All she knew for sure was that she still had to do her job, still had to protect little Cornelia and the other innocent people of Biltmore.
She watched as Mrs. Vanderbilt handed Cornelia to Essie, mounted her horse, and then took Cornelia back into her arms. There was only one way Mrs. V was returning to Biltmore, and that was with her baby. One of the men helped Essie up onto his horse, and they all began the journey home.
“Braeden,” Mr. Vanderbilt said, looking at his nephew with harsh, troubled eyes. “I don’t know what you’re doing back here at Biltmore when you should be in New York, but you need to come with me now and explain yourself.”
“I will, sir, I’ll come right away, I’ll explain everything,” Braeden said quickly. “But I need to attend to the horses that may have been injured by the crash.” He gestured toward Nolan and the coachman trying to disentangle the four black thoroughbreds from the wreckage of the carriage.
“Get yourself and the horses home as quickly as you can,” Mr. Vanderbilt said as he climbed up into his saddle.
“I will, sir,” Braeden said, nodding.
“And you,” Mr. Vanderbilt said sternly as he turned toward Serafina and locked his black searing eyes on to hers. “I will see you at Biltmore as well.”
Serafina stared at him, her heart pounding, but she did not reply and she did not look away.
Finally, Mr. Vanderbilt turned his horse and followed the other riders back up the road to Biltmore.
She knew there would come a time very soon that she would meet that man alone, face-to-face, and there would be no place for either of them to go.
The moment his uncle was gone, Braeden looked over at Serafina in relief, and then hurried on to help the entangled horses.
Nolan and the coachman used knives to cut the horses out of the hopelessly twisted harnesses as Braeden steadied the horses’ heads.
“We’re all right,” Braeden whispered to the horses in quiet, reassuring tones. “We’re all together.”
She knew that years before, these four fine thoroughbreds had carried the caskets of Braeden’s mother, father, brothers, and sisters during the funeral in New York City after a catastrophic fire burned down the family home. Braeden and these four horses had been companions ever since. When he moved to Biltmore to live with his uncle, he came with no possessions other than his black dog Gidean, who had saved him from the fire, and these four black horses, who had saved him from the devastating sorrow that followed.
As Nolan and the coachman finally got the harnesses cut away, they led the horses out of the ditch and up onto the road.
“I’ll take them on up to Biltmore, master,” Nolan said, jumping onto the bare back of one of the horses.
“We’ll be right behind you,” Braeden said. “Be careful on the road.”
As she and Braeden watched Nolan ride off with the horses, she said, “I’m very sorry I put them in danger.”
“I know. Come on, let’s get home,” he said, gesturing toward the carriage he had arrived in.
“Do you think you can get us around all this wreckage, John?” he asked as the coachman climbed up into the driver’s seat.
“I can manage it,” the coachman said with a quick nod.
Serafina thought it was kind of Braeden to open the carriage’s door for her and hold her hand as she stepped up into it. He was always a gentleman, even to a girl who was more often a prowling cat than a fancy young lady.
It wasn’t until Braeden climbed into the closed space of the carriage, sat in the seat across from her, and let out a long sigh that she realized how nervous he’d been about standing up to his uncle and all those other men. He had seemed so brave, so resolute, but she realized now that his heart had probably been pounding just as hard as hers.
“Thank you for believing in me back there,” she said, her voice quavering.
“You would have done the same for me,” he said, nodding. Again, there was no doubt in him.
Sitting alone with him in the carriage as it traveled down the road reminded her of the first carriage they had ever been in together, a year before, traveling through a dark forest, not that different from this one.
“I’m very glad to see you,” she said, and then, in as soft a voice as she could, she asked him the question that she couldn’t help from asking. “After the night by the lake…what happened to you?”
Braeden dropped his eyes to the floor and slowly shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Serafina,” he said, his voice rife with shame. “I left for New York early the next morning. I couldn’t face you to say good-bye. After everything I said by the campfire, I didn’t know how to tell you that I still had to go…I still had to leave…. The whole thing made me sick.”
As she listened to his words, and heard the remorse in his voice, she could feel her heart opening up to him. She nodded, trying to show him that she understood. “I thought that you must have gone back, but I didn’t know for sure,” she said, more disappointed in her own confused, frightened, flinchy mind than in him, but he still took her words hard.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” he said, shaking his head. “I should have faced you. I should have come to you and said good-bye. I’m a total coward sometimes.”
She looked at him and tilted her head in surprise. “You’re not a total coward,” she said. “You’re just a plain old, regular coward, a typical horseback-riding, train-jumping, animal-healing mountain boy. Nothing wrong with that. We seem to need those around here.”
He smiled a little bit. “Thank you, but I am a coward, at least about some things.”
“Maybe some things,” she said. “But not where it counts. You stood up to those people. You were the only one who believed me.”
“But tell me what’s wrong,” he said. “What happened to you after I left?”
“First, tell me about the white deer,” she said.
He frowned in confusion. “Do you mean the little fawn?”
“Yes. What happened to it?”
