Autumn Thorns

  I opened my arms. “Give me a hug, Ivy. You’ve waited a long time . . . and so have I.”

  As her arms wrapped around me, I felt oddly safe, and for the first time in a long while, I felt that I had family on my side. Grandma Lila had always stood by me, but always—always there had been Duvall looming in the background and when push came to shove, she took his side. But Ivy? She was unencumbered. Duvall was dead. He couldn’t scare her into submission anymore. I had the freedom to finally learn about my father.

  After a minute, she stood back, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry—I don’t mean to be so emotional.”

  “Don’t apologize. Ivy . . . you know, I want to but I can’t call you Grandma . . .” I flashed her a grin. “You just don’t look old enough to be my grandmother! Please don’t be offended, though.”

  She laughed then. “Offended? No, girl, not at all. Ivy suits me just fine. So, come in, have some tea and tell me everything that’s happened.”

  And so, as I slid out of my coat and followed her through the cozy living room into her kitchen, I told her about the Shadow Man.

  CHAPTER 11

  I remember when Lila told me about the Shadow Man. That’s when I started working protection magic for you. You never knew, but some of the toys in your room? I enchanted them on Lila’s request. They were there to watch over you and keep him away.” Ivy refilled our cups.

  “I wonder, is that why he never came back? I can’t remember him coming back after that.”

  “Most likely. I looked after you from a distance, sort of a fairy godmother. In fact, Lila made me promise that if anything happened to her before you were grown, that I would secret you away from Duvall and get you out of here. I’m just grateful that I never had to attempt that.” The look on her face told me her gratitude was for herself as much as me. I was beginning to see just how afraid people had been of Duvall.

  “I’m beginning to understand just how much sway my grandfather held in this community.”

  “Your grandfather had a tremendous amount of power within a certain sector of Whisper Hollow. They were all old money, Ivy League graduates, from long-established families, and your grandfather—while he didn’t have the highest pedigree among them—was the strongest in personality and greed.”

  I had never heard my grandfather talk about wanting to be rich and said so.

  “Oh, I’m not talking money, Kerris. Your grandfather craved power over other people. He loved to make the rules and watch people squirm. He was a bit of a sadist at heart. In some ways, he would have made a good military commander. He never seemed to be fettered by emotion. Other people’s suffering didn’t affect him.” She frowned. “In fact, Duvall missed the Vietnam draft by a couple of years—he was . . . oh . . . I think about twenty-six when they started heavy-duty conscription of boys, and while he could have been called up, by the time they were drafting everybody, he was past the age.”

  I frowned. “He was an architect . . . I suppose he designed a number of homes.”

  “He did, and he was a good one. He joined a firm—I don’t remember the name of it now—back after he returned from college. Within two years, he managed to make partner and then it was only a matter of another five years before he took over the firm and pushed the original owner out. Think Scrooge and Fezziwig.”

  That sounded about right. I frowned. “I wish he had been nicer, and not just to me.”

  “I don’t think the word ‘nice’ was in his vocabulary. Your grandfather had a real knack for taking the lead. He was good at pretending to be part of the team, until he was ready to strike, and then he would put his plans in action. That’s how he got his claws into your grandmother. We’ve never been sure just why she left Aidan—she even chased him out of Whisper Hollow—but Ellia and I both knew she still loved him as much as she despised Duvall.”

  “Yet she married Duvall, hating him.” Another thing to find out: what Duvall held over Lila’s head in order to make her marry him. “So, what was my mother like? I have some memories of her, but they’re all rather blurry. I remember she smelled good, like lemon and lilac.”

  “Tamil was a smart woman. She was also a romantic and a rebel, and those qualities did her in, when it came to your grandfather. They fought constantly. Unlike Lila, your mother refused to keep her mouth shut. She couldn’t ignore Duvall’s crustiness. She argued back, she mouthed off at him, and Lila used to tell me it was like living in a war zone, being between them. She supported your mother as much as she could, but in the end, Duvall always got his way.” Ivy pursed her lips. There was something she wasn’t telling me.

