Biltmore Estate
Asheville, North Carolina
Serafina opened her eyes and saw nothing but black. It was as if she hadn’t opened her eyes at all.
She had been deep in the darkened void of a swirling, half-dreaming world when she awoke to the sound of a muffled voice, but now there was no voice, no sound, no movement of any kind.
With her feline eyes she had always been able to see, even in the dimmest, most shadowed places, but here she was blind. She searched for the faintest glint of light in the gloom, but there was no moonlight coming in through a window, no flicker of a distant lantern down a corridor.
Just black.
She closed her eyes and reopened them. But it made no difference. It was still pitch-dark.
Have I actually gone blind? she wondered.
Confused, she tried to listen out into the darkness as she had done when she hunted rats deep in the corridors of Biltmore’s sprawling basement. But there was no creak of the house, no servants working in distant rooms, no father snoring in a nearby cot, no machinery whirring, no clocks ticking or footsteps. It was cold, still and quiet in a way she had never known. She was no longer at Biltmore.
Remembering the voice that had woken her, she listened for it again, but whether it had been real or part of a dream, it was gone now.
Where am I? she thought in bewilderment. How did I get here?
Then a sound finally came, as if in answer to her question.
Thump-thump.
For a moment that was all there was.
Thump-thump, thump-thump.
The beat of her heart and the pulse of her blood.
Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.
As she slowly moved her tongue to moisten her cracked, dry lips, she sensed the faint taste of metal in her mouth.
But it wasn’t metal.
It was blood – her own blood flowing through her veins into her tongue and her lips.
She tried to clear her throat, but then all at once she took in a sudden, violent, jerking breath and sucked in a great gasp of air, as if it were the very first breath she had ever taken. As her blood flowed, a tingling feeling flooded into her arms and legs and all through her body.
What is going on? she thought. What happened to me? Why am I waking up like this?
Thinking back through her life, she remembered living with her pa in the workshop, and battling the Black Cloak and the Twisted Staff with her best friend, Braeden. She’d finally come out into the grand rooms and daylight world of the fancy folk. But when she tried to remember what happened next, it was like trying to recall the fleeting details of a powerful dream that drifts away the moment you wake. It left her disoriented and confused, as if she were grasping for the tattered remnants of a previous life.
She had not yet moved her body, but she felt herself lying on her back on a long, flat surface. Her legs were straight, her hands neatly lying one over the other on her chest, like someone had laid her there with respect and care.
She slowly separated her hands and moved them down on either side of her body to feel the surface beneath her.
It felt hard, like rough wooden boards, but the boards were strangely cold. The boards shouldn’t be cold, she thought. Not like this. Not cold.
Her heart began to pound in her chest. A wild panic rose inside her.
She tried to sit up, but immediately slammed her forehead into a hard surface a few inches above her, and she crashed down again, wincing in pain.
She pressed her hands against the boards above her. Her probing fingers were her only eyes. There were no breaks or openings in the boards. Her palms began to sweat. Her breaths got shorter. A desperate surge of fear poured through her as she craned her body and pushed to the side, but there were boards there, too, just inches away. She kicked her feet. She pounded her fists. But the boards surrounded her, closing her in on all sides.
Serafina growled in frustration, fear, and anger. She scratched and she scurried, she twisted and she pried, but she could not escape. She had been enclosed in a long, flat wooden box.
She pressed her face frantically into the corner of the box and sniffed, like a trapped little animal, hoping to catch a scent from the outside world through the thin cracks between the boards. She tried one corner, and then the next, but the smell was the same all around her.
Dirt, she thought. I’m surrounded by damp, rotting dirt.
I’ve been buried alive!
Serafina lay in the cold black space of the coffin buried underground. Her mind flooded with terror.
I need to get out of here, she kept thinking. I need to breathe. I’m not dead!
But she could not see. She could not move. She could not hear anything other than the sound of her own ragged breathing. How much air would she have down here? She felt a tight constriction in her lungs. Her chest gripped her. She wanted her pa! She wanted her mother to come and dig her out. Someone had to save her! She frantically pressed