Serafina and the Seven Stars

by Robert Beatty

  She grabbed a rag from the counter, fell to her knees, and tried to stanch the blood oozing from Mr. Cobere’s head.

  His eyes were open, and he gazed up at her in utter shock of what had happened to him. “Why, Serafina?” he asked in a weak, raspy voice. “Why did he do that?”

  “Just hold on, Mr. Cobere, hold on…” she cried, but even as he looked at her, his body went limp and his eyes went glassy.

  Mr. Cobere was dead.

  And Mr. Vanderbilt was the murderer.

  She stumbled down the corridor away from the scene of the crime, every step she took pounding in her head, the walls of the passageway undulating with darkened colors. The floor felt slanted beneath her feet.

  All she could see in her clouded mind was the sight of Mr. Cobere raising his arms to cover his head as Mr. Vanderbilt struck him down.

  In all her dealings with him over the last year, Mr. Vanderbilt had always seemed like a fair and gentle man. She just couldn’t understand how he could possibly have murdered Mr. Cobere. But she had seen it with her own eyes!

  And she knew Mr. Cobere was a good man. He wasn’t some kind of criminal or demon or a treacherous fiend that Mr. Vanderbilt had to defend himself against.

  As she made her way down the basement corridor, she could still hear the echo of Mr. Cobere’s screams in her mind.

  What was she going to do now? She had no place to go. No place was safe. If the master of Biltmore was a murderer, what was he going to do next? He had seen her watching him. He knew she had witnessed him killing Mr. Cobere.

  She didn’t want it to be true. She didn’t want it to be real. But she knew it was.

  There must be some dark, violent part of Mr. Vanderbilt that I didn’t know about, she thought. Did everyone have some sort of black panther living inside them?

  If she couldn’t trust Mr. Vanderbilt, then who could she trust? The pain of it seeped through her brain.

  When she finally made it to the workshop, she stumbled to her sleeping pa and crawled into his cot with him, desperate for any kind of refuge.

  She knew she had to keep moving, she had to figure out what to do, but her legs had stopped working and her mind couldn’t think. How do you respond to something that’s impossible? How do you move?

  Her pa stirred and muttered as he pulled her close. “What’s wrong, Sera?”

  She buried her face in his arms.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked her again.

  “Everything,” she cried in despair, her voice wet and raspy.

  “I want to help you, Sera. What I can do?”

  “Nothing,” she said miserably.

  How could she tell him that the man he admired most in the world was a murderer? How could she tell him that heinous, winged beasts were slithering into Biltmore? How could she tell him that his daughter was a strange, shape-shifting creature of the night? It was just too much.

  “All these bad things keep happening, all jumbled together, but I don’t know how to stop them!” she cried.

  “Listen, Sera,” he said, holding her tight, “when you’re down in the muck of the swamp and your feet are stuck in the mud and the weeds are so thick you can’t see in front of you, then you know what you gotta do.”

  “I don’t!” she cried.

  “You do, Sera! You know.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Are ya gonna say that the swamp is too big and you can’t get across it? Are ya gonna sink down into the water of the swamp and give up? Will that get you home?”

  “No,” she said.

  “No, it won’t,” he said emphatically. “If you’re stuck in the swamp and you give up, it’s gonna get darker, you’re gonna get hungrier, colder, more and more tired. There’s an old saying: The only way out is through. Do you understand? When it feels like you’re stuck in a swamp, you gotta keep goin’, Sera, that’s what ya gotta do. You might be tired, you might be runnin’ blind, but you gotta keep pushing. You go on faith.”

  “Faith?” she said doubtfully. It felt like the whole world had broken, every part of it shattering. “Faith in what?”

  “Faith in what you know is true,” he said forcefully. “It might be hard to see, but you find it. Faith in yourself. Faith that there must be an end to the swamp, that it has another side. The only way out is through. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand,” she said, opening her eyes and wiping her nose. “But I gotta tell ya, Pa, I’m right in the middle of a big ol’ swamp, and it’s a bad one.”

