Spotlight & Giveaway: In Charm’s Way by Lana Harper

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Lana Harper’s new release: In Charm’s Way

A witch struggling to regain what she has lost casts a dangerous spell and finds much more than she expected in this enchanting new romcom by New York Times bestselling Lana Harper.

 
Seven months after having been hit by an accidental power surge that nearly obliterated her memory, Delilah Harlow is still picking up the pieces. Her once diamond-sharp mind has become shaky and unreliable, and bristly, self-sufficient Delilah is forced to rely on friends, family, and her raven familiar for help. In an effort to reclaim her wits and former independence, she casts a forbidden blood spell meant to harness power with healing capacities.

While the spell does restore clarity, it also unexpectedly turns Delilah into an irresistible beacon for the kind of malevolent supernatural creatures that have never ventured into Thistle Grove before. One night—just as things are about to go terribly sideways with a rogue succubus—a mysterious stranger appears in the nick of time to save Delilah’s soul.

Gorgeous, sultry, and as dangerous as the knives she carries, Catriona Quinn is a hunter of monsters—and half-human half-creature herself, the kind of sly and morally gray fae Delilah would normally find horrifying. Though Delilah balks at the idea of a partnership, she has no choice but to roll the dice on their collaboration. As the two delve deeper into the power that underlies Thistle Grove, they uncover not only the town’s hidden history but also a risky attraction that could upend Delilah’s entire life.

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from In Charm’s Way 

Chapter Two
The Other Side

I staggered in place, struggling to gain my bearings. The transition to the other side of the veil was always vertiginous, a sickening lurch followed by crawling panic as my senses acclimated. Red clouds, every shade from rust to velvet cake, stuttered overhead—hovering in place, swirling like mist, flashing across the sky in fast forward. As though time here moved not regularly, but in ragged, leaping, senseless increments. The sky itself was a watery smear of grayscale with no hint of color, no bright sliver of moon or sun.
Stillness reigned absolute, an absence of movement alien to someone accustomed to a world rife with circulation, its air funneled into currents and cross breezes. Nothing stirred here, not even the profusion of pitch-black flowers that sprawled over this field—orchids, lilies, roses, and peonies, laced with strange, angular little sprays of babies’ breath. Alongside them grew a riot of bulbous blooms and trumpet-shaped blossoms dangling heavy from thick black vines, unnatural specimens unlike anything I’d ever seen. All of them that same sleek and glistening black, the centers an even deeper, void-like dark. I’d knelt to touch them a few times, rub them between my fingers; they felt chilly and brittle and somehow dusty.
They smelled like nothing, too, as though scent required hot-blooded reality to underpin it, not just this flat mimicry of life.
Spindly trees poked up in the distance, naked black skeletons hung with faceted, geometric approximations of fruit. Big and heavy as gourds, in crimsons and purples so wine-dark they were nearly black. I’d never seen these trees change in any way, sprout buds or leaves. Everything here was like that, besides the clouds; immutable, ever abiding. The opposite of the living realm, where nothing could be counted on as a constant, not even oceans or mountains or the bedrock itself.
I looked down at my hands, like I always did to steady myself. Tracing my eyes over the familiar shape of my fingers and nail beds, the roadmap of lines on my palms, the crosshatched texture of my skin. But even though I appeared corporeal, I wasn’t really here. Only my soul and awareness passed over when I visited, the fiery, enduring core of my spirit and my consciousness. The essence of who I, Dasha Avramov, truly was. Enough of me to create this lifelike avatar, to lend me shape and matter on this side.
As soon as the terrible, off-kilter sense of dislocation passed, a flood of shimmering euphoria rushed in to take its place.
In a world of death—of a vast, flat nothing—I was stunningly alive. The only truly living thing. And this awareness felt wonderful, like a river of warm honey crashing through my veins. An all-encompassing ecstasy that surpassed any human high I’d ever felt.
Fighting it was useless, I’d learned long ago, not that any part of me had ever truly wanted to resist. I tipped back my head and let the elation roll freely through me, yielding to it until it reached a nearly unbearable crescendo, a deluge of gamey, decadent pleasure that felt too much in every respect. I’d tried to describe it to Amrita once, and the closest I’d come had been to tell her to imagine the most mind-blowing orgasm of her life, crossed with an umami mouthful of dark chocolate and melted butter and caviar, all washed down with some blood-red wine.
And even that didn’t graze the surface of how sublime it felt.
Once it abated enough to let me master myself, I opened my eyes to see the Lettie pretender watching me, head cocked.
“Hello,” it said, its voice a triple-pitched, harmonic warble, a malicious smile playing on its lips.
It looked convincingly like a teenage girl. Big hazel eyes under thick, straight slashes of brows, long brown hair parted down the middle, round chipmunk cheeks and a pointed little chin. I could even see some of Emily in her, the shared bone structure that in Lettie hadn’t been given the time to surface. It wore low-slung jeans that sat beneath the hipbones, and a lacy cami under an unbuttoned flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the fabric juddering like static with the effort of trying to be blue and green; most color didn’t fare so well here. A pair of sparkly Skechers were on its feet, and rows of chunky friendship bracelets clustered around one wrist. This must have been a favorite outfit, for Emily to have remembered it in such loving detail.
“How are you here?” As human as it looked, its eyes glittered with the shellacked gleam of a wholly alien curiosity. “You should not be.”
“I was born to death, and I have an appetite for it,” I told it, lifting my chin. “So I’m given leave to visit.”
That was the truth, as far as I knew it. As the only living Avramov devil eater, there hadn’t been anyone to teach or guide me. My father had suspected what I’d become as soon as I was born with the telltale caul, the slippery film of amniotic sac clinging to my face—though, given my Harlow mother, even he hadn’t been sure what might happen until my magic began manifesting as Avramov. We had records of others like me, but I was the first to be born in Thistle Grove, which meant that everything I knew about my talent had been either self-taught or cribbed from our sparse records. Even for a family of necromancers, witches like me were an aberration, travelers who could briefly cross the diaphanous border of the veil. Where the rest of the family took every precaution to ground themselves firmly in the mortal world, I straddled the realms, one foot on either side.
As if I wasn’t exactly human myself.
It made even seasoned necromantic practitioners uncomfortable, if not unnerved. And while I normally wouldn’t be so forthcoming with an entity like this, I wanted this one to consider the wisdom of being afraid of me.
“Curious,” it replied instead, its overbright gaze shifting between my eyes. “I have never heard of such a thing. Are you some abomination, then? And do you mean to try to eat me?”

Excerpted from In Charm’s Way by Lana Harper Copyright © 2023 by Lana Harper. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. ©Lana Harper. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
 
 

Giveaway: One print copy of IN CHARM’S WAY for a U.S. only winner.

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Meet the Author:

Lana is the New York Times bestselling author of Payback’s A Witch, and the forthcoming From Bad to Cursed from Berkley Books. Writing as Lana Popovic, she is also the author of YA novels Wicked Like a Wildfire, Fierce Like a Firestorm, Blood Countess, and Poison Priestess. Lana studied psychology and literature at Yale University, law at Boston University, and is a graduate of the Emerson College publishing and writing master’s program. She was born in Serbia and lived in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania before moving to the United States, where she now lives in Chicago with her family.

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