My breathing slowed to match the waves. In and out. Push and pull.
This was what I loved. This connection that had nothing to do with manipulation and everything to do with presence. My family could reshape the world with their will, but could they feel how the beach remembered every single grain that had ever been part of it? Could they sense the patience in the rocks, how they’d learned to let the ocean shape them instead of fighting the inevitable?
I opened my eyes and found them wet.
“Shit,” I muttered, wiping at my cheeks with sandy hands, which only made everything worse.
But the tears kept coming.
Because this was also what I hated.
This beach, this town, this fucking spot where I came month after month to feel like maybe I belonged somewhere. It never changed. The rocks would be here tomorrow, and next month, and next year. The sand would shift but remain. The ocean would pull and push in the same rhythm that had ruled my entire life.
Everyone I’d gone to high school with had left—for college, for careers, for adventures in places where the coffee shops didn’t know your abuela’s maiden name and family chisme didn’t always seem to circle back to your magical failing. Friends had sent postcards at first, then Instagram stories, then nothing as Crescent Cove became the quaint hometown they mentioned at parties.
“Oh, you’d love it there. It’s like time stopped. Everything’s exactly the same as when we were kids.”
And they were right. The same families ran the same businesses, and the same festivals happened on the same weekends. I was twenty-eight years old, and my life was identical to what it had been at eighteen, just with worse knees.
“I love you,” I told the beach, and it was true. “I love this town,” I told the rocks, and that was true too. “I hate that nothing ever changes,” I told the darkness, and that was the truest thing of all.
The wind shifted.
Dramatically.
Where it had been coming from the north, a steady stream, it now swept in from the south, humid and hot.
My pathetic magic shivered to life, not strong enough to do anything but notice. The shells in my circle hummed a frequency I felt in my bones rather than heard. The candle flame, which I’d finally managed to light with my third match, turned blue at the edges.
I’d lived in Crescent Cove my entire life. The wind came from the north in summer, the west in winter, and the east during storms. It never, ever came from the south. South was where the deep water started, where the continental shelf dropped off intodarkness that even the strongest swimmers avoided. South was the unknown.
The tears on my cheeks dried instantly in the strange new wind, leaving salty trails that tingled. My curly hair whipped around my face, sticking to my lips, and I could have sworn I tasted magic in the air. The magic that came with change. And it wasn’t the gentle kind that came with seasons or tourists, but the violent kind that enjoyed kicking you right in the ass.
The wind whipped up into a tornado, and I scrambled to hold down my shells as it tried to carry them away. Sharp pain lanced through my palm as the edge of one caught my skin, leaving a small cut. I lifted it to my mouth, trying to keep the sand out.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the wind died.
The ocean resumed its regular breathing. The shells settled around me. The candle flame flickered yellow again, ordinary and small. I lowered my hand, and a single drop of blood fell into the calm waves at my ankles, but my chest remained tight, wound like a spring, waiting to be triggered.
I sat there for a long time after that, knees pulled up, arms wrapped around them, staring at the dark water.
The new moon hung invisible overhead—a blank page, my mother used to say, when we still talked about magic.
La luna nueva. Todo es posible.
I wanted to believe her. Tonight, I wanted her old words to be true and her new words to fade. For us to just start over, and the last ten—well really, twenty-eight years—to just be a miscommunication. With the wind’s strange taste still on my lips, I almost believed it.
Was a new beginning coming? My magic was too small to tell me, and that certainly wasn’t changing. I closed my eyes, trying to stretch deeper, listen harder.
I reached out through the sand again, into the cold, salty water, and I felt more than saw a shadow swimming through deep water.
An ill omen?
Just my luck.
CHAPTER FIVE
Chase
