Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series) (33 page)

She imagined running out into the gardens and finding Braeden’s lifeless body lying on the ground, ambushed and stabbed to death by a man with a sharpened blade.

She grabbed Essie’s arm. ‘I’m going to go and find Braeden and bring him back. But you need to do something very important. Run downstairs as fast as you can and get my pa, Mr
Olmsted and Mr Vanderbilt. I want you to tell them to check the plans of the house and find the places it’s most vulnerable to fire. Go to those places and look for pine sap on the floor and
walls, or any kind of flammable material. They should station guards to protect those areas. Make sure no one can light a fire.’

‘I’ll do it. I’ll do it right away!’ Essie said.

Serafina touched Essie one last time and then she ran. She didn’t care who saw her or heard her now. She ran frantically through the house and down the stairs, her lungs gasping for
air.

As she sprinted through the Entrance Hall, she heard the hooves of Braeden’s horse clattering across the courtyard in front of the house. She burst out the front door just in time to see
Braeden gallop by. He was leaning forward on the horse, filled with panicked urgency. She’d never seen him go so fast. But he was riding headlong into darkness towards the gardens.

‘Braeden!’ she shouted. ‘Come back! I’m here! I’m alive!’ But he didn’t hear her.

Serafina ran after him. As she went out into the night, she heard the loud, bloodcurdling howl of a wolfhound in the nearby trees. A flood of dread poured into her mind. It sounded like a
wolfhound sentinel in the woods had spotted Braeden and was sounding the call for his white-fanged brothers to join him.

Then she heard the long, yipping, yelping, snapping howl of a single coyote. The howling answer of a hundred other coyotes rose up from all around Biltmore’s grounds.

A terrible thought struck her mind. All this deception and disguise wasn’t just about finding the Black Cloak and burning down Biltmore. Now they wanted
Braeden
. Braeden in
particular. And soon they would have the boy in their jaws.

She heard another sound in the distance. She knew the wraithy racket all too well: the clatter of four horses and a carriage on the road to Biltmore.

They were coming. They were all coming.

Then she spotted movement ahead at the edge of the gardens. She sucked in a breath. The black silhouette of a figure lurked in the shadows, hunched and slinking in a long dark coat. It was
Grathan. He was wielding his cane like a weapon.

‘Braeden!’ Serafina screamed as he and his horse disappeared into Biltmore’s vast gardens, but he was too far away to hear her.

As Grathan ducked into the gardens behind Braeden, he gripped his cane in two hands and drew out a long, pointed, swordlike dagger. There it was. The weapon he had been hiding had finally come
forth! The freshly sharpened edges of the blade shone in the moonlight with gleaming power. Brandishing it in front of him, Grathan followed Braeden down the path into the gardens. He was going to
kill him!

Serafina burst forward with new speed. When she finally reached the path, she caught something out of the corner of her eye: a white-faced owl glided low across the courtyard and then
disappeared into the garden trees.

Her chest tightened with fear.

Grathan, the wolfhounds, the coyotes, the stallions, the owl – everything was coming together.

The trap had sprung. And she and Braeden were the mice.

S
erafina raced down the path that Braeden and Grathan had taken, but as she rounded a bend she came upon an unexpected sight.

Grathan stood frozen in the path. His back was to her as he stared at the ground in front of him. Whatever it was, it had stopped him dead in his tracks.

‘Don’t move,’ he said, his voice trembling as he glanced round at her.

Serafina didn’t understand what was happening until she saw the timber rattlesnake coiled up on the path in front of him. It was a thick, dangerous-looking snake, nearly five feet long,
brown and patterned with jagged bars. Its nasty wedged-shaped head was raised up off the ground, its yellow eyes staring at him, and its black tongue flicking.

She felt so confused. Why had he warned her?

‘Just don’t move, Serafina,’ he said again as the snake began to rattle.

Then Serafina saw that it wasn’t just one rattlesnake. There were many of them, lying all over the path and the surrounding grass. One of the loathsome pit vipers coiled mere inches from
her bare legs, its head moving back and forth as if it were angling for an attack.

Grathan gripped his cane in one hand and his dagger in the other.

He tried to step backwards, but as soon as his legs moved the closest rattlesnake struck like the snap of a whip, leaving two bleeding holes in his leg, so fast that even Serafina barely saw it.
Grathan tried to leap away from the terrifying strike, but he landed off the path, right onto a second rattlesnake. That rattlesnake lunged forward, its mouth spread, and sank its venomous fangs
deep into his calf. As he cried out and tried to jerk away, a third snake struck his thigh. Grathan screamed in pain and tripped backwards, dropping his dagger. The other snakes converged upon him,
striking him in the face and throat and chest. Their fangs pumped venom into his bloodstream. Grathan’s arms and legs and his entire body were shaking. Serafina had no idea whether she should
fight the snakes or run. There was nothing she could do but stand there in horror and watch.

Grathan lay flat on the ground now, face up, with his limbs splayed, the snakes draping and coiling around him. The man’s face was dark and swollen with poison, but his eyes were open and
he looked at her.

‘She’s . . . not . . . who . . . she . . . seems . . .’ he gasped in a weak, raspy voice, barely able to speak.

‘What?’ Serafina asked in confusion. ‘I don’t understand!’

‘Run!’ he gasped.