“When I woke up, she looked like she was going to survive, so I released her back into the forest. I hope she’s all right. Did you see her or something?”
She didn’t even know where to begin. He had no idea what he had done or what had happened since.
“Tell me what you did after releasing the white deer.”
“I cleaned up our camp so that no one would know that I snuck back home, and then I headed to the village to catch the next train to New York.”
She nodded. All that made sense. She had been trying to tell herself that was definitely one of the possibilities. “But why are you here, Braeden?” she asked. “Your school must still be in session. Why did you come back now?”
He gazed at her without speaking; his eyes and face held an expression that she could not fathom. Had her questions startled him? Was it embarrassment? Fear? It was a species of emotion she had never seen in him.
“Why did you come home, Braeden?” she asked him again.
He looked out the window of the moving carriage, and then down at the floor. “It was last night, or two nights ago, I don’t even know anymore, I’ve been traveling so long,” he said. “I was in my dorm room, and I was sleeping. It wasn’t a dream and it wasn’t a vision. It was more like a feeling. Like someone was calling out to me.” Finally, he lifted his eyes and looked at her. “Like you were calling out to me, Serafina. I woke up. I listened for you. I didn’t hear you again. But I could still feel you. And it was frightening. I didn’t understand. But my heart was pounding. I could swear you were in trouble and you needed my help.”
She listened to his story in amazement, remembering how she had lain in the Angel’s Glade, her shoulder up against the pedestal of the statue as she cried out into the midnight sky.
“I am in trouble,” she said finally. “And I do need your help.”
“I came home as fast as I could,” he said gently.
“You commandeered a train to do it,” she said, smiling as she gazed at him.
“She has good reason to be,” Serafina said, glancing out the window into the darkness they were traveling through, then back at Braeden. “People have been dying ever since you left. I’ve been trying to figure out who the killer is and how I can stop him.”
Braeden looked at her in surprise. “Why do you say ‘him’? I thought you saw some sort of weird, unnatural creatures.”
“There are creatures,” she said. “But there is also a murderer, a man. I saw him.”
“Did you get a good look at him?” Braeden asked, leaning toward her. “Who is it? We’ll tell my uncle.”
“This is going to be difficult for you to hear, Braeden….”
“What do you mean? Why’d you say my name like that?” Braeden replied, his voice edged with a trace of fear. “What is it?”
“It’s your uncle,” she said, watching him carefully, trying to figure out how she could help him through this.
His brow furrowed. “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”
“Your uncle killed Mr. Cobere.”
“No, that can’t be,” Braeden said, shaking his head. “That’s not possible.”
“I saw him do it with my own eyes.”
“My uncle would never kill someone. Or if he did, he must have been defending himself from an attack.”
“No, he wasn’t,” she said firmly. “Mr. Cobere was begging him to stop. Your uncle struck him in the head with an iron fire poker and killed him.”
Braeden stopped talking. His expression clouded as he tried to digest what she had told him. “But if that’s true,” he said finally, “then what does it all have to do with the white fawn and the strange creatures?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s exactly what we need to figure out.”
As she and Braeden were talking, the carriage trundled along down the road, rocking gently back and forth. Despite everything that had happened and all there was yet to do, there was something invigorating about trying to solve a mystery with her old friend at her side.
She wasn’t sure how much farther they had to go, but it looked as if they had left the forest and were now traveling past some of Biltmore’s farm fields, which were bare for the coming winter.
Braeden’s eyes narrowed as he looked out the window.
“What is that?” he asked.
She turned and looked.
“Stop the carriage!” she shouted to the driver.
The moon hung low and hazy in the night sky, casting the empty field in silver light as swirls of gray mist and fog drifted across it. Out in the distance, there was a man walking in the middle of the field. He looked like a young man, his blond hair almost white in the moonlight. He was carrying a rifle and something large draped over his shoulder. The man’s face and arms were cut and bleeding. And by the way he was limping through the field, it was clear that he had been walking for a long time.
At first she thought he must be a hunter carrying the carcass of a deer he had shot. But as the man continued to trudge toward them, she realized that the body he was carrying was not a deer.
“Is that a person walking out there? Who is that?” Braeden asked.
“It’s Lieutenant Kinsley…” Serafina said as she exited the carriage. “Come on, we’ve got to help him!”
As she ran across the field, the soft, tilled autumn earth pulled at her feet.
Lieutenant Kinsley’s jacket was ripped and stained. One of his gloves was gone and the other torn and bloody. He looked like he barely had the strength to keep standing, let alone walking.
As he lifted his head and saw her coming toward him, his face filled with relief and he collapsed to his knees in exhaustion, gently laying the body he was carrying onto the ground.
“Kinsley,” Serafina gasped as she held his shoulders to keep him upright.
“I found her,” he muttered, nearly out of his mind with fatigue.
Lying on the ground beside him there was the body of a girl, her neck smudged with mud, her hair tangled with sticks, and her fingers so curled from the cold that she looked dead. But she was tucked in on herself, her arms crossed over her chest, and she was visibly shivering. When the girl finally lifted her head, the first thing Serafina saw were her bright sapphire-blue eyes.
