Serafina and the Twisted Staff: Chapters 13–21

He was a man of immense wealth but quiet word, a refined, bookish gentleman with a slight frame and slender hands.

He had shrewd, dark eyes, black hair, and a black mustache.

He stared at her with intense, unrelenting eyes.

Mr. Vanderbilt had welcomed all sorts of guests to entertain themselves in the magnificent mansion he had built for that purpose, but he himself had a tendency to withdraw from revelry.

He often sat in a quiet room by himself and read rather than imbibe with others.

But in another way, it seemed to her that he was signaling them, warning them that they needed to be very careful, like the man might possess the power to discern truth from lie.

“I will remain,” Mr. Vanderbilt said unequivocally.

Do you and your master own five mangy, overgrown tracking hounds with teeth like daggers?

The last time she’d seen him, he’d been lying dead on the ground in the graveyard, his blood leaking out of him, and then his body decomposed before her eyes, his worldly carcass becoming nothing but blood-soaked earth.

“Detective, we need to move on,” Mr. Vanderbilt pushed him.
“I have more questions!” the detective insisted, his voice filled with aggravation, his eyes locked on Serafina.

“I have never seen a silver clasp with this design,” she said, at last finding a way to hew to the truth.

She desperately wanted to talk to him, but as they reached the Entrance Hall, she heard Mrs. Vanderbilt and Lady Rowena coming in through the Vestibule.

But of all the cats at Biltmore, this small bronze sculpture of a leopardess in the throes of a ferocious attack had always been her favorite.

Finally, they reached a lattice of steel girders and joists suspended high above the ceiling.

It was a dark and treacherous place. A single misplaced step meant a fatal fall into the darkness.

The top side of the Banquet Hall’s ceiling hovered below them, but if they fell from the girders, they would hit the ceiling and then tumble along the curve until they disappeared into the black chasm that ran along the side.

The only light came from a few tiny pinholes in the slate shingles of the roof.

“Well, this is a nice place for evening tea,” Braeden said cheerfully. “It’s nearly pitch dark, and if I move in any direction, I’ll die, but besides that, I love the ambience.”

“Peregrine falcons are amazing birds. The book says that they can fly anywhere on earth they want to. The word peregrine actually means ‘wanderer’ or ‘traveler.’ Sometimes, two peregrine falcons will hunt together. And they’re the fastest animal on the planet. Scientists estimate that they dive at over two hundred miles an hour, but it’s so fast that no one has ever been able to measure it exactly.”

She stood and walked among the rafters in the attic, hopping across the void from one joist to another, the darkness her domain.

They hurled their bodies against her, clinging at her with their tiny scaly feet, pecking at her with their sharp beaks, their spiny tails digging into her face, their wings batting and tangling up her hair.
The torrent of swifts was so thick around her that she could not hear or see.

Chimney swifts were strange, crepuscular little creatures, but they were normally harmless. She’d seen them flying their cheerful, chirping, mosquito-catching acrobatics above Biltmore’s roofs at sunset many times.

When she reached the top of the Grand Staircase, moonlight shone through the rising cascade of slanting, leaded-glass windows, casting silver-blue light across the wide, gently arcing steps and the filigreed railing that spiraled up through Biltmore’s floors.

Something had twisted him, deranged him, turned him into a rabid beast that did not recognize her.

She gripped what looked like a pencil in her hand, or perhaps a hairpin, brandishing it in front of her like a weapon.

The magnitude of what she was doing began to sink in. She was leaving her pa and Braeden, and Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt, and Essie, and everyone else she knew at Biltmore.

The metal snake weaved in and out of the trees, but as it crossed a trestle bridge over a river, a plume of white steam roiled up into the moonlit clouds.

A wild creature she became, full and earnest, if not in body, then in spirit whole.

She wondered how he had fared since last they met. The wound he had suffered that night had healed and he looked stronger now.

As she descended the mountain, she came to a dark stand of decrepit old pine trees with thick, straight trunks coated in black mold, all the lower limbs of the trees withered and rotted, the roots growing along the ground like long, treacherous fingers.

There were no other plants growing here—no saplings or bushes could survive in the perennial shadow of the blackened pines.

A small door had been fabricated into the end of the cage, with a latch on the outside.

The vines and branches interlaced into an unnatural weave, like the hide of a perverse beast.

The gray remnants of a campfire smoldered in front of the hut.

One of the saddest of all was a red-tailed hawk with its talons lacerated and bloody, its feathers torn and broken from batting its wings against the wire mesh in its fight to escape.

She found a safe thicket of tree brush and stuffed the hawk inside where it could hide from the marauding owls until daylight came.

He had a heavy, dark gray beard, not long and scraggly white like many of the mountain men, but thick and wavy like an animal’s coat.

She had a few seconds of thought left as the blood drained from her head, but she was a dead girl, a cadaver, lying facedown on the ground.

You’ve been a nuisance to us already, haven’t you? And I’ve seen enough of your kith and kin to know that it’s only going to get worse if I let you grow up.

He had seemed to be drifting in and out of the trees with an almost specter-like quality, like an apparition in the mist.