Not sure if the mountain lion knew she was there, and worried that she might scare him away, she did not move. She watched him for a long time, the gentle rise and fall of the cat’s chest, the slow curling of his tail and the small flicking of his huge paws. It was her friend Waysa. And he was dreaming.
As she lay in the ferns beside him, she closed her eyes and tried once again to change into her feline form. But it didn’t come. Tears rose in her eyes, and she pressed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth.
She would have loved to have lain in this beautiful shaded place with Waysa in her panther form, to find just a little bit of peace, just a little bit of gentleness at this moment. That was all she wanted right now, to have her thick black fur, and her whiskers, and her claws, and her muscles, and her long tail, and her four padded feet, and her twitching ears. She just wanted to be a cat. She just wanted to be herself.
The breathing of the lion beside her changed. Waysa slowly opened his beautiful brown-and-amber catamount eyes and scanned the forest for friend or foe. As his gaze turned toward her, she lifted herself up and looked at him, hoping beyond hope that he’d somehow see her there, lying in the ferns beside him, but he looked right through her. Waysa could see her no better than the others could.
With Waysa near, she wondered where her mother and the cubs were. A pang of worry rippled deep through her belly. Had the sorcerer killed them like he had killed so many others?
She looked around her and realized that she recognized this tranquil dell of ferns beneath the shade of the trees where she had taken refuge. In all her running and her panic during the night, she hadn’t come here by chance. This was a place that she and Waysa had spent time before.
“Waysa, can you hear me?” she asked, her voice quivering with both hope and hopelessness. She missed her friend more than she could bear.
Waysa’s ear twitched, but he didn’t look at her. He looked in the opposite direction. Then he rose to his four feet.
Serafina heard a faint rustle of leaves, something coming slowly and quietly through the forest toward them.
Waysa crouched down low onto his haunches as the sound approached. She wasn’t sure if he was frightened, uncertain, or excited about what was coming.
Then Serafina saw it.
The black head came through the brush first, then the impossibly bright yellow eyes, and the muscled black shoulders, the long black body, and the sweeping black tail. Serafina caught her breath. It was the young black panther she’d seen before.
There can only be one black panther, Serafina thought. And there she is. It’s not me anymore. It’s her.
Serafina felt like she should know who this panther was, but she didn’t.
The panther scanned the meadow of ferns and spotted Waysa.
Waysa hunched down his body even further. Serafina wasn’t sure if he was getting ready to pounce on her or if he was trying to make himself less threatening—for a cat, sometimes it was both at the same time.
But whatever kind of movement it was, it was enough to spook the young panther. The panther turned away and bounded into the forest the way she came.
Waysa sprang after her. At first Serafina thought he must be defending his territory against her, but then she realized that he wasn’t attacking her, he was trying to catch up with her, trying to run with her.
“Good-bye,” Serafina said wistfully, as Waysa and the black panther disappeared into the forest together.
Serafina found herself once again alone. Every friend she had made, everything she had gained in her life, was gone now. A deep and overwhelming pain filled her chest. She had to find out what had caused all this. The storm-creech she’d seen in the forest was still out there, and the black shapes were coming, destroying everything in their path. It felt like Biltmore and the people she loved were in more danger now than they had ever been.
But she was powerless. In the physical world, she had no body, no claws, no teeth, no hands, not even a voice. But what is power? she wondered. Was it the weapons and tools to act, or the ability to think? Was it talking to someone, or doing something? If you have only a small amount of power, and you’re able to do only the tiniest, most insignificant things, does that mean you’re powerless? Or with that tiny power, do you have all the power in the world?
She dropped down to her hands and knees and pushed at the dirt with her fingers. Nothing happened. Just as before, the world affected her, but she couldn’t affect the world. She tried again and again, and then gave up.
The night before, she had shifted into the water of the stream, but she didn’t want to become the dirt. The grave, the dirt, the dust, that was the last thing she wanted to become. She’d never be able to get back. She wanted to move the dirt. To affect it. To change it, not her.
A bumblebee buzzed by her, its dangling legs laden with clusters of yellow pollen. Getting an idea, she followed the bee. She came to a bush blooming with pale red flowers—bees, wasps, and other flying insects hovering around the bush, battling each other for position as they dipped in and sipped the nectar. Tiny yellow grains of pollen floated in the light of the sun. When she raised her hand and moved it slowly through the light, the bees and the pollen seemed to move away from her hand.
Hopeful, she pulled in a lungful of air and blew out at the floating pollen, but nothing happened. She remembered a famous musician, a flute player, who once visited Biltmore. One of the children at dinner asked if she could play his flute. But no matter how hard the girl blew into the instrument, she could not get it to make a flutelike sound. “It takes a lot of practice,” the musician said kindly. “You have to do it just right.”
And now here Serafina was trying to play the flute of the world. She blew the pollen from different angles and in different ways, slowly but surely figuring out how it worked. If she blew too hard or too soft or at the wrong angle, nothing happened. But if she blew just right, she could get the pollen to float in the way she wanted.
I can’t do much, but I can do something, she thought, and if I can do even the smallest thing, then I am a powerful being.
As she practiced, trying to figure out what she could do and how she could do it better, she remembered something her pa told her when she was younger.
“Sometimes I reckon the universe we live in is one of God’s great machines,” her pa had said. “Its gears are nigh on invisible, and its spinning wheels are often silent, but it’s a machine all the same-like, with patterns and rules and mechanisms. And if you look real close, you can understand it, and for just a spell, in just the smallest way, you may be able to get it to do what you want.”