Chapter 2
Crystal sat cross-legged on her bed, the one she’d claimed in the L.A.W. mansion as hers. It still smelled faintly of cedar and the ocean, though given her recent chat with the Atlantic, that might have been less “faint” and more “looming.”
On the tray in front of her: one black candle, one lighter, a chalice of wine, three “inspirational” Post-it notes she’d angrily torn off her bathroom mirror, and a photo of Stan she’d printed just so she could set it on fire.
She struck the lighter, muttering, “Bye-bye, Captain Commitment Issues.” The flame flared, licking the edge of the photo until Stan’s smug grin wrinkled and blackened.
She raised the wine like a toast. “Here’s to forgetting you exist.”
The words of the forget-him spell were simple enough, lifted from a dusty grimoire and slightly modernized.
She chanted them three times, eyes fixed on the curling smoke.
“I release you, false lover, and I decree, ‘tis the best for you and me. Leave my memory and don’t return. I’ll replace you with the worth I’ve earned. ”
The room shifted.
The bed was gone. So was the mansion. The candlelight became red battle-lamps. Steel walls closed in around her. The low hum of engines vibrated up through her boots.
She knew this room. Knew it in her bones. The bridge of the frigate HMS Sutherland, her old posting. Only she wasn’t twenty-nine with a grudge against German cars. She was twenty-three, crisp in her uniform, hair pinned tight, hands braced on the wheel.
An alarm wailed. Somewhere below deck, voices shouted and repeated orders. Spray lashed the windows even though the sea outside was wrong. It was too dark, too alive, swells rolling in unnatural rhythm.
“Ma’am, something’s in the water!” a voice barked from the radar station.
Not something. Someone.
She saw it then. A figure rising out of the black water, taller than most men, hair waving like kelp in a current that didn’t exist. A sea-witch, pale as moonlight and smiling with too many teeth.
The commander barked, “Bring us about. Keep her broadside. She can’t breach from the flank.”
Crystal’s grip tightened on the wheel. Her younger self’s ‘Ay-ay’ came back to her, sharp and steady as she acknowledged her superior’s orders.
The Sutherland groaned under the maneuver, the deck tilting hard enough to send coffee mugs sliding across the bridge. The witch’s smile faltered when she made direct eye contact, her voice a low hiss that threaded straight into Crystal’s skull: Little sailor… We’ll meet again.
The memory fractured on those words.
Crystal jerked back into her room at the mansion, the candle snuffed out, the photo of Stan gone. Her wine had spilled across the duvet, and her bird was perched on the bedpost, staring at her as if it had just watched a ghost crawl out of her chest.
“Right,” she said, wiping her face with both hands. “That’s not what I ordered.”
She stayed there for a long moment, the wine slowly soaking into the duvet in a stain that looked like an inkblot test.
If she tilted her head, it even resembled the sea-witch’s smile.
“Perfect,” she muttered, hauling herself off the bed. She set the glass aside, mostly so she wouldn’t hurl it, and started pacing.
Why now?
She’d buried that memory. Not metaphorically.
She’d spelled it down, wrapped it in wards so tight even she couldn’t dig it up without getting a psychic nosebleed.
That day on the Sutherland had been the beginning of a chain of orders and compromises she didn’t want to look at too closely.
Everyone who’d witnessed the sea witch had to be spelled to forget.
Her bird fluttered down to the back of her chair, claws ticking against the wood.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “This is just a coincidence. I try to forget Stan, my brain takes the scenic route, and suddenly it’s amateur hour in maritime memory trauma.”
The bird cocked its head.
She stopped pacing. “Except it’s not just the memory, is it?”
That tide-surge feeling from earlier, the Atlantic’s voice in her head, the shards in the kitchen… It was all the same hum. Same pressure. The sea-witch’s pull from twenty-three-year-old Crystal’s bridge had been the exact feel of the ocean’s warning today.
Her pulse spiked.
If the witch was moving again, like the Atlantic had said…
She pressed her palms to her eyes, but that only made the phantom image of the witch loom larger.
“Bloody hell,” she whispered into her hands. “She’s not coming for me when I’m aboard a ship this time.”
The bird trilled low, almost approving, and Crystal dropped her hands. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll tell the others. Eventually. Once I know I’m not losing my mind.”
But she could already feel it… that same slow drumbeat the shard had given off when she touched it. Only now it was under her skin.
Crystal waited until the hallways stopped creaking with the sound of people doing witchy things, like shuffling grimoires, clinking chalices, arguing over whether nettle tea could be substituted for stinging nettle, and then she slipped out the back door.
