4. Selena
CHAPTER FOUR
Selena
The call lasted four minutes. It felt like forty.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity, mija. RipTide is one of the biggest brands in extreme sports—do you know how many towns applied to host this? And they chose us. Because of me.”
A pause so the me hit just right.
“Because I told them I could guarantee conditions that no other location on the East Coast could offer. And I can, Selena. You know I can.”
“Mamá, my tournament—”
“Ay, your tournament.”
She said it like she referred to summertime tourist traffic, an inconvenience.
“You can move it, no? Do it the weekend before. Or the weekend after. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. The tides that weekend are aligned with the nesting cycle. I’ve planned around the lunar—”
“Mi corazón.”
My mother’s voice shifted to the tone I’d grown up with—the one that wasn’t cruel, exactly, but was so absolute it left no room for argument.
“I have been working on this for two months. I have spoken with their executives, their event coordinators, their lawyers. I have signed paperwork, mija. This is happening. And it is going to be wonderful for this town—for the businesses, for the tourism board, for everyone.”
For everyone.
The word hung there, glittering, daring me to ask whether “everyone” included me.
I didn’t ask. I already knew.
“And the turtle nests? On the north shore? You know—”
“The turtles will be fine. They’ve been nesting on that beach for hundreds of years, Selena. A few days of music and cameras isn’t going to—”
“A few days? Mamá, they’ve planned a full week just for setup. This is a huge undertaking. Generators, stage lighting, foot traffic across the entire—”
“Ay, Selena, enough.”
Final.
“Confía en mí. I know what I’m doing. I have always known what I’m doing. When have I ever let this town down?”
Never.
That was the answer, and she knew it.
Marina Torres had never let the town down.
She’d made the Fourth of July waves perform right along with the dock’s fireworks for twenty years running, and tourists came from three states away just to watch the water dance.
They hadn’t known why, but they always left Crescent Cove saying it had been magical. Ha, how right they were.
A side effect of the town’s barrier. Outsiders conveniently forgot anything supernatural when they left but kept the feelings it had inspired.
Apparently, that wasn’t enough anymore.
She had never let the town down.
She had only ever let me down, and only one of them counted in her mind.
“Okay, Mamá,” I said.
“Okay? Okay, you agree, or okay, you’re going to be difficult?”
“Okay, I have customers.”
A sigh.
“Está bien. Come by later so we can finish this. And Selena?”
“Yeah?”
“Try to be happy about this, mi corazón. Not everything has to be a fight.”
She hung up.
I set the phone on the counter and stood still for a long time.
Not everything has to be a fight.
No.
Just the things that mattered to me.
I’d spent the whole day trying not to think about how my carefully laid plans were all being ripped out from under me.
I’d closed the shack at four p.m., which was the time most people stopped pretending they wanted anything without alcohol in it on the beach.
I turned that business over to The Salty Siren and replaced my sensible work shoes with running sneakers.
That’s what I needed: a run. It wasn’t as good as being on the court, didn’t “spark joy” or whatever, but it was efficient and kept my cardio up. And with music blaring and my lungs burning, it was hard to focus on the other ache in my chest.
I kept today’s run to a short five-miler. I had a ritual to prepare for tonight.
The new moon found me on the beach at midnight.
Not the main beach—my spot.
Everyone in Crescent Cove had a spot, whether they admitted it or not. Mine was a small cove about a mile north of the boardwalk, where a small tidal cave sat behind a hidden stretch of white sand. You couldn’t see it from the road. You had to know it was there.
The full moon was what my tournament was synced to, its tidal pull creating the perfect conditions in the cove for the turtle hatchlings making their first crawl to the sea.
I’d always synced the volleyball tournament with it.
It was when my magic was strongest all year, powered by the excitement and community energy of my tournament.
I used it for the only real spell I ever did—a protection spell for those adorable little babies and all the other creatures that came across my beach. It took weeks of preparation.
The new moon was the start of the cycle. It was the setting of intentions, the moment you told the universe what you wanted, even if the universe had a well-documented history of not giving a shit.
My mother would have laughed at my “spot.” She could call ocean magic miles from shore, although she preferred the dock, where the convergence of ocean and the eyes of the townsfolk gave her the extra boost she pretended she didn’t need.
But me? I needed this exact place, where the sand held the day’s warmth, where the rocks had been worn smooth by centuries of tides, where the ocean whispered things I could almost, almost understand.
The sand was warm between my toes, the perfect temperature that reminded you it was alive, that billions of tiny fragments were shifting and breathing beneath your feet.
I’d brought my supplies in a canvas bag that had seen better decades: a mason jar of ocean water collected at high tide during the last full moon, five shells I’d found over the past month—each one had called to me in its own tiny way, though I’d die before admitting that—and a candle I’d have to light like some kind of medieval peasant.
Real witches lit their candles with magic. I lit mine with corner-store matches and spite.
The ritual wasn’t anything formal—goddess knew I’d tried the formal ones, watched Lupe whisper incantations and seen the air actually shimmer in response.
My ritual was more like…a conversation. Or maybe a confession.
I arranged the shells in a circle, placed the candle in the center, and sat cross-legged just inside the boundary, my palms pressed flat against the sand.
“Hi,” I whispered to the darkness. “It’s me again.”
The ocean answered how it always did—by continuing to exist, magnificently indifferent to my presence. But the sand beneath my fingers hummed, an old friend who had been waiting for me. I was on my beach, and maybe, in this exact spot at this exact moment, I was enough.
I closed my eyes and tried to do what my tía called “sinking into the element.” For her, it meant becoming one with the water, letting her consciousness ebb and flow until she couldn’t tell where she ended and the ocean began.
For me, it meant sitting very still and trying to feel something, anything, beyond the sand making my ass numb.
But tonight, it was different.
Maybe it was the new moon, pulling at that tiny reservoir of magic deep inside me.
Maybe it was my mother’s voice still ringing in my ears, atención de verdad, as if everything I’d poured into this place for the last decade was meaningless.
Maybe it was the fact that somewhere out there, a corporate surf circus was packing its branded water bottles and comeback-tour golden boy, all of it aimed at MY beach.
I pressed my palms deeper into the sand, and I felt it. The sand held the heat of a thousand summer days, the weight of a million footsteps, the echo of children laughing and lovers promising and seagulls calling.
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 into darkness 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.