Filled with nothing but blind panic, she belly-crawled frantically over to a tree for cover. But when another black shadow tore through the space around her, the tree made no difference. The blackness cut right through it, bursting a section of the trunk to pieces and bringing the top of the tree crashing down.
Seeing another black shadow coming toward her, she ducked down and tried to scramble away, but she tripped hard and tumbled head over heels. She splashed into the cold depths of the swollen river. And in that moment, she came to understand that sometimes the key to survival wasn’t resisting, but giving in.
“Water,” she commanded herself, and she disintegrated instantaneously into millions of droplets of water and flowed away downstream.
In that moment of pain, confusion, and fear when she fled Braeden and fell into the river, Serafina grasped one thing: she was a shape-shifter. Whether in body or spirit, a living whole or a wisp of elements, she was a shape-shifter.
She flowed down the river for a long time, knowing only movement, a constant, sweeping, pulling force that carried her along through the current.
She tried to pull herself back together again into spiritual form, but she couldn’t do it. She had shifted into the water, but now the water didn’t want to give her back. She could feel her droplets spreading apart, blending with the rest of the water, slipping into eddies, swirling behind rocks, seeping back into the universe.
“Spirit!” she commanded forcefully, using the word to focus her mind, and finally pulled her spirit back together again. She crawled from the river several miles downstream from where she began.
She didn’t know exactly what she had done when she splashed into the river, or how she’d done it, except to let herself fade into the water, to will herself into it, to envision herself becoming one with it, but now she clambered up onto the rocky ground and looked around her at the river and the forest. It was still dark and raining. She checked her arms and her legs. She flexed her hands, turned herself around, and moved her head back and forth. She was whole again. Maybe whole wasn’t the right word. She definitely wasn’t whole, she knew that, but she was the spirit she had been before.
An idea leapt into her mind. “Body!” she said excitedly.
But nothing happened. She did not change. Some part of her was broken. Her body was gone. Was this what death was, to be pulled back into the elements that made up the world? But if that was true, and she was dead, then why wasn’t she already gone? Why hadn’t she already disintegrated back into the world? What was her spirit clinging to?
Finally, her mind turned back to Braeden and what she’d seen that night. Picking a direction, she headed into the forest, her only thought to put as much distance between her and the darkness-spewing Black Cloak as she could.
When she was miles away and the rain finally stopped, she slowed down and caught her breath, but she kept moving. Every few steps, she checked the forest behind her, terrified that Braeden and the Black Cloak would be there.
When dawn came with the dull glow of gray light slowly filling the southern sky, she came into a shaded dell of ferns in a secluded spot she had used before, and there the weight of all that she’d been through finally caught up with her. She collapsed to her knees in exhaustion, grief coiling through her in trembling sobs, then she curled up in a little ball on the forest floor and wept. Her heart ached so bad that it felt like it was going to break apart.
She couldn’t believe what had happened. How was it possible that Braeden had the Black Cloak, and why had he put it on? Had he been using it to capture people’s souls?
Still crying, she tossed and turned in her bed of ferns, her heart filled with anguish. She wasn’t sure if Braeden had actually seen her and had been trying to attack her with the cloak’s searing black shapes. Was it possible that Braeden had truly turned on her?
She ran the back of her hand across her runny nose, wiped her eyes, and sniffled. She was a spirit, but she couldn’t separate herself from the memories and sensations of the physical world, the longing and the pain of it. Her chest and legs hurt from running. Her face hurt from crying. But more than anything, the pain was in her heart. Was heartbreak any less painful because it wasn’t physically real?
She pressed her eyes shut, curled into a tighter ball, and covered herself with her trembling hands.
After she crawled from the grave, she had rushed back to Biltmore to warn everyone about the evils she’d seen in the forest, to help them fight the coming storms and darkness, but it was hopeless. It was already all over. The darkness had already come. Her enemy had already attacked her and defeated her and pulled Braeden into his evil realm. Or maybe Braeden was the evil realm.
What was she going to do now?
She was nothing but a spirit, bodiless, powerless, dead and buried. The storms and the floods were coming to Biltmore. The water was rising. That clawed creature she’d seen in the forest was on its way. The sorcerer had already cast his spells, and she had already lost. She had lost everything. Her world was ending, and there was nothing she could do.
Her only relief was when she fell into an exhausted sleep. She dreamed she was a droplet of water tumbling in the flow of a turbulent river, then drifting into the still waters of a placid lake, then lifting on the heat of the midday sun and sailing on a tumult of moisture-laden clouds, until she was rain, falling back down through the sky again, landing on a leaf, and then dripping down to the earth, and then running along the ground until she slipped into the flow of the river where she began. The water, the sun, the earth and sky…It felt as if she could see all the inner workings of the universe.
She knew her time in the living world was coming to an end. She didn’t know how many more nights she had left before she faded, or how many times she could shift before she couldn’t shift back, but her body and her spirit were being absorbed back into the elements. Soon, she’d become so intermingled with the world, she would cease to be any semblance of what she had been before.
When she woke, the forest was fresh and cool with morning air, but she felt so disoriented that she had to remind herself where she was and how she got there. It took her several seconds to piece together everything that had happened the night before.
And as she lay there on the forest floor trying to understand, she gradually realized that she was not alone. A large animal lay in the grass a few feet away from her. It was a mountain lion, long of body and dark of fur.
Serafina smiled and pulled in a long, deep, pleasurable breath. Seeing the cat lying there filled her heart with joy. It was a catamount she knew well.