Page 8 of No Charm Done

Shaw glanced toward the door behind the desk, then quickly away. “Well, there’s that door over there, but . . .” He shuddered slightly. “Trust me, you don’t want to know what’s behind it. Smells like formaldehyde and sounds like . . . well, let’s just say I don’t expect it leads to any improvement on our current situation.”

Max followed his gaze. “You’ve never tried to open it?”

“Once I got about as far as turning the handle before I decided I’d rather spend eternity in here, thanks very much.”

An uncomfortable hush fell over the waiting room. Max fidgeted with Quentin’s cage while Shaw dealt himself a hand of solitaire on the coffee table.

“Of course . . .” Shaw didn’t look up from his cards. “That doesn’t mean a fella can’t make his own door.”

“What do you mean?”

Shaw grinned and stood up, walking over to the motivational poster that declared “You already have what you need.” With theatrical flair, he peeled back the corner of the poster to reveal a small hole in the beige wall, barely the size of a golf ball.

“Been working on this little project for about forty years now,” he said proudly. “Figure I’ll break through . . . oh, sometime around the year 3000. Give or take a century.”

Max stared at the tiny hole. “That’s your escape plan? You’re . . . digging out with what, a spoon?”

“Magical equivalent of a spoon, yeah. See, the Void doesn’t like being messed with. Try to blast your way out with some big flashy spell, and it’ll crush you like a bug. But tiny little bits of magic, applied very, very slowly . . .” He demonstrated by holding up his index finger, which glowed with the faintest possible light. He touched the finger to the edge of the hole, and a few flakes of wall crumbled away. “It’s all about patience, kid. And I got nothing but time.”

“But that’ll take forever!”

“Everything takes forever when you’ve got forever to do it.” Shaw smoothed the poster back into place. “Besides, it beats sitting around feeling sorry for myself. A man’s gotta have a project, you know?”

Max looked at him with something approaching admiration. “You really think it’ll work?”

“Hell if I know.” Shaw winked. “But I’ll tell ya what: I’d rather die while trying to escape than live while accepting I can’t.” He settled back into his chair and picked up his cards. “So, Max the Magnificent. You any good at gin rummy? Because we got a lot of time to kill.”

Chapter 3

Borrowing Trouble

Oak Haven witches threw parties the way toddlers threw tantrums: frequently, enthusiastically, and with zero regard for consequences. It was opening day of the Summer Festival, and the park in Oak Haven’s downtown looked like the love child of Disney World and Burning Man.

As Luna wandered through the chaos, children ran here and there, armed with water balloons that burst into clouds of glitter instead of water. Every few minutes, the trees spontaneously bloomed with botanically incorrect flowers, then shed them on the heads of passersby. A flock of origami cranes, folded from sheet music, swooped between the trees, playing fragments of half-remembered childhood songs.

Papa would have loved this, she thought with a familiar pang. He’d be chasing those cranes around, trying to correct the lyrics.

Continuing her circuit of the park, Luna passed the magical arts and crafts stalls where children could paint pictures that leaped off their canvases. At a face-painting booth, the Melrose sisters’ dear friend Aphra was working her way through a line of excited children, transforming their faces with quick, precise spells rather than brushes and paint.

“Hey, Luna!” Aphra called out cheerfully while turning a little girl’s face into a monarch butterfly. “How’s every little thing? You should stop by the yarn shop sometime when things calm down. I just got in the most gorgeous alpaca wool from Peru. You’d love it.”

“Sounds wonderful,” she replied. “Assuming I ever get a day off from the inn, maybe I’ll have time for hobbies again.”

Aphra chuckled. “Ah, not to worry. Alpaca is a very patient wool.”

With a weak smile, Luna mentally added learn to knit to her ever-growing list of things she’d rather do than hotel management. It was a long list, containing essentially every activity in the world.

The food area was a festival-goer’s dream, featuring Oak Haven’s famous color-changing ices. They shifted through an entire spectrum of flavors, ranging from strawberry and lemon to exotic options like “the feeling of finding money in the laundry.”

The lobster queue moved slowly, giving everyone time to admire the cooking process, which involved enchanted grills that adjusted their heat automatically to make every bite perfect, every time.

“Luna, dear!”

She turned to find Belinda Chatterjee directly behind her, wearing a bright yellow sundress and looking absolutely delighted with life in general.

“Belinda! How are you enjoying the festival?”

“Oh, it’s absolutely wonderful! Though I have to say, the ices are quite adventurous this year. Mine started as lime and somehow ended up tasting like pickled herring.” But Belinda wasn’t put out by this development. “Such an unexpected journey!”