As she stood in the darkness of the unlit Entrance Hall, the main room in the center of the house, she heard movement down toward the Library.
She walked slowly down the length of the Tapestry Gallery, listening and scanning the shadows ahead, the moonlight falling through the windows casting white slanting rectangles across the floor. The colors in the tapestries that covered the wall and the intricately painted beams on the ceiling seemed to glow in the light.
Then she heard the sound again. Something touching the glass windows. The shuffle of footsteps. Voices. It sounded as if someone outside was trying to get into the Library.
Serafina crouched down, her heart beating heavy in her chest. Her lungs pulled in slow, full breaths, readying her for whatever was about to happen.
She crept forward, using the fine chairs and other furniture in the Tapestry Gallery for cover, but always looking ahead through the archway that led into the darkened Library.
She heard a click and then the movement of a hinge.
Her fingers clung to the top of a settee as she peeked over its edge and watched the French doors. One of the doors swung slowly open into the Library.
Serafina felt the hair on the back of her neck rising.
She spotted a dark hooded figure slipping into the room.
She knew she shouldn’t be scared. She was the Guardian of Biltmore! She had been expecting this! But it didn’t matter. She was terrified.
Her heart pounded now. Her chest tightened something fierce, her lungs started pumping, wanting more air, and the muscles in her arms and legs bunched for action.
The dark figure coming into the house pulled back its hood and looked quickly around the room to make sure it was empty. It was Rowena. Her hair lay in a jumble around her shoulders in an unusually unkempt fashion. Her face was smudged with soot and slime. Her eyes scanned the darkness. Serafina could see that it was the sorceress, so she knew she shouldn’t be frightened, but she was. Every pore of her body was slowly filling with dread. Rowena looked so different from the last time they had spoken. Everything about her reminded Serafina not of the ally she’d been working with over the last few days, but the dark and mysterious druid girl she’d seen by the river, the young sorceress of the forest, the caster of spider spells, and the speaker to the dead. Serafina knew she should trust her new friend, knew that they had come up with the plan together, but she couldn’t stop thinking that everything about the girl she was seeing now oozed a dark and wicked treachery.
Rowena whispered something to someone just outside the door. The sorceress wasn’t alone.
Just stay steady, Serafina told herself. Just stay very still. But her heart was pounding so hard that it felt like it was going to give her away.
Rowena whispered again, bringing the person with her slowly into the house.
As she watched it, Serafina couldn’t believe that it was actually happening. Her hands balled into tight, shaking fists.
She smelled the rotting, earthy stench of the creature first, and then heard the tick-tick-ticking sound of its gnashing teeth. Then she saw the long, dark, ragged coat, and the clawed hands protruding from the tattered sleeves. The mangled, bleeding face came into the room with glowing silver eyes. Serafina’s body flooded with cold fear. It was him! It was Uriah, coming right into the house!
“Come this way, Father,” Rowena whispered. “They’re all asleep…”
Serafina watched from behind the settee as Uriah looked slowly around the Library of Biltmore Estate, gazing up and around at all the books and fine furnishings—the secret inner sanctuary of his despised enemy.
Before Uriah had become the bent and hissing creature he was now, he had been the bearded man of the forest, a shrouded hermit whom day folk seldom saw. He had gathered his curses into sap-fueled cauldron fires up in the barren pinelands, but avoided face-to-face battles with his enemies. He never endangered himself. He was like a sniveling rat, a stinking polecat that stays hidden in the darkest depths of the forest. To attack his enemy, he would cast his spells from afar and send his demons into Biltmore to do his bidding. But this night, he had come. He was entering the very place he most wanted to destroy.
As Rowena led her father quietly into the darkened house, Uriah spoke in his low, gravelly voice. “Have you done everything we talked about?”
“Everything and more, Father,” Rowena said in an excited whisper. “It’s even better than we hoped.”
“Tell me,” Uriah rasped.
“You were exactly right. The cat and the boy had the silver clasp all along. But more than that, I now know that the boy can control the spiders.”
“What?” Uriah said harshly as he turned angrily toward his daughter in surprise and grabbed her by the throat. “You taught him how to cast the weaving spell?”
“No, no,” she gasped, clutching at his scaly hands, tightened around her neck. “Father, listen to me. I swear I didn’t! The boy doesn’t use spells. He has the power to befriend the creatures of the forest.”
“Like he did with the hawks and the wolves…” Uriah rasped as he released his daughter’s neck.
Still in human form, Serafina watched in amazement as Uriah and Rowena spoke. She knew that Uriah could cast powerful spells and that the Twisted Staff he had created had allowed him to control animals by force at close range, but he seemed to envy Braeden’s natural power. He and his daughter had once enslaved many of the forest’s creatures, but even he couldn’t claim the true and constant alliance of the wolves, the elk, and the other animals.
“Who’s inside the house now?” Uriah asked. “Where is the usurper and his woman?”
“The Vanderbilts have gone, Father,” she said. “Your storms have pushed them out.”
“What about the Black One and the other catamount?”
“They’re out patrolling the grounds, but I know the path they take. I waited until they were on the other side of the estate, miles away, before I brought you in.”
“So, it is just the boy,” Uriah said greedily. “We’ll leave his bloody dead body on the floor for the usurpers to find when they return.”
“We need to make them suffer, Father,” Rowena hissed, “for all that they have done to us.”
“And do these others trust you?” Uriah asked.
“They’re fools, Father,” the young sorceress said. “Even the cat trusts me this time. I pretended like I was conflicted about right and wrong, like I didn’t know which path to follow, and then when I told them the secret of the black widow spiders, that clinched it.”
“What about the cloak?”
“The boy and I have been working on it day and night,” Rowena said. “The boy and his spiders have made the fabric, and I have used the spells you taught me to bind the darkness and suck in souls. But I must tell you, Father, the cloak is far more powerful than anything we’ve made before.”
“More powerful?” he asked, his eyes widening. Serafina could hear the envy seething in his voice. “Where is the cloak now?”