Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series) (35 page)

Suddenly, a tan-coloured flash burst beside her, and a half-dozen coyotes went tumbling away, whining in pain and fear, many of them bleeding as they went down. Serafina’s mother ran
beside her, fighting her way through, clearing her path. Her mother had returned! The lioness leapt onto the closest coyote, sank in her claws and took it down in a snapping, somersaulting ball.
Serafina kept on running, driving through, gaining speed now. Her mother reappeared and took down another coyote, and then another. Soon she and her mother were running side by side unopposed, two
catamounts at full speed through the forest, the coyotes well behind them.

Just as the carriage crossed a stone bridge, Serafina leapt onto the backs of the four stallions, her claws ripping into their bodies as they tried to rear up and fight her. They bent their
necks in their leather harnesses and snapped at her with their crushing teeth, but they were no match for her saber-toothed fangs and razor-sharp claws. Their panicked, flailing struggles pulled
the four horses wildly off-kilter. The carriage careened off the road and went tumbling down, Serafina and the stallions battling all the way, until it finally crashed into the bottom of the
ravine.

She could only become what she could envision.

And finally she had envisioned it.

Find the Black One!
Uriah had told his dogs. But it wasn’t the Black Cloak he had been searching for.

It was
her.

He’d known she was going to get in his way.

She realised as she leapt upon the backs of the stallions and tumbled down into the ravine that her father hadn’t been a mountain lion like her mother.

He had been a
black panther
.

And now so was she.

It all came together in her mind. Her mother and father had fought Uriah twelve years before. Her father had been the Black One, the warrior leader of the forest who had almost defeated Uriah
and whose descendants could never be allowed to rise again.

But now his daughter – the new Black One – had come into her own. And her name was Serafina.

S
erafina clawed her way out of the wreckage. She leapt easily up onto a large rock and looked down at the pieces of the broken carriage,
desperately searching for Braeden.

She was relieved when he crawled slowly out of the debris, battered and disoriented but still alive. When he glanced up at Serafina, his eyes widened in surprise. He was startled for a moment,
but then Serafina saw the recognition flood through his expression and he smiled. He knew exactly who she was.

But he did not take the time to speak or approach her. He immediately dug through the debris and found the Twisted Staff.

‘Braeden, give that to me . . .’ Rowena said, her voice seething as she clambered from beneath the broken boards of the carriage. ‘We don’t have to fight each
other,’ she said. ‘Just like you said, we’re friends. Join me and all this will be over.’

Braeden gripped the staff at each end and slammed it over his knee, but it did not bend or break.

‘You aren’t strong enough to destroy it,’ Rowena said. She stepped towards him and slowly put out her hand. ‘Just give the staff to me, Braeden, and we’ll work
together. I’ll show you how to use it. We’ll combine your powers with my powers, and we’ll control everything in these mountains. No one will be able to stop us, not even the
catamounts.’

Braeden looked at her silently.

‘These aren’t your people, Braeden. You know that,’ Rowena said. ‘Haven’t you felt the pull I’m talking about? You came to these mountains two years ago and
you’ve been searching ever since, but you won’t find the home you’re looking for at Biltmore.’ Rowena’s lip curled a little bit. ‘It’s filled with nothing
but humans.’

Finally, Braeden turned. It looked like he was going to simply walk away from her.

‘Braeden, I’m warning you one last time . . .’ Rowena said, her voice rising.

At that moment Braeden stopped. Now it seemed as if he was going to turn towards her, but he lowered his arm and then hurled the staff way up into the sky.

Rowena frowned, looking both annoyed and perplexed by his action. ‘You know it’s going to come back down,’ she said condescendingly.

But Braeden just smiled and gave a long whistling call. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said.

At that moment, something came swooping in across the darkened sky.

‘What is that?’ Rowena snapped in surprise. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Just a friend of mine,’ Braeden said. ‘No wire.’

The peregrine falcon came in high, but then tilted and rolled. She reached out and grabbed the Twisted Staff out of midair with her talons. Then, with several quick flaps of her wings, Kess
propelled herself upward. She seemed to drift across the moonlit sky almost effortlessly.

‘Bring that bird back here right now, Braeden!’ Rowena shouted. ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’

‘Yes, I think I do,’ Braeden said, nodding as he turned from the falcon and looked at Rowena. ‘I want to make this very clear: I will never join you, Rowena.’

‘You’re going to wish you had,’ Rowena spat.

But as the staff became more and more distant in the talons of the falcon, two of the wolfhounds emerged slowly from the trees, their hearts no longer twisted by its controlling power. The
wolfhounds stalked towards Rowena, their heads low and their eyes filled with menace as they bared their teeth and growled.

‘No,’ she ordered them, facing them uncertainly, thrusting her bare hands towards them. ‘No! Stop! Get out of here!’

But they did not go. And they did not stop.

‘You’re free now! Go!’ she shouted at them.

Beasts of their own will, they continued to move towards her. They were indeed free.

The dogs leapt upon her. Her shouts turned to screams. She writhed and fought. One bit her leg. The other her side. Serafina leapt into the battle to help the wolfhounds fight her. But at that
very instant, there was a blur of sight and sound, and Rowena disappeared from between the two dogs.

A barn owl flapped up into the sky. Serafina pulled back in surprise, startled by what she’d just seen.

