jumpy. The snap of the toy guns in Luna Park, the pop of cars backfiring. Every girl with curly brown hair giggling past me makes my heart jolt in an I’m going to regret this later way.
“You should read some of this too.” Kurt arcs an eyebrow. “It’s mostly about the kings and their accomplishments. King Karanos built the first great prison for the merrows.”
“Too bad all it did was provide a massive nursing room for the sister he couldn’t kill.”
A fat man, covered in baby oil and reading a beat-up paperback, glances over at us from his bench like we’re making too much noise. He ignores me and keeps reading, just like Kurt.
“Plus, my hands are dirty with oil. It could damage the paper.” I dip the last bit of my hot dog in mustard. When I bite down, bits of sand are mixed into the sauce but I swallow it anyway. I dust my hands and hold them out to my guardian. “All right, I’ll take over. Your dogs are getting cold.”
I set the papers in my lap, but I can’t concentrate. I wonder where Sarabell is. What if she stands me up and I never get to find out anything about Adaro? Sitting down here, I can watch the crowds without being noticed. Tons of young hipsters with top hats and clothes that don’t match on purpose. A mother tries to keep all six of her kids from killing each other over a volleyball. Some photographer directs a model to pout as she contours herself across a hand-painted garbage can. An old man power-walks in nothing but neon-green spandex shorts.
Then there are the things not everyone can see. I rub my eyes and squint against the sun. There’s a girl with tattooed wings on her back. At just the right angle, I can see that the wings are real, white feathery things retracted against her snowy white shoulders. She holds her ice cream cone to her boyfriend’s lips, the vanilla rolling down his brown skin.
I rub my eyes again and see what he really is, with skin like copper blood. His lips smile and take a giant bite of her ice cream with sharp teeth. Two small horns poke out of his forehead. Something passes over his angular face, and he finds what’s troubling him— me. He can feel me staring. To my surprise, he doesn’t flip me off. Instead he nods once, as if to just acknowledge me, then slings his arm around his angel girl, grazing the down feathers as he leads her farther down the boardwalk.
“Are you paying attention?” Kurt asks.
“You see that?”
He follows my stare to the heavenly hellish couple and shrugs. I guess he’s too cool and has seen everything under the sun.
A familiar boy runs down the boardwalk. When I point out, “Hey, is that Timmy?” a new horde of beachgoers barrels past us, obscuring our view.
“Timmy!” I call out, but my voice is drowned out by a boom box strapped to the back of a bike zooming by. Timmy runs into his mom’s arms. His mother, Penny, scoops him up and rubs the hard shell of his back. From here, he seems to be a kid with a weird backpack. When I met them on Arion’s ship, I discovered it’s a part of him. Penny, on the other hand, has arms that shift into tentacles. They’re the landlocked. Here in Coney Island, they don’t seem so out of place.
Penny shields the sun from her eyes, scanning the crowd for someone. I shout her name, but she doesn’t see me.
Kurt buries his nose back in the papers. He’s not exactly a lover of the landlocked. But Penny clued us in on what the merrows were after they attacked my school. Penny and Timmy embrace a green-haired girl. “What’s Thalia doing here?”
When I mention her name, Kurt snaps to attention.
“What? Where?” He gets up for a better view of them, but in the shifting crowd, I’ve already lost them.
Suddenly a man gets in my face. He’s stick skinny with skin like used charcoal. He nods at the food on my tray. “You gonna finish that?”
Kurt rolls the parchment papers into a tube and tries to catch up to Thalia, but he’s going against the current of beachgoers.
Then the man looks at me. I mean, really looks at me, and backpedals. “I’m—I’m sorry, my lord. I didn’t mean—”
There are scabs around his neck and ribs. They could be scars or dried acne or,