Chapter 1 #2
Crystal lifted her chin. “‘Crystal is not too much. She is the exact right amount of much. I am, in fact, insufficient.’ He stammered on ‘insufficient’, but we got there.”
“Good girl,” Joell said, and the approval hit Crystal harder than it should have. A lump threatened to reform in her throat, but she swallowed it.
They crossed into the kitchen. Sun streamed through the transom windows, laying out long bars of light across the marble tile.
Someone had left the tea things stacked on the counter.
Rayna went for the kettle. Sahara needed a new pen since she chewed a hole in the last one.
Victoria settled her raccoon with a biscuit.
Crystal set her duffel down and flexed her fingers until the tremor stopped.
Outside, a gull swept across the glass, white wings trimmed in gray. Crystal’s bird answered with a low whistle, the two sounds meeting like a strange melody.
She stared at the kettle until it boiled. When the whistle finally rose, she reached to lift it, and a flight of small blue lights flickered along the counter—four neat sparks, like stars. No one breathed. The lights winked out.
Crystal set the kettle down very carefully. “Brilliant,” she said to the air, voice steady again. “I appear to be making tea lights.”
“Pun noted and forgiven,” Rayna said as she picked up the kettle and began pouring. “Sugar?”
“God, yes.”
Victoria passed the cookie tin. Sahara leaned a hip against the counter, eyes on Crystal, weight of command warm as a cloak. “You don’t have to be okay yet,” she said.
“I know. I will be,” Crystal said, taking the mug, the heat of it anchoring her skin to her bones. “I’m better at being okay than most people are at breathing.”
“After tea,” Joell said, “we go downstairs. Range time. You’ll put holes in paper while you imagine Stan’s face. Then Sahara will take five drops of your tears for science, and we’ll put that sea glass under the microscope.”
Crystal nodded. “And then?”
“Then,” Joell said, “you tell me everything about the way the ocean has been talking to you since you walked in the door.”
Crystal’s laugh came out surprised. “You heard it?”
“I always do,” Joell said. “It’s louder around you today.”
Crystal wrapped both hands around her mug and let herself listen. There it was, beneath the clatter and the comfort of the tea, beneath her pride and her temper and the urge to set a small, controlled fire in a car park, the faint, insistent murmur of tide against stone. It sounded like a signal.
“Fine,” she said, and her mouth found an edge of a smile. “After tea and bullets and science, I’ll go down to the water and ask it what it wants.”
“And if it says revenge?” Rayna asked, too casually.
“Then,” Crystal said, raising the mug in a toast to her own terrible taste in men and better instincts, “we negotiate.”
The Atlantic wasn’t far. From the mansion’s kitchen door, the air thickened with salt, and the lawn gave way to a cliff the color of old pewter. Crystal walked it like it was a firing range—steady, measured, her bird familiar gliding silently, white, and silver above her.
The tide was up, gnawing at the rocks below with a low, rhythmic hunger. It was the kind of sound that made you think of old seaside myths, the kind with teeth and moral lessons no one wanted to learn twice.
You’re late, said a voice in her head, as casually as if they’d arranged to meet for coffee.
Crystal stopped dead at the edge of the bluff. “All right,” she muttered aloud, because ignoring telepathic weather systems was the first step toward padded rooms. “You don’t get to act as if I stood you up. I’ve been busy.”
Busy throwing knives at a German car, the Atlantic replied. Its tone was not oceanic majesty. It was wry, low, the sound of a tide curling into a smirk. Not your worst work, but a questionable use of conjuring.
Crystal squinted at the waves. “It was not conjuring. It was a controlled accident. Also, he called me ‘too much.’”
He was wrong. A pause. You’re exactly the right amount of much.
That knocked her a little sideways. “That’s what I said.” Several thousand square miles of water can’t be wrong. “Flattery from a body that’s swallowed half the known world means nothing.”
Then try prophecy. The sea’s voice shifted, darker. Something’s coming. You’ve felt it already, haven’t you? That pressure behind your eyes, that drag in your chest? The last time you felt it, you were—
“—twenty-three, on the Welsh coast,” she finished, surprising herself. “It pulled the fog inland for three days.”
And something slipped through with it.
Her stomach went cold. “You mean—”
Yes. The water surged hard against the rocks, sending spray high enough to spatter her boots. It’s moving again. Toward you.
