finally startled the rat into action. He quickly got his wits about him and scampered into the thicket.
‘Have a good evenin’, now,’ she said. She reckoned he’d bolster his memory of his courage the further he got away from her and have a good story to tell his wife and little ones by the time he got home for supper. She smiled as she imagined him telling a great and twisty tale with his family gathered around – how he was in the forest just minding his own business, gnawing on a beetle, when a vicious predator pounced upon him and he’d had to fight for his every breath. She wondered if she’d be a beast of ferocious power in the story. Or just a girl.
At that moment, she heard a sound from above like an autumn breeze flowing through the tops of the trees. But there wasn’t a breeze. The midnight air was chilled and quiet and perfectly still, like God was holding his breath.
She heard a delicate, almost gossamer, whisper-like murmur. She looked up, but all she could see were the branches of the trees. Rising to her feet, she brushed off the simple green work dress that Mrs Vanderbilt had given her the day before and walked through the forest, listening for the sound. She tried to determine the direction it was coming from. She tilted her head left and then right, but the sound seemed to have no position. She made her way over to a rocky outcropping, where the ground fell steeply away into a forested valley. From here she could see a great distance, miles yonder across the mist to the silhouettes of the Blue Ridge Mountains on the other side. A thin layer of silvery-white clouds glowing with light passed slowly in front of the moon. The brightness of the moon cast a wide-arcing halo in the feathery clouds, shone through them, and threw a long, jagged shadow onto the ground behind her.
She stood on the rocky ledge and scanned the valley in front of her. In the distance, the pointed towers and slate-covered rooftops of the grand Biltmore Estate rose from the darkness of the surrounding forest. The pale grey limestone walls were adorned with gargoyles of mythical beasts and fine sculptures of the warriors of old. The stars reflected in the slanting windowpanes, and the mansion’s gold-and copper-trimmed roofline glinted in the moonlight. There in the great house, Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt slept on the second floor, along with their nephew, her friend, Braeden Vanderbilt. The Vanderbilts’ guests – family members from out of town, businessmen, dignitaries, famous artists – slept on the third floor, each in their own luxuriously appointed room.
Serafina’s pa maintained the steam heating system, the electric dynamo, the laundry machines powered by spinning leather straps, and all the other newfangled devices on the estate. She and her pa lived in the workshop in the basement down the corridor from the kitchens, laundry rooms and storerooms. But while all the people she knew and loved slept through the night, Serafina did not. She napped on and off during the day, curled up in a window or hidden in some dark nook in the basement. At night she prowled the corridors of Biltmore, both upstairs and down, a silent, unseen watcher. She explored the winding paths of the estate’s vast gardens and the darkened dells of the surrounding forest, and she hunted.
She was a twelve-year-old girl, but she had never lived what anyone other than herself would call a normal life. She had spent her time creeping through the estate’s vast basement catching rats. Her pa, half joking when he’d said it, had dubbed her the C.R.C.: the Chief Rat Catcher. But she’d taken on the title with pride.
Her pa had always loved her and did the best he could to raise her, in his own rough-hewn way. She certainly hadn’t been unhappy eating supper with her pa each evening and sneaking through the darkness at night ridding the great house of rodents. Who would be? But deep down she’d been a fair bit lonely and mighty confused. She had never been able to square why most folk carried a lantern in the dark, or why they made so much noise when they walked, or what compelled them to sleep through the night just when all manner of things were at their most beautiful. She’d spied on the estate’s children from a distance enough to know she wasn’t one of them. When she gazed into a mirror, she saw a girl with large amber eyes, deeply angled cheekbones, and a shaggy mane of streaked brown hair. No, she wasn’t a normal, everyday child. She wasn’t an any day child. She was a creature of the night.
As she stood at the edge of the valley, she heard again the sound that had brought her there, a gentle fluttering, like a river of whispers travelling on the currents of wind that flowed high above her. The stars and planets hung in the blackened sky, scintillating as if they were alive with the spirits of ten thousand souls, but they offered no answers to the mystery.
A small, dark shape crossed in front of the moon and disappeared. Her heart skipped a beat. What was it?
She watched. Another shape passed the moon, and then another. At first, she thought they must be bats, but bats didn’t fly in straight lines like these.
She frowned, confused and fascinated.
Tiny shape after tiny shape crossed in front of the moon. She looked up high into the sky and saw the stars disappearing. Her eyes widened in alarm. But then the realisation of what she was seeing slowly crept upon her. Squinting her eyes just right, she could see great flocks of songbirds flying over the valley. Not just one or two, or a dozen, but long, seemingly endless streams of them – clouds of them. The birds filled the sky. The sound she was hearing was the soft murmur of thousands of tiny wings of sparrows, wrens, and waxwings making their autumn journey. They were like jewels, green and gold, yellow and black, striped and spotted, thousands upon thousands of them. It seemed far too late in the year for them to be migrating, but here they were. They hurried across the sky, their little wings fluttering, heading southward for the winter, travelling secretly at night to avoid the hawks that hunted the day, using the ridges of the mountains below and the alignment of the glinting stars above to find their way.
The flighty, twitching movement of birds had always tantalised Serafina, had always quickened her pulse, but this was different. Tonight the boldness and beauty of these little birds’ trek down the mountainous spine of the continent flowed through her heart. It felt as if she was seeing a once-in-a-lifetime event, but then she realised that the birds were following the path that their parents and grandparents had taught them, that they’d been flying this path for millions of years. The only thing ‘once in a lifetime’ about this was her, that she was here, that she was seeing it. And it amazed her.
Seeing the birds made her think of Braeden. He loved birds and other animals of all kinds.
‘I wish you could see this,’ she whispered, as if he was lying awake in his bed and could hear her across the miles of distance between them. She longed to share the moment with her friend. She wished he was standing beside her, gazing up at the stars and the birds and the silver-edged clouds and the shining moon in all its glory. She knew she’d tell him all about it the next time she saw him. But daytime words could never capture the beauty of the night.
A few weeks before, she and Braeden had defeated the Man in the Black Cloak and had torn the Black Cloak asunder. She and Braeden had been allies, and good friends, but it sank in once again, this time even deeper than before, that she hadn’t seen him in several nights. With every passing night, she expected a visit at the workshop. But each morning she went to bed disappointed, and it left her with biting doubts. What was he doing? Was something keeping him from her? Was he purposefully avoiding her? She’d been so happy to finally have a friend to talk to. It made her burn inside to think that maybe she was just a novelty to him that had worn off, and now she was left to return to her lonely nights of prowling on her own. They were friends. She was sure of it. But she worried that she didn’t fit in upstairs in the daylight, that she didn’t belong there. Could he have forgotten about her so quickly?
As the birds thinned out and the moment passed, she looked across the valley and wondered. After defeating the Man in the Black Cloak, she reckoned herself one of the Guardians, the marble lions that stood on either side of Biltmore’s front doors, protecting the house from demons and evil spirits. She imagined herself the C.R.C. of not just
