T WAS JANE’S TURN TO PACK AWAY THE ALTaR TOOLS. Rugosa Coven’s ritual-in-a-box box was an impeccably organized Rubbermaid tub, full of cardboard dividers for compartments, and little Tupperware containers to keep the homemade incense from getting all over everything. She’d come up with their system herself.

When she was satisfied that she’d tucked the chalice and the blade away clean, with no traces of wine or beach sand left on them, she gave herself a moment with the birding binoculars she’d brought. Four kinds of gull circled, and a sandpiper ran along the waves’ edge. Jane took in the wind in the dune grass and the light on the rugosa bushes. From Sandy Hook, she could see across Raritan Bay north to Manhattan. It was the Sunday afternoon just after Labor Day, and Rugosa Coven might as well have had the whole Jersey Shore to themselves. All to themselves, because they preferred the nude stretch of the beach. She got up to join her covenmates. The beach was never the same twice, and after what Hurricane Lorelei had done to Cape Hatteras, there was no knowing what Hurricane Nora would do to Sandy Hook. Already, the breakers were too big for swimming. Tomorrow the rain would come.

While Bob and Sebastian engaged in a futile attempt to play Frisbee in the sea wind, Sebastian’s girlfriend, Amber, collected shells. Amber was always collecting things. When she’d run out of skin of her own for her collection of piercings and tattoos, she’d collected her tattoo artist. Casting her magpie eye over the sand, Amber saw something that stopped her stock-still.

Sophie dropped the bread she’d been feeding the gulls, let out a little shriek of horror, and pointed where Amber was looking. Jane turned to tease Sophie for how easily she startled, but then followed her roommate’s gaze to a tangled pile of yellow seaweed at the high water mark.

Protruding from the tangle was a pale human foot. “Oh,” said Jane, and a cold numbness descended over her.

“What?” said Bob, and when Sophie pointed, his face wore exactly the same alarm hers did. He went to his sister and put a hand on her shoulder to calm her.

Something had to be done, and with no lifeguards on duty, Jane might as well be the one to do it. She’d had the courage to leave her marriage, to drive Ria out of the coven, to sort out Sophie’s taxes, and now she’d have the courage to lift aside a few fronds of yellow seaweed to see for herself.

She had to get down on her knees and tug to clear the seaweed away, until the whole body was free and she could step back. It smelled simply of salt, so she took a deep breath to steady herself and looked.

Sophie said, “Pretty,” and it was true. The pale body of a slender young man lay intact, if somewhat scuffed and lacerated, on the sand. His was a finely-shaped face under a tousle of curly black hair. How he had washed up naked and dead on a public beach, Jane could not imagine. Tiny crustaceans crawled over his cuts.

Then she saw it: a bit of seaweed that still stuck to his neck was actually caught under a flap of skin. “His throat’s been cut,” she heard herself say, as if from a very great distance.

Sebastian, who had the strongest stomach of any of them, knelt down to get a closer look. He worked the frond of seaweed free. “Um, no.”

“What then?”

“See for yourself, Jane. You won’t like it.”

So she bent down to look again. Not a slit throat, no. “Gills,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

“You’re looking right at it,” said Amber.

“But they make no sense! He’s a mammal. He’s too big, they’re too small. Plus, he’d freeze. Am I the only one who was paying attention in high school biology?”

Sebastian raised an eyebrow. A body modification artist needed to know anatomy, and Sebastian took pride in his work.

Jane wasn’t having any of it. “He doesn’t belong here. We should throw him back.”

Sophie was aghast. “To be eaten by crabs? It’s not right.”

A hideous future played out in Jane’s mind. “So we give the body to the authorities, and then what? Television news crews crawling all over Gunnison Beach, making lewd remarks about nudity. Journalists staking out our houses for comment on how we found the body, and you can imagine how they’ll portray us, Wiccans naked on the beach. Bob, just think what your wife will have to put up with at Bible study. Bogus documentary filmmakers from the goddamn SciFi Channel staging episodes of the new In Search of… and demanding that we be their talking heads, and a whole generation of idiot Atlantis cranks rising up, and they’d be our fault, all our fault. We are not fluff-bunny Pagans! We are not Atlantis cranks! I am not going to be party to any of that.” Jane kicked the body. “None of it!”

The body groaned, rolled sideways into a fetal position, and shivered.

It was Sophie who moved first, to touch the pretty man’s hair. Typical. “Are you okay?” she asked.

The stranger’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.

