Page 2 of Jingle Spells

“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.

And yet . . . despite how foreign Tokyo was to a Yankee like Delilah, even so there was something oddly familiar about it all. It took Delilah a while, sitting by the window with her coffee, to figure out why. A quick query to her phone revealed that Christians comprise maybe three percent of Japan’s population; interestingly that was roughly the same percentage to be found in Delilah’s witch-dominated—which is to say pagan—hometown. And once the traditional reason for the season is cut loose from its theological moorings, well. All bets were off. With no Christ Child to bring solemnity to the proceedings, Christmas quickly spun off its axis into rock ’n’ roller-zoku Santas and a strange devotion to fried chicken.

Delilah was still mulling the cultural connection she’d found when a huge crash emanated from the bathroom. It was the sound of multiple haircare products hitting porcelain, followed by a hearty “Oh for crying out loud!”

Delilah wasn’t startled by the racket. She was barely even surprised by it. With a deep sigh, she hauled herself to standing and moped over to the bathroom door. “What do you want?”

There behind the glass shower door stood her sister, sopping wet in blue jeans and a grey Stanford University sweatshirt. Scarlett grinned widely. “Finally! There you are! This is the seventh damn bathroom I’ve checked in this hotel.”

“It took you seven tries to locate my room?” tsked Delilah. “Still lousy at locator spells, I see. And why are you wet?”

“I was never lousy! It’s not my fault that . . . ugh!” Scarlett freed herself from the pile of shampoo bottles and climbed out of the shower. “You’ve got way too many haircare products—it’s ridiculous. Anyhow, it’s not my fault that the locator spell was invented long before people could live fifty stories in mid-air. The spell gave me your latitude and longitude but not your altitude, which is a bit of a challenge in a building of this—ooh, is that a bidet? How class!”