Serafina and the Seven Stars: Chapters 31–45

Making her way through the piles of long, crisscrossing, storm-damaged copper gutters, she felt like she was crawling through the weathered bones of an ancient dinosaur in a dark, primordial cave.

As the cat scurried away behind her, she heard his feet pattering rapidly across the floor and down the back stairs.

And its almost doglike, hairless head had long, sharply pointed ears, bulbous eyes, and a prodigious snout with rows of sharp, protruding teeth.

In mind, it seemed obsessed, like a starved animal digging for a succulent piece of food.

Whatever these terrifying things were, they had a penchant for killing small animals.

But the screeching thing scampered straight up the side of the wall, tearing into the wallpaper and clanging against one of the brass sconces.

She wasn’t sure if the brutish man had been a police commander, an army sergeant, or a wretched crook before he came to Biltmore, but he seemed more than capable of violence.

Every instinct in her body was telling her that the creatures were hunting the baby, that they’d follow her. The only consolation was that maybe they’d leave poor Mrs. Vanderbilt alone back in the nursery.

As she began to breathe again, her skin prickled with the vestiges of fear still pulsating through her limbs.

Then she heard the sounds of claws scrabbling through the walls around her.

Just as she was about to reach the Porte Cochere, Baby Nell began to wriggle and squawk, as if she suddenly realized that some vile creature of the night had filched her from her mother’s crib and was thieving her out into the cold.

“Fly, Nolan, fly!” she shouted as she clambered to her feet in the swaying carriage, the baby in her arms.

Nolan drove the running horses with wild shouts and snapping reins, their steel-shod hooves clattering on the cobblestones of the courtyard, rising up into the night and filling the house with ominous, echoing sound.

“Yes, it was him,” Serafina said soberly, knowing that it wasn’t going to settle well with her companion.

Nolan pulled the reins, steering their carriage around a sharp bend in the narrow road, the whole carriage careening wildly.

“Oh, Essie, are you hurt?” Serafina gasped, hurrying toward her.
“My head took a wallop,” Essie said, as she rubbed her temple and squinted her eye, “but I ain’t no worse for it.”

“Get the baby,” Mr. Vanderbilt ordered, the tenor of his voice vibrating with harshness.

“Aunt Edith, why are you treating Serafina like this?” Braeden beseeched Mrs. Vanderbilt.

Mr. Doddman, provoked by Braeden’s insolent tone, pushed toward him and shouted at him in his gruff, commanding voice, “Tell us, boy, just how did you get here anyway?”

Serafina could see in her mistress’s eyes that maybe her anger and suspicion were finally beginning to subside.

He had seemed so brave, so resolute, but she realized now that his heart had probably been pounding just as hard as hers.

“Thank you for believing in me back there,” she said, her voice quavering.

“I’m so sorry, Serafina,” he said, his voice rife with shame.

He gazed at her without speaking; his eyes and face held an expression that she could not fathom. Had her questions startled him? Was it embarrassment? Fear?

“I came home as fast as I could,” he said gently.
“You commandeered a train to do it,” she said, smiling as she gazed at him.

His expression clouded as he tried to digest what she had told him.

As she ran across the field, the soft, tilled autumn earth pulled at her feet.

A living, flesh-and-blood medieval warrior—a young woman clad in full plate armor and brandishing a long, steel-tipped spear—was charging toward them.

The skin of his face was white with deathly pallor as he gazed up at her in shock.

The girl looked about seventeen or eighteen years old, tall and strong, and she had a handsome face with white alabaster skin.

There were many graven ogres, griffons, harpies, minotaurs, satyrs, and other mythical creatures covering the wall.

But despite how strange and almost inconceivable it was that the statues were doing all this, she felt a swell of excitement that she was finally starting to put some of the pieces of the puzzle together.

“That’s right,” Serafina said, feeling the excitement of the discovery scintillating in her mind.

She knew that what she had just told him was so foolishly impossible that it barely warranted serious thought.

And as she looked up at all the books, it just seemed so daunting. There were over ten thousand books on these shelves, and another twelve thousand scattered throughout the house. How could she find any answers in a place like this?

“Then let’s try this one,” Braeden said as he pulled out a much thicker black tome and began flipping through the paintings of constellations, Cygnus the Swan, Taurus the Bull, Orion the Hunter, page after page.

There were seasons for all things, but autumn in particular was known as a time of change and calamitous events. Every fall, when the Seven Stars first rose high in the midnight sky, it was believed that the veil between the physical world and the magical world was at its thinnest.

It was said that during this time if the Seven Stars were caught in a reflection, then they would reflect their magic into our world, while at the same time reflecting our world into their magic, like a mirror into a mirror. Whatever was occurring at the moment of the reflection—the good, the evil, the wondrous, and the vile—would become manifest in our world.

“Was the real Joan of Arc a vicious fighter?”
“My uncle said that she wore armor and carried a sword into battle, but she was more of a spiritual leader, to boost the morale of the French troops. I think mainly she wanted peace.”

The smell of smoke filled the air, the acrid stench of woolen tapestries on fire.