  “What is it? I know there’s more.”

  Ivy gave me a long look. “There’s no way to prove it, so I’m hesitant as to whether I should even bring it up.”

  “Tell me. I need every piece of the puzzle I can get.” I pushed my tea out of the way.

  “There’s some speculation that your grandfather may not really have been your grandfather. That Lila slipped away to Seattle for a couple weeks and . . .”

  I caught my breath. “Got pregnant with my mother there.” And then, I read between the lines. “Aidan! Where did he go when he left Whisper Hollow?”

  “Seattle.” Ivy shrugged, a tight little shrug with her head pressed against her left shoulder. “There’s no way to know for sure—not really. Not unless you can track him down and ask him about it. He might know. But . . . here are the facts as I know them. First, Duvall married Lila in 1961. She was twenty. They’d been engaged for several years and she put off the wedding as long as she could. I know she wanted children—she was a spirit shaman and expected to have a daughter to carry on the blood. The power travels through the maternal lineage. We—Ellia and I—knew full well Aidan was her shapeshifter and she rejected him. I can prove this because my clan is connected to his. Mae was not in favor of her marrying Duvall, by the way. Your great-grandmother was an extraordinarily powerful spirit shaman. She was pissed as hell when Lila chased Aidan away.”

  “What happened to her? I never met my great-grandparents.” It seemed odd to me now that Grandma Lila had never talked much about her mother, and for some reason, I hadn’t asked. Maybe I sensed that Duvall would have been angry.

  “Your great-grandfather, Tristan Stonecross, and your great-grandmother Mae emigrated from Ireland and settled here in 1936. Mae told us they were in their early twenties when they arrived here. He was a huge man, burly and strong and he went into the logging industry. Tristan died in a logging accident when your grandmother Lila was thirty. That would have been . . .” She calculated for a moment. “Lila was born in 1941, a few months after I was, so that would have been in 1971.”

  I blinked. That made her only a few years older than Bryan’s daughter. “You really are young, for a shapeshifter.”

  “Yes, actually—I married young and had Avery right away. That’s tradition in my clan. We mate early and usually for life. That Roger and I split up is unusual, but we are still friends.”

  “Was Tristan Mae’s protector? Her guardian?”

  Ivy nodded. “Yes. And that made him a shapeshifter, too. After he died, Mae had no guardian, so she focused on increasing her power as a spirit shaman to compensate.”

  I thought about this. My great-grandfather had been a shapeshifter. Lila had been an only child, so there had been no boys to carry on that side of the line. “What happened to him?”

  “Tristan was driving a logging truck down one of the access roads and for some reason, he put it into park on the side of the road. Besides the parking brakes, logging trucks often have wheel chocks—they wedge in around the wheel on a slope to keep accidents from happening. He must have thought he had the chocks firmly secured, but nobody really knows what happened. All they know is that Tristan was checking something behind the truck when it lurched and began to roll backward. It caught him under the wheels, and . . .
well . . . cut him in half. Another logger found him a couple hours after it happened.”

  I blinked; the image forming in my head was by far more grisly than anything I’d been thinking might have happened. “That’s horrible.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s an occupational hazard when you log up in these hills. But yes, it tore Mae up. They were quite the couple—absolutely in love. So that was ten years after Lila married Duvall. But anyway, Lila wanted children. She told me once that she had been to the doctor, and he said there was no reason she shouldn’t get pregnant, but Duvall refused to go in and get himself checked. So we all figured that he couldn’t father children.”

  “Then she turns up pregnant.” I was beginning to see how this was playing out.

  “Yes, a number of years after they were married. And two or three months before she made the announcement, she took a vacation on her own and went to Seattle. Duvall didn’t want her to go, but Mae was still alive, and Mae frightened Duvall.”

  “I wish I could have met her. How did she die?”

  Ivy shifted. “Doc Benson said it was a heart attack.”

