Serafina scurried for cover, pushing herself farther out onto the thinner branches of the tree even as they bent and twisted in the wind, lifting her and dropping her in sudden movements that made her stomach feel like it was floating.
She scanned the branches on the opposite side of the river. A moment before, it had been too far to jump, but her muscles were bursting now, her whole body filled with panic.
She focused her eyes on the branch she had to jump to, tilted her head to study the angle, then leapt for it with a mighty grunt.
As she flew through the air she envisioned herself as the black panther deep inside her soul and tried to shift her shape. She could see her panther form clearly in her mind. This was the moment. She was in midair. She had to do it now!
But the shift didn’t come.
She reached out desperately with her thin, human arms as she sailed through the air, trying to grab hold of the branches of the pine tree on the other side. When she felt her hands touch the branches, she grabbed hold. She had made the distance! But her body swung too hard, and she immediately lost her grip and continued to fall.
Her arms flailed, reaching out in all directions as she tried to catch hold of something, anything, on the way down.
She slammed into a thick branch. It knocked the wind out of her with a painful crack. She twisted around and frantically tried to hold on to the branch, but couldn’t.
She fell again, hit the branch below her, reached out, fell, grabbed, fell, slipped again, reached out, slipped, then grabbed hold with an infuriated snarl and finally held fast.
She found herself clinging to the bough of a pine tree some fifty feet lower than where she’d started. Her arms and legs were scratched and bleeding. The long, curving spine of her back, usually so supple and strong, hurt something fierce. Grabbing at the hard branches on the way down had jammed her measly human fingernails painfully into her fingers.
Frightened to make any more racket than she already had, and still wincing from the pain of the crashing fall, she gritted her teeth and quickly crawled into the cover of the pine tree’s inner branches and hid.
She peered out from her hiding spot, sure that the sorcerer must have heard her. She expected to see him staring up at her, or casting a spell, or summoning one of the black shapes to finish her off.
Instead, the smoking, hissing blue ball of burning light came toward her, floating up into the trees, illuminating everything around it in a bright halo as the sorcerer looked on from below. Serafina cowered into her hiding spot in the thick cluster of pine needles as the eerie blue light came closer.
The buzzing, burning light smelled like a lightning storm, and made her hair float up around her head. But she stayed hidden where she was, her skin tingling.
Finally, the light floated on, and the sorcerer continued his journey through the forest.
Serafina let out a deep sigh of relief and started breathing again.
She watched as the sorcerer made his way through the ferns that grew along the edge of the river. He leaned down and pulled some sort of plant from the ground, then moved on.
Suddenly, Serafina noticed something out of the corner of her eye, something moving much closer to her. Snapping her head toward it, she saw a large, silvery spiderweb glistening in the starlight, its eight-legged spinner lurking on the outer edge with its many eyes watching her. As the spider moved, tiny droplets of dew on the web shimmered in the light, some jostling loose and falling to the forest floor below, others moving like quicksilver along the strands. Serafina knew it was impossible, but she swore she could not just see, but hear the droplets sliding along the strands of the web. She could actually feel them skittering along, like a shudder down her spine.
Startled, she climbed away from the spider’s web and looked back down into the forest. The druid-sorcerer, or whatever he was, had gone down onto his knees now. The burning blue orb hovered over him like a lantern, giving him light to work. He dug through the boggy area at the edge of the river, gathering the tall, pitcher-shaped carnivorous plants that grew there.
Just as she was about to creep away, the sorcerer spoke. He did not stop his work or look around him. He didn’t speak in a deep and frightening man’s voice like she expected, but a surprisingly soft, calm, steady tone. It was as if Serafina wasn’t hidden in a tree a hundred feet away but concealed in the bushes beside the hooded figure.
“I can’t see you, but I know you’re there,” the voice said.
Serafina burst out of her hiding spot and fled. She leapt from branch to branch down through the tree. As soon as she hit the ground, she ran, her bare feet thrashing quickly across the forest floor. When she looked over her shoulder, she didn’t see any sign of the sorcerer, but she kept running.
Putting the dark river behind her, she fled way up into the rocks and trees of a high ridge, then through a wide, forested valley. When she finally slowed down, she could tell by the type and age of the trees that she was getting closer. She could see a soft glow of light in the distance, and it drew her home like a beacon.
As she made her way along the edge of Biltmore’s bass pond, she noticed that the little stream that normally trickled into it was swollen with rain, filling the pond with more water than usual. The storms are coming, Serafina thought.
The calm, flat water of the pond reflected the light of the stars and the moon, but she didn’t linger to admire it. She was anxious to get home, to make sure Braeden and her pa were all right, and to warn them about what she’d seen in the forest.
She followed the garden path up through the pink and orange azaleas, which were blooming as bright as the moon itself. When she saw a faint green glow up the hill toward the rest of the gardens, she paused, uncertain. She knew Biltmore’s gardens well, but had never seen a greenish light like this before.
Her first thought was that the sorcerer was already here, had already taken over and made Biltmore his domain. Then she heard the murmur of many voices.
As she approached more closely, she saw that the green glow wasn’t a sorcerer’s spell, but the Conservatory all lit up for an evening party, the light shining through the leaves of thousands of orchids, bromeliads, and palms, and out through the greenhouse’s many panes of glass.
She crept along the edge of the building and looked into the Walled Garden, where she saw hundreds of ladies in formal summer dresses and gentlemen in black tailcoats gathered for the party. The windows of Biltmore House blazed above, the south walls and towers of the mansion rising like an enchanted castle into the night.