“It’s here in the house, Father, but they’ve locked it away. I can’t get to it on my own. I need your help.”
Uriah nodded, very pleased. “We’ll take the cloak first and then we’ll kill the boy.”
“This way,” Rowena whispered, leading him out of the Library and into the Tapestry Gallery.
As they walked, Uriah put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder, a glint of pride contorting his nasty face. He looked as if he was more than pleased with his daughter’s talent for treachery, her ruthless and conniving ability to change herself into whatever he needed her to be. Good or evil, dark-haired or fair, human or animal, she was the consummate shifter. His other demons and devices had been flawed, but his apprentice daughter! She was his most perfect creation.
Serafina ducked down into the darkest shadow she could find as Uriah and Rowena walked past her, his earthen stench wafting toward her like the odorous, twisting branches of a diseased and rotting tree.
Suddenly, Uriah stopped in midstride and looked around him.
Serafina froze, her heart pounding.
“What is it, Father?” Rowena whispered.
“Stay quiet,” Uriah ordered her, as he listened into the darkness.
Serafina watched from her hiding spot behind the settee as he slowly turned his head and his silver eyes scanned each and every shadow in the long moonlit gallery.
She wanted to flee, right then, just get up and run like the dickens, but she knew she mustn’t move or make a sound. She stayed exactly where she was, watching from the shadows of the room.
Uriah tilted his head and sniffed the air, like a predator picking up the scent of its prey.
A pain filled Serafina’s chest. Her lungs wanted to breathe, to gasp in rapid gulps of air, but she could not let them, for a hurried breath would kill her now.
Stay very still, she told herself.
She pulled back just a little farther into the darkness, trying to settle her thumping heart and her buzzing legs so that he could not feel her there.
He sniffed the air again.
“She’s here…” he rasped in a low, hissing whisper.
“Who’s here?” Rowena asked.
“The Black One…” he said.
“Where?” Rowena asked, looking around them.
“She’s here, in this house right now…” he whispered. He began moving with a slow and creeping deliberateness among the low tables and soft chairs where she was hiding, his scaly clawed hands raised and crooked like a praying mantis.
“She’s in this very room…” he rasped.
He began to search behind each piece of furniture, dragging it aside, then going to the next.
He was coming her way.
“THERE!” he screamed, pointing to her.
Serafina broke cover and tried to run.
Serafina burst away and sprinted down the length of the gallery, running as fast as she could. Uriah rushed toward her with terrifying speed. The air around her concussed with shaking force. All she could hear behind her was the pushing of the furniture as he shoved it aside and the violent clicking of his gnashing teeth.
As she turned the corner out of the room and dashed across the main hall, she felt a blast of burning air fly past her. The glass on the old grandfather clock cracked, and the wood sides caught on fire.
She ducked down the corridor and darted across the Salon, jumping a chaise lounge as Uriah came barreling around the corner and threw a spell that smashed through the room, toppling everything in its path, and crashed through the far windows with an explosion of glass.
Her chest heaved in rapid breaths as she ran. Her arms pumped. Her legs buzzed with speed. She wanted to change into panther form so bad, but the time had not yet come.
Behind her, she heard the ferocious, attacking growl of Waysa tearing into the room. She glanced back just in time to see the fanged catamount leap upon Uriah’s back, biting him and clawing him, pulling at him.
Waysa slowed Uriah down just enough to let Serafina get ahead. But then Uriah slammed Waysa’s body into a stone pillar and the catamount collapsed to the floor.
Serafina’s heart wrenched when she saw Waysa go down, but she knew he had done what he’d come for, and now the rest was up to her.
She raced away as fast as she could in the moments Waysa had given her. As she scurried through the Breakfast Room, the creature came right behind her, throwing a fireball that lit up the room with blazing orange light and set the leather wallpaper on fire.
There was less than a second between life and death.
Finally, she darted through the door that led into the Banquet Hall.
She’d made it!
She was exactly where she needed to be at exactly the right moment.
As she turned the corner out of sight and ran past the room’s three giant fireplaces, she shifted into panther form. She leapt straight up the far wall, clung to the priceless Flemish tapestry with her claws, climbed it with tearing speed, and sprang through the air toward the window, which Braeden had opened for her just moments before.
But the window was far too small for a panther, so she shifted into human form in midair and landed on the windowsill. Unlike normal windows, these small, seldom-noticed windows at the top of the Banquet Hall didn’t go outside, but to a back corridor of an upper floor high above.
“Here it is,” Braeden said, handing her the coiling, hissing Black Cloak, just like they had planned. “Go!”
Grabbing the cloak, she sprinted down the length of the upper corridor, looping back behind where she expected Uriah to be, and came to a second window that looked down into the Banquet Hall. It was similar to the window she’d leapt into, but there was a reason she’d chosen this spot in the house.
Rowena had lured Uriah into Biltmore just as they had planned. Waysa had attacked him at just the right moment to slow him down. Braeden had been ready with the cloak right where they had agreed. And now Serafina was positioned directly over the door that Uriah was coming through as he entered the Banquet Hall in search of her.
Seeing Uriah below her, Serafina leapt.
As she fell through the air she stretched out the Black Cloak in her arms, coming down on Uriah like a giant black bat. But as she came down, she realized her timing was off and she was going to miss him. If she’d been in her panther form she could have used the twist of her tail to change the angle of her attack in midair, but she needed to be in her human form to hold the cloak. And now she was going to fall uselessly to the floor behind him. But in the moment of her fall, she used her new powers to shift the air around her with a violent push, and for a split second she wasn’t just controlling the movement of the air, she was the air itself. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, she thought. I am human and panther. I am body and spirit. I am all things in the darkness.
Her timing was perfect. Just as Uriah came through the doorway, she fell directly upon him and pulled the inner folds of the open cloak over his head and shoulders.