She slowly turned and looked again, her nose and mouth wrinkling as she expected to see her body’s rotten skin peeling back from her bones.
But her body wasn’t rotten. Her body was facing upward, with her eyes closed, her hands neatly lying one over the other on her chest, like someone had laid her there with respect and care. As she looked closer, she could see that some dirt had spilled into the grave onto her, but her face and body were not rotted. She was not a grotesque corpse. She appeared to be in some form of suspended animation, as if she lay in eternal spring. Braeden had brought her here to the angel’s glade, where decay and seasons and the cycles of the universe had no sway.
Serafina stood over her own grave and stared down into the coffin at her body in disbelief. Braeden and Gidean stood beside her.
Her body was clearly dead in that there was no life in her, no breathing or movement, and yet, her body was not blue or grayish of skin or decayed in any way. It seemed perfectly protected there, as if nothing would ever harm it.
Serafina studied Braeden’s expression. He did not seem surprised that her body was in the coffin. He seemed to expect that. He had put it there. But his eyes were wide and his face filled with shock about something else.
“All the wounds are healed,” Braeden said in amazement. Her dress was badly torn and stained with old blood, but her body was in perfect condition.
He turned and looked up at the angel.
“You healed her,” he said, almost apologetically after the accusations he’d slung at her earlier that night. “You’ve been protecting her,” he said, as he wiped tears of relief from his eyes.
Serafina gazed all around at the angel’s glade, with its beautiful, peaceful willow trees and its lovely green grass. It had always been this way, winter, spring, summer, and fall.
Braeden looked up at the angel again and spoke to her as if she was not only a living, sentient being but a true friend. “But what do I do now? How do I help her?”
He looked at the angel expectantly, but after a long time, his excitement faded, and some of his old sadness returned.
“Don’t give up hope,” Serafina whispered.
Finally, he laid himself down on the dirt next to her open grave like he himself was dead.
“I’m not going to lose hope, Serafina,” he said. “Somehow, I’m going to get you out of here.”
She knew he hadn’t truly heard her. They had been feeling the same thing at the same time.
Serafina gazed down at Braeden lying beside the grave and she tried to understand it all. Her human body lay in the coffin. Her panther body was out in the forest, a wild animal. Her restless spirit had crawled out of the grave, carrying with it all the trappings and constraints she remembered of the physical world—the steadiness of the earth, the challenges of physical obstructions, the essence of sight and sound and feeling, pain and hunger and sleep. But it had left her body behind, like a cicada crawling out of its dried shell. Her spirit had made it all the way to Biltmore and haunted those within. And now she was back again. Her spirit was here once more.
For a long time, she just tried to understand the difference between thought and action, between dream and waking, between the physical world and the spiritual, between perception and reality.
She tried to figure out what Braeden meant when he said he was going to get her out of here. Out of the grave? Out of her dead body? She didn’t understand, but at least she knew now, without any doubt, that even after all this time, after all that had happened, he was still her friend, he was still fighting for her, and he still had hope. He had tremendous hope, brighter than the darkest night.
He was lying on his back now beside the grave and his eyes were open. Gidean crept forward and curled up close beside him, and Braeden put his arm around him. For months, Braeden had been pushing his dog away, ashamed of the boy he had become, but now the rift between them seemed as if it was beginning to heal. Serafina was glad to see them together, but why was it happening here and now? What had changed?
As Braeden stared up through the opening in the trees, she wondered what he was looking at, what he was thinking about in that moment.
She went over to him. She did not go near her dead body lying in the grave. She was scared of what might happen if she did that. But she went to his other side.
As she moved, she noticed a pair of yellow eyes staring from the shadows. The cat’s black fur was nearly invisible in the darkness, but Serafina could see the panther’s face and the outline of her ears. The panther had crept up close and was lying down now, still and quiet, gazing into the glade toward them.
Serafina slowly made her way over to Braeden and lay down in the dirt next to him.
Lying on her back beside him, she gazed up through the opening of the angel’s glade into the nighttime sky. She and Braeden were looking up into the stars just like they had when they used to lie on Biltmore’s rooftop together. Those nights seemed so long ago now, like they had been a dream. But it had all been real, and somehow, this was, too.
Lying side by side, they gazed up at the crystalline black ceiling of the midnight sky. It was a beautifully clear night. They could see thousands of points of light splayed above them, clusters of many stars, Saturn and Mars and Jupiter glowing in all their glory, and the bright swath of the Milky Way galaxy splashed across the glistening heavens.
They watched the stars and the planets sliding slowly over their heads, marking time so precisely that it was barely perceptible, like a great, steady celestial clock, keeping the time of their inner lives, showing them that out there in the world everything was always changing, but here in the center of the world, where they were lying side by side, everything would always remain the same.
For the first time, Braeden did not seem upset by her spirit’s presence. With her spirit on one side, her human body on the other, and the panther nearby, all was well again. It had been the terrible separation of the three that had caused him such tearing grief. But now, he lay quietly.
As Braeden fell asleep beside her, and she fell asleep beside him, she began to slip away, not into a nightmare like before, but into a lovely dream. She dreamed she was a tendril of moving air, flowing from place to place, without weight or body, only movement, constant movement, from forest to home, from mountain to field, she swept and rolled and turned, like the music of a gentle symphony gliding on the breeze.
For once in a long time, she and Braeden were together, and they were finally at peace.
When Serafina woke, she found herself lying in the angel’s glade with Braeden and Gidean standing nearby. She quickly got herself up onto her feet to see what was happening.
“What do you think you’re doing?” a male voice asked in a forceful tone.
Serafina looked around the forest.