“But—”
We were interrupted by the loud vibrating sound that I’d heard the night before. In response, a man in the group cried out in excitement. He leaped to his feet and pointed toward the waves, but I couldn’t look. I was too astonished. The man was Mr. Lir, a guy who had babysat me, had put bandages on my bloody knees, and had taken me and his son, Samuel, to the Bronx Zoo every summer until I was ten.
“Lyric, go, now!” my mother said as she and her friends got to their feet. They linked their hands together and raised them over their heads, facing out at the horizon.
“They are here!” Mr. Lir shouted.
I turned my eyes to the water, and my throat was seized by dread. There were people rising out of the surf, about fifty of them. Yet they were not people. They were something else. Each was easily over six feet tall and heavily muscled, with skin like a copper penny and dressed in bizarre armor made from bones and shells. They all held weapons—tridents or spears or huge, heavy hammers—and they waved them around aggressively. Behind them was a second wave of people who were not as hulking as the first group but just as intimidating. They held no weapons, because theirs were in their bodies: vicious blades that came right out of their arms. Two men from this group were at the center and stood out among the rest. One had a shaved head and wore a goatee sculpted into a point beneath his chin. The other had long, golden hair like a lion and wore sea glass around his neck and hands. With them was a woman whose breathtaking beauty seemed to multiply with every steps she took toward me, yet there was something unsettling about her as well, something predatory and vicious, like a great white shark hiding in the body of a woman. To her right was an elderly woman wearing what would best be described as a nun’s habit, only made from the skin of some dark-furred animal. It covered her entire body, exposing only her face and hands, and the “habit” formed a strange hammerlike shape on either side of her head.
And then there was the boy. He was about my age, with hair cut short and eyes blue and bright, eyes that burned a glowing echo I could see even when I closed my own. He looked lost and confused, troubled by what he was seeing around him, like he was seeing the world for the first time.
Behind him came others who were far more strange and whose names I would learn later: the Nix with their teeth and claws, the quietly confident Ceto, and the Sirena, whose every emotion was revealed in colorful scales. There were some I haven’t seen since that day—translucent-skinned ones and people with tentacles for limbs. All of them were in a state of metamorphosis. Tails became legs. Fins sank into flesh. Gills vanished, causing their owners to choke on their first breaths of air. There were elderly creatures, babies, teenagers, and families, all climbing onto the beach, eyeing us with wide-eyed wonder. At first they numbered in the hundreds, then thousands, until eventually I could no longer see the sand for all the bodies.
Panic broke out all around me. Sunbathers abandoned towels, coolers, and chairs. They trampled one another to get away, and children became separated from parents. Yet in the chaos I heard someone calling my name. I searched the crowd, careful not to get knocked over in the rush, and spotted my father sprinting toward us with his gun in hand.
“Summer! You promised Lyric would not be part of this!” he shouted.
“It’s not my fault. She found me, Leonard!” my mother cried. “Please take her home.”
“We’re all going!” he demanded.
My mother pulled away from him. “You know I have to do this. I have a responsibility to them.”
“What about your responsibility to us?” my father said.
“Will someone please tell me what’s happening?” I screamed.
Mr. Lir pushed his way through people to join us. “Summer, send your family away. It is not safe for them to be here.”
My father waved him off. “It’s not safe for any of us, Terrance. People will take pictures of this—they’re taking pictures right now—and if we stay on this beach any longer, we are all going to be in them. They’ll figure out what you are, what Samuel and Lyric are, and they’ll come for them. They’ll come for all of us.”
“What did you say?” I cried. “What am I?”
“I’m sorry, Lyric. We didn’t know how to tell you,” my mother said, and as she took my face in her hands I saw faint pink- and rose-colored patches appear on her neck and forearms. They were scales, like those on a fish or a snake, both beautiful and terribly wrong.
I shrieked and fell backward. “What are you?” I cried.
“We can explain later, Lyric,” my father cried. “Right now we have to get out of here. Summer, come with us.”
My mother stared at him for a long moment, perhaps weighing every day of their life together against the responsibility she felt to the strange visitors, and then she turned to the ocean and her scales turned fire-engine red and blistering white.
“Tell them I’m sorry, Terrance,” she said without even looking at him. “Try to make them understand.”
“Summer, you cannot turn your back on our people,” Mr. Lir shouted. “They’ll call you a traitor. You’ll be an untouchable!”
“We have to run,” she said as she took my hand. My father took the other, and we fled through the crowd while her odd friends called out to us with their bizarre, angry words.
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