Bob ran back to the coven’s heap of towels and returned with a bottle of water and a first aid kit. “Why couldn’t he have washed up before Labor Day?” Bob lamented as he laid out the kit’s contents. “There would have been lifeguards before Labor Day.” He managed to get the stranger to swallow a little water from the plastic bottle.

There were alcohol swabs in the kit, and Sebastian got to work cleaning the stranger’s cuts and tweezing out the little crustaceans that infested them. “Hey, there,” he said to the stranger, with the same calming voice he might have used with any client under his tattoo needle. “Where did you come from?”

A long run of syllables, short on consonants and heavy on pitch accent, failed to answer the question. The stranger opened his eyes to look blearily at Bob and Sophie. For Sophie, he managed a quite charming smile before the exertion of holding up his head was too much for him. As if it weren’t trouble enough that he had gills, he had to go flirting with Jane’s roommate. Jane was sure no good would come of it. No good ever came of Sophie’s boyfriends.

“My name’s Sophie. What’s yours?”

The stranger tried another long run of vowels, waited a moment, then tried something different, something melodic but vaguely familiar.

Amber leaned over the stranger to listen, and said tentatively, “That’s Ancient Greek.”

Jane had to reassess her covenmate. “You know Greek, Amber?”

“I did a semester in college, skipped classes, and flunked because I was drinking absinthe and playing Starcraft. I was young and stupid. But I know the sound of it. Not that I remember much vocabulary.” She screwed her face up in concentration until her eyebrow piercings clinked against each other. “This is so embarrassing. Um. Hoi polloi?”

Jane couldn’t help laughing out loud.

“Hoi demoi…” said the stranger. After that, Jane could make out maybe one word in three. “Hoi demoi … thalatteis,” she thought she heard. He rambled for some time, flinching intermittently at Sebastian’s tugs of the tweezers, and appeared to have difficulty keeping his eyes focused.

Amber said, “Well, I didn’t get any of that except something that sounds like Atlantis.”

“At least it still sounds like Greek,” said Jane. “Maybe we can find a classicist.”

Bob said, “We’d do better to find a doctor.”

Sophie protested, “What do you think a doctor would do with an Atlantean? With gills? There would be dissections and government people and the Department of Homeland Security. You know what happens to foreigners from countries that actually have consulates. All kinds of badness, for no reason half the time. Who’s got the authority to make sure his rights are respected? Us? A bunch of Wiccan blue-staters? He’d be safer if we threw him back into the breakers.”

“She’s got a point,” said Sebastian.

Jane’s head hurt. “Or she watches too much television. So if we don’t want to throw him back, or leave him here, or hand him over to experts, what does that leave? That leaves taking him in, ourselves.” Jane already knew where that was going.

Bob said, “I can’t ask my wife and kids to deal with that on no notice.”

Amber said, “Too many sharp things for him to come to grief on at our house,” and Sebastian nodded.

Sophie looked up at Jane with big eyes. The house belonged to Sophie, but Jane paid rent. “We can take him, can’t we, Jane? He can have the couch. Besides, our place is closest to the water. If he gets better, he can just cross the street and the seawall, and he’ll be all gone.”

All gone sounded good to Jane, even if the only way to keep the matter quiet was to install the stranger on her couch for a week. “All right. But I still don’t think he’s from Atlantis. He looks Greek, doesn’t he? He probably just works on a freighter or a cruise ship, and fell overboard in the last gasp of Lorelei.”

“Except for the gills,” Sebastian pointed out.

Amber was still trying to remember her botched semester of language instruction. “Okay, I’ve got the principal parts of some verbs. Blapto, blapso, eblapsa, beblapa, beblammai, eblaben?”

“Eblaben,” said the stranger. He gestured toward the waves. “Eblaben.”

“He says he’s been utterly destroyed, once and for all.”

Even Sebastian looked at her skeptically. “How do you get that out of one word?”

Jane said, “In a semester of Starcraft and absinthe, it would have been relevant vocabulary.”

“Whatever,” said Amber, and turned back to the stranger. “Agora?”

He shook his head no, and pulled the heap of seaweed back to cover himself. “Oux agora.”

“Oh, come on,” said Jane. “I could have done as well as that. You’re just saying any old word that comes into your head.”

Amber put her hands on her hips and said, “Well, it’s a good thing you can do as well as that, since it’s your couch he’ll be living on. Nobody takes Greek because it’s useful. You take it because it’s beautiful.”

