Shadow Wrack

To Lizzie,

who fills my days with magic

Willa Fuller — Twelve years old. This “ordinary” girl was faced with some pretty extraordinary events one summer and rose to the challenge. Clever, brave, and responsible … but also hesitant, anxious, and afraid. She wishes more than anything that her family could just get along.

Mirabel (a.k.a. Belle) — Cranky old dame in a wheelchair who loves the ocean. Spends a lot of time in the bathtub. Her secret: under that lap blanket is a mermaid tail. Long ago she assumed human form to marry a handsome fisher­man. She had a child but was dissatisfied with life on land and left them both, returning to the ocean. Now she seems mostly
land-bound
; she still has a tail but no longer has the ability to breathe underwater.

Grandpa — Willa's grandfather who singlehandedly raised Willa's mother. Still a rather handsome fisherman. Gentle and forgiving. Doesn't like to dredge up the past.

Baz — Elderly and enigmatic, rather short and stout. Loves to take cat naps. Used to be the cook at Eldritch Manor but now doesn't have much to do. Her secret: she's part cat, but which part … she's not telling.

Horace — A bookish and
mild-mannered
old gentleman. Very old. Very,
very
old. As in old enough to remember ancient Egypt, because he was there. His secret: he is really an androsphinx, which means he is half lion. Occasionally changes into a lion, but not often. Starting to lose his memory a little.

Mab — Queen of the fairies. Keeper of dreams, mistress of enchantments, Mab is a dainty spitfire. Her secret: swears like a sailor. Loves pulling pranks. Do not get on her bad side. Since making peace with the tree nymphs in the backyard, she once again has subjects to boss around, which she thoroughly enjoys.

Robert — Irascible old fellow with a quick temper and a love for fine brandy. His secret is not so secret: he is a centaur, human from the waist up, with the body and legs of a horse. Cannot change shape, which makes it pretty difficult for him to blend into a crowd.

Tengu — Small in stature but a martial arts master. Always cheerful and remarkably free of ill will, considering he loves nothing more than a good fight. Has an unhealthy obsession with weaponry.

Miss Trang — This stern,
middle-aged
lady in the sensible shoes with no sense of humour is the
caretaker-manager
of Eldritch Manor. Her secret: she is also a dragon in her spare time. Often leaves town for unknown reasons, placing Willa in charge of the Eldritch oldsters.

The Phoenix — Descendent of an ancient line, she is the daughter of Fadiyah, the bird who went up in flames to save Willa but ignited Eldritch Manor in the process. The young bird has got a few issues.

Mr. and Mrs. Hacker — Live next door to the ruins of Eldritch Manor. Snoopy, gossipy, critical, sniping … in short, extremely annoying. Pretty much
everything
about Eldritch Manor and its inhabitants causes them irritation and intense curiosity.

The House

I
n
a small seaside town, on a quiet street next to a park, there lies the smoking ruin of a house. Before it went down in a blaze of glory, the house was one you might walk past a hundred times and never really look at. It was old and rambling, with a sagging front porch and a neglected lawn. The inhabitants were similarly tired, ancient, and sagging ladies and gents who moved slowly and grumbled about everything under the cold, watchful eye of Miss Trang.

This was the house that somehow caught the eye and imagination of
twelve-year
-old Willa Fuller. This was the house where she first saw a brownie — and by brownie I mean one of the Little People, not a wee girl hawking cookies door to door. This was the house where Willa got her
first-ever
real job, as a housekeeper, and found out that the residents had some rather spectacular secrets.

This was the house where she met fairy, centaur, androsphinx, mermaid, and even a dinosaur. This was the house where surprises lurked around every corner, and dark, mysterious things began to happen. This was the house that Miss Trang departed from, leaving Willa in charge.

This was the house where black spots grew like mildew.

This was the house that finally burst open at the seams, letting in horrible creatures from “the other side”: cats with human faces, swarms of spiders, mobs of butcher birds, and the great, black, sightless worm with the gaping mouth and infinite gullet.

