“We can’t let it get any closer!” Kinsley screamed as he levered his rifle and shot again. The bullet hit the dirt at their feet.
The bullets are being deflected, Serafina thought suddenly, like reflected light splintering from a diamond.
Kinsley levered another cartridge and fired again.
“No, Kinsley, stop shooting!” she screamed as she lunged toward him, but it was too late. He pulled the trigger.
“Aaagh!” Kinsley shouted out in pain and surprise as the bullet ripped through his arm. He dropped his rifle and clasped his hand against the bloody wound, stumbling back against the wheel of the carriage, and then collapsing to the ground.
“What in tarnation is going on?” the coachman asked as he hurried down from the driver’s seat in a panic and pulled a knife from his belt. “What is that thing out there?”
The white deer began walking toward them.
Serafina’s heart hammered in her chest. The moment she began to move, she could feel the deep, soft soil clinging to her feet.
And then she caught something out of the corner of her eye and turned.
“Braeden, what is that coming toward us?”
A cold, moonlit fog had risen from the moist soil of the farm field, and there were three shapes rushing toward them out of the trees from the direction of the house.
“It…I…” Braeden stammered.
“Run!” Kinsley shouted as he struggled back up onto his feet despite his bleeding wound.
Serafina gazed in astonishment at the three shapes coming toward them, unable to believe what she was seeing.
A living, flesh-and-blood medieval warrior—a young woman clad in full plate armor and brandishing a long, steel-tipped spear—was charging toward them. And there were two huge male African lions charging with her.
“All of you, run!” Kinsley shouted again.
But Serafina did not run.
She didn’t understand what she was seeing. But she knew she couldn’t let herself and her friends die.
“Into the carriage, now!” she shouted at Braeden and Jess as she pushed them inside and closed the door behind them.
Then she turned toward the oncoming attackers and shifted into a black panther.
The knife-wielding coachman standing nearby screamed at the sight of her. A medieval warrior, a pair of African lions, and now a strange, black-haired thirteen-year-old girl changing into a black panther right before his eyes was all too much for him. He dropped his knife and bolted across the field in panic. She wanted to go after him, to show him that she didn’t mean him any harm, but she knew she couldn’t. She had to face the attackers charging toward her and Kinsley. Sticking together was their only hope.
As she turned to join the lieutenant, she bared her panther fangs with a snarl of readiness and took her place at his side. Kinsley’s eyes went wide in startled surprise as he said, “Well, that explains a lot!”
Then he pivoted his rifle and pointed it at the warrior and the lions bounding toward them.
He stood without fear or hesitation, and he aimed with perfect steadiness. But when he pulled the trigger, he shouted at the pain of the rifle’s stock jamming into his wounded shoulder.
His first shot hit the warrior in the chest, but the bullet thudded against the slope of her fluted-steel breastplate. He immediately levered his rifle and shot again.
As their enemies charged toward them across the field, Serafina crouched, readying herself for the incoming attack.
Kinsley’s second bullet hit the curve of the warrior’s shoulder plate, but sparked away without doing her any harm. Despite the bullets striking her, the warrior kept coming, completely unafraid, thrusting her spear ahead of her.
And then one of the running lions spotted the coachman fleeing across the field in the distance and sped toward him. Serafina’s heart lurched. She wanted to run to him, to protect him, but she knew it was too late.
The coachman screeched in horror as the great maned beast pounced onto his back and slammed him to the ground. The bleeding, screaming man scrambled away on all fours and got to his feet. But the lion lunged forward with incredible speed and struck him with its claws, knocking him down again.
Serafina couldn’t believe the impossibility of what she was witnessing before her eyes. How could all this be happening? How could a medieval warrior and two African lions even be here?
Kinsley fired again, their enemies seconds away now.