  “You’ll find your way, Sera,” he said. “Just keep pushing through.”

  As she felt the black darkness in her heart beginning to fill with something else, she wanted to tell him everything right then and there. She wanted to tell him who she truly was, not just a girl, not just his daughter, but a catamount, a panther, half human, half cat, a being with two halves to her soul, and she had fought battles against the darkest of enemies. But she knew she couldn’t tell him. Deep down, she was just too scared. If he knew the truth, what would he think of her? How would he react? She wanted to tell him that the whole world was a lie and it was crumbling down around them. But she lay there, just holding him, too scared to tell him any of it.

  She dreamed of Braeden coming to her on the terrace beneath the stars and saying her name. She dreamed of a white deer with a red stain. But she awoke to the sound of a woman screaming.

  “Get up, Sera,” her pa said, shaking her. “Something has happened.”

  She followed her father down the corridor toward the kitchens. It appeared that the servants had come in to begin their day. Twenty cooks, scullery maids, and other servants were gathered outside the Rotisserie Kitchen, gasping and whispering and asking questions no one had answers to.

  “What’s this all about?” her pa asked as he approached them.

  But Serafina’s stomach twisted. She already knew.

  “Is someone hurt?” her pa asked them, trying to get through the crowd. Her father had known Mr. Cobere. They had been friends. And he was just about to see him dead.

  But then the crowd of servants suddenly parted as someone else approached from the other direction.

  Serafina’s heart lurched when she saw Mr. Vanderbilt coming down the corridor.

  “What is going on here?” the master of the house demanded in a firm voice.

  “Mr. Cobere is dead!” one of the washerwomen cried out, sobbing.

  Mr. Vanderbilt’s face went grim and he shoved his way through the bystanders.

  There he is, Serafina thought. The murderer. Right there!

  Her pa pulled her back from the crowd of servants and the gruesome sight of what was lying on the kitchen floor, saying, “You don’t need to see this.”

  She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she’d already seen it, she’d seen it bad, the murder and the blood, and the great Mr. Vanderbilt, his friend and employer, was the one who had done it!

  As her father led her away from the commotion, Serafina could hear many of the people in the crowd whispering about what might have happened to Mr. Cobere. And then, just as she and her pa turned the corner of the far corridor, Mr. Vanderbilt’s voice rang out. “Has anyone seen Serafina? I need Serafina!”

  Serafina ducked down, her heart accelerating in panic. Was he going to drag her away someplace and kill her? Imprison her? Accuse her of something? She had no idea how she could face Mr. Vanderbilt after what she saw him do.

  There was a part of her that wanted to point at him in front of everyone and scream out, He’s the murderer! He’s the murderer! But there was another part of her that remembered the horrific way he had killed Mr. Cobere. She imagined Mr. Vanderbilt charging toward her, striking her with the iron fire poker. She had seen everything he did, and now he was going to kill her!

  “I’m sorry, Pa,” she said, hurrying forward without him. “I’ll come back later, but I’ve got to go.”

  She scampered up the servants’ stairs to the main floor and fled the h
ouse through the side door, headlong into the pouring rain.

  Her running legs took her across the courtyard through the storm, the blustering wind buffeting her body as thunder and lightning crashed overhead.

  When she reached the cover of the trees, she lunged forward and landed on four clawed feet.

  Snarling with frustration, she raced through the forest, the wind and the rain whipping her face.

  She had such power with these muscles, such sharpness in her teeth and claws. She could fight any enemy. But how could she fight Mr. Vanderbilt, a man she admired and looked up to? And if not Mr. Vanderbilt, then who? Who could she fight?

  She kept running, not even thinking about where she was going. She followed rocky, narrow ridges and crossed through thick stands of rain-dripping pines.

  When she noticed fresh claw marks and scratches on the trunks of several trees, she brought herself to a stop. She had seen scratches like this before.

  Even through the rain, she smelled the strong odor of blood, and saw its dark stains on the pine-needles. Then she saw the body.

