Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,20

there, both dark and bright, and they will ensnare your soul.”

She stared at her pa for a long time, trying to comprehend his words. She could see the seriousness in his eyes, and she felt it, too, deep down in her heart. Her pa was the only person she’d ever had in the world.

She heard men coming down the corridor outside the door. They were searching the rooms of the subbasement. The hair on her arms tingled, telling her to run.

She looked at her pa. After all he’d done for her by telling her this story, she didn’t want to bring it up again, didn’t want to make him angry, but she had to ask one last question.

“What about the man who took the girl in the yellow dress? What kind of demon is he, Pa? Does he come out of the forest, or do you think he’s one of the fancy-dressed swells from upstairs?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been prayin’ to God in heaven that it was a figment of your imagination.”

“It wasn’t, Pa,” she said softly.

He didn’t want to argue with her anymore, but he looked straight at her. “Don’t get it in your head you’re gonna go out there, Sera,” he said. “It’s just too dangerous for us. You see why now. I know you’re hankering to help her, and that does ya credit, but don’t worry about the girl. She’s their kin, not ours. They don’t need our help. They’ll find her. You stay out of it.”

At that moment, someone pounded on the heavy wooden door to the electrical room.

“We’re searching the house!” a man shouted.

Serafina glanced around even though she already knew there was no way out of the room.

“Open this door!” shouted another man. “Open up!”

The moment her pa opened the door, Mr. Boseman and two other men stormed into the electrical room. Serafina clung to the metal racks on the ceiling, hidden among the hundreds of thick copper wires that ran to the floors above.

While her pa launched into an elaborate explanation of exactly how a dynamo generated electricity to the bewildered men, Serafina crawled along the ceiling, dropped silently to the floor behind them, and darted out the open door.

She dashed down the corridor and crawled into a small coal chute, then curled up in the darkness and hunkered down.

She’d always had a hankering for sitting quietly in dark, confined spaces. As she peered out of the blackness through a small hole in the chute’s iron door and watched the searchers go by one way and then the other, her mind kept going back to the story that her pa had told her about her birth. It infuriated her that he’d waited this long to tell her. Could it really be true? Had she actually been born on the ground one night out in the darkness of the forest? Her momma, whoever she was, must have been very brave.

But the more she thought about it, the more she reckoned that maybe her momma didn’t just go sauntering into the forest that night to give birth. Maybe she already lived there. And if that was true, then what kind of creature had her mother been? And what kind of creature did that make her? What if her pa had been wrong to take her?

It was all so confusing. She felt more unsettled and disjointed than ever. Suddenly, her pa wasn’t her pa and Biltmore wasn’t her home. And she still didn’t have a momma.

She knew now that her pa had been hiding her because he was scared of what people would do to her. But it still confused her because her pa loved her, so couldn’t other people love her, too? What difference did it make when you slept and when you hunted? It seemed like everyone must love the feeling of lying in the warm sunlight of a window, or seeing a bird fly across the sky, or taking a walk on a cool, moonlit night when all the stars were overhead. She wasn’t sure if most boys and girls her age could catch one rat or two with their bare hands, but she didn’t think that it was too strange a thing either way.

As another search party moved past her, Serafina watched them and shook her head. If Clara Brahms was alive and wanted to hide, there were plenty of places for her to do so. Adults, even a hundred of them running around in a panic, didn’t seem to