“No agora,” Sebastian assured the stranger, and pulled the seaweed off and got back to work with the tweezers. “No parasites, either. Goddamn sea lice. And what are these nasties? Mini trilobites? A warm shower would make this a lot easier.”

So they packed away the first aid kit, and Bob and Sebastian propped the stranger up between them to carry him past the dune grass and the rugosa roses to the pile of towels, clothes, picnic baskets, and altar tools. The stranger shivered, so Sophie bundled him in the dry towels before digging her garments out of the heap. “There, there,” she said. “You’ll be all right.” They all gathered their things, dressed, and found that their cars were the last remaining in the parking lot.

“Good,” said Jane. “No witnesses.”

Bob cleared the child seats and plush toys out of the back of his SUV to make room for the stranger to lie down, and Sophie climbed in to keep him company. Closing the trunk on his sister and the stranger, Bob looked in through the rear windshield at the pair of them. He muttered to Jane, “No good will come of this.”

“Oh, you’re just noticing that now, are you?”

“Keep an eye on her for me, will you?”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on her since I moved in, for all the good it does.”

* * * *

They caravanned south, down Sandy Hook and through the narrow neighborhood between river and ocean to the little teal house in Sea Bright. Though Jane tucked her Corolla as close as she could to Sophie’s car, there was barely room in the gravel driveway for Bob’s SUV to squeeze in behind Amber’s silly little convertible. Jane rushed to the back porch shower—nearly tripping over Sophie’s plastic shrine to Sulis, goddess of baths—and opened the hot water spigot all the way to clear the cold out of the line. Jane had time to hose the sand off her feet while the guys hauled the weight of the stranger between them.

Thank goodness for Sebastian, who was accustomed to keeping up delicate work for hours at a stretch despite the discomfort of his clients. Though he had to open all the stranger’s cuts and scrapes back up to do it, he tweezed out the sea lice, intoning a stream of soothing talk all the while. Sophie hovered outside the kitchen door, offering the stranger sips of water from time to time, while Jane took care of things inside. Fortunately, Jane had all the old wedding-gift towels and bed linens left over from her life with Nils, and she didn’t especially care what happened to them just now. She pulled some stray sections of the Sunday New York Times off the couch and arranged a many-layered nest of sheets and blankets there. By the time she was done, her covenmates were bringing in the clean, much-bandaged form of the stranger.

The guest, now. Not a stranger anymore, the moment he crossed the threshold of her home. “Did you get a name out of him?” she asked.

“Not yet,” said Sophie. “We’ve tried the me-Tarzan-you-Jane method, but it hasn’t worked.”

“We are not calling him Tarzan,” Jane declared.

Amber still wracked her brain for traces of Greek. “Onoma, onomatos… Name, dammit, name. Oh, come on, meet me halfway, won’t you?”

That garnered yet another long run of vowels. Nobody had any hope of imitating it.

“Fine,” said Amber. “You look like the kouros sculptures at the Met. You get to be Kouros.”

“Kouros,” said the kouros, brightening a little. He pointed at Sophie and said, “Kore.”

That cracked Amber up. “I don’t know that I’d describe Sophie as a maiden, but you get the general idea. Damn, I wish I hadn’t sold back my old textbooks. Jane, I’ll see if I can pick something up tomorrow at Barnes and Noble. Do you need anything?”

“I have no idea what he eats.”

Nobody else did either. Jane made her best guess and called the fusion Asian place two narrow towns down the peninsula to order sushi and fish broth for delivery. Lots of fish broth, plain, for which she paid too much for the privilege of diverging from the menu. When the delivery guy had been and gone, she and Sophie grappled the kouros by the arms and tugged him into a sitting position on the couch. While the rest of the coven ate sushi, Sophie insisted on spoon-feeding him the broth. The kouros appeared to be entirely unfamiliar with spoons. He just could not figure out what she wanted from him, until she demonstrated by feeding herself. He regarded the spoon with bright-eyed fascination then. The broth brought him back a little strength, and after he was fed, he insisted on holding the spoon, turning it in the light. He still held it when he fell asleep.

“All right,” said Jane. Curiosity was a thing she admired. “Maybe this won’t be so bad.”

Bob, Amber, and Sebastian cleaned up after dinner, insisting that Sophie and Jane would have plenty to take care of after the three of them left. Once they’d gone, Sophie curled up to sleep in the reading chair beside the couch, the better to keep watch over her new pet. Jane shook her head at the inevitable before taking herself to bed.