Serafina and the Splintered Heart: Chapters 1–8

She felt a tight constriction in her lungs.

The coffin’s rough boards felt thin and crudely made, not like a proper solid casket, but like a ramshackle box nailed together from discarded apple crates.

She lost her grip on the beast’s paw and it pulled away, but she clambered out of the dirt until her shoulders and arms were free.

Its bright yellow eyes were as savage as she’d ever seen in a wild animal, filled with a looming and ferocious power.

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.

The sheer white curtains in the doorway glowed in the moonlight as they fluttered in the cold winter breeze.

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.

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.

The angel was old and weathered, mottled with dark moss and green patina.

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.

A gray whispery mist floated listlessly through the graveyard, as if searching for a place to linger.

She knew that the moon was only full one night a month, then it would wane for fourteen nights, with the light on the left side, getting smaller and smaller until it was dark for a single evening.

The steady phases of her pale companion, the slow sweep of the glistening stars, and the curving transit of the five brightest planets had been her silent but loyal confidants for as long as she could remember.

It felt as if she could actually see the evening flowers slowly opening their petals to the moon and the glint of starlight on the iridescent wings of the insects.

It appeared to be about five feet long, floating of its own accord a few feet off the ground, like a long banner held in the breeze. And it was utterly black, blacker than anything she had ever seen.

The man, or creature, or whatever it was, moved toward her through the forest with a slow and deliberate pace, like a predator hunting for prey.

It stalked on two long, gangly legs, its back hunched over and its head hanging down, its shoulders swaying one way and then the other as it gazed from side to side.

The creature’s face had been slashed with a savage wound that oozed with the blackish, festering blood of an injury that never healed.

She thought that the thick foliage would protect her, but the leaves and branches snapped and hissed as the black shape touched them, bursting them one by one, as it moved toward her.

But what blocked her path now was a powerful river, turbulent and strong, ripping through the trees.

If the little creek she remembered was now this churning river, then there must have been many other storms like the one she’d just fought her way through.

Looking out across the river, she was amazed to see an entire tree—branches, trunk, and roots and all—floating downstream, tumbling through the current, like a great, leafy leviathan.

The long, curving spine of her back, usually so supple and strong, hurt something fierce.

Grabbing at the hard branches on the way down had jammed her measly human fingernails painfully into her fingers.

As the spider moved, tiny droplets of dew on the web shimmered in the light, some jostling loose and falling to the forest floor below, others moving like quicksilver along the strands.

He dug through the boggy area at the edge of the river, gathering the tall, pitcher-shaped carnivorous plants that grew there.

As she approached more closely, she saw that the green glow wasn’t a sorcerer’s spell, but the Conservatory all lit up for an evening party, the light shining through the leaves of thousands of orchids, bromeliads, and palms, and out through the greenhouse’s many panes of glass.

And smaller lights hung along the wooden arbor that covered the central path of the garden, the lights tucked among the leafy vines and flowering blooms like little faeries taking refuge among the leaves.

But everything about this party flummoxed her. It must have taken weeks of planning to arrange all this, and yet she hadn’t heard anything about it. And why wasn’t Braeden here?

A few of the more adventurous adult guests and a coterie of their fancifully attired children huddled together and lit candles inside small paper lanterns, then held them aloft.

She saw right away that Braeden wasn’t there, but Mr. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Vanderbilt were standing together with several of their guests near one of the rose trellises.

Mr. Vanderbilt was easily recognizable with his black hair and mustache, and his lean, shrewd face with dark, inquisitive eyes.

Many of the men she’d spied on over the years were loud of voice and boisterous of manner, but Mr. Vanderbilt was a quieter, more refined, thinking kind of gentleman.

She wore a lovely, loosely flowing mauve dress, but what truly stunned Serafina was that Mrs. Vanderbilt’s belly was large with her baby.

She had lost her ability to shift shape, but she certainly hadn’t lost her knack for sneaking unseen or unheard.

The terrace was covered by an arbor heavily laden with long, hanging purple wisteria.

The vines grew thick and twisty around the arbor’s stout posts and up into its latticework above.

The poor dog was lying twenty feet away, his head down, his ears drooped, a sad, dejected expression on his face, as if Braeden had sent him away, scorned and unwanted.

“There wasn’t anything to do down there,” Mr. Vanderbilt said, smiling a little, and Braeden gave him a wan, knowing smile in return.