Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series)

by Robert Beatty

  Finally, she gathered herself up.

  Whoever the boy was, she hoped he’d be all right. Stay strong, my friend.

  She ducked into a dense boscage of spruce and fir, the evergreens packed so tightly together that it was like swimming in an ocean of green foliage. As she pushed her way through the thicket, she found her strength giving way to confusion. Her knees kept buckling beneath her, and she couldn’t focus on the terrain in front of her. She raised her hand to her head and realised that she was bleeding badly from a tear in her scalp. The blood was dripping down her forehead and into her eyes.

  She stumbled through the sea of trees, knowing there was no way to elude the dogs now. Spasms of pain radiated from the puncture wounds in her arms and legs. She had to wipe the blood out of her eyes to see where she was going. The needled branches of the trees were so thick and high that she could no longer see the moon and stars. Her racing feet cracked sticks on the ground, making noise that she wouldn’t normally make, but it didn’t matter now. She had to run like she’d never run before. But even as she ducked and darted between the trees, she kept hearing the feral boy’s voice: You can’t outrun these things for long! She wanted to turn and fight them, but if they caught her here in the thicket of trees it’d be impossible to see their attacks. They’d kill her for sure. She had to keep running.

  Suddenly, the trees opened up and she nearly fell headlong over a cliff edge into a rocky crash of whitewater rapids below. She pulled herself back from the edge with a gasp and grabbed onto the branches of a tree.

  Looking over the edge of the cliff, she could see there was no way to cross the river here. The cliff was too high, the rapids too dangerous.

  There ain’t nothin’ but bad choices, she thought. She knew she had to get to cover, but right now the cover she needed was to conceal her scent.

  Pushing herself on, she ran along the cliff as it led down towards the river.

  When she came to the stretch below the rapids, she tried to wade quickly across what looked like the safest and shallowest point. She’d never been in deep water before and didn’t know how to swim. She pushed hard through the drag of the rushing, knee-deep water, desperate to reach the other side and escape the wolfhounds. The mountain river was so cold that her legs ached. The current ran swift and strong. As she placed each step against the tearing force of the water, she felt the round, algae-covered rocks turning and slipping beneath her searching feet.

  She reached the centre of the river. The water ripped round her thighs, making it more and more difficult to push against it. She was making headway. But just when she thought she was going to make it across, she felt the current lifting her body away from the rocks beneath her feet. She lost her balance and crashed down into the icy-cold water. She flailed wildly, desperately kicking her legs in search of footing, but the bottom of the river disappeared as the current swept her into deep water. Coughing and spitting, she thrashed and leapt and gasped frantically for air as the river carried her downstream towards the next set of rapids.

  The current sucked her into a rifling chute between two giant boulders, then shot her out the other side, tumbling end over end underwater through a dark green pool. As her head broke the surface, she managed to steal another gasp of air before the river grabbed hold of her again, heaving her and yanking her through a spiral of rushing water. She found herself spinning, submerged in a whirlpool so deep that she said goodbye to her pa. But then her body hit a jagged rock. She tried to cling to it, but the rushing flow immediately pulled her away again. She’d always thought she was strong, but compared to the force of the river she was nothing more than a kitten tossed into the water. When the rapids finally spat her out into the calm water downstream, she crawled from the river, wet and bedraggled, and collapsed onto the rocky shore, exhausted.

  She had made it across.

  Serafina knew that if the dogs followed her downstream and saw her across the river, then they would pursue her. She had to get up, had to keep running, but she couldn’t force her arms and legs to move. She couldn’t even lift her head. The freezing-cold water and pounding force of the river had sapped all the remaining strength from her muscles. Her limbs were shaking. As she lay on the watery stones at the edge of the river, the protection of Biltmore seemed impossibly far away, beyond her reach. Her body was so tired she could barely get a few feet, let alone the miles she needed to go. The small puddles of water among the stones where she lay began to turn dark one by one. She felt so cold.

  She wondered if the feral boy was lying mortally wounded in the forest back where she’d left him or still fighting the wolfhounds. Or maybe he had escaped them. She could hear his voice in her mind. Run! he had shouted to her. Run! But she could not run. She could not move.

  A wave of black calm passed through her, inviting her to simply shut her eyes and let everything go. A cloud of sickening colours veiled her eyes. She could feel herself passing out. How easy it would be to simply drift away. But a fierceness boiled in her heart. Get up! she told herself. Run! Get home! She struggled to rouse herself, to get onto her feet, to at least raise her head.

  She opened her eyes and squinted through the blood. The terrain on this side of the river was low and gentle, dotted with ferns and birch trees, so different from the rocky cliffs that she had left behind on the other side. She saw a light coming towards her in the darkness. At first she thought it must be a twinkling star, for the sky was clear, but it wasn’t one light. It was many lights.

  She felt her chest trying helplessly to suck in air in anticipation of an attack, but even in the haze of her fear she hoped that it might be a torch or lantern, her pa coming in search of her like he had once before.

  But then she saw that the lights weren’t the flickering flames of a lantern, but the scintillating dance of living creatures floating in the air and coming towards her down the river.

  Are they fireflies? she wondered as they came closer.

