Page 66 of No Charm Done
“No, thank you,” Shaw said, backing away. “I’m quite all right without—”
“MINNIE MOUSE!” someone shouted from nearby. “PHOTO WITH MINNIE!”
“Come on.” Luna grabbed Shaw’s elbow. “We don’t have time for this.”
They dodged around a family taking selfies and nearly collided with a vendor selling cell phone cases. Shaw kept craning his neck to look at the screens above them, mouth slightly open as he tried to reconcile what he saw with his memories of New York. The buildings dwarfed anything from his era. “How is this . . .” He gestured vaguely at everything. “How is any of this even possible? The electricity alone—”
A double-decker tour bus crawled past, its sides wrapped in a screaming-yellow advertisement for The Lion King. Shaw glared like it had personally offended him. “What is that monstrosity?”
“It’s a bus, Shaw. Surely you had buses in 1926.”
“That’s no bus. Buses are—” He made a gesture indicating something much smaller and less aggressive.
“Welcome to 2026, sweetheart.” Luna picked up the pace, pulling him along. “Come on, we need to get to Grand Central.”
“The train station? But why? Why am I even here?” A man on an electric scooter zipped past, narrowly missing a woman in a Statue of Liberty costume who was handing out flyers for discount electronics. “I don’t like it here.”
“Nobody does. It’s midtown.” Luna continued tugging him east, steering him through the crowd with the ease of someone who’d navigated this chaos many times.
“Why are there so many lights?” Shaw was still craning his neck to look at the screens. “Why does everyone need to know about—” he squinted at a particularly aggressive advertisement “—cryptocurrency? What even is cryptocurrency?”
“Let’s not. Move.” Luna dodged a stationary family, mid-selfie. “We don’t have much time; there’s a lot you need to know.”
“Right. Yes. Obviously.” Shaw made a visible effort to stop gawking and focus on her. “Start with, um . . . start wherever.”
“Okay, so. There’s a tech company that’s launching an app—”
“A who that’s what-ing a which?”
“Oy. An application. It’s a thing on phones that—you know what, think of it like a vending machine for magic spells.”
“A vending machine. On a telephone.”
Luna sighed, suddenly exhausted beyond measure. “Ohh, boy. This’ll be harder than I thought.”
* * *
They continued eastward, and Luna kept on explaining the situation as best she could. By the time Grand Central loomed overhead, Shaw was mostly up-to-date.
“Let me understand . . . Someone’s invented a way to put magic in everyone’s pocket, and we’re trying to stop them by . . . borrowing some coins?”
“Tokens, not coins. But yes, essentially. Think of them as batteries of urban longing, charged with psychic energy from millions of New York commuters. Assuming the coven will allow us to borrow the tokens, we can use that stored energy to influence the CastR investors, provoking them to overfund the company so aggressively that it collapses under its own weight.”
“That’s—” Shaw paused. “Actually, that’s fairly elegant.”
“I know, right? Except the coven might not lend them because they think Oak Haven witches are a bunch of clueless country mice.”
Shaw went silent, his brain clearly working overtime to sort through the implications. Around them, the city hummed with cars and voices and the ever-present electronic pulse of a world that had left 1926 so far behind it might as well be another planet.
“In other words,” he mused, “we need to convince a coven of skeptical big-city witches to trust us with their most powerful magical objects so we can commit securities fraud for the greater good.”
Luna nodded, hoping he understood the gravity of their mission. If they failed, if Vex’s spells were released unchecked into the public, it would be chaos. Spells gone wild, wreaking havoc among country and city mice alike.
She steered him toward the chaotic station entrance. “Just follow my lead and try to look trustworthy.”
“I’m a confidence man, Melrose. Appearing trustworthy is the most important part of my job.”
* * *
