Serafina and the Black Cloak (27 page)

Serafina spotted the Black Cloak lying on the ground. She darted into the battle and snatched up the dagger that had fallen from Thorne’s hand. Then she attacked the cloak with the blade.
She was sure this was the answer. She cut and stabbed, trying to slice through the material, but the cloak fought against her, twisting and turning and rattling. Becoming a black seething coil in
her hands, the cloak clutched at her and wrapped itself around her arms and then her body, and began to crush her. No matter how hard she tried, she could not cut the snaking cloth.

As the folds of the Black Cloak slithered around her neck and began to tighten, she tried to scream for help, but the cloak choked her breath short. Nothing but horrible gagging noises escaped
from her clasped throat. Gasping for breath and clutching at her neck, she struggled to get up onto her feet. She stumbled toward the statue of the angel in the middle of the glade.
It had
sliced my finger with the slightest touch
. In one swift motion, she hurled herself onto the point of the angel’s gleaming sword. The sword slashed the side of her neck with searing pain
as its tip pierced into the folds of the Black Cloak. The cloak screamed and hissed as the razor-sharp edges cut into it. Serafina grabbed at her neck and tore the cloak away, then clenched the
material in her fists and slammed the cloak onto the sword point. She pierced it again and again. The cloak slithered and screeched, coiling like a tortured serpent. It writhed in her hands as she
tore the cloth, but she did not relent. When she was finally done, there was nothing left of the Black Cloak but shreds lying at the angel’s feet.

Serafina fell away, panting and exhausted, pressing her hand to the wound at her neck to staunch the bleeding. She looked over and saw Thorne pinned to the ground beneath her allies. Thorne was
strong, but without the Black Cloak he was no match for the speed, power, and jaws of both Gidean and the lioness.

Serafina felt a wave of triumph pass through her. They’d done it. It was all over. It had to be.

But as Gidean and the lioness struck the final, killing bites into Thorne, his body emitted a frightening sizzling sound, like meat burning on a fire. His carcass vibrated as his skin burned and
peeled down into blood and bones. A thick cloud of smoke emanated from his body as it rapidly disintegrated, as if enkindled by the air itself.

Gidean stepped back and tilted his head in confusion. The lioness retreated into the den to protect her cubs.

The stinking black effluence poured forth until the roiling smoke filled the entire glade. The whole area became a great, choking cloud. Serafina coughed, waved her arms, and tried to escape
from the smoke.

“Come on, Gidean,” she called, and pulled him back as she gagged on the horrible taste of the smoke in her throat.

Overwhelmed by the fumes and unable to see, she tripped over something and fell face-first to the ground. Whatever she tripped over was hard, like a branch. But when she looked, she realized it
wasn’t a branch. It was a human leg. She whimpered in horror and scrambled away from it. The body of a little girl lay on the ground, her arms and legs tangled and bent at crooked angles.

S
erafina crawled several yards across the angel’s glade, then got up onto her feet, her whole body shaking with fear. She looked again at the
body of the girl lying on the ground. It had blond hair and wore a yellow dress. A yellow dress! How was that possible?

The body was facedown. Serafina couldn’t see the face, just the hair, the sickly pale legs, and the crumpled fingers of the hands.

Just as she took a small, tentative step toward the body to get a closer look, one of the fingers twitched.

Serafina leapt back, grabbing Gidean for protection. Gidean barked and snarled at the body, his teeth white and gleaming.

The hand bent. Then the body’s arm moved, then a leg. It was like a carcass crawling its way out of a grave.

Serafina’s instinct was to run, but she forced herself to stay.

The body slowly got up onto its hands and knees, the hair falling around the face and covering it.

Serafina was horrified to think what the face was going to look like, imagining it to be the face of a carcass, bloody and rotted.

The thing stood erect on two feet.

Serafina watched in a paralyzed state of horror. Gidean lunged and snapped repeatedly, warding off the zombie’s attack.

But then the head slowly turned and the hair parted and Serafina looked into the face. It wasn’t a rotting monster, but the perfect features and lucid, pale blue eyes of Clara Brahms.
Clara opened her mouth and spoke in a desperately sweet voice, “Please, can you help me?”

Serafina froze, astounded. Clara was alive! She stood before her in her yellow dress as bright and bold as a Sunday morning. Her body and her soul had been freed.

“I remember you,” Clara said to Serafina. She reached out and clutched Serafina’s hand. Serafina flinched back reflexively, but the hand that grasped her was warm and full of
life. “I saw you,” Clara said. “I called out to you. I
knew
you’d help me. I just knew it!”

Too shocked to speak or respond to Clara in any way, Serafina turned and looked across the glade. As the smoke cleared, it revealed the bodies of many children and adults lying on the
ground.

The victims of the cloak woke up slowly, as if from a long, nightmarish sleep. Some of them sat on the ground in confusion for a long time. Others stood and looked around them.

A tall girl with long, curly black hair came up to Serafina and started speaking to her in Russian. She seemed very sweet, but scared and anxious to reunite with her father and her dog.

And there was a young man, as well, who didn’t understand what was happening. “Have you seen my violin?” he asked repeatedly. “I seem to have lost it.…”

A small boy with a mop of curly brown hair, wearing an oversize coachman’s jacket, touched Serafina’s arm. “Pardon me, Miss Serafina, but have you seen the young master?
I’ve got to get home. My father is going to be worried about me, and the horses need to be fed their grain. Do you know the way to Biltmore?”

