And then she thought about her whisper of a spirit crawling from the grave and creeping through the gardens back to Biltmore.
Three, she thought. Three pieces. My human body, my panther body, and my spirit. My trinity was split.
And as horrible as that was to imagine, and as difficult as it was to accept, everything finally began to make sense in her mind.
She knew from the stories of the mountain folk that there could only be one black panther in the forest at a time.
And it’s me, she thought. It’s still me. I’m the black panther running through the forest.
And I’m the dead girl lying in the grave.
And I’m this lost spirit finding her way through the living world.
On the night of the full moon, she and Braeden had fought an epic battle against Rowena. And they had lost.
She had lost.
The damaged Black Cloak had torn her asunder and flung her pieces out into the world. Time and space, body and spirit, dream and waking, were all a-jumble now.
She was not exactly dead. She was not exactly alive. She was not spirit or body. She was all these things and none, thrown to the winds of chaos, like the black shapes still floating in the forest and destroying everything they touched. They were the torn inner remnants of the Black Cloak.
Still stunned, she looked over at Rowena. “How did you show me this vision? It felt so real. I remember walking onto the Loggia that night and standing at the rail, but once the cloak went over my head, I was torn apart. I couldn’t have seen all those things you showed me. Those couldn’t have been my memories alone.”
“No,” Rowena said softly, lowering her head. “Your memories, my memories, the light of the moon, the slip of the stars…it’s everything that happened that night, the print of our movement on the thread of time.”
Serafina began to reply, but she was unable to find the right words, and she was still trembling from the experience of it. “It was startling,” she said finally.
“What I did is called scrying,” Rowena said. “It provides a vision of past events, a glimpse into the thread.”
“And you have seen it before?”
“Yes,” Rowena said, and Serafina could see that it had affected Rowena as powerfully as it had affected her.
“You attacked me on the Loggia,” Serafina said, trying to connect everything together in her mind. “You tried to kill me with the Black Cloak.”
“And I almost succeeded,” Rowena said.
“You probably thought you had me as good as dead.”
“I did, indeed,” Rowena admitted, obviously annoyed. “There was no way you should have been able to survive that.”
“I reckon I’m not quite as easy to kill as you figured, either.”
“Apparently not,” Rowena said with a ghost of a smile.
Serafina frowned in confusion and looked up at her. “But…you still showed me the vision…”
Rowena turned away, hiding her expression.
“But why?” Serafina asked. “Why did you show me that?”
“Because you were starting to annoy me with all your mewling-weepy-crying about Braeden.”
“But I have always been your enemy, and yet you showed this to me…You helped me.”
Rowena shook her head. “Don’t flatter yourself, cat. I’m not trying to be your friend. I just showed you what happened. The truth is the truth. The past is the past. It cannot be changed. But things have changed now.”
“What do you mean, things have changed?” Serafina asked, sensing that there was far more on Rowena’s mind than she was saying. But Serafina’s thoughts kept going back to what happened on the Loggia. “The cloak was torn…” she said, trying to grasp what she had learned.
“You’ve been splintered…” Rowena said.
Serafina had seen it, experienced it, but when she heard the word splintered spoken out loud, her mind recoiled from the sound of it. It seemed too awful to comprehend, that her heart, her soul, had been splintered from her body, and now she was in three pieces.
“How do I fix this?” Serafina asked. “How do I get back?”
Rowena shook her head. “You don’t. You’re just a spirit now, harmless as a fly, and soon you’ll begin to fade, if you haven’t already. You can’t last in this world, and then you’ll be gone. We all go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”
Serafina looked at her in surprise. It was the passage she’d thought about when she saw the dust in Essie’s room.
“So that’s why you thought you could show me the vision…” Serafina said.
“I’m not stupid, cat,” Rowena said. “I know your claws too well.”
As Serafina made her way through the forest back toward Biltmore, one thought dwelled on her mind: before she faded away, she had to help Braeden. She didn’t know to what extent the Black Cloak had drawn him into its power, but she had to save him, even if she couldn’t save herself. She had seen the violent storms in the forest, the claw-handed storm-creech, and the floating black shapes. Something was driving these evils toward Biltmore, something so powerful that even Rowena hid from it. Was it some dark force in the forest? Or someone inside Biltmore itself? Or was it Braeden using the Black Cloak?
When she arrived at the estate, strong winds were blowing through the trees. She felt light on her feet, like if she lifted her arms she would actually float away and become a flurry of drifting air. She was tempted to try it, to keep learning her new skills, but she dared not test the power of the gale, lest she never return.
Crawling through a small shaft in the back of Biltmore’s foundation, Serafina found her way back into the house.
Her pa was working on some sort of electrical accoutrements with many copper coils, wires, and bulbs for the summer ball. She wanted to watch him, just be with him for a while, but she knew she shouldn’t.
As evening came, Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt and their many guests gathered in the Banquet Hall for dinner. More newcomers were arriving every day for the ball, and now some sixty people sat around the long oak dining room table, displayed in sparkling fashion with its fine Biltmore-monogrammed porcelain settings and silver candelabras.
She scanned the room. There was an empty chair next to Mr. Vanderbilt, but she didn’t see Braeden. She wondered what had become of him after he put on the cloak.
Finally, just before dinner began, Braeden came into the room. He was still limping with the metal brace on his leg, but he appeared fresh and clean, and he was wearing a fine dinner jacket.
She studied him carefully, trying to understand what he was thinking and feeling at that moment, but she couldn’t read his face. What had been going on in that head of his? Had the despair of losing her driven him to the Black Cloak?
His dog, Gidean, followed several yards behind him, not at his side. When Braeden took his seat at the table next to his uncle, the dog went over to a distant corner out of Braeden’s line of sight and lay down, his head on his paws.