Charms and the Cursed Coven (Paperback)

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Format: Paperback
Length: 198 Pages
Dimensions: 5” x 8” x (12.7 cm x 20.32 cm x )
ISBN: 978-1-962759-08-3
Publication Date: March 4, 2026
Publisher: Alorium Publishing

SPOILER ALERT: This sample may reveal secrets from earlier books in the series. If you're new to Point Pleasant, you might want to start at the beginning!

I slammed the kettle onto the stovetop and turned on the burner. I hunched over it, my fingers digging into the oven door handle. My attention was focused on the dining room table to the left of me, specifically on the woman sitting at it as if it were the most normal thing in the world for her to be seated in my kitchen between my daughter, Grace, and my fiancé, Chris. It had been almost twenty years since I’d seen my mother, twenty years since she had taken off in the middle of the day, abandoning my infant daughter in her crib for hours until I got home from work. I ground my teeth. At the time, I had been terrified something had happened to my mother. But after I went so long with no word, after she ignored all my attempts to contact her, she just showed up out of the blue. At the sight of her, all I had left inside was fury.

“Dani, do you need any help in there?” Lori asked, her voice calm.

I flinched as the kettle screeched. I turned off the heat and flipped up the steam whistle. “I’ve got it.”

“Are you—” Lori began.

“I said I’ve got it.” I grabbed mugs from the cupboard and banged them down on the counter. “Chamomile or tension tamer?”

Grace cleared her throat. “Tension tamer sounds great.”

I tossed tea bags into the cups, filled them with water, then carted them, one by one, to the table. The movement of crossing back and forth, depositing mug after mug in front of Grace, Lori, and Chris helped calm my nerves. By the time I set my mug down, my fury had cooled to a simmering rage. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth as I took a seat between Grace and Chris, opposite my mother. I had never been so angry before. Lori was here for a reason.

Her words replayed in my head. I stayed away as long as I could. The darkness is coming faster than I predicted. And now we’re running out of time. The only emotion stronger than the anger was the curiosity that statement fueled. What darkness? How are we running out of time to break the curse?

I glanced between Lori, Grace, and Chris, my eyes lingering on the bruise on his forehead from where Justin had bashed him over the head with a glass globe, and cleared my throat. “Why are you here, Mother?”

Lori gave me a weak smile and cocked her head toward Chris. “This is a private conversation. Between family.”

“No,” I said.

Lori opened her mouth, and I shook my head.

“Chris is my partner. He knows everything. He isn’t going anywhere. Whatever it is you came to tell me, you can say it in front and him. Then you can leave.”

Lori winced and fidgeted in her seat. “I’m not sure where to begin.”

I glowered at her. “Why don’t you start—”

Lori squealed with delight and bent over, reaching toward my familiar, Charlie, who had just sauntered into the room. He had just hit a year old, and he was a big cat. He weighed almost twenty-five pounds and came up to just below my knees. It was one of the benefits of being a witch familiar. They lived longer and grew bigger than their normal counterparts. He wasn’t done growing yet. I suspected he would end up past my knees and over thirty pounds by the time he was done. I sincerely hoped he would stop wanting to be carted around in my purse when he got that big. Charlie strutted across the room, his tail high behind him, and sniffed at Lori’s fingertips. He ducked his head under her waiting hand and purred.

“What’s his name?” Lori looked up at me as Charlie turned and twisted his way through Grace’s legs to stop at my feet.

“Charlie.” I scooped him up and held him close to my chest, kissing the top of his head. “Traitor,” I murmured in his ear.

“Let’s get back on track. You returned to the great state of Washington for a reason. What did you come here to say?” Grace asked.

Lori chewed on her lip, her eyes darting between everyone at the table. Her shoulders slumped. “I should have practiced a speech or something. I’m not good at this. You know, talking to people. How about you ask me questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them?”

My jaw clenched, and I pulled Charlie closer to my chest. He tucked his head under my ear and purred until my shoulders lowered. I closed my eyes, turned my head away, and asked one of the questions that had been on my mind since she’d disappeared. “Where have you been?”

“Traveling. I had things to figure out.”

I snorted. “And you couldn’t return a phone call?”

“I… it was complicated.”