  But these were much larger and bright green in colour, their wings slowly flashing white and green, white and green, as they flew, like the wings of luminescent butterflies.

  But they’re not butterflies, either, she thought with a smile. They’re luna moths.

  It was an entire eclipse of moths, each one pale green in colour and glowing in the moonlight, hundreds of them flying together down the length of the river, their long tails streaming behind their silent, gently fluttering wings.

  She had found her first luna moth in Biltmore’s gardens one midsummer’s night when she was a little girl. She remembered the moth’s almost magical glow in the starlit darkness as she held it in her open hand, its wings moving gently up and down. But it was strange to see so many of them travelling together. Was she imagining this? Was this how death came? A distant memory from the midnights of her past?

  But, as she watched the luna moths flying over the water, it struck her again that they weren’t just hovering. They were travelling down the length of the stream, as if they would follow this river to the one that it flowed into, and then onward to the next river, and the next, through the mountains, and all the way to the sea. They were leaving this place. Just like the birds.

  She heard the wolfhounds barking and howling to each other on the cliff on the other side of the river. They were coming.

  As the last of the luna moths disappeared, she tried to push herself up onto her weakened arms, but she didn’t have the strength. She tried to get her legs underneath her, but she couldn’t.

  But she’d seen the luna moths for a reason. She was sure of it.

  She looked around for a place to take cover and noticed a grove of birch trees just a few feet away. As she tried to figure out how she was going to reach the trees, she saw a pair of eyes glinting in the darkness.

  The eyes were keeping their distance, studying her.

  Serafina held the eyes in her gaze and breathed as steadily as she could.

  At first, she thought she had misjudged the position of the wolfhounds
, that they had already crossed the river and were now surrounding her. But these weren’t the searing black eyes of the wolfhounds. The eyes were golden brown.

  A flood of relief flowed into her.

  She knew who it must be.

  ‘I need your help,’ she whispered.

  But what emerged from the forest jolted her with a shock of fear. A mountain lion she had never seen before came straight at her. He was a young lion, with dark fur, but he looked strong, unafraid and hungry. He was not at all the creature she was expecting.

  Serafina tried to get up to defend herself, but it was no use. The beast could easily kill her.

  Then, even as she tried to figure out how she was going to fight this unknown lion, a second lion emerged from the trees.

  She breathed a sigh of relief. It was a lioness, full-grown and full of power; a lioness she knew well.

  When her mother was in her lion form, she was more beautiful than ever, with a thick tan coat, huge paws and the muscles of many hunts. Her striking face and golden eyes glowed with intelligence.

  ‘I’m so glad it’s you, Momma,’ Serafina said, surprised by the tearful desperation in her own voice.

  But in that moment, before Serafina could make out any sort of answer in her mother’s eyes, the lioness suddenly turned her head and looked across the river.

  Then Serafina heard it too. The wolfhounds were upon them. And it wasn’t just two any more. The five were united again, growling and barking and snarling. They would be here in seconds.

  Serafina’s mother moved quickly towards her and flattened herself beside her. Serafina didn’t understand what she was doing. Then the darker lion came and nudged Serafina’s body with his head. At first, she thought the lions were trying to rub against her and disguise her scent with theirs, but then she realised their true intention.

  Serafina climbed onto her mother’s back, clutching her neck and shoulders. With the lioness carrying her and the dark lion close at her side, the three of them moved into the trees, slowly at first, and then more quickly. Serafina felt her mother’s fur against her face, and the force of her mother’s lungs, and the power of her muscles. The lioness began to move more swiftly through the forest. Soon they were running.

  It was the most incredible feeling, streaming through the night at high speed, propelled by the undulating rhythm of the lioness’s bounding stride, so strong and quiet and fast, the dark lion running beside her. Serafina had dreamed of running like this many times, but she had never moved this fast in her entire life. What amazed her was how smooth it was, how agile her mother’s movements, how quickly she could change direction and speed, with both grace and power at her command.

  When they reached a prominence of high ground, the two lions paused and looked down towards the river. They watched as the five wolfhounds followed Serafina’s scent to the edge of the river, then crossed it. But they went straight across, not realising she had been swept far downstream by the powerful current. At the time, it had felt like a catastrophe that the river had pulled her off her feet and carried her away, but now she realised that it had saved her. The wolfhounds sniffed the ground, circling in confusion. They’d lost her scent. And when they ran up and down the edge of the river looking to find her trail, their confusion mounted.

  They can’t find me, Serafina thought with a smile as she clung to her mother’s back. All they can smell is mountain lion.

  Suddenly, the lions were moving again, running through the forest at high speed, leaping small ravines and creeks, dashing through ferns. The branches and trunks of the trees flashed by. The whistle of the wind filled her ears.

  They ran for so long through the night that Serafina’s eyes closed, and all she could feel was the movement of the running, the coolness of the air above her, and the warmth of her mother beneath her.

