Page 7 of Summer L.A.W.

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.