16. Selena
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Selena
Elliot
Good morning. Are you up?
Me
No
Elliot
They redid the RipTide compound last night. It’s on the north stretch now.
I sat up.
Me
Define north stretch
Elliot
Past the high-tide line. They moved everything after the bird incident. They said the location had been “compromised.”
Compromised.
So my brilliant plan had only made things worse. That was right on track for my life.
Me
Elliot thats where the nests are
Elliot
I know.
The hatchlings orient by light. They come up at night and crawl toward what’s brightest. It’s supposed to be the moon on the water.
RipTide’s compound has a forty-foot LED wall, playing the same damn commercial over and over.
I’d seen it. Seen a certain someone’s face plastered all over it.
If the hatchlings crawled the wrong way because of it, they were much more likely to get eaten or simply die of exhaustion.
Me
Ok so we file a complaint with the coastal preserve, they have to move
Elliot
I filed three weeks ago. I filed again on Friday. It’s “under review.”
Charlene at the county office says it got kicked up to a discretionary committee.
Selena, there has never been a discretionary committee. I’ve been doing this for eight years. The permit process is one guy named Walt.
I thought about the man in the white button-up shirt on the beach talking with Chase. About every other corporate employee I’d seen crawling around that compound.
This was about dollars to them, and moving the tents again cost money.
I also knew exactly how “efficient” our town’s bureaucracy was.
Me
What do you need?
Elliot
The compound moved. That’s all. Two hundred feet south and the nests have a dark corridor to the water. RipTide can have the entire rest of the beach.
The north stretch has the best camera angle. That’s the real reason they’re up there.
Me
I’ll fix it
Elliot
How?
Me
Don’t worry about it
Three dots appeared and disappeared twice, the closest Elliot got to protesting.
Elliot
Please don’t get arrested before the tournament. I can’t afford your bail before we get that tournament money.
Me
No promises
He sent back a turtle emoji and a thumbs-up, and I lay there, trying to formulate a new plan.
Two hundred feet. That was nothing. They could move the whole compound in an afternoon, and they wouldn’t, because the cameras liked the north light, and it would move their bottom line ever so slightly.
Even though it would cost the lives of innocent creatures.
But they didn’t care. Turtles don’t buy energy drinks.
Fine.
I’d make them move.
When people imagine an ocean witch, they picture my mother—and fair, that’s what an ocean witch looked like. Brimming with power, enough to control—or at least manipulate—a force so vast it was almost beyond comprehension. The whole heaving, depthless weight of it, hers to the horizon.
I got the beach.
The sand, the shore, the margin. The strip everyone walked over to get to the ocean.
I sometimes wondered if, when our family’s magic got divided up, my mother received the sea and I received the part the sea wiped clean twice a day.
Even my weak magic had always resonated with every part, from the creatures who lived there, to the shells they left behind, but especially with the sand that was the foundation.
It still stung, but as I’d grown older—if not wiser—I tried to think of it as zoning: the water was hers, but every grain from the dunes to the tide line was mine, and RipTide had built their little branded city on top of it.
Well, unlike my mother, I wasn’t a very hospitable landlord.
And here’s what I knew about that little city, from observation and one very satisfying afternoon of bird-related vandalism: the whole thing ran on a fresh-water line they’d trenched up from the public hookup by the showers.
They’d blocked off the public resource for their own purposes and sabotaging it there would be nearly impossible with the amount of staff around.
They wanted misters in the VIP tent and a foot rinse for influencers who didn’t like sand at the beach, and they had gotten them.
They’d buried their lines shallow, maybe two feet down, under thirty yards of sand.
My sand.
So, I asked the sand to give it back. I asked it to surface the line slowly, the way shells and sea glass and lost things all surfaced throughout the day. Then let the lines bake in the sun, get stepped on, get kinked, get expensive.
And while I was at it, why not a little more sabotage? Some sand drifting into the generators, sand in the misters, tent stakes that wouldn’t hold, and most importantly, cameras they couldn’t keep upright. Very expensive cameras that kept crashing to the ground.
Nothing too dramatic—or traceable. Just perfectly normal beach things, until the north stretch cost more than the camera angle was worth.
The seagulls had been fun, hilarious even, but the fastest way to hurt a corporation was on its bottom line.
I went at dusk, when the crew had thinned to two guys breaking down the demo stage and a security guard whose entire job was apparently surfing his phone.
