Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,80

several yards across the angel’s glade, then got up onto her feet, her whole body shaking with fear. She looked again at the body of the girl lying on the ground. It had blond hair and wore a yellow dress. A yellow dress! How was that possible?

The body was facedown. Serafina couldn’t see the face, just the hair, the sickly pale legs, and the crumpled fingers of the hands.

Just as she took a small, tentative step toward the body to get a closer look, one of the fingers twitched.

Serafina leapt back, grabbing Gidean for protection. Gidean barked and snarled at the body, his teeth white and gleaming.

The hand bent. Then the body’s arm moved, then a leg. It was like a carcass crawling its way out of a grave.

Serafina’s instinct was to run, but she forced herself to stay.

The body slowly got up onto its hands and knees, the hair falling around the face and covering it.

Serafina was horrified to think what the face was going to look like, imagining it to be the face of a carcass, bloody and rotted.

The thing stood erect on two feet.

Serafina watched in a paralyzed state of horror. Gidean lunged and snapped repeatedly, warding off the zombie’s attack.

But then the head slowly turned and the hair parted and Serafina looked into the face. It wasn’t a rotting monster, but the perfect features and lucid, pale blue eyes of Clara Brahms. Clara opened her mouth and spoke in a desperately sweet voice, “Please, can you help me?”

Serafina froze, astounded. Clara was alive! She stood before her in her yellow dress as bright and bold as a Sunday morning. Her body and her soul had been freed.

“I remember you,” Clara said to Serafina. She reached out and clutched Serafina’s hand. Serafina flinched back reflexively, but the hand that grasped her was warm and full of life. “I saw you,” Clara said. “I called out to you. I knew you’d help me. I just knew it!”

Too shocked to speak or respond to Clara in any way, Serafina turned and looked across the glade. As the smoke cleared, it revealed the bodies of many children and adults lying on the ground.

The victims of the cloak woke up slowly, as if from a long, nightmarish sleep. Some of them sat on the ground in confusion for a long time. Others stood and looked around them.

A tall girl with long, curly black hair came up to Serafina and started speaking to her in Russian. She seemed very sweet, but scared and anxious to reunite with her father and her dog.

And there was a young man, as well, who didn’t understand what was happening. “Have you seen my violin?” he asked repeatedly. “I seem to have lost it.…”

A small boy with a mop of curly brown hair, wearing an oversize coachman’s jacket, touched Serafina’s arm. “Pardon me, Miss Serafina, but have you seen the young master? I’ve got to get home. My father is going to be worried about me, and the horses need to be fed their grain. Do you know the way to Biltmore?”

“Nolan! It’s you! You’re alive!” Serafina grabbed the little boy and hugged him. “I’m so glad to see you. Don’t worry. I’ll take you home.”

“You’re bleeding, miss,” he said, gesturing toward her neck.

She touched the wound. It hurt a bit, but the bleeding had stopped. “I’m all right,” she said. The truth was, she’d suffered multiple cuts and bruises, but she didn’t care about that. She was just so happy to be alive.

She looked at all the children, took a long, deep breath, and smiled. She felt a tremendous sense of relief, a sense of exultation. They were alive. They were safe. She had saved them.

Then Serafina saw among the cloak’s victims a woman with long golden-brown hair, lying on the ground. She looked weak and confused, but she was alive.

Serafina went over to her. She got down on her knees and comforted the woman. As Serafina took her arm and helped her stand, she noticed how lean and muscular the woman was, but she seemed even more disoriented than the others.

“Where are my babies?” the woman muttered in slurred, hard-to-understand words.

When Nolan came over and covered the shivering woman with his jacket, she pawed it slowly and awkwardly around herself with her open hands, as if her fingers were stiff and didn’t bend.

“You’re safe now,” Serafina assured her. “You’re going to be all right.”

The woman just stared at the ground, her hair hanging loose around