  A small black bear cub was lying dead on the ground.

  At first she thought that the search party, the men hunting for the beast, had shot the cub. But it was clear that something had attacked and killed it in the most vicious manner.

  It seemed like death was everywhere, coming faster and faster. And she had no idea what was causing it or how to stop it.

  She continued on, running beyond the pines, through a deep forest of oak and hemlock, and then down into a thick, watery marsh.

  It wasn’t until she saw the gravestones that she knew where she was going.

  Why here? she thought. Why do I keep getting drawn back here?

  Longing for Braeden, for a friend, for anyone who would understand, she made her way through the graveyard to the Angel’s Glade.

  When she shifted back into human form, she wiped the rain from her face and squinted up at the stone angel. The angel stood tall above her, her wings aloft and her sword held strong.

  Serafina read the familiar inscription on the pedestal.

  OUR CHARACTER ISN’T DEFINED

  BY THE BATTLES WE WIN OR LOSE,

  BUT BY THE BATTLES WE DARE TO FIGHT.

  Serafina thought about holding Ember in her hands as she died, and Mr. Kettering lying dead on the floor, and the sight of Mr. Vanderbilt murdering Mr. Cobere. And she thought about all the other things she had seen.

  “How?” she screamed up at the angel’s unmoving, tear-stained face. “How do I fight this?”

  Serafina lifted her hands and shook them at the angel. “What good are these claws when there’s nothing I can attack? What good are these teeth when there’s nothing I can bite? Do you want me to kill Mr. Vanderbilt? This isn’t a battle! It’s chaos!”

  But no matter how loud she screamed, the angel did not reply. Her face remained as stone and stoic as it always did.

  In the past, Serafina had always imagined that the angel was on her side, speaking to her and guiding her, deep in her heart. The angel had seemed to possess a wondrous inner magic—her glade always green, her sword always sharp, and her presence filled with the power to hold life and death at bay. But now the Angel’s Glade seemed dead and lifeless, and she felt a pang of doubt whether the spirit of the angel was even real.

  And the more she sank into her thoughts, the angrier she became. What exactly was she fighting for? For Biltmore, the place that hosted the hunters who had come to kill her kin? Was she fighting for Mr. Vanderbilt, a devious, two-faced rat of a man who had murdered Mr. Cobere? What was this ideal called Biltmore Estate?

  “It’s nothing!” she snarled. “It’s nothing!”

  As she gritted her teeth and turned from the statue, the torrent of the rain finally began to slow.

  The rushing sound of the storm gradually fell away and all that remained was the rain dripping quietly from the bare branches of the trees and the mist rising from the ground.

  As her mind cleared, and she began to calm, she thought about what her pa had told her.

  The only way out is through.

  But how?

  There was no doubt she was stuck in the swamp just like he said—tired, lost, and losing hope.

  How could she get through?

  Over the last year, she’d come up out of the basement, found her claws, and learned to fight. She had defeated all her enemies in battle. But she couldn’t claw her way out of this. She wasn’t even sure what the this was. She wasn’t even sure if she could trust what she had seen with her own eyes, what she had heard with her own ears, or even what she herself had done. How could any of it be true? She knew it couldn’t be, but it was.

  And what if what she was fighting for wasn’t even worth fighting for? What if Biltmore itself was evil? What if Biltmore and the man who built it needed to be destroyed?

  The more she thought about it, the more she realized that what scared her the most was that this time, she wasn’t the hunter. She was the hunted. There was something a-prowl, killing them off one by one. She wasn’t thinking—she was reacting. She was running. She’d been desperate to catch someone, to fight someone, but she was flailing. She was blind.

  She had to figure out what her enemy was doing, what was driving him, what he wanted, and then maybe she could anticipate his next move. It was no good finding poor Mr. Kettering lying dead on the stone floor at the bottom of the Grand Staircase. He had already fallen. It was no good watching Mr. Vanderbilt kill Mr. Cobere. Before she could figure out what to do, the killing blow was already struck.