Charlie massaged my shoulder with his giant paws and pushed his head farther against mine. He purred directly into my ear. I exhaled, releasing a bit more tension. “Okay. That’s wonderfully vague. What have you been working on?”

“The curse.”

My eyes flicked open, and I stared at Lori.

She clasped her mug in front of her with her head bowed over it. Her dark-brown hair, streaked with white, hung over her face, concealing it from view. “It needs to be broken. I know how. But I had to get it all in the correct order so we know what to do. It’s hard when the visions come in out of sync.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Grace, Lori, and I were all witches with powers of divination. It was part of being a witch of the Williams line. Grace was particularly skilled at looking into the past with her powers. She picked up emotional resonance left behind on objects much better than I could. But on the flip side, I could track people with magic much faster and more efficiently than Grace, and my handle on using divination to understand the here and now was stronger. I chewed my lip. I had never given much thought to what my mother’s specialty was. She made it sound like she was much more future focused.

“Have you figured out the order?” Grace asked.

I blinked and refocused on Lori’s face as she set a notebook down in front of her. It was almost identical to the ones my grandmother had left me. Through them, I had learned almost everything I knew about how magic worked. For the past year, they had been delivered by some unknown benefactor whenever I was ready, or in need, to learn something new. Bile rose in my throat as I realized who had been delivering them. I narrowed my eyes. My grandmother had trusted my mother with the notebooks. Why didn’t Gran leave them with Betty? She was already looking after me. Why would my gran give my mother a way into my life again?

Lori tapped the book with her fingers. “I wrote it all down in here.”

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. “Then leave the notebook and go. It’s what you’re good at.”

I inwardly winced as Lori flinched. “If only it were that easy. We all have to be there to break the curse. It won’t work if any of us are missing.”

I sagged in my seat. “Of course we do.”

Grace put one gloved hand over Lori’s and another on my shoulder. She squeezed, comforting me. Having my mother present, after all this time, was throwing me for an emotional loop. My anger was quickly fading as my childhood despair over not being good enough reared its ugly head. Chris slipped his hand under the table and put it on my knee. Between Grace, Chris, and Charlie, I recentered myself.

I exhaled slowly and shook my head to clear it. My mother was here for a reason, and focusing on my hurt feelings wouldn’t do me any good. The curse wasn’t going to break itself. And this family desperately needed it broken. While it had hit me the lightest out of me and Grace, it was still untenable at times. I could never shut off the visions. I could never stop feeling what others felt when I touched stuff. Grace had it worse with nightmares, emotional feedback loops, where what she picked up from others played over and over, getting more and more intense with each iteration until she was a sobbing mess on the floor. She had to maintain a barrier between her and the rest of the world at all times, but she couldn’t live in gloves and long-sleeved shirts forever. If my mother knew how to break this curse, then we had to do it.

I straightened in my chair and focused on the next question. “How do you know now is the right time?”

“I don’t.” Lori sighed. “All I know is that the darkness is coming, and we won’t have a chance at breaking it again if we don’t do something now. It’s not that now is the right time. It’s that now is the only time we have left.”

“What is the darkness?” I asked. “And how do you know it’s coming now if everything comes to you out of order?”

“I—”

The house shook violently under us, cutting off Lori’s words. Grace’s mug fell to the floor, crashing across the hardwood. Loud thumps sounded above our heads as things fell off shelves around the house. I clutched Charlie to my chest. While occasional earthquakes occurred near Seattle, I had never felt something so powerful since moving out to live on Whidbey Island. My heart skipped a beat as the entire room was bathed in a bright-green light.

I stumbled to my feet as the shaking stopped and surged toward the front door, the others close on my heels. I slid to a stop on my front porch, Charlie still clutched to my chest, and stared. My jaw dropped. Trees had fallen over. And in the distance, in the heart of Point Pleasant, was a pillar of green flame.

“Oh no! It’s too late.” Lori stepped up next to me. “It’s already here.”

• Potions and the Pleasantly Poisoned
• Tomes and the Tangled Trail
• Divinations and the Disappearing Dead
• Hexes and the Haunted House
• Spells and the Suspiciously Silent
• Grimoires and the Ghostly Guest
• Enchantments and the Eerily Ensnared
• Rituals and the Restless Remains
• Charms and the Cursed Coven