The wounded coachman punched and kicked, rolled through the dirt, and broke free, then sprang up and limped away, determined to stay alive. The lion hurled itself forward and tackled him, clamping its front paws around him, the full weight of its body dragging him down as it sank its massive fangs into his neck. When the screaming stopped, there was no doubt in Serafina’s mind that the poor man was dead.
And then the lion was up and running again, sprinting to rejoin the other two attackers racing toward her and Kinsley. The sight of it startled her. A normal predator didn’t immediately abandon its kill to join another fight, but here it came, straight at them.
Her powerful panther heart pounded in her chest. Her muscles tightened. At the last second, as the two big cats burst ahead of the armored warrior, Serafina leapt forward, her long black body speeding across the ground to meet them head-on.
Knowing she couldn’t fight both lions at the same time, she attacked the closest one with everything she had. Her plan was to kill it quickly and move on to the next before they could gang up on her.
But the first of the five-hundred-pound beasts reared up on its hind legs and slammed into her, chest-to-chest. The lion wrapped its front legs around her in a violent, bearlike embrace, then dug its claws deep into her back and threw her to the ground. The heavy blow immediately stunned and knocked the wind out of her. And then the lion held her down by the neck, its massive jaws clenched tight, pinning her on her back, her legs flailing helplessly in the air.
Any thought that the attackers were figments of her jittery imagination or ghosts in the autumn mist was instantly gone now. She was seconds from suffocation.
Pinned upside down by the lion’s colossal weight, she twisted her long, feline spine, bent herself in half, and snagged all four of her clawed paws onto the lion’s face. Then she pushed. The lion roared with the pain of her claws tearing through its skin and muscles, scratching against the bone, as it tried to wrench itself free.
She burst upward, spinning in midair, and landed on top of it, clawing into its sides. But with a deafening, guttural growl, the lion twisted away, ripping into her and trying to clamp on to her head with its long fangs.
Serafina spun again, clawing the lion’s back. Then the lion twisted and turned and threw her off, lunging at her with a fierce triple swipe of its claws as it charged. Serafina sprang back, and back again, dodging the swipes, then threw herself into the lion with a snarling, biting counterattack.
The second lion lunged at her at the same time, sending spasms of pain through her legs as it ripped four streaks of blood across her haunch. And she caught a glimpse of Kinsley striking at the armored warrior with a mighty swing of his rifle. It would have been a killing blow, but the warrior blocked the strike with the steel vambrace of her raised arm, then used her other hand to thrust the tip of her spear into Kinsley’s stomach. Kinsley cried out in pain as he clutched at the shaft of the spear.
Outnumbered and outmatched, speed and agility were Serafina’s only weapons against the two lions, her only means of survival. She clawed at one lion, then sprang at the other. She bit the head of an incoming attacker, then dodged to the side, spun, and swatted the face of another. Back and forth, bite and claw, lunging and leaping, twisting and darting, she was everywhere, all the time.
But these lions would not give up. She had scratched them, pierced them, torn at their faces, but they would not retreat like normal cats would. They weren’t lions, they were mindless killing machines.
She dashed away, ran twenty strides, and then p
ivoted. The two lions charged toward her. She lunged at the closest one just as she had done before. And just as before, it reared up onto its hind legs and wrapped its front legs around her, trying to throw her to the ground with the weight of its shoulders.
But this time, she didn’t try to fight against its weight and strength. She didn’t try to overpower it. She could not battle a male African lion in the way male African lions fought. Instead, she folded her body straight to the ground, dragging her claws down the entire length of the lion’s exposed underside.
She felt her claws tearing into it, the blood coming down.
Just as the first lion collapsed and died, the second lion slammed into her. The two of them tumbled across the ground in a ball of snarling teeth and ripping claws.
Instead of trying to fight against it, she twisted herself upside down, turned underside-out, and sprang free. She leapt upward, spinning in midair, and came down hard on its back.
As her fangs clamped onto its spine, its body jolted and went still.