This was the house where the battle occurred, and where Miss Trang turned into a dragon.

This was the house that caught fire from a phoenix flame and was utterly destroyed, though the inhabitants escaped.

The sign is still there, though the house is not, and the sign says: “
Eldritch Manor.
”

In which Willa has to deal with a feuding family, furious fairies, and a surly centaur

N
ever
battle the forces of darkness a week before school starts. It's very distracting. Willa learned this lesson the hard way. One Wednesday she barely escaped a giant evil worm, aided by a dragon
and
a dinosaur, when an exploding phoenix set the whole place on fire. Five days later, the biggest challenge in her life was remembering her locker combination.

The summer had turned her whole world upside down. Her regular
twelve-year
-old life seemed unreal, and the mermaid, centaur, and fairies that she now called her friends seemed totally normal. The upside was that after facing the big worm, gym class just didn't fill her with dread like it used to. The downside? She couldn't talk to anybody about her recent adventures. Her mom and dad knew parts of it, but they didn't want to hear any more. She certainly couldn't tell her friends at school, she had promised Miss Trang she wouldn't, and they wouldn't have believed any of it anyway.

The strangest thing about her summer was how she felt now that it was over. You'd think that having survived something like that,
plus
finding your
long-lost
grandmother, would make you happy and relieved and just plain grateful to be alive. But Willa didn't feel any of those things. She felt like she had more problems than ever before. She was anxious, jumpy, depressed, and even … truth be told … a little angry.

A sudden
sploosh
startled Willa awake. She was sitting in the hallway leaning against the bathroom door. Inside she could hear water slopping out of the tub. Down the hall there was a
squawk
as the bird in the living room woke up. Every morning her dad tried to tiptoe out the front door to go to work, and every morning the bird woke up and squawked at him. In the kitchen a kettle whistled. That meant her mom was up. She would be out the door as quickly as possible, to avoid Belle.

Willa thumped her head against the bathroom door. “Belle! Will … you … hurry … up?” Silence within and then another
sploosh
and cheerful humming. Willa sighed. Her
mermaid-grandma
was in the bathtub, making her late for school. Again.
Just another chapter in my ridiculous life
, she reflected. Her family was scattered all over, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, only she couldn't put them together to form the picture she wanted. And when she tried to talk to them about it, she got exactly nowhere.

“So.” Willa dangled her legs over the side of the dock, staring down at the water as the sound of waves washed over her. “Belle
is
my grandmother, isn't she?” She glanced at Grandpa. He was loading supplies onto his fishing boat and paused, balancing a large cooler on the railing.

“Yes. Yes, she is.” He slid the cooler off the rail, and it thudded onto the deck.

“And she's a mermaid.”

“
Uh-huh
.” He shoved the cooler into a corner.

Willa took a deep breath. “You married a mermaid.”

Grandpa gestured helplessly. “Well, she was human sometimes; she could switch back and forth. And I didn't know what she was, at first.”

“And Mom was born. And then Belle…?”

“She left.”

“And put a curse on you so you couldn't catch any fish.”

He squinted again and shrugged. “Well … I guess she was sore at me.”

“You didn't catch a single fish in forty years!”

“There's no point dwelling on the past. The curse is off now. My catches are setting records, and the good weather looks like it'll hold for a while yet.” He grinned and rapped his knuckles on the wooden roof of the boat's cabin. “Knock on wood. Everything's grand.”

Willa sighed. Her grandpa never did hold a grudge, even when it was totally called for.

“Why did she do it?”

“Do what?”

“Why did she leave?”

“You'll have to ask her.”

“You don't know? But you must have some idea.”

At this, Grandpa just looked at her pityingly. “Willa, it was a long time ago. I don't think about it any more. Nothing to be gained by it.”

“Why did you leave?”

Belle was watching TV; on the screen, jellyfish were undulating in a turquoise sea.

“Why did you leave?” Willa asked again, louder this time.

