Serafina and the Twisted Staff by Robert Beatty

Author:Robert Beatty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2016-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

Serafina watched, her heart beating strong and steady in her chest, marking time. When Braeden came out of his room, the spy stepped back into the shadow of an alcove and hid from him.

Serafina sucked in a breath and readied herself to push open the register cover and leap into action, but as Braeden walked by, the man remained hidden. He did not attack.

To Serafina’s astonishment, Gidean walked at Braeden’s side. The dog moved slowly, carefully, but he was walking on his own. Serafina couldn’t believe it. How was this possible? She’d only been gone a few days. How could the dog’s broken bones have healed so quickly?

The spy waited until Braeden was gone, then quietly slipped into his room.

That dirty rotten rat, Serafina thought as she crawled back to the other register to watch him.

The intruder rummaged hurriedly through Braeden’s desk and opened his dresser drawers. She worried that he’d pull back the register cover and see her there, or maybe hear her breathing, but she had to stay and see what he was doing. As he bent down to look under Braeden’s bed, she saw the side of his scarred face. Just as she’d suspected, it was Grathan.

She felt the fear rising up in her stomach.

Why was he rummaging through Braeden’s belongings? Was he truly looking for evidence of Mr. Thorne’s murder? Or was he looking for clues to the whereabouts of the Black Cloak?

Or did Braeden have some other connection to all this that she didn’t understand?

Grathan found a small map of the riding trails that Braeden had been working on, but seemed frustrated that he couldn’t find anything else. When he finally left Braeden’s room, Serafina breathed a sigh of relief, but she couldn’t rest.

She dropped down through the vent shaft to the main floor and looked through a register just in time to see Gidean lying down in the morning sun in the Entrance Hall with the master’s huge Saint Bernard, Cedric. That meant Braeden couldn’t be too far away. But finding him and staying undetected wasn’t going to be easy.

Many of the fancy-dressed guests were taking their strolls. Servants bustled about the house attending to their various duties upstairs and down. Several families of Vanderbilts were arriving from New York to spend the holidays. Serafina prowled from spot to spot, avoiding a gaggle of housemaids and then sneaking past a pair of footmen, one of whom had a bandaged hand from her bite a few days before.

By afternoon, the house was so busy that she had to take refuge in the hidden compartment beneath the stairway on the south side of the second floor. When she overheard two chambermaids saying that the young master had gone out to the South Terrace, she ran for it.

Slipping out a side door, she darted along the columns at the front of the house, beneath the strange creatures carved into the tops of the columns and the gargoyles mounted along the edge of the roof. Few people seemed

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