Jingle Spells (Oak Haven Witches #2)

1. Blue Christmas

Blue Christmas

The greased-up pompadours of the Elvis dancers glinted in the December sunshine.

In Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park, seven men grooved and jived in a loose circle as an almost-but-not-quite-right cover of “C’mon Everybody” blared through a nearby speaker.

Ostensibly the men were dancing together, but in truth each was lost in a rockabilly fantasia of his own.

Hips swiveled and elbows pumped for an audience of lovesick girls who existed only in the dancers’ minds.

Occasionally one of them would burst into the center of the circle for a bit of anachronistic breakdancing.

Although no live teenyboppers were screaming for their Japanese Elvises (Elvi?), a modest crowd had gathered to watch, nonetheless.

Delighted tourists snapped photos and videos to entertain the folks back home.

Meanwhile locals looked on with a sort of knowing amusement; the “rock ’n’ roller-zoku,” as the men were known, have been a constant presence in the park for decades.

Meanwhile Delilah Melrose stood apart from it all: frowning, miserable, lost in her own thoughts.

Or rather, just one thought: Papa would have loved this .

When the song ended, the dancers gathered in a clump near the speaker. They whispered to one another, clearly planning something.

What could this be, wondered the crowd, perhaps some special event?

Soon the rock ’n’ roller-zoku traded their leather jackets for red coats lined with white fur. They draped strings of battery-powered twinkle lights around their necks. One brave soul even pinned a floppy Santa hat to the top of his pompadour.

Oh yes, thought the crowd. A lovely Christmas show!

Oh no, thought Delilah. A goddamn Christmas show.

Delilah had deliberately, naively, chosen to visit East Asia in December, hoping to skip the holidays.

She didn’t realize that going to Tokyo to avoid Christmas is like going to Los Angeles to avoid smog.

She’d traveled thousands of miles to avoid the holly-jolly and found herself positively soaking in it.

As the opening notes of “Santa Claus is Back in Town” echoed across the park, Delilah turned and fled towards Harajuku Station.

Roughly wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, she muttered, “Fucking Christmas...”

Delilah’s misguided decision to visit Tokyo in December had been made in the worst possible way—in the middle of an argument.

She was the eldest of three sisters: Scarlett was second, and Luna third.

All three were witches, as was their mother, and as were all the women in their small New England town of Oak Haven.

The Melrose family was something of a “first among equals” in the town: their lineage dated all the way back to the town founders, who’d fled Salem back in the seventeenth century.

The girls’ idyllic childhood had come to an abrupt and horrific end with the death of their father when Delilah was nineteen, Scarlett eighteen, and Luna sixteen.

Each daughter had responded to the tragedy in her own way.

Scarlett fled to the West Coast, swearing off magic and trying to blend in with the normies of San Francisco.

Luna did the exact opposite: she focused obsessively on her magical studies, drifting from coven to coven like an excessively curious tumbleweed.

And Delilah? Delilah was the eldest. Responsible. Reliable. She didn’t wander and study and perfect her witchcraft like Luna, and she didn’t run away and date boys and feign “normality” like Scarlett. No. Delilah stayed.

She’d devoted the decade after Papa’s death to managing the Melrose family business: Oak Haven’s Stargazer Inn. She worked, and behaved herself, and stood glumly behind the reservation desk as her twenties passed her by.

When Scarlett finally did return to Oak Haven, she offered to assume her share of the burden in caring for the inn. Which meant Delilah suddenly found herself a free agent for the first time in her life. With great excitement, she’d packed a bag. The only question was, where to go?

Travel is quite different for Oak Haven witches than for average people.

The women of Oak Haven have the ability to create and move through portals: a wall in one place can become a door to any other.

For an Oak Haven witch, traveling from the Stargazer Hotel to, say, a Marriott in Sydney was merely a question of the right incantation and a pristine level of mental focus.

Gifted with the ability to go anywhere, baby sister Luna had ravenously gone everywhere.

And in all the places she visited, she sought out magical communities with interesting ways of working and thinking and practicing their craft.

It had been an adventurous life... but also rather a lonely one.

So when Delilah asked to come along, Luna was delighted to have a companion.

They visited a coven on Mongolia’s Eastern Steppes, where they studied a remarkable form of nature magic that could bend the very air to their will.

They visited the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia, Turkey, where the witches cure disease and extend life nearly to infinity.