  I sensed an undercurrent there. “But . . . ?”

  “But . . . Mae never had a health problem in her life.”

  I rubbed my forehead. This was getting worse and worse. “I see. I’ll just file that fact away with the rest. So what happened?”

  “Mae scared Duvall into backing down—I think she threatened him with something, because suddenly he was all in favor of Lila running off to Seattle for a vacation. When she returned, she seemed happier, like she had a new lease on life. She quit arguing with Duvall so much, and he—in turn—grew more imperious. She announced that she was pregnant, and how surprised they were that after all these years somehow . . . You get the picture.”

  “And Duvall’s name went on the birth certificate because there’s no way in hell my grandfather would ever admit to being cheated on. Especially if it resulted in a pregnancy. He’d suck it up and claim paternity before that.” I knew my grandfather only too well, and that was absolutely what he would have done.

  “Yes, that’s what we thought, too. Ellia and I discussed it privately and decided not to press Lila. Why push her on an uncomfortable issue when her life was already so disrupted? But we always secretly believed that Tamil was actually Aidan’s daughter.” She paused to clear the cups off the table and leave me to think about that for a moment.

  If so, that would make me Aidan’s blood, too. The man my grandmother truly loved. “What did you say his last name was?”

  “Corcoran. Irish . . . comes from the word for purple. He used to be heavily into genealogy, if I remember. One of those odd facts that stuck in my mind. He was a sweet boy, Aidan was.” She leaned over my shoulder, brushing my hair out of my face. “I don’t think there would be any harm if you thought to look him up and find out the truth—at least as much as he knows of it.”

  “If he’s still alive . . .” I murmured. All roads were leading back to the Morrígan. But it was time to focus on why I had come. “So, what should I do to protect myself? The Shadow Man was able to grab hold of me physically. Either he’s one of the Unliving, or he’s some astral entity who’s obviously dangerous. I don’t want to face him again, not without some sort of protection. And I think that means sleeping with the lights on until I learn how to fight him. He seems to show up during the night, when all the lights are off.”

  Ivy motioned for me to follow her. “Let’s go back in my ritual room. I’ll see what I can teach you. Or at least try to find something to protect you until I can piece together what information I can find on him. Shadow People are dangerous.”

  “Shadow People? You mean there are more than one?” I had dealt with a number of ghosts over the years and had heard the term bandied about, but I’d always been reluctant to delve into any research on them—something held me back, like a restraining belt. The very words made me nervous, and after my experience with the Shadow Man, and remembering my childhood experience, I understood why I’d blocked it all out.

  Ivy nodded. “Yes, there are. They are called the Ankou in Celtic lore. They’re rogue soldiers of Arawn, the Celtic lord of the Underworld. The Ankou, along with the Black Dogs, are members of the Unliving, but unlike the Unliving who rise from the graves here, they have been assigned specific tasks and they are always dangerous. Rumor has it that they’ve escaped from the rule of Arawn and wander the Earth rather than staying in the land of Annwn—the Underworld—where they belong.”

  I thought about this. It made sense. “So, technically Unliving, but with stronger powers because they come directly from the Underworld itself.”

  “Right. Spirit shamans appear to be able to take them on, so there’s a natural antipathy. And it’s difficult to displace them once they get their hooks into an area. I know Lila had to fight a couple during her time, and it wasn’t easy. We even petitioned Veronica at one point, asking her if she could control them since she’s Queen of the Unliving, but she said they weren’t under her jurisdiction and she seemed frightened of them. And not much frightens her.”

  I frowned. If they scared Veronica, then the Shadow People weren’t anything to take on lightly. “Is there a way to petition Arawn to . . . I don’t know . . . corral them up?”

  Ivy stared at me, then laughed. “I don’t want to be the one to try. Honestly, is that something you would like to do? Call on the god of the dead? It’s scary enough petitioning the Morrígan, and you—and most of us in the Crescent Moon Society—have a connection to her.”

