The snarling sphinxes and gargoyles had turned to stone where they stood.
And the screeching wyvern had gone silent and fallen from the sky.
All that remained of the battle in the Angel’s Glade was the drifting, acrid smell of what Serafina thought must be the remnants of burning stars.
Her skin was still tingling, and her body still shaking, as she peeked slowly out from behind the pedestal.
The angel was walking toward her, calm and peaceful now. She was tall, with long striding legs that moved in a fluid, graceful motion, and flowing silvery hair that seemed to be filled with light. Her gray feathered wings rose up from her shoulders like the wings of a swan. She was the most beautiful being Serafina had ever beheld.
When the angel stopped in front of her, Serafina could barely breathe.
The angel smiled, took Serafina’s head gently into her hands, and kissed her forehead with a long, tender kiss that felt like the touch of a warm breeze against her skin. In this touch, in this moment, she felt a sense of acceptance more powerful than she had ever felt before, as if everything she had ever done right, everything she had ever done wrong, everything she was, was perfect. In this moment, she felt all that it meant to be loved.
For several seconds, Serafina was so overwhelmed by everything that had happened, and so stunned that the angel had actually looked at her and touched her, she could not move.
Finally, she gathered up her courage and, still trembling, rose to her feet and turned toward the angel. Who are you? she was about to ask. What is your name? Why have you helped me?
But the pedestal was empty.
The angel was gone.
I need to find Braeden…
She turned in the direction she’d seen the wyvern go down.
Was it possible that he had survived?
She headed out into the forest to look for him, but immediately ran headlong into an obstacle. The ancient willow tree at the edge of the glade, which had once been the den of her mother, brother, and sister, had toppled to the ground, its trunk and branches a crisscross of broken destruction. She pushed into the fallen tree and clambered through its branches.
When she reached the other side, she got back onto her feet and tried to run, darting between the scattered, broken gravestones and the statues of gargoyles, but her feet sloshed through the inches of swamp water seeping out of the ground all around her. The gravestones and the trees and the fallen statues were sinking into the earth, the swamp engulfing everything, as if it had been only the Angel’s Glade that had prevented it from doing so long before.
She climbed up and over the massive root ball of a fallen oak tree, and came down into two feet of green water.
Pushing through the swamp, she passed the stone bodies of the two sphinxes, with only their heads above the water now.
Her chest tightened as she gazed out at the dark and murky devastation of the flooding graveyard.
“Braeden!” she shouted desperately. “Braeden, can you hear me?”
She sloshed through the water in one direction and then the next, frantically looking for him. She could feel the heat of despair rising in her face. She had no idea which way to go. But she had to find him!
Frustrated, she stood in the waist-deep water and scanned in all directions, looking out across the drowning forest, trying to figure out what to do.
In the distance, she saw a single black shape circling above the canopy of the trees.
At first she thought it was the wyvern, flying way up in the sky, but then she realized that the wyvern had turned to stone and fallen.
Is it some kind of bird?
Still not sure, she moved toward it, her feet dragging and tripping on the rocks and branches beneath the water’s surface.
Then she saw another dark shape similar to the first, and she began to make out the flapping of wings.
They definitely looked like birds, and they were circling.
It’s the crows! she thought, pushing harder in that direction. Braeden’s crows!
As she came closer to the spot over which the crows were circling, several other crows rose up from a branch and started flying around her. Soon there were dozens of crows, and then hundreds. The crows were everywhere, cawing raucously.
At first it seemed as if they were attacking her, but then she realized they were urging her on, guiding her where they wanted her to go.
She gasped in dismay when she spotted a pale white shriveled hand sticking up out of the swamp water.
Serafina shoved herself through the muck of the swamp. She could see the white limbs of Braeden’s body down in the murky water, trapped under the large stone pieces of the broken wyvern. But one of his arms was sticking straight up out of the swamp, like he was raising his hand in class, as if he’d been trying to make sure she saw him there. It was as if he knew she would be coming for him. His other arm was under the surface, clinging desperately to a half-submerged toppled tree. And there, pressed against the trunk, was his head, his mouth just inches above the water.
“Braeden!” she shouted, lurching toward him and grasping his upraised hand.
His eyes opened suddenly. “You found me!” he said in relief. “I’m stuck, I can’t get out!”
She reached under the water, grabbed on to him, and tried to pull him forcefully to his feet, but it was no use. A part of one of the wyvern’s stone talons still gripped his leg, holding his lower body down into the water.
“The water level’s rising fast,” he said.
“Hold on,” she said, as she looked hurriedly around for ideas. She needed some sort of leverage.
Then she spotted something gray sticking up out of the water nearby. She thought at first it was a gravestone. But it was actually a piece of the wyvern’s stone wing. It wouldn’t work as a pry bar, but she had another idea.
She gripped it in both hands and tried to lift it, but it was far heavier than she expected and it nearly pulled her off her feet.