The moment the second lion was dead, Serafina pivoted toward the armored warrior, who was thrusting her spear into the wounded Kinsley for the third time.
Snarling with anger, Serafina sprang toward her, flying through the air.
She pounced onto the warrior’s back and tore her clanking, metal-clad body tumbling to the ground.
Leaping on top of her, Serafina clawed her and bit her, but she couldn’t get through the warrior’s armor plates. She scraped and scratched to no avail as the warrior pummeled her sides with her gauntleted fists.
Realizing that brute force wasn’t going to work, Serafina extended the claws of her right paw, hooked them on to the warrior’s uppermost shoulder plate, and pulled it back to expose the warrior’s neck. Then she slammed her fangs into the warrior’s throat and clenched her panther jaws.
With her full weight holding the warrior down, and her teeth clamping the warrior’s throat, she sensed her enemy’s death was near. Even as the warrior began to die, she kept fighting Serafina, kept trying to do as much damage as she could. But the truly disturbing thing was that she wasn’t fighting to live. She wasn’t fighting to breathe. There was no last-second burst of strength to escape, no all-consuming instinct to survive. Just as with the lions, it was as if killing was primary, and living was secondary.
As Serafina held the warrior’s windpipe clamped shut, she felt the warrior’s lungs begin to deflate, her heart stop beating, and her blood stop flowing.
Finally, the warrior was dead.
But it was as if, in some ways, she had never been truly alive.
Serafina crouched low over Kinsley’s fallen body, growling as she protected him, her claws still out as she scanned the field for the next attack. When she looked over her shoulder to make sure Braeden and Jess were still safely inside the carriage, she saw their blanched faces peering out of the window at her and Kinsley. And then she searched the top of the distant hill and the forest beyond. But there were no more attackers, and the white deer was gone.
She shifted into human form and dropped to her knees beside Kinsley, staring at him in dismay.
He was lying on the ground flat on his back, sunk deep into the soil of the field, gasping desperately for breath. The skin of his face was white with deathly pallor as he gazed up at her in shock. It seemed so wrong! They had fought hard, they had stuck together, they had done everything right, but he was still down, still wounded, and there was nothing she could do!
“Just hold on, Kinsley,” she cried. “We’re gonna get you through this!”
But the truth was, she didn’t know how to help him. She didn’t know how to save him.
And as she pressed her hands against his wounds to stanch the bleeding, a lake of warm blood welled up between her fingers.
She tried to stop the bleeding, to hold him, to talk to him and give him hope. But Kinsley looked up at her one last time, and then his eyes drifted shut. A long, ragged breath escaped from his struggling body, and he went still.
She wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive, but her chest filled with aching pain. All Kinsley wanted was to be a brave and worthy friend to Mr. Vanderbilt. All he wanted to do was lend a hand to the people around him. I’ll see you at dinner, he had said to her the last time they parted.
“Braeden, Jess, come quickly!” she shouted toward the carriage.
Braeden came running out, Jess stumbling behind him.
“Kinsley’s been stabbed,” Serafina said, her eyes tearing up, as Braeden knelt down and put two of his fingers to the lieutenant’s neck. She knew Braeden couldn’t heal humans the way he could animals, but she desperately hoped he could help in some way.
“I can’t feel a pulse,” Braeden said, shaking his head.
Serafina’s heart sank at the discouraged sound of his voice.
“He’s not dead,” Jess said from behind them.
They both turned in surprise.
“Look carefully at the bullet wound at his shoulder,” she said. “The blood is welling up in the hole. If he were dead, his heart would be stopped, and the blood would sink to the lower part of his body.”
Serafina felt a surge of relief and nodded to Jess: her eagle-eyed friend was back.
“We’ve got to get him to a doctor right away,” Braeden said as they got to their feet and worked together to drag Kinsley’s unconscious body.
As they pulled him toward the carriage, Serafina gazed sadly out across the field at the body of the coachman in the distance. They would need to return for him later.
