Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series) (25 page)

Braeden used such refined English and her pa used such mountain talk that sometimes she had to help them understand each other. For the first time in her life, she felt like she didn’t
just
belong
, but like she was the glue that held the world together.

After dinner, Serafina invited Braeden to do what she imagined friends all over America did after a good meal together. They went rat catching.

‘My pa told me that some sort of rodent has been chewing at the wires,’ Serafina explained.

‘Then let’s get to it,’ Braeden agreed.

As the last of the gilded ladies and gentlemen upstairs retired to their bedrooms for the evening, and as the servants cleaned up the Banquet Hall, Serafina led Braeden through the back rooms of
the basement. In an hour or so, when everyone was asleep, she’d sneak up to Grathan’s room on the third floor and search it, but until then, the hunt was afoot. They prowled the
darkened corridors and shadowed storage rooms of her old domain, bringing back memories of her life in the world below.

After all that had happened to her over the last few weeks, she thought catching a couple of wire-chewing rats would make for easy pickings. But she and Braeden searched and searched and they
couldn’t find them. As the night wore on, it became more and more perplexing. She used her eyes and her ears and her nose just as she always did, but the rats were nowhere to be found. Her pa
had said there were rats in the house. And she was the Chief Rat Catcher. She always found her rats. But for some reason, she could not find them tonight.

‘Is it me?’ Braeden asked. ‘Am I making too much noise?’

‘No, I don’t think that’s it,’ Serafina said. ‘We’re checking all their favourite hiding spots. If they’re down here, we should at least be seeing
them.’

‘What about upstairs?’

She shook her head. ‘There aren’t any rats upstairs. I never let them get that far.’ She frowned, not sure what to do.

‘Maybe your pa was mistaken about the rats,’ Braeden said.

‘It’s possible,’ she said, ‘but I saw the wires, and they definitely looked like they’d been chewed.’

Just after midnight, she and Braeden gave up the hunt and went back upstairs to the main floor. There was no one there. All the lights were off and the candles had been extinguished. The
servants had gone to their rooms upstairs and down. The musicians had closed up their cases and gone home for the night. The Banquet Hall and all the other rooms on the main floor were dark and
empty.

‘Come on,’ she said, waving for him to follow her as she crept up the darkened Grand Staircase. ‘We’ll search Grathan’s room.’

At the top of the second floor, they hunkered down and looked upward to make sure the stairs were clear, then padded quietly up to the next level.

When they reached the third floor, they crouched down once more, protected by nothing but darkness and the sweep of the staircase. At that moment, Serafina realised they were in the exact
location where she and Gidean had gone over the railing. She looked over into the dark, empty living hall. The moon shone in through the windows, casting the room in an eerie silver light.

A shiver ran through her.

She heard something on the other side of the living hall.

When she looked at Braeden, she could tell by his expression that he had heard it too.

It was faint and difficult to make it out. She cupped her hands behind her ears to amplify the sound.

Then she heard it again.

A faint slithering just ahead.

The scrabbling of tiny feet on bare floor.

She touched Braeden rather than use her voice, and together they crept forward along the wall.

When the sound stopped, they stopped as well. When the sound resumed, they crept forward once more.

Now she could hear the creatures breathing, the scratching of their toenails on the floor and the dragging of their tails. She felt the familiar trembling in her fingers and the tightness in her
legs.

‘It’s the rats,’ she whispered to Braeden.

They crept slowly and quietly across the darkened living hall until they reached the corridor between the north tower and the south. When she peeked round the corner, a dark fear boomed into her
chest. At the end of this corridor was the cabinet with the hidden door that led to the attic where the chimney swifts had attacked her.

Were the rats in there?

She stepped slowly forward, still listening, still trying to figure out exactly where the rodents were. She heard what sounded like the grinding teeth of a hundred rats.

She was now standing in the exact spot where Gidean had attacked her that night.

‘Serafina . . .’ Braeden whispered, his voice filled with terror, as his trembling hand searched for and then touched her arm.

And then she saw it. Attached to the wall was a large wooden fire-alarm box with a glass front and brass instrumentation inside. It had been there for years. But crammed inside the box tonight
was a mass of roiling dark fur and scaly tails. Their gnawing teeth clicked like the sound of a thousand cockroaches. The rats were chewing on the electrical wires.

She watched the rats in horror, too shocked to move. Braeden clutched her arm tighter.

Then the sound stopped abruptly.

All at once, all the rats craned their necks and looked at her.

A large, grisly-looking rat, half out of its mind, crawled out of the box. Then another followed it. The rats rose up onto their back legs and stared at Serafina. Then they all started moving
towards her.

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She wasn’t hunting them – they were hunting her!

Filled with fierceness, she charged towards them, wondering how she was going to catch them all. But they weren’t moving like normal rats moved. They weren’t scurrying away in fear
at the sight of her. They ran
towards
her.

‘Serafina!’ Braeden whispered in terror, looking around them.

When Serafina looked down, she saw what he was seeing: hundreds of spiders and centipedes crawling out of the woodwork.

‘Serafina!’ Braeden cried again as he frantically wiped the spiders off his legs.

Serafina heard a terrible
tick-tick-tick
ing sound and a long, raspy hiss. She felt the hot air of a breath on the back of her neck. She spun round in panic, but there was nothing there
except a darkened corridor.

‘Braeden, run!’ she shouted.

They turned and ran. They tore through the living hall and down the Grand Staircase. She glanced over her shoulder. A brown slithering carpet of hundreds of rats flooded down the staircase
behind her. It was like a waterfall of rats. She burst forward with speed, but Braeden couldn’t run nearly as fast as she could. The rats were going to eat him alive.

But just as she slowed down to wait for him something flashed by her.