  The light wavered. I wrapped my arms around myself. She had a point. Even the thought of attempting to contact the lord of the dead made everything take on a darker note. I tried to shake off the sudden gloom that had risen. Ivy’s house was bright and cheerful, filled with living plants that coiled and crept along the walls and up stakes, and whose leaves cascaded down over plant stands to fill what would otherwise be empty corners of the rooms.

  “You have a green thumb,” I mentioned, musing over the contrast between our surroundings and our conversation.

  “I have an understanding with the natural world.” She tilted her head to one side. “Plants have a form of consciousness, you know. Not like you and me, but they feel, they calculate . . . they . . . sense. There’s far more to the green world than a lot of people realize. That carrot you pull for dinner—it knows it’s doomed, as much as any animal you hunt down. Maybe on a different level, with a different type of reaction, but it knows when it’s being uprooted.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about my salad knowing that it was dinner-in-waiting, but then again, I was no vegetarian. “All life feeds on life. Death is necessary to ensure life continues, whether it be the death of an apple off a tree or a cow for beef, or whether it’s us—to keep the world from being overcrowded. We’re worm food, Ivy. And that’s something I’ve always known. Lila was extremely good about instilling a strong respect for the cycle of life in me.”

  “Good, because as a spirit shaman, you need to respect the process. Come, follow me.” She opened a door on the right side of the hallway and led me into a large room. It looked like it might have been a master bedroom at one time, or a second sitting room. “Welcome to my temple.”

  The moment I stepped across the threshold of the room, my body started to tingle. The energy was high in here—active and alive, and curious. It swirled around me, testing and probing, tapping me on the shoulder to let me know it was there. At no time did I feel threatened, but I knew without a doubt that if I had been a threat to Ivy, it would have struck out like a snake, and I had no doubt its fangs were nasty.

  “Your guardians are very strong.”

  “My guardians are very old, Kerris. They go beyond history, beyond the human world.” She winked at me. “I am the descendant of a long family line of shapeshifters and witch women. You have my blood in your veins—never forget tha
t. And even though the shapeshifting side won’t play through, I have strong magic in my bones. And so do you, though you haven’t tapped into it yet.”

  I sucked in a deep breath. “Does Oriel know you’re a shapeshifter? Did she know about Avery?”

  “Of course she knows. Oriel’s a special breed, by the way. She took over the boardinghouse from her mother, but don’t let that cheerful demeanor fool you. Oriel’s sole focus is to help the town thrive and continue, regardless of what that means. She can be a ruthless enemy and if you are out to harm the town, you are going to face her anger.”

  “She’s not a shapeshifter, though.”

  “No, nor is she a spirit shaman, nor does she pledge to the Morrígan. But she . . . her roots go deep into the natural world, and she is the hearth and heart of Whisper Hollow. She was born into a human body, but she’s no more human by soul than I am.”

  I frowned, trying to decide how much to say. “Bryan . . . his father was killed by a rival shapeshifting clan. Are all shapeshifters pledged to the Morrígan?”

  “No, not at all.” Ivy motioned for me to follow her to the center of the room. “The Morrígan selected several clans of shapeshifters to be her Chosen. The rest? Follow other gods, other ways, and other paths. And trust me, they don’t all like each other.”

  Ivy motioned for me to sit on a bench in front of her altar. There, in the center, was a statue of a woman with a crow on her shoulders, and several at her feet. Without turning my head, I said, “That’s a statue of the Morrígan, right?”

  “Correct. You, Ellia, me . . . we are all pledged to her service. We are all part of this together.”

  “Tell me what you know about the spirit shamans—I haven’t had a chance to read through Lila’s journal yet.”

  “There are many places in the world like Whisper Hollow, where the dead rise and walk. Each culture has its own form of guardians. Since this town was founded by those of Irish blood—well, we brought our customs with us and that includes the spirit shamans. But you have counterparts all around the world, pledged to different traditions, who all basically do what you do. Protect the living from the restless dead.”