Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

knew they had come to love her too.
    She reached up to feel the cut on her head. It had been dressed with a leafy compress that had stopped the bleeding and numbed the pain. The wounds on her arms and legs had been treated with
poultices of forest herbs. She didn’t want to, but she was pretty sure she could move if she needed to. She had noticed in the past that pain didn’t slow her down like it did many other
people. She had surprised her pa in this regard more than once. Cold weather didn’t affect her either. Like her kin, she seemed to have been born with a natural toughness, the ability to keep
going even when she had been battered and bloodied. But, even so, the medicine on her cuts and punctures was a welcome relief.
    Feeling a gentle hand on her shoulder, she looked up. Her mother was in her human form – with her golden feline eyes, strikingly angled cheekbones, and long light brown hair. But the most
striking feature was that whenever Serafina looked into her mother’s face she knew that her mother loved her with all her heart.
    ‘You’re safe, Serafina,’ her mother said as she checked the dressing on her head.
    ‘Momma,’ she said, her voice weak and ragged.
    Looking around her, Serafina saw that her mother had brought her deep into the forest, to the angel’s glade at the edge of the old, overgrown cemetery. Beneath the cemetery’s dark
cloak of twisted and gnarled trees, thick vines strangled the cracked, lichen-covered gravestones. Straggly moss hung down from the dead branches of the trees, and the darkened earth oozed with a
ghostly mist. But the mist did not seep into the angel’s glade itself, and a small circle of lush grass always remained perfect and green, even in winter. In the centre of the glade stood a
stone monument, a sculpture of a beautiful winged angel with a glinting steel sword. It was as if the angel protected the glade in a cusp of time, making it a place of eternal spring.
    Her mother had been raising her two new cubs in a den beneath the roots of a large willow tree at the edge of the glade. And on a very different night from tonight, it had been the battleground
on which Serafina and her allies had defeated Mr Thorne, the Man in the Black Cloak.
    Find the Black One!
the bearded man with the wolfhounds had said earlier that night. She could not help but gaze around the glade for signs of the Black Cloak that she had torn to pieces
on the razor-sharp edge of the angel’s sword. She’d been sure that she had destroyed it, but she should have smashed its silver clasp and burned the leftover scraps of cloth. She looked
towards the graveyard, with its tilting headstones and its broken coffins, and wondered what might have happened to the last remnants of the cloak.
    For as long as she could remember, she had prowled through Biltmore’s darkened corridors on her own. All her life, she’d hunted. It had been her instinct. She had never known why she
had a long, curving spine, detached collarbones, and four toes on each foot. She had never known why she could see in the dark and others could not. But when she’d finally met her mother
she’d understood. Her mother was a
catamount
, a shape-shifting cat of the mountains. Serafina had come to understand that she wasn’t just a child. She was a
cub
.
    Desperate to learn more, she had hunted with her mother in the forest every night for the last several weeks, not just learning the lore of the forest, but what it meant to be a catamount. She
had listened diligently to her mother’s teachings and studied her mother when she was in her lion form. She had concentrated with all her mind and all her heart just like her mother had
taught her. She had tried countless times to envision what she would look like, what it would feel like, but nothing ever happened. She was never able to change. She stayed just who she was. She
wanted so badly to ask her mother to help her try again right now, but she had a sick feeling in