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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, semicontrolled 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 huge as I 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