ONE
LUNARIA
The sunset bleeding across Haven Shores’s coastline looked like a warning.
Lunaria Reed gripped the steering wheel of her ancient pickup truck and told herself that was superstitious nonsense. She’d spent a decade reading fate in the stars, and not once had the sky ever bothered to warn her about anything useful. Not about her grandmother. Not about Marcus. Not about any of the people she’d watched die exactly as the charts predicted, down to the hour and minute of their last breaths.
No, the sky didn’t give warnings. It gave certainties. And certainties were so much worse.
Her truck groaned as she crested the final hill, the engine protesting in that particular way that meant she’d need to find a mechanic within the week. The bed was loaded with ceramic pots she’d collected from a dozen different towns—Savannah, Austin, Portland, Sedona, places that blurred in her memory because she’d never stayed long enough to know them properly. Two suitcases. One box of gardening tools worn smooth from use. Everything she owned in the world fitted neatly into a vehicle held in one piece by rust and sheer stubbornness.
Fourteen towns in a decade. And now number fifteen.
Haven Shores sprawled below her, tucked between forested hills and a stretch of rocky coastline that caught the dying light and scattered it into fragments of gold and crimson. Pretty. Quaint, even. A small supernatural town that probably had a farmers’ market on Saturdays and a gossip network that moved faster than wildfire.
She’d be gone by spring.
Except.
Lunaria’s fingers tightened on the wheel until her knuckles ached. That was the problem, wasn’t it? The except. She’d checked her chart before leaving her last stop—a ritual, now, performed before every new place—and found an anomaly she’d never seen in years of reading her own fate.
A blank space.
Not the crisp lines of a destiny fulfilled. Not the dark certainty of an ending she could calculate down to the moment. Just... nothing. A void in her future centered directly on Haven Shores, someone having taken an eraser to the trajectory of her life and scrubbed until the page was bare.
She’d spent three sleepless nights staring at the charts, recalculating, triple-checking her readings. The result never changed. Her future simply ceased to exist when it reached this town.
Either I die here, or I become someone new.
A car horn blared, shattering her thoughts. A powder-blue convertible careened around the bend behind her, headlights flashing in a pattern that was probably meant to be friendly but came across as mildly unhinged.
Junie.
Lunaria pulled over to the shoulder, barely getting the truck to a stop before the convertible skidded in behind her, and a whirlwind of red hair and chaos magic came barreling out.
“You’re here!” Junie Reed-Castellan slammed into her before she’d fully exited the truck, arms wrapping around her in a hug that smelled of cinnamon and char. Chaos magic left that burnt-sugar residue. “You’re actually here. I had a bet with Leo that you’d bail at the state line?—”
“You bet against me?”
“I bet that you’d bailand thenturn around and come anyway because spite is a more powerful motivator than fear.” Junie pulled back, grinning wide enough to show the slight crookedness of her canines. Her cousin hadn’t changed in three years—still loud, still chaotic, still filling every room she entered to the point of overflow. “Was I wrong?”
“I didn’t bail at all.”
“But you thought about it.”
Lunaria didn’t answer. Of course, she’d thought about it. She’d thought about bailing at the state line, at the county line, at every gas station and rest stop along the way. Her bags stayed packed. Her exits stayed mapped. That was the entire point of how she lived.
“Come on.” Junie grabbed her arm and started tugging her toward the convertible. “Leave the truck. Leo can come get it later—he owes me for losing the bet anyway. I’m giving you the tour.”
“I have pots in the back?—”
“The pots will survive. They’re ceramic, not crystal. Get in.”
The tour, as it turned out, consisted of Junie driving too fast through winding coastal roads while pointing out landmarks with one hand and gesticulating wildly with the other. Haven Shores Pier jutted out into water gone deep purple with twilight—that was where Beck Driscoll’s family had run a brewery for three generations, serving craft beers that “might literally be magical, we’re still not sure.” The Siren’s Rest perched on a hillside overlooking the harbor, a bed-and-breakfast owned bysomeone named Avine who was “lovely, you’ll adore her, she makes the best wine, and she gives the best advice.”
Junie pointed out the stretch of beach where Leo had proposed by accidentally shifting into lion form mid-question and nearly swallowing the ring. “He was so nervous, his lion just took over. I had to wait fifteen minutes for him to shift back, and the whole time he was making these pathetic growling sounds and pawing at the sand.”
“Romantic,” Lunaria said dryly.