They practiced telekinesis with the Warlpiri in the Great Sandy Desert of Australia.

Luna was over the moon: at last, she had a companion in learning about all the mysteries of the magical world.

As it turned out, what Delilah mainly learned was that she hated sleeping in yurts.

And she wasn’t so interested in finding out the mysteries of the magical world. She was more keen on finding eight-hundred-thread-count sheets and a bartender who could make a decent Manhattan.

To her credit, Delilah’s patience with her sister’s vagrant lifestyle stretched for nearly eight months. But when her little sister proposed a lengthy stay with a cadre of reindeer-herding witches in Siberia, Delilah put her foot down in the firmest possible of ways.

“I’ve had it! Enough ‘roughing it’ in some forgotten corner of the planet. I swear to you, I won’t milk another goddamn yak, no matter what you say!”

“But Del,” Luna explained patiently, “there aren’t any yaks in Siberia.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t understand what I mean.”

“I know, we do rough it , a bit.”

“A bit!” Delilah exclaimed. “ A bit ?! Compared to you, Luna, the Donner Party roughed it, a bit .”

“That’s a cheap shot. We’re visiting the places where truly powerful magic still exists. The forgotten, overlooked places. And it’s so important that we study and understand these practices before the modern world wipes them away completely.”

“Luna! I’ve been trapped behind a desk for my whole life . The modern world is exactly what I want!”

“Well... okay...” Her sister thought for a moment. “Actually, there is a coven of powerful mind readers I’ve been meaning to visit in New York City.”

“ New York City? Okay, now you’re talking.”

“They live in the subway tunnels under Times Square. Is that the sort of thing you’re after?”

“Subway tunnels.” Delilah sighed miserably.

“No, baby sister of mine, that’s not the sort of thing I’m after .

I’m after stuffing myself with duck confit at La Tour d’Argent.

I’m after dancing down Bourbon Street in a second-line parade.

I’m after singing karaoke in Shibuya. Doesn’t any of that sound appealing to you? ”

“I guess.” Luna shrugged. “But not more appealing than what we accomplished last month.”

“We stood on a dirt road in Middle of Nowhere, Australia, and learned to levitate rocks.”

“You were so good at it, though! Telekinesis isn’t a natural part of an Oak Haven witch’s toolkit, but you were amazing!”

“I don’t care, Luna.”

“C’mon, of course you do! Telekinesis is very cool.”

Delilah lifted an eyebrow. “It ain’t cooler than duck confit, sweetheart.”

And so it was that the sisters went their separate ways. Luna, to her appointment with the Siberian witches, and Delilah, to her date with decadence.

She did indeed find that second-line parade, and she did consume her weight in duck confit.

With those two boxes checked, it was on to Tokyo, where Delilah had arrived just yesterday.

She’d stepped through a portal inside the colorful street art in Paris’s La Pointe Poulmarch and emerged in an octopus vendor’s stall in the Tsukiji Outer Market.

As she wandered aimlessly across the city, she was shocked by the holiday light displays and the Christmas cake stands on every corner. Despite the loveliness of Tokyo at Christmas (or, really, because of it), Delilah began to worry she’d made a serious miscalculation.

Eventually she’d found herself in Yoyogi Park.

While he was alive, Papa Melrose had devoutly loved three things: his family, Christmas, and Elvis. For Delilah, the rock ’n’ roller-zoku presented quite a personal, though unintentional, punch in the face.

Determined to salvage the trip, she’d abandoned the park and headed for Karaoke Kan Shibuya.

At the bar, she downed a large sake and performed a Bonnie Tyler two-shot of “It’s a Heartache” followed by “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” The crowd ate her up; in fact, she wasn’t allowed to pay for a single drink the rest of the night.

One chap liked her so well he’d followed her back to her hotel like a lost puppy.

He was still snoring beside her when she awoke this morning.

Haruto? Delilah thought. No, that’s not his name. Hiroshi? Haruki?

She sighed. Oh dear.

Once she’d gotten her bedmate dressed and out the door (his name was in fact Haruto, she’d had it right the first time), Delilah pulled on her fuzzy hotel robe, poured herself some room-service coffee, and pulled back the window shades.

Gazing out at splashy Shinjuku City below, Delilah was aghast at what she saw.

The Christmas of it all. The Christmas was absolutely blinding.