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slowly and peeked under the table to see hooves and furry goat legs. How had she not noticed that before?
    “How…?”
    He shrugged. “Humans don’t see what they don’t expect. I’d say you’ve seen something bizarre you can’t deny and it’s opened your mind to other possibilities. Plus, you might have a bit of fae blood in you that’s helping you to see through my glamour.”
    “Fae blood?”
    “You able to do anything else unusual?”
    “I dream of the dead,” she said before she thought better of it.
    He just nodded, his face revealing no expression. She figured he was hiding his surprise to be polite. “Bit of banshee blood, probably. Now tell me, do the horns and hooves do anything for you? I promise you satyrs are better in bed.”
    She almost missed his proposition, she was so shocked by his admission. “Nope. Sorry, Arty. But I can serve you dinner. What would you like tonight?”
    She could have smacked herself for leaving herself open for that one. “I’d like you, naked on my table, with pancakes and syrup covering all of your naughty bits.”
    That image was just too much. She couldn’t help laughing. “You never fail to make me laugh, even though you’re a lecherous old man who should know better.”
    “I’d never fail to make you come either, if you’d just give me a chance.”
    She shook her head. “You want eggs with those pancakes?”
    Arty gave her a nod and a wink and she got back to work, the back of her mind now struggling with the existence of satyrs, which made the existence of mermaids that much more likely.
     
    She got out of the restaurant around midnight. She should have gone home and gone to bed, but she didn’t have to get up early the next morning and she was wired from the night. Seaside Seafood was one of the few restaurants that had chosen to ignore the governor’s suggestion that all businesses and residences re-locate three miles from shore. The restaurant sat on a small hill five hundred yards from high tide and had the best views in Greenville. Liza stepped outside, breathed in the scent of the sea and headed to the beach for a moonlit stroll. The beach at night probably wasn’t the best place to go alone, but she’d had years of self-defense training and mace in her purse. It may have been more than ten years since the topography of the world changed, but there were still a lot of hungry, desperate people in the world. A lot of people who’d lost everything they had and had no qualms about stealing to get it back.
    The beach was quiet and the moon was bright enough that she didn’t need a flashlight. She kicked off her shoes and left them where they lay. She’d get them on the way back. The sand was still warm from the hot day and was a gentle massage on her sore feet. The waves were calm and rolled gently against the shore, the smell of salt water calming her and reminding her that she was home. She’d grown up on the coast of Virginia, and although the news and people told her times were more dangerous, she never would have walked on the beach alone at night in Virginia Beach ten years ago, either. With the severe weather and the rise of the oceans people everywhere had lost loved ones and possessions, their homes. People had learned to fear nature in a way they’d once forgotten. Besides that, the loss of coastal cities, particularly the big ones like New York and DC, and every one of the major shipping ports, had ruined the economy and panic had spread everywhere.
    People had banded together for a while, to clean up the mess and find homes for refugees, to deal with the new weather patterns and the changed shape of the world. And, sure, there’d been a lot of desperate people and there’d been violence and crime. In Liza’s opinion, the crime hadn’t increased as much as people’s fear had increased. The threat of violence just gave people one more excuse to hide in their homes and keep to themselves. Hoard their resources in case the climate