Serafina and the Splintered Heart. Robert Beatty

with her wings raised up around her, stood on a pedestal in the centre of the small clearing. Serafina had no idea how she’d got here, but she knew this place. It was the angel’s glade. But before she could take it all in, she heard something behind her and spun around.

      A black panther was coming straight towards her, crouched low for the lunge, its ears pinned back, its face quivering with fierceness as it opened its mouth and hissed with its long fangs bared and gleaming, ready to bite.

      Serafina stared into the face of the angry panther. Its bright yellow eyes were as savage as she’d ever seen in a wild animal, filled with a looming and ferocious power. She crouched down low, ready to defend herself. When the panther showed its long white fangs and snarled at her again, Serafina bared her teeth and hissed right back, fierce and fiery, challenging it with everything she had. But to her astonishment, the black panther turned its head away, then slunk into the forest and disappeared.

      Overwhelmed with exhaustion, Serafina collapsed to the ground. She sucked in long and heavy breaths, just relieved to be alive. That big cat had me as good as dead, she thought. Why in the world did it slink off like a socked possum?

      As she lay there recovering, she tried to comprehend what had happened. Someone had buried her. But they hadn’t just buried her, they had buried her in the old, abandoned graveyard that had been overgrown by the forest decades before.

      And the more she thought about it, the more she couldn’t believe what she had just seen. How could there be a black panther?

      Her mother was a catamount, a shape-shifter with the ability to turn into a mountain lion at will, but when Serafina finally learned to shift, she was a black panther like her father had been, a rare variant of the race. According to mountain lore, there was only one black panther at a time.

      She kept thinking that the panther must have been her father, but her father had died in battle twelve years before, the night she was born. Her pa, the man who had found her in the forest that night and taken care of her ever since, was the only father she had ever known. And the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that the panther she’d just seen hadn’t been a full-grown male, but a young cat, lean and uncertain. It might have been her half sister or half brother, but they were just spotted little cubs. When her catamount friend Waysa was in lion form, his fur was dark brown. Maybe the light had been playing tricks on her eyes, but if it had been Waysa, why would he run away from her?

      Questions reeled through her mind, but the sensations of her body began to overwhelm her. Her head hurt from the swipe of the panther’s claws, which had left a bleeding wound, but it wasn’t too bad. After what she’d experienced in the coffin, it felt so good to just have air moving in and out of her lungs. She could feel the warm breeze on her bare skin, and smell the clover and ferns growing nearby, and see the glorious stars above. Her senses seemed more acute than ever before.

      As her strength returned to her arms and legs, she brushed the remaining dirt from her body and straightened out the plain beige dress she was wearing. That was when she noticed the large, dark stains around the rips in the material. Frightened, she quickly looked herself over and found dried blood all over her bare torso, shoulders, and arms. But there were no recent wounds. Just scars.

      At that moment, memories of her life began to flow slowly through her like a quiet river. She saw herself eating supper with her pa in the workshop, and lying on Biltmore’s highest rooftop with Braeden as they counted stars in the midnight sky, and running happily through the forest in panther form with her mother and Waysa. She saw herself sitting in front of the fireplace in Mr Vanderbilt’s library as he told her stories from his books and travels, and sitting quietly at morning tea with Mrs Vanderbilt, who had recently announced that she was with child.

      Then she remembered her friend Essie, one of Biltmore’s maids, helping her lace up the beautiful golden-cream gown that Braeden had given her for the Christmas party. She remembered looking at herself in Essie’s mirror, seeing a twelve-year-old girl with sharp, feline angles to her cheekbones, amber-yellow eyes, and long, shiny black hair, and thinking, for the first time, she was going to fit in just fine.

      The memory of the Christmas party swirled around in her mind. She could so vividly remember the softness of the candlelight, the scent of the wood on the fire, the smile on her pa’s face, and the warmth of Braeden’s hand on her back as they entered the room together. It was a moment of peace and triumph, not just because she and Braeden had defeated their enemies, but because she felt like she truly belonged.

      The last night she remembered at Biltmore, she had been making her rounds through the house on a winter evening. The memory came to her in snatches. She was the Guardian, the protector against intruding spirits and other dangers. Everyone else had gone to bed, and she had the darkened corridors of the house to herself, just like she liked it. She stepped out onto the formal back patio, which the Vanderbilts called the loggia. The sheer white curtains in the doorway glowed in the moonlight as they fluttered in the cold winter breeze. She looked out across the grounds of the estate towards the forest and the mountains in the distance. The full moon was rising over the peaks.

      All was still in the house, but then she felt an unusual movement of air around her and a disturbing chill ran up her spine. The hairs on the back of her neck went up. Suddenly she sensed something behind her. She spun around, ready to fight, but all she could see was a black and roiling darkness where the walls and windows of the house should have been.

      Something struck her chest with piercing pain. A storm of wind swept around her. Her mind filled with confusion. She fought with tooth and claw, growling and hissing and biting. Blood was everywhere.

      But then it all went black, and the memory faded.

      She stood now beside her own grave in the pale light of the moon in the centre of the angel’s glade and looked around her. She was miles from home. What a strange and haunted place to find herself crawling from the ground! The loose dirt was tracked with human footprints and what looked like shovel marks. There was no gravestone, just a mound of dirt. She reckoned that whoever had buried her didn’t want her found. Had someone attempted to murder her and then hide the body?

      She looked up at the stone angel. ‘What did you see that night?’

      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 centre 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 colour 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 grey 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.’