By Sea Read online

  By Sea

  The Witches of Portland, Book Four

  T. Thorn Coyle

  1

  Raquel

  She looked ahead on the sun-washed shoreline and saw Zion’s dark shape, playing chicken with the waves. He knew better than to turn his back on the ocean. Raquel had taught him that early on. The waves on the Oregon coast could reach up and snatch a person before they even knew what happened. Tourists got dragged out to sea at least once a summer.

  You’d never see a local standing on a log, just as you’d never see a local turn her back on the sea.

  It was good to see Zion having fun, laughing, and running back and forth, filled with the energy of a thirteen-year-old boy. Lately, the smile that usually graced his face had become as rare as sun during the Oregon winter. But he still wouldn’t tell her what was wrong.

  “It’s nothing, Mom,” he kept insisting. Well, it was something, that was for sure. And it felt like more than just adolescent blues.

  The sand was cool, and crunched under the balls of her feet as Raquel walked, sneakers in hand. She skirted the massive, uprooted trees that dotted the coastline like the corpses of fallen giants. They looked like the bones of some mythical creatures, who lived in a land far away. A land that time forgot.

  Her dreadlocks tied back, she turned her face to the sun, and inhaled the brackish scent of salt water and washed-up seaweed. It soothed her heart and soul. The winter had been hard. She was so ready for Beltane and the warmer months.

  Raquel hadn’t been to the coast in entirely too long. But for a single parent running her own business, days off were in short supply. It didn’t matter how busy her life was, though, she always reached the point where she just had to get close to the ocean. She needed her dose of salt water, sea air, and the screech of seagulls flying over the cliffs.

  So today, she’d left her coven sister Cassiel in charge of the café, packed Zion into her beetle-green electric Fiat, and made the two-hour drive to Lincoln City.

  Just up ahead was a five-foot-tall pyramid of driftwood. People loved to make sculptures of the sea detritus, and the park service always came along and knocked them back down again. The never ending cycling of nature, art, and government rules.

  They’d been coming to this beach since Zion was five, after his dad died and Raquel needed to do things that got her away. Zion still loved the kites that flew in bright array when the wind was right. They’d already walked by the kites. Raquel could hear them flapping in the wind behind her. She inhaled, as deeply as she could, and held the breath in her lungs. Then she slowly exhaled. Goddess, her soul needed this. She watched the waves rolling in as she walked, tumbling and crashing into nothingness, until there was just a slender wash of water, snaking up onto the shore.

  “Sorry I’ve turned my back on you lately, Mama.” Raquel said. “You are my heart, my soul. And I know it’s been too long.”

  Yemọja. She of the oceans and the rivers. Siren of the sea. Protector of children and women. Raquel had been dedicated to Yemọja since long before she became a witch. She just hadn’t known the Power’s name back then.

  Raquel had always been a creature of the sea. She even collected mermaids as a child, loving the strangeness of a being that was half human, half massive fish.

  Raised a nominal Christian, it was only once she started studying magic—and she and Brenda had formed Arrow and Crescent Coven together—that she began to understand that the ocean had a Goddess. Was a Goddess. Or really, what some African peoples called an òrìṣà, a Power. And that Power had a name.

  Raquel had worshiped Yemọja ever since.

  Zion looked happy. Maybe she just needed to get him out of the city more often. Away from what troubled him. Of course, not every place in Oregon felt safe for a Black mother and her child. Her own mama had taught her that.

  “But you can’t let that stop you, girl,” she murmured to the wind.

  White-and-gray gulls swooped down in front of her, and began picking at the shoreline, looking for small crabs. A group of plovers ran towards the water, and then raced back. It was amazing how they moved in concert like that, almost as if they were one being. Kind of like bees, she supposed. She wondered how much individual plover consciousness there was.

  Look at you, musing on the deep mysteries of bird brains, she chided herself.

