She flutters a hand in greeting before we’ve entered her line of sight, and the hand stays poised over the air in front of Colin, shuffling side to side as if feeling along a wall.

“I agree,” she says.

Colin blinks. “What?”

Rose picks up a pinch of bright purple petals. “My sister’s confidence makes her very comforting to be around, though you wouldn’t know by looking at her that she’s actually a bundle of nerves, aren’t you, Anna?”

My cheeks flush red. “We came for the pouches, Rose, not a reading.”

“Anxiety is nothing to be ashamed of.” She smiles faintly, tipping the pouches balanced in her lap into our outstretched hands. I quickly shuffle Colin away before Rose can say anything else embarrassing.

“Rose can read emotions,” I tell him. “She usually understands you better than you understand yourself.” Kara and I had made a game of guessing which guests would leave her readings in tears. There’s something freeing about being understood so completely, and people return to see her a lot.

“What are these?” Colin holds up a sage-green pouch.

“Glamour charms,” I reply, leading him inside and to the second floor. “We put them in guests’ rooms so that if they encounter anything magical, the spell will make it so they see something totally normal. Unless they’re magical—then they can see through it! Or if the magical thing wants to be seen, of course.”

Together, we go through each room, knocking on doors and replacing the pouches in rooms where the guests have already gone out. We have to trek back to Rose for a second round, as the inn is already quickly filling with guests for Samhain. They mill about the garden, taking tea at the small tables throughout, and kids run through the hall, playing chase with Max.

A thin man corners us just inside the foyer on our way back in. “Young lady, there’s a leak in my room.”

“What did you do?” I ask.

“Excuse me?” He draws himself up.

“Whatever you did, apologize to the house. It’s the only way it’ll stop.”

I brush past him, Colin casting a bewildered look in our wake. “What if he doesn’t apologize?”

I shrug. “He must have hit a wall pretty hard to make the house that mad.”

He’s lucky the house didn’t just drop him through the floor.

“Morning, Anna,” calls Mr. Andrade when we knock on his door. A short, Salvadoran man whose face falls easily into laugh lines, Mr. Andrade and his wife are regulars for Samhain, though they live just downtown in an apartment above the animal shelter they run together. Mr. Andrade is a psychic, and his wife is a shapeshifter from Ireland, and they prefer to be near the inn during the holiday.

“Sorry, Mr. Andrade,” I say, holding up the glamour bag in explanation. “Forgot this was your room.”