hole, pushed with her legs, and started digging towards the surface. But the dirt came down so fast, and pushed in so hard, she never had a chance. Even as she dug, the dirt began to suffocate her. Its crushing weight pushed against her chest, driving one last scream from her lungs.
Loose earth poured down around her head and shoulders, collapsing onto her faster than she could dig it away. She felt the pressing weight of it all around her, closing in on her, trapping her legs, but she kept clawing, kicking, squirming her way blindly up through the darkness, desperately trying to pull gasps of air through the fabric covering her face. She felt the material pushing deeper and deeper into her mouth as the dirt pressed in, gagging her, shutting off the flow of air to her aching lungs.
Then she heard a fast scratching sound above her, like the frenzied digging of an animal. She hoped that Gidean, Braeden’s dog, was trying to rescue her, but a terrible, low growling sound told her it wasn’t her canine friend. Whatever kind of creature it was, the beast’s claws tore at the earth, ripping it away with terrific power. Was it a bear digging up its supper? It didn’t matter. She had to keep climbing. She had to breathe!
Sharp claws raked across her upstretched hands. Serafina shrieked in pain, but she grabbed hold of the beast’s paw. Gotcha! She held on for dear life. The force of the paw yanked her body up through the ground.
The snarling beast jerked its paw again, trying to free itself of her, yanking and pulling, but Serafina held on tight.
When her head finally broke the surface of the ground, she sucked in a mighty gasp of air, flooding her lungs with new life. Air! She finally had air!
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.
Hope filled her heart. She’d made it! She’d escaped! But as she reached up and pulled the fabric from her head, she heard a loud roaring snarl, and the claws came down at her again, raking across her scalp just as she tried to duck away. Clutching wildly at the earth with her hands, she quickly scrambled out of the grave and got up onto her hands and knees to defend herself.
She had crawled out of the ground into a moonlit graveyard, overgrown by a dense forest of trees and vines. A large stone angel, with her wings raised up around her, stood on a pedestal in the centre of the small clearing. Serafina had no idea how she’d got here, but she knew this place. It was the angel’s glade. But before she could take it all in, she heard something behind her and spun around.
A black panther was coming straight towards her, crouched low for the lunge, its ears pinned back, its face quivering with fierceness as it opened its mouth and hissed with its long fangs bared and gleaming, ready to bite.
Serafina stared into the face of the angry panther. Its bright yellow eyes were as savage as she’d ever seen in a wild animal, filled with a looming and ferocious power. She crouched down low, ready to defend herself. When the panther showed its long white fangs and snarled at her again, Serafina bared her teeth and hissed right back, fierce and fiery, challenging it with everything she had. But to her astonishment, the black panther turned its head away, then slunk into the forest and disappeared.
Overwhelmed with exhaustion, Serafina collapsed to the ground. She sucked in long and heavy breaths, just relieved to be alive. That big cat had me as good as dead, she thought. Why in the world did it slink off like a socked possum?
As she lay there recovering, she tried to comprehend what had happened. Someone had buried her. But they hadn’t just buried her, they had buried her in the old, abandoned graveyard that had been overgrown by the forest decades before.
And the more she thought about it, the more she couldn’t believe what she had just seen. How could there be a black panther?
Her mother was a catamount, a shape-shifter with the ability to turn into a mountain lion at will, but when Serafina finally learned to shift, she was a black panther like her father had been, a rare variant of the race. According to mountain lore, there was only one black panther at a time.
She kept thinking that the panther must have been her father, but her father had died in battle twelve years before, the night she was born. Her pa, the man who had found her in the forest that night and taken care of her ever since, was the only father she had ever known. And the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that the panther she’d just seen hadn’t been a full-grown male, but a young cat, lean and uncertain. It might have been her half sister or half brother, but they were just spotted little cubs. When her catamount friend Waysa was in lion form, his fur was dark brown. Maybe the light had been playing tricks on her eyes, but if it had been Waysa, why would he run away from her?
Questions reeled through her mind, but the sensations of her body began to overwhelm her. Her head hurt from the swipe of the panther’s claws, which had left a bleeding wound, but it wasn’t too bad. After what she’d experienced in the coffin, it felt so good to just have air moving in and out of her lungs. 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.
As her strength returned to her arms and legs, she brushed the remaining dirt from her body and straightened out the plain beige dress she was wearing. That was when she noticed the large, dark stains around the rips in the material. Frightened, she quickly looked herself over and found dried blood all over her bare torso, shoulders, and arms. But there were no recent wounds. Just scars.
At that moment, memories of her life began to flow slowly through her like a quiet river. She saw herself eating supper with her pa in the workshop, and lying on Biltmore’s highest rooftop with Braeden as they counted stars in the midnight sky, and running happily through the forest in panther form with her mother and Waysa. She saw herself sitting in front of the fireplace in Mr Vanderbilt’s library as he told her stories from his books and travels, and sitting quietly at morning tea with Mrs Vanderbilt, who had recently announced that she was with child.
Then she remembered her friend Essie, one of Biltmore’s maids, helping her lace up the beautiful golden-cream gown that Braeden had given her for the Christmas party. She remembered looking at herself in Essie’s mirror, seeing a twelve-year-old girl with sharp, feline angles to her cheekbones, amber-yellow eyes, and long, shiny black hair, and thinking, for the first time, she was going to fit in just fine.
The memory of the Christmas party swirled around in her mind. She could so vividly remember the softness of the candlelight, the scent of the wood on the fire, the smile on her pa’s face, and the warmth of Braeden’s hand on her back as they entered the room together. It was a moment of peace and triumph, not just because she and Braeden had defeated their enemies, but because she felt like she truly belonged.
The last night she remembered at Biltmore, she had been making her rounds through the house on a winter evening. The memory came to her in snatches. She was the Guardian, the protector against intruding spirits and other dangers. Everyone else had gone to bed, and she had the darkened corridors of the house to herself, just like she liked it. She stepped out onto the formal back patio, which the Vanderbilts called the loggia. The sheer white curtains in the doorway glowed in the moonlight as they fluttered