  Zion shrieked, and her head snapped towards him again, just in time to see the small wave that had hit him begin to recede. His pants were drenched. Well, she’d planned for that, hadn’t she? Making him put extra pants and socks, and a T-shirt even, into his backpack, currently locked in the trunk of the car. You never knew what was going to happen on the coast.

  The sun highlighted his limbs, and the shape of his beautiful head. When Zion was young, a local painter had done a portrait of him as a tarot card—The Sun. In the painting, his arms upraised, huge grin on his face, his whole body was outlined by bright golden rays. Just like today. Her sunny boy, he warmed her heart.

  Raquel took in another breath and paused on the sand for a moment, turning to face her beloved ocean full-on. The sun was just at her left side, still high, but beginning to wester. She dug her feet into the sand, and dropped her shoes. She raised her own arms to the sky.

  “Yemọja! Mother, ocean, water of my heart, of my spit, of my blood. Renew me, let me grow again. Watch over and protect my son, Zion. Whatever troubles his heart, let him know that his mother loves him…and guide me, please. Show me the best way to comfort him, and help him on his path. Yemọja, please bless our family. Give us the strength we need, and give me a sign that I’m on the right track. Blessed be. Ashé.”

  The light breeze ruffled the edges of her dreadlocks. Raquel needed renewal. Badly. She needed to not always work so hard. And lately? Maybe this was what people called a crisis of faith. She felt at odds with herself. With the coven. And with her own power.

  She felt the salt of tears, pricking at the back of her eyes. She blinked them back and took in a shuddering breath. Goddess, so much emotion all of a sudden!

  “Mama? Please. Ease this aching in my heart.”

  A lot of things made her heart ache these days. Another boy had been killed by police, and she was raising a Black son. The climate was still changing, the earth suffering. Some days, it felt as if the whole world were on fire. She needed the cooling waters to bathe her soul.

  But that wasn’t all.

  “And Mama? If it’s not too much to ask, maybe even send me someone to love, who will love me back.”

  There. She’d said the words out loud.

  It had been so long since someone had held Raquel at night. So long since she had someone other than her coven and her friends to make her laugh.

  Too long since someone had looked at her, just as a woman. Not a parent. Not a priestess. Not their boss. Maybe that was why she felt at odds with her power. She was sick of holding it all the time.

  She just needed a damn break.

  And the coven had been so serious these days. Their magic had taken a turn in the last year. It was a good thing, but damn, a woman could use some ease and celebration, you know?

  And with the trouble Zion was in, whatever it was…? Laughter had been in short supply all around.

  Raquel sighed, and pressed her fingers into the corners of her eyes. She wanted love and everything that came with it. She just didn’t see how it was going to happen. When did she ever have time to meet someone? And she sure didn’t have the energy to waste on those dating apps. She’d heard they were mostly for sex these days, anyway. Not that she had anything against sex, but she did okay for that on her own. She wanted sex. But she wanted it mixed in with the possibility of love.

  “Zion!” she called across the sand.

  His head whipped around,
and he grinned, a broad smile filled with white teeth. He ran toward her, feet churning the sand as he went, streaks of it sticking to his wet jeans. Raquel couldn’t help but smile.

  “Where are your shoes?”

  He pointed toward one of the big logs behind her.

  “Up there. But Mama, look what I found!”

  He held out his hands. In one small palm was a sand dollar, perfect and whole, untouched by the beaks of the seagulls and the ravages of being bashed against the shore. And in the other palm was a beautiful, soft-edged piece of turquoise. Sea glass.

  “Oh baby, those are beautiful.”

  “Hold out your hand,” he said.

  She did, and he dropped the sea glass into her palm.

  “That’s for you.”

  “Thank you baby, I love it.” She folded her son into her arms, just for a moment, looking at the ocean over his head. He smelled of the sea, and the sweat of a boy.

  As always these days, Zion pulled away first. She wondered how quickly the day was coming that he wouldn’t let her hug him in public at all. Soon, she bet.

  “You hungry?”

  “Yes!”

