No Charm Done (Oak Haven Witches #3)

1. Two Couples, One Bed

Two Couples, One Bed

To the opening notes of “Dancing Queen,” Luna stepped through a portal beside an upright piano.

The high school orchestra pit was cramped, dimly lit, and absolutely not designed for interdimensional travel.

“Sorry to interrupt!” she whispered to the startled old music teacher.

He’d nearly fallen off his piano stool at the sight of her.

She clutched a small leather change purse to her chest. Inside, antique subway tokens clinked softly together, warm with an indescribable magic, powered by the accumulated hopes and dreams of the commuters of New York City.

“Luna!”

Adrienne’s voice crackled through a second portal, which was beginning to materialize onstage.

“Toss it! Now!” Luna hurled the change purse toward the stage, and it vanished into Adrienne’s portal just as two magicians in expensive suits arrived through Luna’s.

The men stumbled into the percussion section, sending cymbals crashing to the floor.

“Hey!” one of the magicians started to say. “Where did she—”

But Luna was already gone.

She emerged through a new portal at the bottom of a shark tank at the Oklahoma Aquarium.

This was, of course, a terrible place for a portal and not at all where Luna had wanted to end up; she made a mental note to work a lot harder on her aim next time.

A massive bull shark glided past with a look of what Luna hoped was only mild curiosity.

As her lungs screamed for air, Hector’s portal opened beside her, and she dove through it gratefully.

“—had any idea she was such a troublemaker!” Hector was saying.

Luna collapsed onto what appeared to be metal decking. “Who, me?” Coughing up aquarium water, she pulled herself to her feet and looked around. They were on the deck of an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, water stretching in all directions.

Hector’s twin brother, Diego, stood nearby, and the men’s identical weathered faces were both creased with amusement. “Trouble does follow you,” Diego said earnestly. “After all, we’ve never—”

“Never had a visitor quite so—” Hector gestured at her.

“—unpopular with magicians,” Diego said. “Luna, why are you—”

“—so unpopular with magicians?” finished Hector.

“Come on! This isn’t my fault. The magicians are after your coins, not me.”

“They’re tokens, subway tokens,” Hector corrected. “And in the past seventy years—”

“—magicians have never shown any interest in our coven,” Diego continued.

“Until you joined us.”

Luna shrugged. “No idea, fellas. Magicians have been hassling my hometown for—” The air behind them shimmered. “Aw, nuts.”

Adrienne’s angular, no-nonsense face appeared in the shimmering doorway, and she reached out with her tough-gal, Linda Hamilton-style biceps. “They caught up to me—they’re tracking us faster than expected.” She tossed the change purse through the portal, shouting, “Get moving!”

Luna deftly snatched the purse from mid-air. “Fellas! Come with me if you want to live!”

“What the hell—” Hector began.

“—does that mean?” Diego finished.

“You know, The Terminator? Because Adrienne looks just like the actress who—you know what, forget it.” She turned her mind to the next destination. “So, where to next?”

“Don’t worry about—” Hector said.

“—us. We’ll handle these guys.” said Diego. “You just—”

“—get the tokens out of here.”

Luna opened a portal and flung herself through, barely evading the hand of a magician reaching for the hem of her skirt, and landed on a windswept plateau—maybe Peru?

Bolivia? She couldn’t be sure. A herd of alpacas grazed peacefully under an infinite sky.

They barely looked up when Luna landed in their midst, and she found their lack of interest oddly comforting.

“How much longer can we keep this up?” she wondered aloud. Luna wasn’t expecting an answer from the alpacas, but she got one anyway when Adrienne appeared through her own portal.

“As long as it takes,” was Adrienne’s grim reply. “Our tokens can’t fall into magician hands. The psychic power they contain would give them access to every secret in New York. Every thought, every plan, every hidden thing.”

Luna nodded. She’d spent the past few weeks learning the basics of the coven’s telepathic magic, marveling at how they had transformed the techniques of nomadic tribes into something modern and uniquely urban. Their skills were so different from those of her own witchy family back in New England.

A shimmer in the air warned her that the magicians had found her again. “Time to go,” she murmured, already focusing on her next destination. But as she prepared to open another portal, a different voice cut through the mountain air—sharp, demanding, completely out of place. “Miss? Oh, miss? Miss!”

