she imagined herself and Braeden leaping onto moving trains and fast-running horses, soaring up into rising planets and streaking down as falling stars. They swam through tepees of glowing embers and glided over lakes of mirrored glass, curled in clusters of sparkling light.
When the stars above her began to fall from the sky, she sucked in a sudden breath, not sure what she was seeing.
“Look!” Braeden gasped excitedly, clutching her arm as long, thin streaks of blazing light shot across the darkness. “It’s a meteor storm!”
She’d spent so much of her life outside at night that she’d seen many falling stars flashing silently through the lonely heavens, but it had never looked or felt like this before, with Braeden beside her, the burst of meteors coming down one after another.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Braeden asked breathlessly.
But the abrupt sound of men’s voices coming from the top of a nearby hill interrupted her reply.
She quickly turned to look, then pivoted again to a much closer sound rushing toward her.
She saw it immediately: the startling sight of a pure white deer running through the woods.
She gripped Braeden’s arm in surprise, so astonished by what she was seeing that she couldn’t utter a sound.
In the light of the stars, the creature’s white fur seemed to almost glow with incandescence as it ran through the darkness of the trees, leaping effortlessly over fallen branches and narrow gullies, and seeming to glide through the ferns.
Even as she was watching it, she knew it would be—for the rest of her life—one of the rarest and most beautiful things she would ever see.
And then a gunshot rang out.
The white deer stopped.
A single red spot stained her side.
Her head slumped.
Her knees buckled.
And her eyes closed as she crumpled slowly to the ground.
“No!” Braeden screamed, rushing toward her.
The wounded deer did not die immediately. She was trying desperately to get back up onto her shaking, weakened legs. She took three tentative, trembling steps, her head moving one way and then another, as if each step required vast effort, and then finally, she began to run, run in blind terror, away from the danger.
Another gunshot split the night air.
Erupting with powerful anger, Serafina sprang out her claws and snarled her fangs, her long panther body twisting as she whirled toward the sound of the hunters and sprinted toward them.
The frantic, running deer crashed into the water of the lake, shattering the smooth reflections of the stars, and tried to swim. But the deep water and her bone-shattering wound were too much for her. She thrashed in desperation, her head barely above the water as her front legs kicked and flailed around her, her eyes wild with fear, and her pink tongue protruding from her mouth in a bleating scream.
Braeden plowed into the water to reach her as another shot came ripping toward them.
Serafina raced up the hill, snarling and making as much noise as possible to draw the attention of the hunters as she charged straight toward them. There were at least three of them, all with rifles, but she didn’t care. The anger boiled up inside her, filling her lungs, driving her muscled legs. She wanted to tear the men apart with her rage.
As one of the hunters spotted her black body and yellow eyes rushing through the darkness toward them, he stuttered in fear, “Wh-what is that?”
“Run!” said another.
The third shot at her, but was shaking so badly that the bullet struck a tree trunk behind her.
She lunged straight at him. The slash of her claws knocked the gun from his hands and scraped the skin of his neck.
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Screaming, he tried to turn and run, but tripped and toppled to the ground. He scrambled back up onto his feet and fled with the others as they ran toward the house.
Serafina wanted to chase them. She wanted to kill them. She knew she could easily catch up with them and pull them down one by one with her teeth and claws. But a sudden dread flooded into her mind and she stopped.
She quickly turned and looked down the hill toward the last place she’d seen Braeden.
How many shots had been fired?
Where had all the bullets struck?
She burst into a run toward the lake.
As she reached the shore of the lake, she frantically looked around her, searching for Braeden. But he was nowhere to be seen. She scanned the grass and the shoreline, dreading the sight of a crumpled, bullet-wounded body lying on the ground. Then she gazed out across the surface of the water.
Braeden splashed up out of the lake and walked toward her, panting and dripping wet, the white deer cradled in his arms.
“I’ve got her,” he gasped with a shaking voice. “But I think they’ve killed her,” he said as he lowered the deer gently to the ground and knelt beside her.
Serafina shifted into human form as she came toward him, and then knelt down with him next to the small body of the deer.
It was only then that she realized how young the deer was. She was just a fawn. And her fur wasn’t tan, but pure white over her entire body. She had black eyes and a black nose, so she wasn’t an albino. Serafina had never seen anything like her. Whatever she was, and wherever she came from, it was clear that she was a rare and precious creature. But the fawn was bleeding from her side, gasping her last labored breaths, her head hanging limp and her long, spindly legs tangled up like broken sticks.
“I’m so sorry, Braeden,” Serafina said gently, knowing that there was nothing more difficult for him than seeing an innocent animal suffer.
He placed his hands on the deer’s side and neck.
Serafina had seen him restore the cracked bones of a badly wounded dog, mend the broken wing of a falcon, and help many woodland creatures. He had been blessed with the ability to commune with and heal animals, but with it came its own kind of suffering, too close to the life and death of the world.
“I can’t let her die,” he said.
Serafina watched as he closed his eyes and held the deer in that position, infusing her with his healing power. She’d seen him use his abilities before, but it always amazed her.
She glanced in the direction the hunters had run, wary of their return. She thought there was a chance they were local poachers who had been out hunting the Biltmore grounds at night, but the way they had immediately fled toward the house made her think that they probably weren’t.
Her pa had told her that most deer hunters had a sort of unwritten code that they followed. They didn’t hunt at night or use electric light to mesmerize deer. They didn’t shoot young deer. And they wouldn’t shoot a deer that was trapped, too close to them, or special in some way. She was pretty sure they would never shoot a white deer. It was just too unusual, too easy to see. But these hunters had done exactly that. As if the trophy of a rare, all-white deer was just too much to pass up on.