Filled with anger now, she grabbed it again. With a heavy grunt, she raised it above her head. Her whole body tilted under the weight of it, leaning one way and then the other as she stumbled and splashed through the waist-deep water.
“Watch out, Braeden!” she yelled as she came barreling toward him.
“But I can’t get out of the way!” he shouted up in panic as the stone came slamming down from above her head and smashed into the wyvern’s talon, cracking it to pieces.
“You did it!” Braeden said, yanking his leg free.
Mighty relieved that she hadn’t killed him, she pulled him to his feet. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” he said, and they set off at a steady push. They waded through the swamp together, Braeden sometimes reaching out a hand to help her over the trunk of a fallen tree, other times Serafina leading the way through a particularly nasty thicket of bramble.
As they put the swamp behind them, Serafina glanced back over her shoulder. It was hard to believe, after all the time that she and Braeden and her feline kin had spent there, but the Angel’s Glade and the old, abandoned graveyard that surrounded it had been destroyed.
“That was a good idea to use your crows to signal me,” she said. “I would have never found you in time on my own.”
“Some people send up rescue flares, I send up crows,” he said, smiling. “They don’t normally fly at night, but it was kind of them to help us.”
Once they found their way out of the swamp, they traveled for several miles through the forest, back toward Biltmore.
When it was clear that they had left the battle well behind them, they rested for a few moments, climbing together into the shadowed hollow of an old tree that had been struck by lightning years before.
The space inside the tree was cramped, and the night air cold, so they huddled together, wrapping their arms around each other without saying a word.
They had meant to rest for just a moment to catch their breath, b
ut once they were in the warmth of each other’s arms, they stayed in the hollow of the tree for a long time, just holding each other.
Her heart stopped pounding so hard in her chest. Her body stopped shaking from the cold.
Braeden’s panting breaths slowly quieted and his head tilted down, gently touching hers.
They had finally escaped.
Huddled there in the darkness, they did not move. They did not speak.
She could feel the pulse of her blood moving gently through her veins, her chest slowly pulling air into her lungs.
For a few moments, she simply existed, grateful to be alive.
Finally, Serafina said, “We’d better get on home.”
“Yeah,” Braeden said softly, and they reluctantly disentangled themselves from each other and crawled out of the tree.
As they headed home, she could sense that, like hers, Braeden’s thoughts were turning to what lay ahead.
“What do you think happened at Biltmore after we left?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, thinking about her pa and everyone else back at home.
As she and Braeden continued on their way through the forest, she asked, “Why did you run toward the wyvern like that?”
“The wyvern was preventing you from getting to the Angel’s Glade.”
“So you threw yourself into its talons?”
“I didn’t throw myself!” he protested with a laugh. “I charged at the wyvern and tried to fight it, but it grabbed me! I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“What happened after it got you?”
“As it was flying, I kept fighting and kicking, trying to grab branches in the trees to hold myself closer to the ground. I knew I couldn’t let it take me up too high or I was done for, so I called the crows. There wasn’t much they could do against the wyvern, but they mobbed it and harassed it like it was a giant hawk in their territory. Crows don’t like hawks. We weren’t winning the fight, that’s for sure, but at least we were distracting it and keeping it close to the ground.”
“You were distracting it?” she said incredulously, remembering how her heart had lurched when she saw him dangling from its talons fifty feet in the air. “That was your plan, to throw yourself at the wyvern and distract it?”
“You make it sound like I tried to sacrifice myself in some sort of heroic, last-stand suicide attack or something.”
“It looked an awful lot like a heroic, last-stand suicide attack to me,” she said with a smile.
“Well, I think it was more of a flailing, screaming, hanging-upside-down sort of thing,” he argued.
“But what were you thinking, doing something like that?”
“I told you, I wanted to give you time to get to the Angel’s Glade.”
“But you didn’t even know why I wanted to get there,” she said.
He walked on through the forest without saying anything for a few moments, as if her questions had stumped him a little bit, and then he said, “I knew you must have had some sort of plan.”
“You knew,” she repeated as she walked beside him, wondering about that word.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said with a smile. “You were right.”
“So what about you? How did you know the statue of the angel would do what it did?”
She wasn’t sure she could give him an adequate answer, but she tried to explain it the best she could.
“From the books in the Library, we learned that people long ago thought that the magic of the Seven Stars had the ability to slip through the veil between the physical and the magical world, and that it had the power to bring spirit to that which did not have spirit.”
“Like the statues at Biltmore,” Braeden said.
“And that’s the key. Unlike the statues at Biltmore, the angel in the glade already had a spirit.”
Braeden took a few more steps, and then said, “So when the magic of the Seven Stars awoke the angel, it couldn’t control her….”
“That’s right. The angel was far more powerful.”
“But I don’t understand. How did you know the angel had a spirit? How did you know she wasn’t just plain old stone like all the other statues? Was that from a book, too?”