  One of the things her pa had taught her from a young age was that when it seemed like everything was coming at her, when life was just too confusing and overwhelming to bear, then she should stop, sit down, and ask herself one question: What is the most important thing? What is the one thing that I must do? And then focus on doing it.

  What is the one thing? she wondered. What must I make sure I do no matter what?

  It did not take long for the answer to form clearly in her mind.

  I must protect the good and innocent people of Biltmore.

  That meant her pa, and Essie, and Mrs. Vanderbilt, and poor Jess, who she’d abandoned in the forest, and so many others. And most of all, it meant little Baby Nell.

  She couldn’t just sit here in the graveyard feeling sorry for herself, scared and shaking, a little mouse among other mice, all getting hunted one by one.

  No matter how frightening it was, no matter how confusing, she had to do her job the best she could.

  She had to protect them.

  As she finally made her way back to Biltmore, the sun was setting and she found herself slipping through the foggy cover of a coming night, the clouds hanging so low that it was impossible to tell if she was below them or inside them.

  She approached the house quietly and unseen, trusting no one.

  Avoiding the front doors and the Main Hall of the house, where she feared there could be footmen, guests, or even Mr. Vanderbilt himself, she circled through the woods, down into the valley, and snuck along the back side, where the mansion’s massive stone foundation rose up out of the steep slope like the wall of a castle.

  She followed closely along the wall until she came to a small rectangular pit at its base, then wriggled her body down through its iron cover-grate. When she reached the bottom of the pit, she shinnied up a brick-lined vertical shaft some thirty feet, her back pressed against one side of the shaft and her feet pressed against the other, inching her way up like a little crevice-dwelling caterpillar.

  She had used this method to enter Biltmore many times when her life in the basement had been unknown to the fancy folk above, and that was the secrecy she needed once again.

  Thanks to the house’s architect, Mr. Richard Morris Hunt, this well-hidden shaft fed fresh air to the giant boilers in the subbasement, like the windpipes of a gargantuan stone-and-steel beast, and established the central spine of the mansion’s vast ventilation s
ystem.

  When she reached the top of the shaft, she pushed up the metal grate, crawled out, and arrived in one of the subbasement storage rooms. Making her way through the piles of long, crisscrossing, storm-damaged copper gutters, she felt like she was crawling through the weathered bones of an ancient dinosaur in a dark, primordial cave.

  She climbed up the narrow brick stairway to reach the basement level of the house. Then she darted from one shadow to the next, making sure that no one walking through the basement corridors late at night would see her, especially Mr. Vanderbilt or one of his men. Then she dashed up the back stairs to the second floor.

  When she arrived in the back corridor near Mrs. Vanderbilt’s suite of rooms, she crouched in a shadow, waiting and listening. The passageways of the second floor were dark and quiet. Everyone seemed asleep in their rooms.

  She scurried forward and around the corner, slipping as quickly and quietly as she could past Mr. Vanderbilt’s bedroom. He was the last person in the world she wanted to encounter in a dark, empty hallway.

  As she passed the windows in the corridor, the arched glass roof of the Winter Garden was visible below. The white fog that she had traveled through to get home floated in the moonlight just outside the windows, like ghosts waiting to get inside.

  But as she walked through the second floor living hall to get to the other side of the house, her pace faltered. She knew it wasn’t possible, but when she looked across, she could swear the fog was now actually inside the room, floating over all the empty chairs and sofas, and around the cross-armed wrought-iron lamps standing like scarecrows in the pale, cold moonlight.

  It felt as if she had been in this moment before.

  But it’s just a trick of the light, she told herself. It’s impossible for the fog to be inside the house.

  She ducked past the railing of the Grand Staircase and the doors of several bedrooms, and then paused uncertainly when she reached the T at the end of the corridor, everything so still and empty in the darkness. The right led down a dark hallway to Braeden’s bedroom, closed and unused. The left led to the nursery.