“Nolan! It’s you! You’re alive!” Serafina grabbed the little boy and hugged him. “I’m so glad to see you. Don’t worry. I’ll take you
home.”

“You’re bleeding, miss,” he said, gesturing toward her neck.

She touched the wound. It hurt a bit, but the bleeding had stopped. “I’m all right,” she said. The truth was, she’d suffered multiple cuts and bruises, but she
didn’t care about that. She was just so happy to be alive.

She looked at all the children, took a long, deep breath, and smiled. She felt a tremendous sense of relief, a sense of exultation. They were alive. They were safe. She had saved them.

Then Serafina saw among the cloak’s victims a woman with long golden-brown hair, lying on the ground. She looked weak and confused, but she was alive.

Serafina went over to her. She got down on her knees and comforted the woman. As Serafina took her arm and helped her stand, she noticed how lean and muscular the woman was, but she seemed even
more disoriented than the others.

“Where are my babies?” the woman muttered in slurred, hard-to-understand words.

When Nolan came over and covered the shivering woman with his jacket, she pawed it slowly and awkwardly around herself with her open hands, as if her fingers were stiff and didn’t
bend.

“You’re safe now,” Serafina assured her. “You’re going to be all right.”

The woman just stared at the ground, her hair hanging loose around her head. When Serafina slowly brushed back the woman’s hair from her face, what she saw startled her. The woman had the
loveliest face Serafina had ever seen. She had a perfect, pale complexion; high, protruding cheekbones; and long, angled cheeks. But her most striking feature was her amber-yellow eyes.

Serafina frowned. She looked at the woman in confusion and disbelief. The woman looked so familiar to her, and yet Serafina was sure she had never seen her before.

It was at that moment that she realized that it felt like she was looking into a mirror.

Serafina opened her mouth to speak, but her voice was trembling so badly she could barely get the words out.

“Who are you?”

T
he woman did not answer the question. She rubbed her eyes and face with the backs of her hands, then she looked around, glassy-eyed, taking in the
forest and the angel’s glade as if she did not understand what she was seeing or how she came to be there. The woman stumbled toward the opening of the lion’s den beneath the roots of
the willow tree.

“Where are my babies?” she asked frantically.

Seemingly ignorant of the severe danger of entering a lion’s den, the woman went to the mouth of the den and looked in. She appeared to think her babies were in there. Serafina felt so
sorry for her. The poor creature must have lost her mind in the imprisonment of the cloak. Worried that the lioness would attack the woman, Serafina reached to pull her out of harm’s way. But
then the woman made a series of sharp, guttural hissing noises, and the lion cubs came trundling out of the den in response to her call. Laughing, the woman dropped down onto her knees and
encircled the cubs in her arms as they rubbed their shoulders against her, purring.

Serafina cringed, expecting the mountain lion to come charging out of the den at any second. But when she checked the den, there was no sign of the mother lion. Serafina scanned the trees
nervously.

The woman, still on her knees with the cubs, lifted her hands and looked at her palms, as if they were things of amazement, opening and closing her fingers repeatedly, and she smiled. She rubbed
her arms and her head and brushed back her hair like a person who had woken up from a terrible nightmare and had to reassure herself that she was still in one piece. She stood and looked up at the
night sky and took a long, deep breath. Then she turned rapidly around, holding Nolan’s jacket to her body. She laughed. She tilted her head back and shouted up at the stars. “I’m
free!”

Still smiling, the woman looked around at her surroundings with a new brightness in her eyes. She looked at the graveyard, the stone angel, and the other victims. Then she looked at Serafina.
The woman froze. She stopped smiling. She stopped moving. She just stared at Serafina.

Serafina’s heart began pounding in her chest, a slow, steady rhythm. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Suddenly, the woman lunged at her with a startling burst of speed. Serafina leapt back to defend herself, but the woman caught her with ease and held her by the shoulders, looking into her
face.

“You’re her!” the woman said in astonishment. “You’re really her! I can’t believe it! Look at you!”

“I—I…I don’t understand…” Serafina stammered, trying to pull away.

“What’s your name, child?” the woman asked. “Tell me your name!”

“Serafina,” she mumbled, staring wide-eyed at the woman.

“Let me look at you!” the woman said, turning her first one way and then another, as if to take her measure in every way. “Just look at you! You’re so big! How wonderful
you are. You’re amazing!”

Serafina reeled with dizziness as a new wave of confusion swept through her. What in heaven’s name was this woman doing?

“Who are you?” Serafina asked again.

The woman paused and looked at her with compassion. “I’m sorry,” she said gently. “I forgot that you don’t know me. My name is Leandra.”

The name meant nothing to Serafina, but the woman’s eyes, her voice, her face—everything about her mesmerized her. Serafina felt like sparks of a crackling fire were popping in her
mind.

“But who
are
you?” Serafina asked again, clenching her fists in frustration.

“You know who I am,” Leandra said, studying her.

“No, I don’t!” Serafina shouted, stomping her foot.

“I’m your mother, Serafina,” the woman said softly, reaching out and touching Serafina’s face for the first time.

Serafina went quiet and still. She frowned in confusion. How could this be possible? She studied the woman’s face, trying to make sense of its configuration, trying to understand if she
should believe what she was seeing in front of her. Her mouth felt terribly dry. She licked her lips and then clenched them together, breathing through her nose. She tried to steady her breathing
as she looked at the woman’s hair, her hands, her sinewy body. But it was her eyes more than anything, her yellow eyes, that told her that it was true. This was her mother.