She stumbled down the corridor away from the scene of the crime, every step she took pounding in her head, the walls of the passageway undulating with darkened colors. The floor felt slanted beneath her feet.

All she could see in her clouded mind was the sight of Mr. Cobere raising his arms to cover his head as Mr. Vanderbilt struck him down.

In all her dealings with him over the last year, Mr. Vanderbilt had always seemed like a fair and gentle man. She just couldn’t understand how he could possibly have murdered Mr. Cobere. But she had seen it with her own eyes!

And she knew Mr. Cobere was a good man. He wasn’t some kind of criminal or demon or a treacherous fiend that Mr. Vanderbilt had to defend himself against.

As she made her way down the basement corridor, she could still hear the echo of Mr. Cobere’s screams in her mind.

What was she going to do now? She had no place to go. No place was safe. If the master of Biltmore was a murderer, what was he going to do next? He had seen her watching him. He knew she had witnessed him killing Mr. Cobere.

She didn’t want it to be true. She didn’t want it to be real. But she knew it was.

There must be some dark, violent part of Mr. Vanderbilt that I didn’t know about, she thought. Did everyone have some sort of black panther living inside them?

If she couldn’t trust Mr. Vanderbilt, then who could she trust? The pain of it seeped through her brain.

When she finally made it to the workshop, she stumbled to her sleeping pa and crawled into his cot with him, desperate for any kind of refuge.

She knew she had to keep moving, she had to figure out what to do, but her legs had stopped working and her mind couldn’t think. How do you respond to something that’s impossible? How do you move?

Her pa stirred and muttered as he pulled her close. “What’s wrong, Sera?”

She buried her face in his arms.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her again.

“Everything,” she cried in despair, her voice wet and raspy.

“I want to help you, Sera. What I can do?”

“Nothing,” she said miserably.

How could she tell him that the man he admired most in the world was a murderer? How could she tell him that heinous, winged beasts were slithering into Biltmore? How could she tell him that his daughter was a strange, shape-shifting creature of the night? It was just too much.

“All these bad things keep happening, all jumbled together, but I don’t know how to stop them!” she cried.

“Listen, Sera,” he said, holding her tight, “when you’re down in the muck of the swamp and your feet are stuck in the mud and the weeds are so thick you can’t see in front of you, then you know what you gotta do.”

“I don’t!” she cried.

“You do, Sera! You know.”

“I don’t!”

“Are ya gonna say that the swamp is too big and you can’t get across it? Are ya gonna sink down into the water of the swamp and give up? Will that get you home?”

“No,” she said.

“No, it won’t,” he said emphatically. “If you’re stuck in the swamp and you give up, it’s gonna get darker, you’re gonna get hungrier, colder, more and more tired. There’s an old saying: The only way out is through. Do you understand? When it feels like you’re stuck in a swamp, you gotta keep goin’, Sera, that’s what ya gotta do. You might be tired, you might be runnin’ blind, but you gotta keep pushing. You go on faith.”

“Faith?” she said doubtfully. It felt like the whole world had broken, every part of it shattering. “Faith in what?”

“Faith in what you know is true,” he said forcefully. “It might be hard to see, but you find it. Faith in yourself. Faith that there must be an end to the swamp, that it has another side. The only way out is through. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand,” she said, opening her eyes and wiping her nose. “But I gotta tell ya, Pa, I’m right in the middle of a big ol’ swamp, and it’s a bad one.”

“You’ll find your way, Sera,” he said. “Just keep pushing through.”

As she felt the black darkness in her heart beginning to fill with something else, she wanted to tell him everything right then and there. She wanted to tell him who she truly was, not just a girl, not just his daughter, but a catamount, a panther, half human, half cat, a being with two halves to her soul, and she had fought battles against the darkest of enemies. But she knew she couldn’t tell him. Deep down, she was just too scared. If he knew the truth, what would he think of her? How would he react? She wanted to tell him that the whole world was a lie and it was crumbling down around them. But she lay there, just holding him, too scared to tell him any of it.

She dreamed of Braeden coming to her on the terrace beneath the stars and saying her name. She dreamed of a white deer with a red stain. But she awoke to the sound of a woman screaming.