  It was so good to see him happy.

  “Let’s go get some food, then. Get your shoes on.”

  As Zion raced to get his sneakers, Raquel turned toward the ocean once again. She held up the sea glass toward the ocean. It glowed in the light of the sun. Luminous.

  She hoped this token from the ocean was a sign that good things were coming.

  2

  Charlie

  Damn, Charlie loved spring. At least he used to.

  The crisp, blue skies. The blooming tulips and cherry trees. The influx of children who overran the shop when they were released from school.

  Yeah. It was that time of year. Owlbear Games was swamped with preteens and teenagers, all scoping out the newest games, looking for cards to boost their carefully put-together packs, or eyeing pewter miniatures in the display cases.

  Lindsey Sterling played her violin ode to Skyrim over the speakers, and Charlie was ensconced at the far end of the long, glass display counter, behind his computer, working on the books, a steaming cup of milky tea at his right hand.

  Sam was at the opposite end, working the register. She was a young Korean American woman with long black hair, two eyebrow piercings, and a black hoodie with a Princess Leia silhouette in red and the caption: “A woman’s place is in the resistance.”

  Sam had been a godsend to Owlbear. Not only was she a hard worker, she was a geek extraordinaire. Sam knew her stuff, and didn’t take shit from the sexist dirtbags that occasionally darkened the shop’s door. In her spare time, she DMd tabletop adventures, wrote her own games, and even did some coding. He knew she was secretly hoping to make it big someday.

  Charlie had asked her once why she didn’t go work for a gaming company, but she insisted she was just messing around. Messing around or scared to put herself out there? Made no difference. Charlie knew better than to push. Everyone grew into themselves in their own time.

  “You couldn’t die in the middle of winter, could you?” He jabbed at the keys. “You had to die in spring, and throw everything into a tailspin.” His father. His beloved, stern, problematic father. It wasn’t actually that he had messed up Charlie’s favorite season, marking it forever as “when Dad died.” It was that Charlie…was overwhelmed by it all.

  Charlie took a sip of tea, a cardamom-laced Assam. His favorite tea, on his favorite kind of day, in a shop he now, amazingly, owned free and clear.

  Charlie felt like shit.

  Owlbear had no mortgage now because Charlie’s father had co-signed the building loan six years before. And two weeks ago? His sixty-five-year-old heart had decided to just give up.

  David Dillon had left Charlie enough money to pay off the building. So yeah, Owlbear was his now. No one could take it, or his apartment above it, away.

  But he’d also left Charlie the legacy of an attic of boxes filled with things Charlie didn’t want to think of. Things that troubled him.

  He tucked an errant strand of gold-blond hair back behind his ear and sighed. He really shouldn’t be thinking about his father’s past. He needed to focus on these books.

  Whether a business was doing well or poorly, there were always numbers to crunch. His very non-favorite thing to do, but the end of April was coming pretty damn quick, and if he didn’t get all of his receipts entered, Charlie knew he’d be very unhappy come quarter’s end. Just because last year’s taxes had been filed a month before didn’t mean he could slack on this year’s accounting.

  He really shouldn’t be doing accounts in the middle of a rush, but Sam insisted she was fine, and besides, from this vantage point, Charlie could easily keep an eye on the browsing kids without looming. Nothing cleared a shop out more quickly than a looming and suspicious owner.

  He also checked periodically on the twenty-somethings back at the gaming tables. A group of white dudes with fancy, high-and-tight hair cuts, with a longer swathe swooping over their foreheads, they’d been coming in more and more lately. They were polite and friendly, but there was something a little off about them. They didn’t look like the usual run of nerds.

  Besides, they played HackMaster. Charlie never trusted anyone who was into that game.

  Not that Charlie hadn’t learned to question his prejudices every step of the way in this business.

  Prejudices. Yeah. Back to Dad.