The mansion’s gardens were still slick from the earlier plumbing purge. Her boots sank into the mossy path like the earth was trying to keep her from leaving. Which, given the house’s general protective personality, wouldn’t surprise her.
Her bird followed her overhead, wings silently gliding through the damp air as she took the long trail down toward the cove. The air was sharp with brine and the kind of humidity that crawled straight under your clothes.
When she stepped onto the rocky beach, she knew immediately something was wrong.
Brianna’s owl familiar was sitting in a tree, like a sentinel.
The tide was way up… too high for the moon phase or weather.
Waves slapped at the black rocks in quick, impatient bursts, as if the ocean had better things to do than wait for her.
And that hum…
Under her skin and in her ears. Slow, steady, matching the beat of her pulse. A ripple ran through the waves, far out in the dark water. Crystal narrowed her eyes. Not a boat. Not a log. A figure.
Her name came on the wind, not in her head this time, but out loud, stretched into something both intimate and mocking.
The figure was tall, with wet hair streaming behind it in a wild wind. Even at this distance, she could make out the unnatural paleness of the face, the black line of the mouth, the creepy smile.
The hum turned to a pounding drumbeat, and the air changed. Heavy. Charged.
“Not today,” Crystal muttered.
The Atlantic’s voice slammed into her mind like a shout. A raw, booming warning. Beware!
A wave reared up, bigger than it had any right to be, and crashed over her in a sheet of saltwater. She staggered back, coughing, hair plastered to her cheeks, and by the time she blinked the sting from her eyes, the figure was gone.
Her bird landed on her shoulder. “Don’t give me that look,” she told it, swiping at her dripping face. “I’m fine. Mostly.”
The tide was already receding, but the drumbeat under her skin didn’t fade.
She turned and started the climb back to the mansion, boots squelching. “Yeah,” she said to herself, “definitely telling the others. Right after I figure out how to make it sound like I’m not cursed or crazy.”
By the time Crystal shoved open the library doors, the fire roared in the hearth, and four heads turned toward her: Joell, Brianna, Magda, and Sahara, all gathered around the big oval table like they’d been plotting the downfall of a small nation.
Brianna arched an eyebrow. “I assume you didn’t just lose a fight with the shower?”
“Worse,” Crystal said, heading straight for the hearth and peeling off her rain cape with a wet slap. Her bird fluttered to the mantle and shook itself indignantly, scattering droplets onto Crystal’s head. “I just got told off by the Atlantic Ocean.”
Joell leaned back in her chair, studying her like a puzzle piece that didn’t fit. “You want to run that by us slowly?”
Crystal held her hands out to the fire, letting the heat sink into her fingers. “I went down to the cove. The tide was too high for the moon, waves all wrong, and then I saw her. Tall, pale, dripping malice, my old friend the sea-witch.”
Magda paused mid-page-turn. “The one from the Sutherland? The one you told me about when you visited me in Australia? I thought you were joking.”
“The very one. Same picket-fence smile. Same ‘I’m here to ruin your life’ energy.”
“I thought Bas spelled the entire ship to forget about that encounter.”
“She did, but as I was trying a ‘forget Stan’ spell, the memory resurfaced.” Crystal recounted the whole thing… her name on the wind, the drumbeat under her skin, the Atlantic’s bellowed beware, and the rogue wave that had tried to shove her into early retirement.
Brianna was standing now, her mug of tea forgotten. “You’re certain it wasn’t a vision? Spell backlash from earlier?”
Crystal shook her head. “I’ve had visions. This wasn’t a vision. This was weather trying to kill me while something in the water looked for the best angle.”
Sahara was already flipping through one of her coastal folklore tomes. “If she’s moving again, the tide patterns will show it. Did you feel the pull on the shore?”
Crystal nodded. “Felt it in my bones too. Still do.”
Joell’s voice was calm, but her eyes had sharpened. “And you didn’t think to mention you’d met this witch before?”
Crystal met her gaze without flinching. “I buried the memory—or rather, Bas did, for a reason. The Sutherland encounter wasn’t exactly tea party material, and everyone on board had to be spellbound to forget it.
But maybe she lifted it from me, later. Anyway, now the sea-witch is back.
And this time, she’s not coming for me on a ship. ”
The room went quiet except for the pop of the fire.
Magda set her book down. “Then we need to decide whether we’re going to her or waiting for her to come here.”
Crystal glanced at the window, where the night pressed in thick and cold. “Trust me,” she said, “she already knows exactly where I am.”