‘Tell me what you’re talking about!’ she cried. She wanted to get closer to the man and hear what he was trying to tell her, but she had to keep her distance from the snakes.
She knew she was in danger, but she had to have to answers. ‘Who are you? Who are talking about?’ she asked him.

But Grathan’s eyes closed and he was gone. He died right before her eyes.

Serafina stepped back, then stepped back again, aghast at what she saw.

She had thought that Grathan was her mortal enemy, the second occupant of the carriage, Uriah’s spy and assassin. But she suddenly felt a strange sadness that something had just happened
that shouldn’t have happened and that it was all her fault. She looked down at the poor dead man on the ground. Had she made a terrible mistake about him? It seemed like he was trying to help
her at the end, like he was trying to tell her something.

The silver clasp of the Black Cloak lay in his open, dead hand. She wanted to grab it, but the snakes coiled round his arm.

As horrified as she was by what she’d just seen, she tried to tell herself that what had happened was good, that these snakes had just killed her enemy. It was over! Her enemy was
dead.

But she shook her head and growled. There weren’t rattlesnakes in Biltmore’s gardens. Vipers didn’t hunt in groups and attack people on paths in the shrub garden. They’d
been brought here by an unnatural power. If he was evil, Grathan should have been
controlling
these snakes, not getting killed by them! The puzzle wasn’t
solved
. There were just
more pieces!

At that moment, she heard a
tick-tick-tick
ing sound behind her, followed by a long, raspy hiss, not a rattle like a snake’s, but the clicking sound of a barn owl. She felt the hot
air of a breath on the back of her neck.

‘I thought I’d got rid of you,’ said a voice behind her.

S
erafina spun, ready to fight.

But it was Lady Rowena standing a few feet behind her. Serafina’s first thought was that she must have been mistaken in what she had heard and felt. Lady Rowena stood before her holding a
twig in her hand, as if to defend herself with it. Serafina was just about to ask her what she was doing there, when Rowena spoke.

‘I see . . . the Black One is here,’ Rowena said in a peculiar voice. When she said the words, Serafina couldn’t help but glance at the Black Cloak’s silver clasp, which
still lay in Grathan’s dead hand.

Following her glance, Rowena’s eyes opened wide. Then she smiled. ‘Oh. Thank you. We’d misplaced that.’

Rowena moved towards Grathan’s body, seemingly undisturbed by the fact that he was lying dead on the ground and that he was draped with rattlesnakes. She stepped among the snakes as they
coiled and raised their heads and watched her with their searing yellow eyes, but they did not rattle or bite her. She bent down and picked up the silver clasp. ‘I’ll take that off your
hands,’ she said to Grathan’s dead, swollen face.

As Rowena spoke, Serafina realised that she sounded different from how she had before. Her snobbish English accent seemed to have decayed into a casual, snarling tone, as if she’d grown
weary of the ruse.

‘I’m afraid Detective Grathan here had been doing a bit too much detecting,’ Rowena said, ‘and he was getting dangerously close to telling Vanderbilt his theories. I
guess the poor, lost soul saw himself as some sort of demon-killer, a fighter against evil. The fool thought he was going to assassinate me with a dagger.’

A loud and sudden howl erupted from the woods, the call of a wolfhound, so close that it startled Serafina into pivoting towards it. But Rowena didn’t seem bothered by the howl at all.

When Serafina looked back at her, the small stick in her hand had become a gnarled and twisted wooden staff. In that moment, Serafina remembered Lady Rowena’s riding crop, and the wooden
pin in her hair, and the parasol on the south terrace, and the hiking staff in the woods.
It goes with my outfit!
she had insisted in her snobby tone. Every time she’d seen Rowena, the
girl had been in different clothes, but she’d always been carrying something long and wooden.

Serafina realised now that Mr Grathan hadn’t snuck into the garden to kill Braeden with his dagger, but to kill Rowena. He wasn’t a police detective like he was pretending to be, but
an occultist, a hunter of the strange and unusual. And he’d found it.

‘There and there,’ Rowena said, pointing the staff to two positions along the garden path, and the snakes slithered to where she pointed.

Finally, Rowena turned and looked at Serafina. ‘Yes, I thought I’d got rid of you.’

‘When was that, exactly?’ Serafina said, trying to stay bold despite her confusion and her fear.

‘When you and the dog went over the stair rail.’

‘Eight to go, I guess,’ Serafina said, her eyes locked on Rowena.

‘I was none too pleased, believe me.’

‘Actually, you looked scared.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Rowena scowled. ‘I was just surprised. You’re a tougher little creature than you look. But I should have known with your kind.’

As they spoke, Serafina couldn’t help glancing towards the house to make sure there were no signs of smoke or flame, but she immediately regretted it.

‘What are you looking for?’ Rowena asked her. ‘It’s too late, you know. I already lit the fires. There’s nothing you can do to stop it now. Your precious house is
going to burn. I told you I was going to finally do something to make my father proud.’

Serafina tried to leap away and run, but she couldn’t move her feet. She looked down at the ground. To her astonishment, vines of ivy were growing rapidly round her ankles and up her
legs.

Before she could tear the ivy away, she heard the sound of a single horse coming swiftly down the path.

The image of Biltmore’s bronze statue of a rattlesnake-spooked horse flashed in her mind.

Rowena turned towards the sound of the horse.

Braeden came round the corner on horseback. ‘Serafina, I’ve been looking all –’

‘Braeden, run!’ Serafina screamed as loud as she could as Rowena raised the Twisted Staff.