I sat in the soft sand above the trench line like a woman enjoying the sunset, El Soldado stationed on a piling as lookout, and I pushed my hands wrist-deep into the warm sand and said hello.
The sand said hello back.
It always did.
Whatever else was wrong with me, that had never gone quiet.
I could feel the whole sleeping body of the beach under my palms—the dry top layer still warm from the afternoon and the packed dark weight beneath.
And embedded in that, thirty yards out, a foreign, cold plastic thread tunneling through my beach.
Up, I asked. Give it back.
My magic flickered like a dying flashlight and went out.
I reached again, and there was nothing to reach for—a hollow where the current should be, scraped clean. The sand under my hands stayed still.
It spoke to me, but it did not obey me.
Somewhere behind me the LED wall flashed at an empty beach.
“No,” I told the beach. “We just did this. We got those goddamn seagulls to listen, and we know how they are.”
The beach did not care.
I tried again, slower—breath out, ask, don’t grab.
I asked.
I asked politely.
Nothing.
I asked significantly less politely with a slew of English and Spanish curse words, and I got one flicker, one pathetic hiccup of effort, and a single elbow of black pipe broke the surface.
Then the hollow feeling rang through me like a bell, achingly empty in my chest, and I sat down dizzy in the evening breeze.
El Soldado made a low noise, and I knew exactly what it meant.
“I’m fine.”
He sailed down, landed beside me, and fixed me with his one black eye, and the look said, You know what you have to do.
Two days ago I’d been a hurricane, rattling a van off its axles.
But that power hadn’t been mine, it was borrowed, and the source was six-foot-something of a smug, shark-shaped problem.
“Don’t,” I said.
He preened a wing feather, insufferably.
What was I even doing? I’d gotten one taste of power, and now I was sure that was the solution to all of this?
I could go to City Hall tomorrow, make some more noise about the complaint.
That was the right move. I could focus on relocating my tournament, although I knew we would get far fewer signups if we weren’t on the main beach.
I could work at Shark Bites and smile at tourists and have all my small, beautiful things—
I heard it in her voice, and my whole body flinched.
No.
I was going to make them move their compound. I was going to protect these nests with Elliot and get my tournament and raise money, and I wasn’t going to be small.
And to do that, I needed magic, big magic, and there was exactly one person who could light me up like the Crescent Cove lighthouse.
I walked home. I ate dinner with Lupe, who told me about Antonio’s new grievance with his manager, and I said “mmm” in the right places, and the whole time the thought wormed its way deeper into my brain, completely at home, like it paid rent.
It would be for the turtles.
That was the loophole that made it fine.
This had nothing to do with him—his stupid lip ring, his stupid smile that was just a little brighter around me.
This was purely resource allocation. Witches had drawn power from willing participants for centuries, and he’d made it abundantly clear he was willing.
Then why did it leave a knot in my stomach?
I cleared my dishes without hearing what Lupe was saying and headed upstairs.
I lay in the dark doing absolutely nothing. A nothing that comprised opening Instagram, navigating to his profile, and clicking on his story.
The first was a video of him flexing his arms in the mirror, the text reading:
in case no one gave you this today
I didn’t know it was possible to roll your eyes so hard it hurt.
But when the next photo popped up, I nearly dropped my phone.
He was standing in front of Shark Bites, taking a selfie with an exaggerated frowny face.
best smoothies in town closed early today =( =( =(
Had he come to see me again?
I didn’t let my brain take over before I opened my DMs to see a video from him tossing El Soldado a piece of what looked like a protein bar.
el_tiburón
had to settle for your coworker
Wipe the stupid grin off your face, Torres.
This is for the turtles.
beachbruja
he’s going to be insufferable now, thanks for that
el_tiburón
any time
miss me like I missed you?
beachbruja
of course not
el_tiburón
you’re cute when you lie
That arrogant, over-muscled asshole.
Another message popped up.
el_tiburón
so u comin over tonight?
beachbruja
no way in hell
el_tiburón
another lie huh? makes me think about our pull-up competition
and we all know how that ended
I stared at the emojis.
Oh, I was going to use him. I was going to power up so I could zap him back to hell where he belonged.
beachbruja
fuck you
el_tiburón
whenever you’re ready, baby
room 14. seaview motor lodge
there is no view of the sea
The message thread sat there, smug, the little read receipt glowing like a curse.
beachbruja
this is not what you think it is
el_tiburón
ok
beachbruja
i mean it. this is a transaction
el_tiburón
whatever you say
beachbruja
stop agreeing with me
el_tiburón
room 14