“What are you talking about? Leave where?” The old woman scowled at the TV.

“You left Grandpa after Mom was born. I was wondering why.”

“I don't remember.”

“You don't remember?”

“I'm four hundred years old! I can't be expected to remember every little thing that happens,” she snapped.

Willa stared at her. “Every
little
thing? Seriously?”

Belle grew uncomfortable under her gaze, shifting in her wheelchair. “Maybe it was someone else. You ever think of that? Now shush and let me watch my show.”

The next conversation was even shorter.

“Mom, I want to know more about Grandpa and Belle.”

“Eat your breakfast.”

“But she's your … mom.” That sounded weird.

“I don't have a mom. Eat. You're going to be late for school.” End of discussion.

“Dad, you know about Belle, right?”

“You mean, that she's … hmm. Yes.”

“So Mom is part … you know.”

“I guess so.”

“Dad,” Willa looked him straight in the eye, “is Mom at all … different? Weird?”

Her dad smiled, scratching his head. “You know what, Willa? Everyone is weird. Mermaid parentage or not.
That
is the
honest-to
-god truth.”

And that was as far as she got with them. Not only would they not talk about it, the four
so-called
grownups in her family wouldn't even sit in the same room together. They were like billiard balls ricocheting off each other.

I have the worst family in the world
, Willa fumed.
So who needs them?

Ever since the shambolic old place known as Eldritch Manor had burned to the ground, its inhabitants had been scattered all over town. In a moment of weakness, Willa's mom had agreed to let Belle and Baz move in with them temporarily, even though Mom and Belle were not speaking.

Horace and Tengu were in a hotel downtown, and Willa had her fingers crossed that they were behaving themselves. Robert the centaur, being
half-horse
and rather hard to disguise, was living in the stable behind the charred remains of the house, complaining bitterly about being treated like an animal. Mab the fairy queen was living with the tree nymphs in the wild jungle of a yard. The nymphs were basically fairies too, inhabiting a different branch of the family tree, and even though they'd been feuding with Mab for at least a hundred years, they'd suddenly become allies. This made Willa uneasy. Fairies may seem cutesy and sweet, but they can also be astonishingly vindictive and
mean-spirited
. Willa had no idea what trouble they'd get up to now that they were working together. Who knew what those tinkly little voices might be plotting? At least Mab had resumed knitting the time talisman scarf, which kept the whole supernatural bunch of them living in this time, in the real,
right-now
world. The tiny ball of yarn she was stitching into a
doll-sized
silvery scarf was what the dark forces had been after when they attacked in the summer. As Willa understood it, the yarn had some kind of magical properties that would have allowed them an access point to enter this world and this time. Or something like that. Willa was still not totally clear about the details.

A number of strange wee creatures had also disappeared into the yard and were presumably faring all right, though Willa seldom caught a glimpse of them. And as for Miss Trang, no one knew where she went at night, but every morning she appeared at the ruins, picking through the ashes to retrieve anything she could find — a blackened teaspoon, a doorknob, broken bits of crockery. Every once in a while she'd disappear for three or four days and reappear with a new furrow in her brow. Something about
high-level
meetings and everyone being very upset with them, she had confided to Willa just the other day. Willa was shocked.

“Why would they be upset? Didn't we keep the talisman safe? Didn't we
beat
the dark side?”

“Yes, as far as that goes. But the loss of the house was vexing,” sniffed Miss Trang as she turned and paced slowly away, her eyes on the ground. Willa sighed. She hadn't exactly expected a medal from the
powers-that
-be who oversaw mythological retirees, but she thought that defeating the terrifying black worm was worth something other than reproach.

As Willa gazed at the ground that day, she noticed something odd. Poking up from the ash and blackened debris was a shiny white shape. A stone? Willa knelt down and ran her hand over it. It seemed to be made of wood and was rooted firmly in the ground. Looking around, she realized that there were a dozen others, just the same, all in a straight line.