Serafina and the Twisted Staff. Robert Beatty

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      It took Serafina several seconds to realise that she was lying in her mother’s earthen den. Her mother must have picked her up and carried her into the den when she was sleeping.

      She felt warmer and stronger than she had before. She got herself up onto her hands and knees and crawled out of the den, then stood in the moonlight of the angel’s glade. Looking up at the stars, it felt like a few hours had passed.

      Her bleeding had stopped and her wounds did not hurt as badly as they had before. But, as she looked around her, her heart sank, for her mother and the cubs and the dark lion were gone. They had left her here alone.

      She found words traced into the dirt.

       If you need me, winter, spring, or fall, come where what you climbed is floor and rain is wall.

      Serafina frowned. She didn’t know what the words meant or even if they had been left for her.

      She gazed around the angel’s glade and then out into the trees. The forest was utter stillness, nothing but a mist drifting through the wet and glistening branches, and she could not hear a single living thing. It was as if the entire world outside the glade had disappeared.

      She thought about her mother, and the cubs, and the dark lion, and what her mother had said: You don’t belong here, Serafina! Of all the wounds she’d suffered, that one hurt the most.

      Then she thought about Braeden, and her pa, and Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt, and everyone at Biltmore living their daytime lives so separate from her own.

       You don’t belong there, either.

      Standing in the centre of the angel’s glade, she came to a slow and aching realisation.

      She was once again alone.

      Just alone.

      When she thought about what her mother had told her she would never be able to do, an aching, broken, throbbing part of her just wanted to kneel down and cry. She didn’t understand. She had been so hopeful with all the changes that were happening in her life, but now she felt like she was caught in between, like she didn’t belong anywhere. She was neither forest nor house, neither night nor day.

      After a long time, she turned and looked at the beautiful, silent stone angel, with her graceful and powerful wings and her long steel sword. Serafina read the inscription on the pedestal.

      OUR CHARACTER ISN’T DEFINED

      BY THE BATTLES WE WIN OR LOSE,

      BUT BY THE BATTLES WE DARE TO FIGHT.

      Then she looked back out into the forest once more. She decided that no matter what she could or couldn’t do, no matter who did or didn’t want her, she was still the C.R.C. – that much she knew for sure. And she’d seen things in the forest tonight that she couldn’t account for. She didn’t know who the bearded man was, except that he was something so dark that the animals fled before him, something so dangerous that even her mother believed that he could not be fought. Her mother was sure the darkest dangers lurked in the forest, and no doubt they did, but Serafina knew from experience that sometimes they crept into the house. She remembered the driverless carriage and the four stallions going onward up the road towards Biltmore. She could swear there had been someone else in that carriage. In what guise would this new stranger arrive and slither his way into Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt’s home? Into her home. And what had he come for? Was he a thief ? Was he a spy?

      Standing there in the angel’s glade, Serafina came to a decision. If there were a rat in the house, she was going to find it.