‘Come on, slowpoke!’ Braeden shouted as he slid at incredible speed down the endless, smooth wooden railing of the spiral staircase.

The wave of rats slammed into her feet and scratched their way up her bare legs. She tried to tear them away, but it was no use – there were too many of them. She took a flying leap onto
the rail, grabbed on and went sliding down behind Braeden.

It felt like she’d been dropped off the edge of a cliff. The swoosh of her spinning descent made her insides float. She and Braeden slid down, down, spiralling down to the next level, then
ran and leapt, and slid again, following the great arch of the railing all the way down to the main floor. When they reached the bottom, they leapt off the rail and ran down into the basement.

Serafina knew she shouldn’t, but at the bottom of the basement stairs, she turned and looked behind her.

T
he rats were gone.

Those dirty, awful, insane creatures had chased her three floors down and then simply disappeared.

Had they vanished into thin air, or had they slunk back into the walls? Had the rats been some sort of conjuration?

She growled in frustration, angered by what had just happened. She was the Chief Rat Catcher! There weren’t supposed to be rats in Biltmore House. She had made sure of it for years. And
now all of a sudden there were hundreds of huge vicious ones, the likes of which she’d never seen before!

And since when did spiders crawl out of walls and attack? It was as if the creatures’ only purpose was to scare her off the third floor.

Braeden sat on the floor beside her, panting, his back against the wall as he tried desperately to catch his breath.

‘Goodnight!’ he exclaimed, shaking his head. ‘If this is what rat catching is like, you can count me out next time!’

‘Come on,’ she said, touching his shoulder.

‘Tell me where we’re going,’ he said as he got up off the floor.

‘We’re going back up there.’

‘What?’ he said, holding his ground. ‘Please say we’re not.’

‘Don’t you want to see if they’re still up there? That was Biltmore’s Grand Staircase! How can there be rats on it?’

‘I swear, your curiosity is going to get you killed one of these days, Serafina. And me too, I think.’

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to see.’

Gathering their courage, they crept up the basement stairs to the main floor, then came slowly and carefully round, and looked up the Grand Staircase. There were no rats or spiders or
centipedes. There was no sign of them at all. They were gone.

The moonlight lit the staircase in a silver light, as if inviting them to ascend once more,. But as they stared at the foreboding threat of the empty steps and felt the hairs on the backs of
their necks tingling, they both knew there was no way they were going to try to get back up to the third floor tonight. That was just about the last place on earth they wanted to go.

‘There shouldn’t be that many rats in the house,’ Braeden whispered.

‘There shouldn’t be
any
rats in the house!’ Serafina said fiercely, smoothing down the back of her neck with her hand. ‘Something isn’t right,
Braeden.’

‘A lot of four-legged nasty somethings,’ Braeden agreed. ‘Come on, let’s find someplace safe to rest.’

Avoiding the Grand Staircase, they used the back stairs to reach the second floor, then padded quietly to Braeden’s room.

Gidean greeted Braeden happily at the door, then came over to Serafina, his tail nub wagging. She knelt down. Her eyes closed, she hugged him and petted his head, feeling a warmth in her heart.
She was so glad that he seemed to have no memory or confusion about the battle they’d fought against each other that terrible night.

While Braeden slept in his bed, Serafina was happy to curl up with Gidean in the warm glow of the fireplace and try not to have nightmares of rats that didn’t flee.

She awoke a few hours later, just before dawn. She had reconnected with Braeden and her pa, and even Lady Rowena now, but after everything that had happened – breaking the Ming vase, her
fight with Gidean, biting the footman, terrifying the guests, and all the rest – she wasn’t sure if everyone in the house would be glad to see her, so she had stayed low and quiet. But
there was one more person she thought she could trust. And it might be a perfect, sneaky way to get safely into Detective Grathan’s room when he wasn’t there.

She quickly ran up the back stairs to the fourth floor, snuck down the hall and slipped into the third room on the right.

‘Oh, miss, it’s you!’ Essie said, smiling in surprise. Freshly dressed in her maid’s uniform and getting ready to start her workday, Essie set down her hairbrush and went
to Serafina. ‘I heard tell about everything that happened. I’ve been so worried about you! Where’d ya go?’

‘I ran away up into the mountains,’ Serafina said.

‘Oh, miss, you shouldn’t have done that,’ Essie said. ‘That’s far too dangerous for a little thing like you. There are panthers up there!’

Serafina smiled. ‘Those were the least of my problems.’

‘What? What happened?’ Essie said, clutching her arm.

‘I’m all right,’ Serafina said. But then she stepped back and presented her sorry state. ‘I’m sorry about ruining your nice dress, Essie.’

‘Oh, you never mind about that, miss,’ Essie said, pulling Serafina back towards her. ‘Come sit down here on the bed. I can see you’re mulling over
somethin’.’

‘Do you know that man Detective Grathan?’

‘Yes, I’ve seen him,’ Essie said. ‘He’s been askin’ all sorts of questions about Mr Vanderbilt and Mr Olmsted, and about you too, and Master Braeden, and the
dogs.’

‘He asked about Gidean and Cedric?’

‘Oh, yes! He’s been askin’ after the young master’s dog in particular. I can tell you one thing for sure: everyone is mighty tired of that man.’

The night before, Serafina hadn’t known for sure if she should trust Lady Rowena, but so far what the girl had said about Detective Grathan had turned out to be true.

‘Do you clean Detective Grathan’s room?’ Serafina asked, finally coming to the purpose of her visit.

Essie scowled. ‘Maggie and me are supposed to be cleaning it, but he ain’t been givin’ us the chance.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He always locks his door and he’s given us strict instructions to never enter his room. He could have a dead cat in there for all we know, and there’d be nothin’ we
could do about it.’