Page 3 of Summer L.A.W.

“I am not,” Crystal said, exactly like someone who was. She dragged a sleeve across her eyes and stood. “And even if I were, I am allowed to have one catastrophic morning. One. Then I will compartmentalize like the disciplined little box of knives that I am.”

“Plan?” Rayna asked.

“Tea,” Crystal said. “Then target practice. Then a shower so hot it resets my soul. Then perhaps I will petition the universe for a small, tasteful earthquake under Stan’s car.”

“Tea,” Joell agreed, ignoring the earthquake quip. “Then practice. Then perhaps you will fill out a form explaining exactly how you conjured cutlery without setting intention, so Sahara’s brain doesn’t explode.”

Sahara was already scribbling. “We could measure the salinity ratio of your tears versus standard coastal saturation and⁠—”

“Tea first,” Crystal repeated. She shifted her duffel higher, the strap biting into her shoulder. The weight of everything she’d kept at Stan’s place steadied her. She’d carried worse. She’d carried friends’ bodies through storms that came in wild and left in a whimper. She could carry this.

Victoria stepped aside, sweeping an arm toward the corridor. “The kitchen’s braced for impact.”

Crystal moved. The witches fell in around her the way they always did when a comrade was wounded, an unspoken wedge formation, cutting a path through air gone thick with emotion. Her boots thudded on the runner. The house exhaled, then settled, as if it had been holding its breath until she chose to keep walking.

“Quick note,” Rayna said as they reached the archway. “If the toad thing needs reversing, we can reverse it. Preferably before he hops into traffic.”

“I reversed it,” Crystal said. “Eventually.”

“Eventually?”

“I made him promise to repeat a sentence first.”

Victoria’s mouth curved up in a smirk. “Which sentence?”

Crystal lifted her chin. “‘Crystal is not too much. She is exactly the right amount of much. I am, however, 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 pencil since she chewed a hole in the last one. Victoria settled the 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 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 she’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. A signal.