Something was pulling the water out.
My chair clattered to the floor, and I was moving before I’d even had time to think, running across the sand toward the surf.
The ocean sank beneath Selena, and I was too far away. Fuck, I should have been out there. I should have just said yes.
“Selena, paddle in!” I yelled.
She was thirty yards out, sitting on her board, facing the horizon. She hadn’t felt it yet. She didn’t have the senses I did.
“Selena!”
She turned to look at me, and I saw the moment she finally felt it. The water dropping under her board and the horizon line climbing.
When the horizon climbs, it means one thing. It means the ocean is pulling back to throw itself forward.
The set came in from the east, which was wrong, and meant a certain ocean witch was calling water from a direction it didn’t want to come from.
The first wave of the set was eight feet. It came in fast and steep, the face of it too vertical, the lip already throwing before the wave had finished standing up. I’d surfed waves like this. I’d surfed waves bigger than this. I’d built my career on waves like this.
Selena had not.
I watched her try to turn her board. She was good—her instincts were right; she angled for the shoulder where the wave was weakest—but the ocean was just too powerful. She managed to stand.
For a second it was perfect. She was up, riding high on the face, completely focused, and my heart nearly stopped at the beauty of it.
Then the wave did what big waves do.
It closed out, fast, the entire face collapsing at once, and she was in the wrong position, and there was nothing I could do about it.
She went under.
The next few seconds stretched into eternity, and my feet never stopped moving.
The wave broke on top of her, the ugly, churning break of awave that’d been forced into a shape it didn’t want, all whitewater and no structure. It held her under because there was no channel to push her out. Her board shot up through the foam, leashless.
The second wave was already building behind the first.
I reached the shore.
Not again.
The image I’d been trying to shove away for three years resurfaced. Marcus going under in an ocean just like this, an ocean that didn’t care who was in it or on it. On a wave I’d called and he’d followed because that was what Marcus did—followed me into things, trusted my read, believed I knew what I was doing. Because El Tiburón was the best, no matter who got hurt around him.
I dove.
Find her. Just find her.
The thing normal people don’t understand about being a shifter—there is hardly any separation between your human self and your animal self. There is no moment when your human brain says,I think I’ll become a shark now.Your body takes over, the body that’s been sitting inside this limited human costume, tolerating the weak eyes and the slow reflexes and the pathetic single row of teeth, and it doesn’t ask permission. I’d been pushing that part of me away ever since my family had decided it was more important than my sister’s health, that tradition outweighed getting her the help she needed. I’d been El Tiburón, but I had closed off this part of myself to smile and hold up logos and be what my sponsors needed.
Now,sheneeded me. I was in the water, and I was fourteen feet of tiger shark before the surface closed over me.
Everything became crystal clear—the ocean’s electromagnetic field snapping into focus. I could feel every current, every disturbance in the water column. I could feel the magic too, Marina’s pull, the ancient magic beneath it, and now a horrible static that permeated it all.
And through all of that, I couldn’t feel Selena.
There was blood in the water.
That was all I needed; my tail pumped furiously. She was ten feet under me, tumbling. The first wave had her in its vortex, and the second wave’s pressure was pushing down on top of that. She wasn’t panicking—I could hear her heartbeat now, fast but steady, the heartbeat of someone who knew to hold her breath and wait—but she was disoriented. Limp.