She suddenly remembered the first night she saw Uriah in the forest. She had assumed that the owl had been his familiar, his eyes and ears of the forest, but it had been Rowena! He had passed
her the shape-shifting staff that very night.

And now Rowena was flying straight towards the peregrine falcon.

Serafina thought it was strange that Kess wasn’t flying high and fast like a falcon could. She was flying low and slow, down the length of the French Broad River, along an edge of jagged
cliffs. Was the weight of the staff too much for her to carry, or did she have something else on her mind?

Then Serafina saw something that turned her heart cold. The grey-bearded man in the long, weather-beaten coat emerged from the trees at the top of a distant rocky hill. She could see his black
silhouette in the moonlight. Serafina felt the hackles on the back of her neck rise up, the air pulling into her chest. It was Uriah. He’d finally come. The conjurer saw the peregrine falcon
carrying his Twisted Staff away and the barn owl coming up behind the falcon in close pursuit.

Suddenly, Serafina understood.

She burst into a run, sprinting as fast as she could through the forest towards the cliffs that ran along the river. She knew exactly what Uriah was going to do next and where she needed to be
when it happened.

Waysa had told her that Uriah had learned the dark arts during his travels in the Old World. And she remembered thinking that Uriah’s call to the owl a few nights before had been filled
not just with the sense of alliance she expected, but a dark and horrible love. And now she’d seen Rowena turn into an owl, just like Uriah. Rowena wasn’t just the demon he’d sent
into Biltmore to find its weaknesses. She wasn’t just the conjurer’s apprentice and the wielder of the Twisted Staff. Rowena was his
daughter
.

S
erafina tore through the forest up the hill, straight for the rocky, hundred-foot-high cliff edge where Uriah was standing. As her black shape
sprinted invisibly through the night, she kept her eyes fixed on the elusive conjurer. Just as she’d hoped, the man disappeared with a startling blur and turned into an owl. Uriah flew
towards Rowena and Kess. It was the reflex she’d been counting on, that Uriah couldn’t help but fight at his daughter’s side and take back the stolen staff. Serafina knew that she
couldn’t defeat Uriah when he was in human form and able to use his hands to throw his spells. But as he flew down the length of the river along the jagged edge of the cliffs in pursuit of
the falcon, she ran like she’d never run before, her yellow eyes locked on to Uriah as he flew. The flurry of her powerful legs pulled her rapidly across the terrain. Seeing the edge of the
cliff in front of her, she drove forward with one last burst of power. And then she leapt.

Her timing was perfect. She sailed thirty feet off the edge of the cliff. As she soared through the air, she pulled back her paw, then slammed it forward with a mighty strike into Uriah as he
flew by. Her deadly claws raked through the bird. Feathers exploded. The ravaged owl spun end over end from the force of the blow.

She’d done it.

She had defeated the man of the forest.

She had killed her enemy.

Her chest filled with relief and happiness, but then the momentum of her leap gave way to a different sensation. Free fall. She felt herself being pulled towards the earth, her fall picking up
more and more speed. As she twisted her spine and righted herself, she caught a glimpse of a breathless Braeden reaching the rocky edge and looking out in terror as he realised she had jumped off
the cliff.

She fell and fell. A hundred feet was too high for even her to survive, whether she landed on her feet or not. She had but one hope: that she had leapt out far enough.

She hit the water and it exploded all around her. She felt the great crash of it, and then it enveloped her. Her huge black body plunged deep into the river’s dark currents. The force of
the rapids immediately began to sweep her away.

Knowing what she had to do, she quickly started paddling. She rose to the surface in a flurry of bubbles, took a deep breath, shook off her whiskers and then paddled steadily for the shore,
using her long black tail to steer.

She spotted Uriah’s bloodied, white-feathered body floating down the river. She wanted to bite the owl, crush it, make sure it was dead, dead, dead, but the rapids took him away before she
could catch him. She’d have to be satisfied with the havoc she had wrought.

She swam out of the rapids and hauled herself up onto the rocky shore. Waysa came trundling down the shoreline to meet her in mountain lion form, his jaunty steps making it clear that he was
pretty pleased with himself, as if he were saying,
I knew that swimming lesson would save your life one day.

The two catamounts quickly ran back up the path to the top of the cliff, where Braeden waited. He smiled in relief when he saw Serafina, but then he pointed.

Serafina looked into the distance. Rowena, still in owl form, was attacking the peregrine falcon with her talons, hitting Kess’s body with strike after strike. Serafina didn’t know
if Rowena had seen her father die, but there was a new fierceness in the owl’s attacks.

Normally, a falcon would flip claws-up to meet an incoming dive, but because Kess was carrying the staff, she could not, so she took the hits and flew on as best she could. But Rowena was
relentless, striking again and again. Then Rowena finally grasped the Twisted Staff in her talons and tried to yank it away. The two intertwined raptors locked together, clawing and screeching,
tumbling down through the air, fighting as they fell. But then suddenly the falcon flew upward again, pulling with powerful strokes towards the clouds, dragging the staff and the owl with her.

‘What is Kess doing?’ Braeden asked as he peered up into the sky.

Kess flew higher and higher, ignoring the owl’s clawing talons, pecking beak and battering wings.

The two birds went so high they disappeared, even to Serafina’s eyes.