Page 92 of No Charm Done
Nope. Not thinking about any of that.
“—and honestly, the absolute nerve of that guy,” Delilah was sawing into her Belgian waffle with unnecessary violence. “Stealing from you like some common pickpocket. After everything you did for him! Rescuing him from the Void, saving his ungrateful ass multiple times, putting up with his outdated, misogynistic—”
“He wasn’t like that,” said Luna, regretting it instantly.
Delilah’s fork paused mid-air. “Are you defending him right now?”
“No! I’m just saying . . .” Luna stabbed at her own breakfast “. . . he did treat me like an equal. That’s all.”
Her big sister rolled her eyes. “What does he want, a medal? How about the lying? The thievery?” Delilah was really hitting her stride now. “The man is basically a really well-dressed tapeworm. Charming on the outside, parasitic on the inside—”
“Okay, steady on there, Del.” Scarlett reached across the table to pat her sister’s hand. “Dial it back a smidge.”
“Why?” Delilah demanded. “You saying he didn’t earn a comparison to intestinal parasites?”
“Sure, but . . . Life is funny sometimes. What if Luna forgives him at some point? You’re going to have a lot of backpedaling to do.”
“What?” sputtered Luna. “There is zero chance that I would ever forgive that duplicitous, antiquated, token-stealing piece of—”
“See, now you’re in the spirit.” Delilah grinned.
“—with his stupid perfect hair and his stupid cufflinks and his stupid stories. There will never be anything between me and Elias Shaw. Ever. I mean it.”
Scarlett shrugged her older-sister shrug that said she knew things Luna didn’t. “If you say so.”
“I do say so!”
“Great! Then it’s settled.” Scarlett reached for the syrup. “He’s a terrible person, and you’re well rid of him. Now, can we please talk business? We have approximately forty-eight hours to make sure we can counter every spell in Vex’s stupid app, and I’d really like to not screw this up.”
Luna took a deep breath, grateful for the change of subject. “Right. Yes. The plan.” She pulled out a folded piece of paper covered in her careful handwriting. “We don’t know which spells Vex will try to demonstrate, so we’ve got to break them all. Polly’s teaching love spells at the bookstore, Aphra’s handling glamours with the younger witches, Mama’s doing portals at All Who Wander—”
“And I’ve got general spellbreaking here at the inn,” Delilah added. “Basically ‘everything that doesn’t fit in another category.’ Should be a true disaster.”
“It’ll be fine.” Scarlett squeezed her sister’s shoulder. “You’re an excellent teacher.”
“I’m not, though.”
“You taught Luna how to properly fold fitted sheets. That’s basically witchcraft in itself.”
Scarlett stood, brushing crumbs from her shirt. “Come on, Luna. Let’s go make the rounds, see how everyone’s doing. Del, you good here?”
“I’m good.” Delilah was already mentally preparing her lesson plan; Luna could tell by the way her eyes had gone slightly unfocused. “Just . . . maybe keep your phones on? In case anyone accidentally vanishes someone or turns them into furniture or whatever fresh hell awaits us today?”
“Optimistic as always,” Scarlett said cheerfully. “That’s what I love about you.”
As they headed for the door, Luna caught sight of her tired reflection in one of the lobby mirrors. Not just physically tired, though she was that, in spades. More like her soul was tired. The kind of tired that came from trusting someone and being proven catastrophically wrong.
Stop it. The town is counting on you. Fall apart after Vex is defeated.
If only her heart would listen.
* * *
Spellbound Books smelled intensely of roses, which was either good news or bad, depending on how Polly’s love spell class was going.
From the look on Polly’s face when Luna and Scarlett walked in, things were drifting toward “bad.” She spotted the Melrose sisters, and her expression moved from exasperation to relief. “Oh, thank the gods. Reinforcements.”
The bookstore had been transformed into a makeshift classroom, with chairs arranged in a circle. Around the room, about a dozen witches of varying ages were working in pairs, one casting a love spell and the other breaking it. One young witch had apparently succeeded in casting a love spell, but her partner failed to break it in time. Now she was gazing adoringly at a bookshelf, luxuriously running her fingers along the spines of Patricia Highsmith novels and sighing.
