Thunder wakes me. When I get out of bed and pull up the blinds, I find a purple sky filled with charged and menacing clouds. If it could talk, it would all be threats. I will unleash hell on you. I will open up and drown you like ants. A storm of biblical scale is on the way. I can’t help but feel it’s the best thing that could happen to this neighborhood. I’m ready to be washed away.
I hear a buzz and realize my phone is sitting on my bedside table. My father must be home, because he took it when I went into school. Oh, yeah, school. I did a face plant in the cafeteria. I reach up and feel a warm, spongy knot on my head. It aches when I touch it.
The phone buzzes again. It could be a text from Bex, and I need to find out what everyone is saying. But when I scroll through my messages, I realize I don’t need her after all. Everyone in the world has sent me a text of their own.
F U AND UR FISH HEAD FRIEND.
FISH LOVER.
FILTHY WHORE.
YOU’RE DEAD.
WATCH YOUR BACK YOU PIECE OF TRASH.
I’M GOING TO PUT A BULLET IN YOUR EYE.
I don’t recognize most of the numbers, but there are some I do. They’re from people in the neighborhood, people I used to consider friends—Mark, Kelli, Talia, too many to count—all wishing me dead, promising they will have a hand in it.
And then there are Bex’s.
R U OK?
U DROPPED LIKE A ROCK.
I THOUGHT U WERE DEAD.
FATHOM CARRIED U 2 THE OFFICE. IT WAS LIKE AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN.
VERY HOT.
Really? I’m surprised. Why would Fathom do that?
PLEASE CALL ME!
DAMN U 4 MAKING ME WORRY.
U R MAKING ME OLD BEFORE MY TIME.
I FOUND A GRAY HAIR.
I LUV U. WILL CALL SOON.
I’m pecking out a message to make sure she’s okay when I look at the time. It’s noon. How can it be noon? Did I really sleep an entire day? Oh, Bex! She was supposed to stay with me last night. I was her escape from Russell. I send her a text and then realize she’s at school right now. She doesn’t have her phone.
There’s a light knock at the door, and it swings open. My mother is there, looking tired and doing that nervous thing with her hands.
“I’m the worst friend,” I say. “Bex needed to stay here last night. Russell is smacking her around.”
A crease appears between my mother’s eyes. “I’ll call your father and have him bring her here after school. Right now I have to worry about you.”
I gesture to my phone. “They’re sending me messages.”
“Don’t erase them,” my mother says as she crosses the room. “Your dad will want to keep records.”
She sits down next to me and puts her cool hand against my forehead. I lean into it, enjoying the delicious pain the pressure creates. For some reason it eases my migraine. “Mom, it was a really bad one, the worst ever. I think we have to add an F6.”
She flinches. “They’re getting worse?”
I nod.
She tries to smooth the wrinkles out of my sheets. “Samuel’s were getting worse before . . .” she says, then trails off.
“This is an Alpha thing?”
“More like a half-Alpha, half-human thing,” she explains. “All of our children suffer from them, some worse than others.”
“Is it some sign of a change? Am I going to grow a tail?” I cry. The words catch in my mouth and come out as a stuttering whimper. My biggest fear, greater than being discovered, greater than being dragged off to some camp like Terrance Lir and his family, is waking up to find that I have transformed into a Sirena. I have never fully recovered from the time my mother dragged me into the bathroom and showed me her legs congealing into a long blue fin that unrolled like a scroll and flopped over the side of the tub. I don’t want to be like her. I want to be normal, no matter how many times I have to re-define its meaning.
“No, Lyric, you aren’t changing, at least I don’t think so. If the headaches were some sort of early warning system, then we would have seen changes long ago. You have been getting them since you were a baby. You and Samuel used to cry all night and nothing helped: aspirin, Tylenol, teas, honeys, herbs, acupuncture—nothing. We even took you in for CAT scans, though we were terrified the doctor would see something that screamed Alpha. We were that desperate. One doctor told us the two of you have overactive electrical systems in your brains, but nothing he prescribed helped much. The yoga on the beach was really the only thing that eased the pain, that and the cold baths. Terrance used to joke that you both were part Rusalka.”
“Rusalka? Is that another clan?”
“Not exactly a clan. More like servants.”
“Slaves?”
She looks away. “I never thought it was right.”