Luna frowned. The voice was getting louder, more insistent, layering itself over the sound of wind through grass. Even the alpacas heard it now, their ears twitching with annoyance.

“I insist you pay attention to me!”

Luna squeezed her eyes shut, desperate to stay in the memory, but when she opened them again, she was back behind the front desk of the Stargazer Inn, her hand clutching her pen as if it were a leather change purse full of magical subway tokens.

The cranky hotel guest standing before her was definitely not a magician, though her expression suggested she might be equally dangerous.

“I specifically requested down pillows,” the woman was saying, “and what I found in my room were clearly synthetic. And don’t get me started on the thread count of those sorry excuses for sheets . . .”

With a deep sigh, Luna forced herself back to the mundane reality: daily life as desk manager of the Stargazer Inn. The warmth of the tokens and the brine of the shark tank still lingered in her mind.

God, I miss traveling, she thought. But aloud she simply said, “Down pillows, got it.” Miserably, she reached for a piece of scrap paper to make a note about the most boring problem in the universe.

“You listen to me, young lady . . . I don’t care if the Stargazer is famous on the internet these days. You still need to provide basic customer service!”

A few months earlier, over the holidays, Oak Haven had experienced a viral nightmare.

In the latest episode of a centuries-long feud between witches and magicians, some magicians had figured out how to destroy Oak Haven’s forgetting spell, which protected the town by wiping the memories of all non-witches who visited.

The spell made it impossible for them to return or tell others about it.

With that protection gone, tourists had flooded in, posting photos and videos of Oak Haven’s “authentic witch town experience” across social media.

For about two weeks, their quiet little village had been more famous than Salem.

The forgetting spell had been restored, causing the non-magical to forget all about Oak Haven again.

But the magical world? Not so much. Witches and warlocks from every corner of the globe now knew all about the infamous Oak Haven, and reservation requests had been pouring in ever since.

And, because Luna was apparently the dumbest dummy to ever have done something dumb, that’s when she had volunteered to take over management of the family business.

“I’ll get you new pillows as soon as I can.

” As the old lady harrumphed her way back up to her room, Luna made a note in the guest registry.

Mrs. Fernsby, room 14, pillow crisis. Just another item on her growing to-do list, which already included a clogged toilet in room 7, a gluten-free breakfast for room 12, and something mysterious involving the ice machine that she was afraid to investigate.

Luna’s eldest sister Delilah had run the front desk for a decade.

She’d done so with military precision and what can only be described as aplomb.

Her sister Scarlett had also taken a run at the front desk, and while she hadn’t come close to Delilah’s organizational mastery, she still did manage to keep the place running without too much drama.

Me, on the other hand . . .

“Luna Melrose, you look like you’re about to hex someone.

” She looked up to see Zahir approaching with a dome-covered tray and a steaming mug of something tasty.

Zahir’s parents had once been the chefs at the Stargazer, and their son had grown up with the Melrose girls like an adopted brother.

Now Zahir ran the kitchen, but that big-brother vibe had never gone away.

“I might just do that.” Luna gestured at the chaos of her desk. “Unacceptable pillows, scratchy sheets, broken toilets. It’s a wonder anyone stays here at all.”

“Aww, c’mon.” Zahir set down the tray. “Most people who stay here love the place. The others just love complaining. Can’t let them get to you.”

“Speaking of complaints? Room 12 wants gluten-free at breakfast tomorrow.”

“What the—!? They’re already vegan and allergic to onions. What am I supposed to feed these people? Leaves and twigs?”

Luna shrugged. “I don’t know how you do it, Zahir. Make the same dishes perfectly, over and over, plus tolerating all the dietary restrictions, the complaints . . . Why even do this job?”

Zahir lifted the cover to reveal Luna’s favorite comfort food: his spring vegetable risotto with fresh peas, asparagus, and leeks.

Luna smiled for the first time all day, and her eyes misted over at the thought of the amount of effort he’d put in to make her something that wasn’t even on the menu currently.

“That face,” Zahir said gently. “That face is why I do it.”

Luna blew him a kiss as she reached for the mug he’d brought over. “Anything special in here? Bit of brandy?”

“No chance—you’ve got four hours left in your shift.” He headed back to the kitchen. “Chin up, kid. Come find me after work. We can share the cabernet that Mrs. Fernsby sent back during dinner.”