Crystal curled her fingers into fists, nails biting her palms. “If this is about my love life, I swear—”
Not a man. Not exactly.
Her bird launched from the bluff, circling over the foamy churn as if scanning for a target. Crystal tracked it with her eyes, jaw tight. “Give me specifics.”
Soon. The voice softened again, sly as an incoming tide. But you’ll need the shards. The ones you cried this morning.
She hated that the ocean knew about that. “Those are mine.”
They’re ours, it corrected. You made them with me in your blood and me in your soul. Keep them close. They’ll signal before you do.
The wind lifted her hair, tangling the salt into it until she could taste the metal tang on her tongue. She breathed in, steadily. “Fine. I’ll keep them close. And if whatever’s coming tries me—”
We drown it together.
Crystal’s mouth curved. “Now you’re speaking my language.”
The Atlantic rolled a single wave higher than the rest, letting it break at her feet with a hiss that sounded almost like approval. She turned back toward the mansion, the bird following above her, the murmur of the tide still in her head.
From her early adulthood in the Royal Navy, the ocean spoke to her but didn’t say goodbye. It never did.
Crystal stepped back into the mansion’s kitchen and immediately found herself ankle-deep in water. Not the good kind, either. The Atlantic’s water had moods, and this was its bratty kid sister, saying, “I’m getting into everything you own”.
Joell was in the middle of the kitchen with a mop, glaring at a puddle as if it had insulted her. Brianna wrung out a dishtowel into a bucket that was already full, while Lioness stood in the doorway holding a mop upside down, looking betrayed.
“Explain,” Crystal said, peeling off her damp boots.
“We sprang a leak,” Joell said. “Actually, several leaks. Possibly a vendetta.”
“It’s in the pantry now,” Victoria added grimly, sloshing past with her bucket.
Sahara appeared from the hallway holding what looked suspiciously like a dripping grimoire. “It’s also in the library.”
Crystal blinked. “How does water get from the kitchen to the library?”
“Magic,” Lioness said, still holding her mop wrong. “And bad plumbing.”
That’s when the doorbell rang. Three sharp chimes, confident as if someone was sure they were the solution to everyone’s problem.
Sahara straightened, mopping in a perfect pivot toward the door. “That’ll be the plumber. Please tell me he’s not ninety.”
The plumber was not ninety. The plumber was tall enough to reach the top shelf without a ladder, with forearms that belonged in maritime folklore and a toolbelt that had seen better days but somehow made it hotter.
Dark hair, blue coveralls, and the kind of easy grin that suggested he could charm an industrial valve into working again.
He looked around at the witches, at the ankle-deep water, and let out a low whistle. “Ladies, where do you want me to start?”
“In the kitchen,” Joell said, smooth as cream. “Then possibly the library. We’ll… supervise.”
The plumber sauntered to the sink, toolbelt shifting with each precise movement. He had that quiet focus of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and how good they looked doing it.
Crystal leaned back against the counter, arms crossed, watching him set down his toolbox and kneel beside the sink. The bird above her gave a soft, knowing trill.
If the ocean had more to say, it could wait.
Lioness leaned one hip against the counter, her mop abandoned in favor of a hair-twirl. “So, is this a big job?” she asked, voice sugar-sweet.
“Could be,” he said, flashing a grin over his shoulder. “Might have to be here a while.”
Sahara, casually drying her hands on a dishtowel, stepped a little closer. “We don’t mind long jobs,” she said, with the kind of tone that could sweeten a camel’s disposition.
Lioness and Sahara traded a look that said they’d just mentally put him on the dessert menu.
Crystal rolled her eyes so hard they could’ve spun a ceiling fan. “Do you two need a chaperone, or should I go get a bucket of cold water? Oh, wait… We’ve already got plenty.”
The plumber chuckled without looking up and reached for a wrench. “Don’t worry, I can handle myself.”
“That’s what they all say,” Crystal muttered. “Then they drown.”
Brianna smirked.
“Are you always this warm and welcoming?”
“Only when I’m wet and cold,” Crystal shot back. “Which, congratulations, is now.”
“Congratulations?” Joell echoed sharply. “This isn’t our fault.”
The plumber tightened something under the sink, muscles flexing just enough to make both Brianna and Joell lean in an inch. Crystal crossed her arms, deciding someone had to be the voice of reason, and clearly, that someone was her.