The storm water swept her away, tumbling her down through the narrow chute of the flume. Her arms and legs twisted and crashed with the turbulence of the rushing water. It didn’t feel like she was going to drown, but like the last pieces of her soul were going to wash away.
Finally, she shot out of the flume’s gushing outlet pipe and splashed into a swollen creek. She came up quickly, gasping for air and struggling to get to her feet. She grabbed frantically at her arms and legs, incredibly relieved that they were still there. She hadn’t dissolved into the elements just yet. She’d fought it off one more time.
Braeden lay at the edge of the creek in the torrential rain, exhausted and pulling in great lungfuls of air, but still gripping the metal box as if his very life depended upon it.
Serafina climbed up onto the creek’s rocky shore and looked around her in bewilderment, trying to figure out where she was. It took her several seconds to realize that she and Braeden were in the narrow ravine at the base of the pond’s dam.
When the water had started coming down the flume in force, Braeden had made the decision that it was better to escape through the outlet rather than trying to fight upstream. That decision had saved his life. And maybe hers too—if the thing she was clinging to was indeed a life.
Serafina couldn’t help but smile, relieved that they’d both made it. She gazed up through the pouring rain at the stone face of the dam. The water of the overflowing pond was pouring over the spillway high above her, coming down in a great waterfall into the creek.
As she turned back toward Braeden, a flash of lightning struck the sky with a piercing crack of thunder. Braeden tightened his jaw, wiped his wet hair out of his eyes, and got up onto his feet. Whatever he was doing, it was clear he wasn’t done.
He knelt down on the rocks at the edge of the storm-swollen creek and opened the metal box.
Serafina had no idea what was inside it, but the moment he opened it, she could see something extremely black inside.
She stepped back in uncertainty.
Braeden pulled out a long black garment—fine black wool on the outside, and an inner lining of black satin.
A sickening feeling gripped Serafina’s stomach and twisted hard.
She could see that the garment had been badly torn. Many parts were nearly shredded, as if by the claws of a wild beast.
A blinding glare of white light glinted on the garment’s small silver clasp as a lightning bolt burned up the sky.
Her palms started sweating. Her lips tightened. The rain poured down her face.
As Braeden gathered the garment in his hands, it began to writhe and rattle like a living snake. A smoky cloud began to hiss out from it, as if it was annoyed that it had been closed in the box so long.
Then, with the rain pouring down all around him, and the lightning flashing in the sky behind him, Braeden stood, and with a great sweep of fabric roiling around his shoulders, he pulled on the Black Cloak.
Serafina watched in dread.
She could see that the cloak had been badly torn, but it was still the Black Cloak she feared and hated. Its dark, slithering folds hung down from Braeden’s shoulders, writhing with power. But in the tears of the cloak was not simply the absence of cloth, but an impenetrable darkness blacker than she had ever seen. No! That was wrong. She had seen it! It was the same black as the black shapes she’d seen floating in the forest.
Whenever Braeden moved, the cloak’s fabric moved with him and the terrible black shapes came wheeling outward into the world around him, tearing through time and space. The cloak threw these torn fragments of roiling, inky black shadow in all directions, blotting out the ground and the leaves of the trees and the stars above.
You’ve done well, boy…the cloak hissed in its raspy voice.
As soon as she heard it, Serafina wanted to pounce on the cloak and kill it. But she had no claws, no fangs, nothing but fear and confusion filling her heart.
I’m not going to hurt you, child…the cloak hissed.
Months before, she and Braeden had seen the cloak’s evil with their own eyes. It had many powers, but the most sinister was that it allowed the wearer to absorb people, body and soul, deep into the black void of its inner folds. Her mother had been imprisoned in the cloak for twelve years until Serafina cut it to pieces on the angel’s sword in the graveyard and freed her back into the world. Destroying the cloak that night had also freed Clara Brahms, Anastasia Rostonova, and the other children who had gone missing.
But the point was that she had slashed the cloak! She had destroyed it! How could it be here again? The last time she remembered seeing any sign of it, there had been nothing left of it but the silver clasp. Detective Grathan had found the clasp in the graveyard and died with it in his hand the night he was killed by the rattlesnakes. Had Braeden somehow retrieved the clasp and reconstituted the black fabric of the cloak? But if so, for what terrible purpose would he bring such an evil thing back into the world? And if it had been remade, why was it so badly torn?
Still wearing the cloak, Braeden stared at the ground, his face clouded with what looked like hatred, violence, and bitter despair all at once, his mind consumed with thoughts he could not bear. “Please forgive me, Serafina,” he whispered to himself.
“Forgive you?” she said even though he couldn’t hear her. “What did you do?”
She still couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Braeden was actually wearing the Black Cloak.
“Tell me what you did, Braeden!” she shouted at him. She didn’t understand what was happening. Had he turned evil?
Then, as if in reply, Braeden reached back around his shoulders and gathered the material of the Black Cloak’s hood into his fingers.
“Don’t you do it!” she shouted at him. “Don’t put on the hood!”
But then he slowly pulled the hood up onto his head. His face flashed with terror and revulsion. A storm of torment wrenched through him. As he turned toward her, the hanging pieces of the cloak’s shredded fabric went wheeling outward, ripping the air with splintering black shadow, tearing through everything around her.
She knew the black tears were at least as much in her world as they were in his, the connection, the uncrossable bridge between the two planes. She didn’t know if he could see her now, or if he even had any idea she was there, but the twisting tears of blackness riving through the air struck her like a physical blow, slicing her with a blaze of searing-hot pain, and knocked her to the rocky ground.