  His father’s funeral had taken place the week before. A lot of his buddies from the VA had attended, gregarious men with haunted eyes. Charlie found he didn’t like them much. He felt badly about it, but that was just the truth. Not that Charlie had anything against veterans. Plenty of them came into the shop, and to game nights. But these friends of his father’s? Charlie had the eerie sense that they were waiting for some signal from him, as though he was suddenly going to join some secret club.

  He had a suspicion about that, but wasn’t ready to face it head-on. Maybe some things needed to stay in boxes.

  “Look! They have new Magic packs!” One of the kids near the wire spinning racks held up a booster deck, a grin so big on her face you’d think it was Christmas.

  Charlie smiled. He loved the preteens most of all. They weren’t afraid to be excited about things. They hadn’t had their joy slammed out of them against school lockers enough times to beat it out of them. Yet.

  The kids were good for his heart and soul.

  Sam had told Charlie to take the rest of the month off, but he couldn’t stand rattling around his childhood home. It just felt like work. A burden instead of a gift. Heavy with years, emotions, and those damn secrets. The few boxes he’d looked at were almost enough to convince him to shove the bulk of it into a storage space, and get the old Northeast Portland house cleared and cleaned, and…

  Charlie wasn’t sure what the step after that was. Sell the place? Move in? At any rate, he could ignore the house and the dresser drawers, and the piles of papers, and the boxes of memorabilia for now. No rush, except the fact that it had to get done someday.

  He shook his head, then realized he’d entered the same receipt three times already.

  “Damn it.”

  He wasn’t good for anything these days. Charlie shoved back from the computer. May as well…do what? His eyes lit on the kids ogling the pewter miniatures.

  “You finding what you need?” he asked. “Want to see any of the figures?”

  The boy and girl were small, the boy looked Latinx and the girl was definitely white, with a dirty blond braid down her back. They smelled like bubble gum.

  The boy pointed to one of the unpainted figures. An ogre with a battle-ax.

  Charlie jingled his keys from his jeans pocket and unlocked the case, carefully picking up the tiny figure between his big fingers.

  The kids looked at him with large eyes, brown and hazel. He knew he could be intimidating, with his broad, weightlifter’s shoulders and chest covered by a Deadpool
T-shirt, blond hair just brushing his shoulders.

  “Thanks,” the boy said, when Charlie placed the figure in his hand.

  “What are your names?”

  “Joe,” the boy said.

  “Tracy,” said the girl.

  “Do you paint?” Charlie asked.

  They both nodded.

  “That’s great. We just got some new brushes in if you need them.”

  He led them over to the display that held tiny pots and squeeze bottles of brightly colored paints, and a variety of brushes.

  The sound of a Star Trek phaser announced that someone had come in the door.

  “Sobrino! Are you bothering this man?”

  A harried-looking, trim man bustled toward them, a crease on his brow. His dark brown hair was receding and he wore a purple button down shirt over slacks and stylish leather shoes. A younger child followed him, another boy of around seven, if Charlie had to guess.

  The new child’s eyes grew huge, and he gasped.

  “Are you Thor?” he asked.

  Charlie laughed.

  “Henry!” the man said. He looked embarrassed. “Just because a man has blond hair doesn’t mean he’s from the movies.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Charlie said. “Happens all the time.”

  He crouched down in front of the boy. “I’m not Thor, but I’m pleased to meet you, Henry. My name’s Charlie and I was just showing your…brother?” he looked at the other boy, who nodded. “I was just showing your brother some miniatures and paints.”

  He stood then, and addressed the man. “Charlie Dillon.” He held out his hand. The men shook.

  “Alejandro López. Thanks for letting the kids poke around your shop on their own. These are my nephews. The boys go to two different schools now, and one of the other parents told me this was a safe place to meet up.”

  “We try to make it welcoming for everyone, and the older kids are certainly welcome here on their own. Any younger than eleven or twelve, and we’d worry. But a lot of parents drop their kids here. Feel free to leave your phone number at the desk. We keep a database in case anything goes wrong.”