The starfish moved agonizingly slowly, its tiny tube feet finding purchase on the rock. But it was moving in the right direction, either guided by me or dumb luck, I wasn’t sure. I could have just picked it up, but my ego wouldn’t allow it. I could use magic for this. I could! Eventually, its arms dipped into the tide pool and it was safe. The hum in my fingers faded to nothing. Spell complete. Alert the elders circle.
My grandmother famously lit the entire cove in bioluminescence for her dawn rituals. My mother could call a wave taller than any of the town’s buildings if she wanted. I moved a starfish six inches.
I stood up and wiped my hands on my jean shorts, turning to face the beach—my beach.
Crescent Cove lay before me in the blue-gray light of almost dawn, looking like it always looked, like a postcard that had been left in the sun just long enough to feel real instead of pretty. The boardwalk curved along the shore, its piers coated in barnacles and stray pieces of kelp. My snack shack—Shark Bites, a name I’d chosen at twenty-two and been too cheap to rebrand ever since—sat at the far end, its turquoise paint peeling in a charming way, not a “the to-do list was too long” way. Beyond it, the town climbed the gentle hill in a scatter of pastel buildings and salt-weathered roofs, still sleeping, still the same. Always the same.
Mrs. Walker’s rooster familiar would crow at exactly 5:47 AM. It had been crowing at 5:47 AM for ten years. I could set my watch by it, if I wore a watch, which I didn’t because I’d given upon time somewhere around my twenty-second birthday when I realized every day in Crescent Cove was exactly the same as the one before it.
Even my volleyball net was the same, the one I’d been practicing on since I’d first been given a ball at six.
It stood twenty yards from my shop, its posts buried in the soft white sand. Beyond it was the ocean, vast and wild and full of things I’d never have enough power to truly know. But on that court I’d taught myself to fly without wings, to strike with the force my magic could never summon.
I glanced around—empty beach, empty boardwalk, not even the joggers were up yet. It would be easy to retrieve the ball I kept behind the counter and let time slip away as I fell into the one thing in my life that felt right.
But I had to open the shack, prep the smoothie station, check on the turtle nesting sites before the beach got crowded. I had responsibilities, and absolutely none of them involved standing on a volleyball court alone at dawn like some washed-up athlete in a sports movie montage.
Because that’s what I was.
I pulled my keys out of my pocket and unlocked the rolling door that covered the front of the shack, ignoring the ache that always followed. Not in my body—my body was fine, better than fine, built by years of athletic conditioning and daily runs, the athlete in me never retiring. The ache was between my ribs, in the place where three scholarship offers had once lived before I’d let them die.
UC Santa Barbara, University of Hawaii, and UCLA—all a world away from Crescent Cove.
Full rides, each of them, with coaches who called every week for a summer. The summer my abuela had gotten sick. The family had come together, saying that “Torreses are strongest together.” Especially my mother. I don’t know what my weak magic contributed to this greater Torres cauldron, but every time I brought up college, she gave me that look. The patient one. Then she’d remind me, “Your abuela held this family togetherfor fifty years, mija, and now she needs us. You’d really leave? For agame?”
She never told me no. She just made staying the only thing a good granddaughter could do and leaving the thing that proved I’d never really been one of them, never been part of the Torres magical legacy. So I picked up the phone three times that summer and told three coaches I wasn’t coming. UC Santa Barbara was the last. The coach went quiet, then said, “If you change your mind, you call me.”
I never called.
I folded the offers into the kitchen drawer with the takeout menus and dead batteries, and I stayed. I sat with my abuela through the worst of it, and I do not regret that. She recovered after six months of fighting and was still hosting her town-famous parties at least once a month.
I regret that no one ever asked if I wanted to. They just assumed the smallest Torres would be the one to fold.
And I was.
And I did.
I became the third generation of Torres women to stay in a town built on ancient ley lines, the perfect home for witches, brujas, shifters—and not a lot of room for those who weren’t.
But that was ten years ago. A different Selena—a younger, dumber Selena who thought staying meant something noble instead of something cowardly. But the doors to a different future had shut, no matter my reasoning.
I shook it off like I always did—quickly, before it could settle—and headed toward the shack, unlocking the side door that barely kept out the wind, let alone a determined intruder. But the only thing that got “intruded” on in Crescent Cove was personal drama, not derelict beachside snack shacks.
The seagulls roosting on the grass roof didn’t even look up. Typical.
I flipped on the lights, and the blender whirred to life on its own, which wasn’t magic—it was a faulty power switch. Put it on the list.
The menu board still had last week’s special on it: The Turtle Power Smoothie. It was made with mango, spirulina, and the desperate hope that buying this will make you feel like a good person, with the proceeds going to our local marine rescue. I should probably change that. I wouldn’t, though. The tourists loved it when I was mean to them. Stockholm syndrome by way of açaí bowl.
I was halfway through prepping the protein powder station when El Soldado landed on the counter with what was becoming a worrying level of audacity.
He was one of the older gulls—missing an eye, one slightly crooked wing from a fishing line incident I’d helped bandage two summers ago, and an attitude that suggested he’d seen more in his thirty years than most humans ever did. He’d been coming to the shack every morning since the fishing line incident, which I’d initially found touching and now found financially unsustainable. The bird ate more fries than a boardwalk tourist.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
He flipped his head over, looking at me with that same unbreaking stare. Black eye, no blinking, and unnervingly observant.
“You’re not as cute as you think you are.”