  Serafina awoke a short time later on a bed of soft bright green grass that glowed in the moonlight. She felt the warmth of nuzzling fur and the deep and gentle vibration of purring. Her mother’s two cubs snuggled up against Serafina, kneading her back with their tiny paws, so happy to see her that they were giving her a back rub. She couldn’t help but smile. She could feel their little noses pressing against her shoulders and their whiskers tickling her neck. Over the last few weeks that she’d been visiting the cubs at her mother’s den, she had come to love her half brother and half sister, and she knew they had come to love her too.

  She reached up to feel the cut on her head. It had been dressed with a leafy compress that had stopped the bleeding and numbed the pain. The wounds on her arms and legs had been treated with poultices of forest herbs. She didn’t want to, but she was pretty sure she could move if she needed to. She had noticed in the past that pain didn’t slow her down like it did many other people. She had surprised her pa in this regard more than once. Cold weather didn’t affect her either. Like her kin, she seemed to have been born with a natural toughness, the ability to keep going even when she had been battered and bloodied. But, even so, the medicine on her cuts and punctures was a welcome relief.

  Feeling a gentle hand on her shoulder, she looked up. Her mother was in her human form – with her golden feline eyes, strikingly angled cheekbones, and long light brown hair. But the most striking feature was that whenever Serafina looked into her mother’s face she knew that her mother loved her with all her heart.

  ‘You’re safe, Serafina,’ her mother said as she checked the dressing on her head.

  ‘Momma,’ she said, her voice weak and ragged.

  Looking around her, Serafina saw that her mother had brought her deep into the forest, to the angel’s glade at the edge of the old, overgrown cemetery. Beneath the cemetery’s dark cloak of twisted and gnarled trees, thick vines strangled the cracked, lichen-covered gravestones. Straggly moss hung down from the dead branches of the trees, and the darkened earth oozed with a ghostly mist. But the mist did not seep into the angel’s glade itself, and a small circle of lush grass always remained perfect and green, even in winter. In the centre of the glade stood a stone monument, a sculpture of a beautiful winged angel with a glinting steel sword. It was as if the angel protected the glade in a cusp of time, making it a place of eternal spring.

  Her mother had been raising her two new cubs in a den beneath the roots of a large willow tree at the edge of the glade. And on a very different night from tonight, it had been the battleground on which Serafina and her allies had defeated Mr Thorne, the Man in the Black Cloak.

  Find the Black One! the bearded man with the wolfhounds had said earlier that night. She could not help but gaze around the glade for signs of the Black Cloak that she had torn to pieces on the razor-sharp edge of the angel’s sword. She’d been sure that she had destroyed it, but she should have smashed its silver clasp and burned the leftover scraps of cloth. She looked towards the graveyard, with its tilting headstones and its broken coffins, and wondered what might have happened to the last remnants of the cloak.

  For as long as she could remember, she had prowled through Biltmore’s darkened corridors on her own. All her life, she’d hunted. It had been her instinct. She had never known why she had a long, curving spine, detached collarbones, and four toes on each foot. She had never known why she could see in the dark and others could not. But when she’d finally met her mother she’d understood. Her mother was a catamount, a shape-shifting cat of the mountains. Serafina had come to understand that she wasn’t just a child. She was a cub.

  Desperate to learn more, she had hunted with her mother in the forest every night for the last several weeks, not just learning the lore of the forest, but what it meant to be a catamount. She had listened diligently to her mother’s teachings and studied her mother when she was in her lion form. She had concentrated with all her mind and all her heart just like her mother had taught her. She had tried countless times to envision what she would look like, what it would feel like, but nothing ever happened. She was never able to change. She stayed just who she was. She wanted so badly
to ask her mother to help her try again right now, but she had a sick feeling in her stomach that her mother wouldn’t do it.

  As the cubs trundled around in front of Serafina and nuzzled her face, she petted them and snuggled them, pressing their little ears back with her hands. The cubs were pure mountain lions, not shape-shifters, but they had accepted her from the beginning, never seeming to notice or care that her teeth were short and her tail was missing.

  She wondered where the dark lion had gone. He was too young to be the father of her mother’s cubs, so why had he been with her?

  ‘Who was that other lion, Momma?’ she asked. ‘The young one –’

  ‘Never mind about him,’ her mother snarled. ‘I’ve told him to keep his distance from all of us, especially you. This isn’t his territory and he knows it. He’s only passing through with the others.’

  Serafina looked up at her in quick surprise. ‘What others?’

  Her mother touched her cheek. ‘You need to rest, little one,’ she said, and then began to pull away.

  ‘Please, tell me what’s happening,’ Serafina pleaded, grabbing her mother’s arm. ‘What others are you talking about? Why are the animals leaving? Who was that man in the forest? Why has he come?’

  Her mother turned and looked into her eyes. ‘Never let yourself be seen or heard in the forest, Serafina. Always stay low and quiet. You must keep yourself safe.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be safe. I want to know what’s happening,’ she said before she could stop herself, realising how childish she sounded.

  ‘I understand your curiosity. Believe me, I do,’ her mother said gently as she reached out and touched her arm. ‘But how many lives do you think you have, little one? The forest is too dangerous for you. One of these nights I might not be there in time to save you.’

  ‘I want to be able to change like you, Momma.’

  ‘I know you do, kitten. I’m sorry,’ her mother said, wiping Serafina’s cheek.