Serafina just kept walking.
Serafina and Braeden crept slowly out of the woods at the top of Diana Hill, near where the goddess of the hunt statue had been, the very place Serafina had been standing days before when the thirteen carriages arrived. She remembered she had been looking desperately for an evil intruder among those new arrivals. It never even occurred to her that the passengers of the carriages would be the victims.
She didn’t know why the deer standing beside Diana had been the first of the statues to come to life. She had learned so much about what had happened, but there were so many things about the magic of the Seven Stars that she still didn’t understand, and probably never would. She had come to realize that there would always be more mysteries. And there would always be more to learn.
“Was the white deer…” Braeden began to ask as he stared at the empty spot where the statue had been. “What would have happened if the hunters had never shot it that first night? Or if we hadn’t tried to fight it? Was the white deer good or evil?”
She thought about it for several seconds.
Obviously, the white deer was evil: It had been killing people. So it had to be stopped.
She and the people of Biltmore were good. So it was evil. Right?
But the more she thought about it, the more she realized it wasn’t that simple.
“I don’t know,” she admitted finally.
“I think maybe it was like the stories said, some kind of reflection of our world in the moment it came. And it splintered and bounced in all different directions, like light in a jewel.”
“Or light on the water of a lake,” she said.
“Right,” he said.
“And there was something else, too,” Serafina said. “The way it attacked mainly the hunters at first. That made sense to me. And even the spiraling out of control when we started trying to defend ourselves, when Kinsley was attacked and the others. But it took me a little longer to understand the rest of it.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. “What rest of it?”
“When we confronted the deer in the Tapestry Gallery, did you see the way it snorted at us and shook its antlers? It seemed so angry, so fierce, like it wanted to kill us.”
“Yeah, I saw that all too close.”
“But why did it do that? On that first night when we were down by the lake, the hunters didn’t shoot the white deer out of anger. They shot it for sport, for the trophy of killing an unusual animal. Not out of rage or hatred. So, if it was reflection, where did the anger and fierceness come from, that drive for vengeance?”
“You’re right,” he said. “I never thought about it like that.”
Serafina remembered that night by the lake, seeing the beautiful fawn and then hearing the gunshots. She remembered the way she had turned on those hunters, charging at them, her fangs snarling, her claws slashing.
“I think…I think maybe it came from me,” she said, trying to absorb the meaning of what she was saying even as she was saying it. “A reflection of our world in that moment.”
Braeden looked like he was about to open his mouth to argue with her. But then he paused and looked away, maybe beginning to realize that it was possible she was right.
“I don’t know if that’s what it was,” he said finally.
“I don’t, either,” she admitted, and it was the truth, but it made her wonder.
It all made her wonder.
As she and Braeden stood near the empty pedestal, she turned and gazed out across the expanse of the Esplanade toward the house. But instead of being a wide, flat open area of grass, the Esplanade was strewn with hundreds of stone statues—fallen gargoyles, slain ogres, and savage beasts of all descriptions.
The walls of Bi
ltmore Estate looked as if they had been decayed by time, as if bits had fallen off and parts were missing—all the empty spots where the carven ornamentation had been.
It gave the house a gray, weathered look, and she imagined it was dead.
She had hoped to see people gathered outside, or perhaps in the windows or on the terraces, but there was no one there.
Her eyes darted from one area to the next, but she didn’t see a single person.
Serafina knew that she and Braeden had been gone from Biltmore for far too long. They had to get home.
“Let’s go down,” Braeden said gravely, both of them sensing what awaited wasn’t going to be good.
He led the way through the field of statues toward the house. She and Braeden moved quickly but warily, half expecting one of the statues to come back to life.
When they reached the front of the house, the doors were hanging wide open, broken off their hinges and tilting to the side. She was expecting to see a footman or someone else guarding the entrance, but no one was there. The house was eerily quiet and still.
“Let’s go inside,” Braeden said, sounding as nervous and uncertain as she was.
The stained-glass windows had been crushed in. The tall wrought-iron lamps had toppled and their glass globes broken. The magnificent grandfather clock had been knocked to the floor, its oak sides split, its springs sprung, and its gears in pieces. Vases that once held whimsical arrangements of flowers had crashed down and shattered across the floor. The carcass of the winged lion, now solid stone, lay among many other stone creatures.
Serafina swallowed hard and kept walking, Braeden quiet at her side.
As they made their way through the Tapestry Gallery, she could see that much of the furniture had been shredded by the claws of the gargoyles. Many of the Flemish tapestries had been burned or torn down and lay crumpled on the floor. But worst of all, the dead body of her friend, the footman Mr. Pratt, lay on the ground where he had been killed.
Serafina tried to keep breathing, tried to keep standing, but the sight of it was almost too much to bear.
Serafina and the Seven Stars Page 21