Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,68

with blazing light. And then the shower was gone, leaving nothing but the stillness of the glistening stars and the glowing planets in the infinite space above her.

She heard tiny footsteps behind her, a small country mouse out foraging and now making his way back home to his family, warm beneath a hollowed log.

The forest was alive at night, filled with motion, sound, creatures, and light.

She felt comfortable here. Connected.

She walked a little farther, studying the lichen-covered rocks, the trees with their outstretched limbs, and the little rills of glistening water that ran beneath the ferns. Was this the forest her mother had come from?

Was this where she belonged?

She thought about why she could see that Mr. Thorne was the Man in the Black Cloak but no one else could. Not even Braeden. Why could she believe it but they could not? Because they were normal, mortal human beings, and she was not. She was closer to the Man in the Black Cloak than she wished to admit. Closer to being a demon.

She knew she couldn’t fight the Man in the Black Cloak directly. He was far too strong. In their first encounters, she had barely escaped him with her life. A shiver ran down her spine just thinking about it. But she couldn’t just keep running away and hiding from him, either. Somehow, she had to stop him. But he possessed an otherworldly power—if her theory about him was correct, then he had within him all the strength and capability of every person he’d ever absorbed into his cloak. And if she gave him another chance, he would surely absorb her as well.

No, she couldn’t fight the Man in the Black Cloak head-on.

Not alone.

She looked around her, and a dark idea formed in her mind. She asked herself the question again: If he were a rat, how would she catch him?

Suddenly, she knew the answer.

She’d bait him.

Fear rose up in her like bile from a half-digested meal. She wanted to turn away from the idea, to avoid it, but her mind kept going back to it as the only solution.

She thought of her pa’s words once more: Never go into the deep parts of the forest for there are many dangers there, both dark and bright.…

You’re right, Pa, she thought. There are. And I’m one of them.

Standing in the woods, she came to a conclusion about herself, something that she’d known deep down for a long time but that she had never wanted to come to grips with: She was not like her pa. She was not like Braeden. She was not human.

At least not entirely.

The thought of it brought a lump to her throat. She felt a terrible loneliness. She didn’t know what it meant, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to know what it meant, but she knew it was true. She was not like the people she loved. She’d been born in the forest, a forest as black as the Black Cloak and as haunted as the graveyard. She was one of them, a creature of the night.

She’d overheard Mr. Pratt say that the creatures of the night came straight from hell, that they were evil. She wondered about it again, her mind pushing through thorny brambles of conflict and confusion. Did evil creatures think of themselves as evil? Or did they think they were doing what was right? Was evil something that was in your heart or was it how people viewed you? She felt like she was good, but was she actually bad and just didn’t know it? She lived underground. She slinked through the darkness without being seen or heard. She secretly listened to people’s conversations. She pawed through their belongings when they weren’t in their rooms. She killed animals. She battled. She lied. She stole. She hid. She watched children lose their souls. And yet she was still living—thriving, even—drawing energy and knowledge and awareness from each and every night that she prowled through the darkness and another child was taken.

She stood for a long time, thinking about why she was alive and the others weren’t, and she asked herself again: Was she good or was she evil? She had been born in and lived in the world of darkness, but which side was she on? Darkness or light?

She looked up at the stars. She didn’t know what she was or how she got that way, but she knew what she wanted to be. She wanted to be good. She wanted to