But the angel didn’t answer. She stood on her pedestal of stone as mute and immutable as she always did. The angel was old and weathered, mottled with dark moss and green patina. She had long, curling hair and a beautiful face, with tears of dark sap streaming down her cheeks. To Serafina her face seemed to be filled with the silent wisdom of knowingness, as if the angel held inside her the fate and fortune of those she loved, and it was all too much to bear. The angel held her mighty, finely feathered wings above her, and she gripped a long, sharp steel sword in her hand. It was the very sword that Serafina had used to cut and destroy the Black Cloak.
The angel stood in the center of a small clearing of bright green grass. The leaves on the trees and bushes around the angel’s glade stayed green all year round, never drying in the summer’s sun, or changing color in autumn, or falling to the ground in winter. The angel’s glade was a place of eternal spring.
The north side of the glade led deep into the rest of the old graveyard, which had been taken back by the encroaching forest long ago, with vines covering many of the headstones and stringy moss hanging down from the black limbs of crooked trees. The graveyard stretched on for as far as Serafina could see, endless rows of tilting, toppled, half-buried monuments marking the graves of hundreds of dead, rotting bodies and lost souls. A gray whispery mist floated listlessly through the graveyard, as if searching for a place to linger. As Serafina peered across the graveyard looking for signs of movement, she hoped that she was the only body that had crawled forth from the grave tonight.
Finally, she said to her buried companions, “Sorry to be gettin’ on my way so soon, but it turns out that I was just a-visiting for a while.”
She walked to the other side of the angel’s glade, which led into the natural part of the forest that she knew so well. Looking into the trees made her think about her catamount mother. She had learned so much from her mother. They’d run through the forest together and hunted together. She’d learned the sounds of the night birds and the movement of the woodland creatures. She wondered why her mother hadn’t sensed her and come to her like she had so many times before.
It began to sink in that her pa hadn’t come for her, either, and neither had Braeden.
No one had come.
She was alone.
Fear began to well up in her mind. As she thought about what might have happened to the people she loved, her heart felt heavy in her chest. She didn’t know what had attacked her or how long she’d been gone. She wondered what the people of Biltmore would think when she walked into the mansion covered in graveyard dirt, but her true fear, deep down, was that they wouldn’t be there at all, that she’d find the house empty, full of nothing but shadows.
Anxious to get moving, she headed into the forest, following the path that would take her to Biltmore. She had to get home.
Serafina followed the path through the darkened forest at a quick pace, down into a ravine dense with ancient maple and hemlock trees. Her legs felt strong and steady beneath her as she weaved between the great trunks of the forest’s oldest inhabitants.
A chorus of tree frogs, peepers, and insects filled her ears, and the scents of primrose and moonflower wafted past her nose. The evening flowers stayed closed during the day, but opened with their sweet smells at night.
Everything seemed unusually vibrant to her tonight, like her body and her senses were alive with new sensations.
The forest grew thick with rosebay rhododendron bushes glimmering in the silver moonlight. Hummingbird moths hovered over the white and pinkish blooms, dipping into the recesses of the flowers and sipping out the nectar within. It almost felt as if she could hear the beat of the moths’ wings against the night air.
Fireflies floated in the darkness above the shiny green leaves of the laurel. Soft flashes of lightning danced on the silver-clouded sky behind them, and a gentle thunder rolled through the darkness, moving on the rising heat of what felt like a summer breeze.
“This is all so strange…” she said to herself, looking around her in confusion as she traveled. The last night she remembered, it had been winter, but the air felt strangely warm now. And these plants and insects didn’t come out in winter. Had the magic of the angel’s glade somehow extended out into the rest of the forest?
When she glanced up at the moon, what she saw stopped her dead in her tracks. The moon was not all the way full, but large and bright, with the light on the right and the shadow on the left.
“That’s not right,” she said, frowning. That night she was on the Loggia the moon had been full, which meant what she was seeing now was impossible.
She knew that the moon was only full one night a month, then it would wane for fourteen nights, with the light on the left side, getting smaller and smaller until it was dark for a single evening. Then it would wax for fourteen nights, with the light on the right, until it was full once more. Then it would start all over again.
The moon was the great calendar in the sky by which she had marked the nights of her life, wandering through the grounds of Biltmore Estate by herself. The steady phases of her pale companion, the slow sweep of the glistening stars, and the curving transit of the five brightest planets had been her silent but loyal confidants for as long as she could remember. They were her midnight brothers and her dark-morning sisters. She had spoken to them, learned from them, watched them as a girl sees the members of her family moving around her.
But tonight she looked at her sister the moon in confusion, a thumping urgency in her temples as she tried to figure out the meaning of what she was seeing. The moon was lit on the right side. That meant it was waxing, getting larger each night. But if the moon had been full the last time she saw it, how could it be waxing now?
It was as if she’d fallen backward a night in time. Either that or something equally unimaginable: She’d been underground for more than an entire cycle of the moon.
“That means twenty-eight nights have passed, maybe more…” she said to herself in astonishment.
The breeze whispered through the tops of the trees as if the hidden spirits of the forest were nervously discussing that she had discovered the universe’s ruse. Time flew forward. Time flew back. Nothing was as it seemed. People were buried underground and people came back. She was in a world of many in-betweens.
Another set of flashes lit up the sky and danced silently among the clouds, then the thunder rolled on, echoing across the mountainsides.