“Jess!” Serafina gasped, and threw her arms around her.
“Serafina…” Jess muttered.
It was only when Serafina heard the exhausted raggedness of her friend’s voice that she truly began to realize what Jess and Kinsley had been through.
Braeden knelt down and gave them water from a leather skin he had retrieved from the carriage, and fed them pieces of leftover biscuits that he had stashed in his satchel during his long journey home.
“What happened to you out there, Jess?” Serafina asked.
“The dogs treed two mountain lions, and my father started shooting…” Jess said, her words so faltering that she almost seemed delirious. “But over the years my father taught me many things….”
“What did he teach you?” Serafina asked, grasping her arm.
“How to adjust the sights of a rifle,” Jess replied, looking up at her. “Before we went out that night, I set his sights three clicks to the right, and five clicks down. He got so angry and confused when his shots kept missing, but there was no way he was going to hit those cats….”
Serafina’s heart swelled. It had been Jess all along!
“But then the fog rolled in,” Jess continued. “There were gunshots and flashes of…I don’t know what it was…. I saw something metal…and then something black….” Jess looked straight at her now, her eyes wide. “I shouldn’t have tampered with my father’s gun, Serafina. He was shooting, but he kept missing. He couldn’t defend himself! My father died because of me!”
Serafina held Jess as she cried.
“But what attacked you, Jess?” Braeden asked, his voice shaking.
“Something black came at me from the side. My horse reared up. I was thrown. When I woke up, my head was bleeding, my leg twisted. I could see my father and the other men were dead. I knew I needed to get back to Biltmore, but my horse was long gone. I could kind of limp along on foot, and I thought I remembered the way home. But as I was going, I saw a white deer in the underbrush. It began to follow me. I saw it behind me, then tracking alongside, getting closer and closer, like it was hunting me. I thought for sure I remembered how to get back to Biltmore, but I got hopelessly lost. I was so cold. I was sure I was going to die. But Lieutenant Kinsley found me. He gave me all his food and water, and he wrapped me in his coat. We rode together on his horse, but then we started seeing the white deer again….”
“We need to stop talking,” Kinsley said forcefully as he got himself up onto his feet. “There’s no time for this.” He scanned the line of trees in the distance. “We need to get out of here.”
“You’re safe now,” Serafina said, putting her hand on his shoulder to reassure him. “We’re almost home. We’ll take you the rest of the way.”
“I can help you to the carriage,” Braeden said to the lieutenant, trying to hold Kinsley’s arm to help him walk.
“You don’t understand!” Kinsley snapped, pulling away from him. “It’s still out there!”
He peered out across the field toward the forest, his trembling white fingers gripping his rifle. “It’s not going to give up! It’s coming for us!”
As she gazed at the panicking lieutenant, Serafina recognized the same fear and confusion she had felt, a sense that the world wasn’t just coming apart at the seams in some random way, but that she was actually being tracked down. And she remembered seeing it in Mr. Vanderbilt’s eyes the morning he arrived unexpectedly in the workshop.
“We’ve got to go!” Lieutenant Kinsley said, glancing frantically all
around.
“You’re right, let’s go, right away,” Serafina said, and pulled Jess to her feet.
The four of them trekked as quickly as they could across the field toward the carriage.
“How did you get back to Biltmore?” Serafina asked as she helped Jess along.
“We were crossing through a swamp, and the white deer came again,” Jess said.
“I took a shot at it to scare it off, but it just kept coming,” Kinsley said, looking over his shoulder. “Every time we shifted direction, it reflected our movements.”
“Our horse panicked and ran,” Jess said, gasping for breath as they moved quickly across the field. They were nearly to the carriage now. “One of its hooves went down into some kind of hole and it broke its leg. Kinsley had to put the poor animal out of its misery.”
“My sweet Arabella is dead,” Kinsley said, “and I was the one who killed her!”
“I’m so sorry, Kinsley,” Serafina said as they finally arrived at the carriage.
“It’s going to be all right now,” Braeden assured them as he opened the carriage door and helped Jess inside. “We’ll get you in front of a warm fire, with a hot cup of tea, and—”
Braeden stopped midsentence.
He froze right where he was standing, his eyes locked on something in the distance.
“She’s back…” he said.
Serafina turned and saw the white deer standing at the top of the nearest hill, its antlers sticking up around its head.
“There it is!” Kinsley shouted. “Everybody go! I’ll hold it off!”
Standing suddenly strong and fierce, he swung his rifle and aimed at the deer.
“No,” Braeden said, lurching forward and pushing the rifle down, a reflex to protect any animal from harm. “Don’t shoot her.”
Kinsley pushed him away. “You don’t understand, Braeden. It’s been hunting us!”
And then he retook his aim at the deer and pulled the trigger. His rifle flashed in the night with a startling crack. But even more startling, Serafina heard the bullet whiz past her ear and smash through the window of the carriage behind her.
Serafina and the Seven Stars Page 15