“Get back to Biltmore as fast as you can,” Serafina said as Braeden climbed up into the driver’s seat of the carriage and took up the reins of the horses.
“What about you?” Braeden asked, clearly startled that she wasn’t coming.
“I’ll catch up,” she said.
As Braeden snapped the reins and the team of horses sped the carriage away, Serafina ran back to where Kinsley had been wounded.
She gazed at the dead body of the medieval warrior lying on the ground. The girl looked about seventeen or eighteen years old, tall and strong, and she had a handsome face with white alabaster skin. The triangular white-and-gold battle standard attached to her spear lay crumpled around her, unusually long, as if it was designed to be seen across the murky chaos of a battlefield filled with the peasants, knights, and kings of old. There was nothing about her that seemed fake or conjured. There was even what looked like a gold cross hanging around her neck. And beneath the plates of her armor, she wore a tunic of chain mail.
And there Serafina paused.
Chain mail, she thought.
She slowly crouched down.
She reached out her hand, and touched her trembling fingers to the skin of the dead girl’s cheek.
Her face felt cold.
But also hard.
Moments before, this girl’s face had been flush with life. But now her cheek didn’t feel warm. It didn’t even feel like skin. More and more, it felt disturbingly like stone.
And not just stone, Serafina thought. Limestone. She knew limestone very well. Biltmore was constructed out of it.
A notion so strange that it could barely be believed crept into her mind.
She ran over to the two dead lions and reached out her hand.
Their bodies weren’t limestone. But they weren’t lion, either. They were cold and hard, smooth to the touch, and reddish in color.
“Italian rose marble,” Serafina whispered in amazement.
As she said the words it felt as if a dam was breaking and a rushing flow of thoughts poured through her mind.
She shifted into panther form and ran for the carriage.
A thirteen-year-old human girl could not run as fast as cantering horses. But a panther could.
She streaked down the Approach Road and came up behind the moving carriage. The horses must not have had blinders on their harness that night, because they soon spotted her with their rear vision. Panicking, they broke into
a full-on gallop to escape the vicious black predator charging up behind them.
It was just the burst of speed she wanted from them. The faster they got Kinsley home, the better.
She accelerated toward them and leapt onto the roof of the hurtling carriage. Then she shifted into human form and sat down in the driver’s seat next to Braeden.
“Glad you made it,” he said, glancing at her as he steered the carriage at barreling speed through Biltmore’s main gate and into the courtyard.
“Mr. Pratt!” he called as he brought the carriage to a fast stop at the main doors. “Lieutenant Kinsley is badly hurt. Get him into the house right away and get the doctor.”
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Pratt replied, shouting for the assistance of several other footmen as he opened the carriage door to retrieve the lieutenant.
“Miss Serafina,” Mr. Pratt said as she climbed down from the carriage roof. “Mr. Vanderbilt wants to see both you and the young master in his office immediately.”
“I understand,” she said as she helped Jess out of the carriage. “Please make sure you take care of Miss Braddick as well, Mr. Pratt. She needs food and water, and she needs to get warm.”
“Yes, miss, right away,” Mr. Pratt said as several of the footmen took Jess’s arms and helped her into the house. “Don’t worry, we’ll attend to her.”
It felt good to have their help, to be working together with the other servants of Biltmore, to be able to depend on them.
The moment she saw that Jess and Kinsley were in good hands, she looked at Braeden.
“Come on, we have things to do,” she said and walked across the front terrace.
“But what about my uncle?” Braeden asked, the strain in his voice making it clear that he didn’t want to see Mr. Vanderbilt any more than she did.
“We’ve got to figure this out,” she said, pulling him along, and then she stopped him with her hand and pointed to the empty area of the terrace just to the side of Biltmore’s front steps. “Look! Do you see? They’re gone. The lion statues. They’re actually gone!”
Serafina and the Seven Stars Page 16