I was seventeen and had had only one boyfriend. I'd known since that remarkable kiss that Hunter and I had a definite connection, but he wasn't my boyfriend, and we'd never been on an official date.
I breathed deeply, willing my pulse to slow down. "I know magick is all about achieving clarity," I said. "But I feel so confused."
"Magick itself is about clarity," Hunter agreed. "But people aren't. Magick is perfect; people are imperfect. When you put the two together, it's bound to get cloudy sometimes. When it's just you and magick, how does it feel?"
I thought back to when I had worked spells, had circles by myself, scryed in fire, used my birth mother's tools. "It feels like heaven," I said quietly. "Like perfection."
"Right," Hunter said, squeezing my hand and turning the steering wheel with the other. His headlights sliced through the night on this winding road toward downtown Widow's Vale. "That's pure magick and only you. But as soon as you add other people into the mix, especially if they aren't totally clear themselves, you get confusion."
"It's not just magick," I said, looking out the window, trying to ignore the exciting feeling of his hand on mine. I didn't know how to put it—despite my two months with Cal, I was still a relative newcomer to the guy-girl thing. I thought that Hunter liked me, and I thought I liked him. But it was so different. Cal had been obvious and persistent in his pursuit of me. What kind of a person was I, liking Hunter, finding him attractive, when until just a few weeks ago I'd thought I was madly in love with Cal? Yet here Hunter was, holding my hand, taking me home, possibly kissing me later. A little shiver went down my spine.
Hunter zoomed around a tight corner, making me lean toward him.
Then he pulled his hand from mine and put it on the steering wheel.
"Whoa," I said, covering my disappointment. "Going a little fast, huh?"
"I can't help it," he said in his crisp English accent. "The brakes don't seem to be working."
"What?" Confused, I glanced over to see his jaw set, his face tense with concentration.
"The brakes aren't working," he repeated, and my eyes widened as I understood the words.
In alarm I looked ahead—we were going downhill, toward the curviest parts of this road, where signs recommended going no more than twenty miles an hour. The speedometer said fifty.
My heart thudded hard, once. "Crap. Downshift?" I said faintly, not wanting to distract him.
"Yes. But I don't want to make us skid. I could turn off the engine."
"You'd lose the steering," I murmured.
"Yes," he said grimly.
Time slowed. The facts—that the road was icy, that we were wearing seat belts, that the car was small and would crumple like a tin can, that my heart was thudding against my ribs, that my blood was like ice water in my veins—all these things registered as Hunter downshifted forcefully, making the engine buck and groan. The whole car shuddered. I gripped the door handle tightly, my foot pressing a nonexistent brake pedal on the floor. I'm too young to die, I thought I don't want to die.
We were in third gear, going about forty miles an hour downhill. The engine whined, straining uselessly against the gravity and inertia that pulled the car forward, and we began to pick up speed again. I glanced at Hunter, hardly breathing. His face looked bleached in the dim dashboard light, as if he were carved from bone. I heard the squeal of the wheels and felt the sickening lurch of the car as we skidded around another curve, then another.
Hunter downshifted once more, and the whole car jumped with an annoyed sound. My back hit my seat, and the car seemed to dance sideways, like a spooked horse. Hunter grabbed the parking brake and slowly eased it upward. I didn't feel any effect. Then with a hard jerk Hunter popped it into place, and the car jolted again and started skidding sideways, toward a tree-lined ditch. If the car rolled, we would be crushed. I quit breathing and sat frozen.
He shifted into first gear and simultaneously turned into the skid so we did an endless, semi controlled fishtail right in the middle of Picketts Road. Hunter let us skid, and when we had slowed enough, he cut the engine. The steering wheel locked, but it was okay—we were still headed into the spin, and finally we scraped to a noisy halt at the side of the road, not six inches from a massive, gnarled sycamore that would have flattened us if we'd hit it.
After the grinding screeches of the tortured engine and tires, the silence of the night was broken only by our shallow panting. I swallowed hard, feeling like my seat belt was the only thing holding me upright. My eyes felt searched Hunter's face.
"Are you all right?" he asked, his voice slightly shaky.
I nodded. "You?"
"Yes. That could have been bad."
"You have a knack for understatement," I said weakly. "That was bad, and it could have been deadly. What happened to the brakes?"
"Good question," Hunter said. He peered through his window at the dark woods.
I looked around, too. "Oh. We're near Riverdale Road," I said, recognizing this bend in the road. "We're about a mile and a half from my house. This isn't far from where I put Das Boot into a ditch."
Hunter unsnapped his seat belt. "Can we walk to your house?"
"Yeah."
Hunter locked the car where it sat neatly and quietly by the side of the road, as if it hadn't almost killed us. We started walking, and I didn't speak because I could tell Hunter was sending out his senses, and I realized he was searching for other presences nearby. And then it hit me: he wasn't sure the failure of the brakes had been an accident.
Without stopping to think, I flung out my own senses like a net, letting them infiltrate the woods, the night air, the dead grass beneath the snow.
But I felt nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently Hunter didn't, either, because his shoulders relaxed inside his coat, and his stride slowed. He came to a stop and put his hands on my shoulders, looking down at me.
"Are you sure you're all right?" he asked, his voice quiet
"Yes." I nodded. "It was just scary, that's all." I swallowed. "Do you think that part of the road is spelled? It's so close to where I had my wreck. And Selene—"
"Is nowhere around here. We check every day, and she's gone," said Hunter. Selene Belltower was Cal's mother and the one who'd urged him to pursue me. She'd wanted me and my Woodbane power and my Woodbane coven tools under her control. Failing that, she'd wanted me dead and out of the way. Though she'd fled Widow's Vale weeks ago, I still felt my pulse race whenever I thought of her.
"When you had your wreck, you thought you saw headlights behind you, right?" Hunter went on. "And you felt magick, didn't you?" He shook his head. "This felt simply mechanical—there just weren't any brakes. I'll call a tow truck from your house, if that's okay."
"Sure," I said, taking a deep breath and trying to unkink muscles still knotted with fear. "And I can give you a ride home.”
"Thank you." He hesitated, and I wondered if he was going to kiss me. But he straightened again and took his hands away, and we began walking toward home.
The cold made us walk fast, and at some point Hunter took my hand in his and put them both in his pocket. The feeling of his skin against mine was wonderful, and I wished I could put my arms around him, under his coat. But I still felt unsure of myself with him—there was no way I could be that daring.
As if he'd read my thoughts, Hunter turned and caught my gaze. I blushed, ducked my head, and walked even faster. I was relieved when we turned onto my street.
My parents and my fourteen-year-old sister, Mary K., were watching a movie in the family room when we got home. Hunter blandly told them he'd had "a little car trouble," and they clucked and fretted while he called the tow service. When he hung up, I looked at the clock—it was a few minutes after eleven.