As Braeden continued to work on the wounded deer, she knew there was little she could do to help, but she sat on the ground beside him and scanned the trees and the distant fields for danger, giving him the time and protection he needed.
They had been together long enough to know what they were both good at, and tonight, clawing was her job and healing was his.
Glancing up into the night sky, she saw that a thin veil of silvery clouds had floated in, very high, long, feathery strands obscuring most of the planets and the stars. Although it remained flat and calm, the water of the lake appeared gray in color now, and the reflection of the stars had disappeared.
When Braeden was finally done, he looked up at her. She was shocked to see how sickly and pale his face had become, filled with worry, and he was shivering from the cold.
“We need to get her warm,” he said, struggling to get onto his feet with the deer in his arms.
“And you, too,” she said, pulling him up until he was able to stand on his own.
As he carried the wounded deer toward the house, she stayed close to him, on guard all the way. They slipped in through the side door, and then crept up the darkened stairs to Braeden’s bedroom on the second floor.
Braeden quickly lit a fire in his bedroom fireplace, then sat in the chair near the fire’s warmth, gathered the deer in his arms, and wrapped her up in a warm woolen blanket.
“If I can get her through the night, then I think I can save her,” he said, his voice weak, but a little hopeful.
“Who do you think that was out there?” Serafina asked.
“I couldn’t see them,” he said.
But as she looked at Braeden sitting in front of the fire, another worry came into her mind. “What are you going to tell your aunt and uncle in the morning when they discover you here?”
Braeden shook his head, clearly too tired and worried about the fawn to think about that.
“You need to sleep,” she said. “You traveled hard to get here, and then you helped the deer. You look exhausted.”
“Yeah,” he said softly. He seemed almost sad that their evening together was finally coming to an end.
“Are you going to be all right here?” she asked as she wrapped another blanket around his shoulders.
“Yeah, I just need to sleep awhile,” he said.
“Whatever happens tomorrow with your aunt and uncle, we’ll get through it together, all right?” she said, hesitating near his door.
Braiden nodded, looking up at her. “Stay bold,” he said gently.
“I’ll see you in the morning. Stay bold,” she said in return, and slipped out.
She made her way downstairs to the first floor, then down to the basement, through the vast network of corridors, kitchens, and storerooms, until she reached the workshop.
Over the last few months, her pa had been working on so many new mechanical projects that he had added two more workbenches, three more rows of storage shelves, and, thanks to Mr. Vanderbilt, a rack of brand-new tools: hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, saws, and metal cutters. Her pa was in seventh heaven.
And thanks to Mrs. Vanderbilt, the kitchen was now providing most of their meals, so they didn’t have to cook them over the burning barrel as often as they used to. Biltmore had various types of kitchens, a prestigious chef from France, and many supporting cooks and staff, including her friend Mr. Cobere, the butcher and meat cook who worked in the Rotisserie Kitchen down the corridor. But even so, her pa was right determined to teach Biltmore’s fancy cooks how to smoke up a good old-fashioned Carolina barbecue pulled-pork sandwich.
Her pa was a big man, strong of arm and thick of chest. He lay sleeping in his cot now, snoring away like he did every night. His snoring probably would have bothered most folk who weren’t his kin, but she was so used to it that she probably couldn’t fall asleep if the timbers weren’t shaking at least a little bit.
Her pa’s face looked placid, as if he was dreaming of equipment that never failed and machines that always did what they were supposed to. But then she realized that wasn’t quite right. If the electrical generator, dumbwaiters, leather-strap-driven clothes washers, and all the other newfangled contraptions in the house always functioned properly, then her pa wouldn’t have a job to do and he’d be miserable, just as she had been earlier that day. Useless.
She was dead tired and worried about Braeden now, but she felt so much better than she had.
She thought it was interesting. If all the horses in the stable behaved perfectly on their own, was there still a need for the horse trainer? If all the souls in the church were already angels, what would the pastor do? If a mother’s baby cared for itself, would she love the baby as much? It seemed as if human beings longed for everything to be easy, she thought, but
deep down, we didn’t want it. It seemed as if everyone had a job to do, a role to play, to fix the always breaking world.
She crawled into her little cot behind the equipment and curled up beneath the soft sheets and warm blankets that Mrs. Vanderbilt had given her.
Her two young cats, Smoke and Ember, came trotting across the workshop floor and hopped effortlessly into her bed. They curled up with her in their usual spots and started purring, one of her favorite sounds and feelings in the whole world. She couldn’t help but purr back to them in return.
Smoke was a large dark gray cat, strong and quiet, with watchful green eyes. Ember was a skinny little orange tabby, talkative and opinionated, fast and lean, and she loved to run and pounce. She was small, but there was a wild, bushy-tailed fierceness to her that Serafina loved.
She had found them as tiny kittens in the ashes of the crumbling chimney of an abandoned building, their eyes still closed, mewing for their momma. But their momma had passed away. Serafina took them home that night, and with her pa’s permission, began to take care of them. As they learned the darkened air shafts and shadowed passageways of the basement, and figured out how to sheathe and unsheathe their claws, it seemed only natural that she give them a job as her rat-catching apprentices.
Most of the night was over, but she was grateful to sleep for a few hours before her pa woke for the day, and more than anything, she was grateful to have seen Braeden again. There was something about his voice, his smile, and the way he looked at the world that always made Biltmore feel like home.
Within seconds after resting her head on her pillow, she felt so comfortable and nuzzled-in that it was as if she’d never moved from there, as if she’d been sleeping there all night, just dreaming away.
“Wake up, Sera.”
Several seconds went by.
“Serafina,” the voice came again.
She swam slowly up through the thick black molasses void of deep sleep, unsure where she was.
And as she came awake she felt the slow shock of entering a world different from the one she’d been in moments before.
Serafina and the Seven Stars Page 3