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The steering wheel jerked in my hands, and I started from my reverie, wondering if a tire had just blown. But no, I wasn’t getting any tire-pressure warnings from the display on my dash. I clamped down on the steering wheel, feeling it shudder against my fingers, as though the tires it was steering were being directed by something other than my own will.
What the hell?
Then it was as if an invisible hand grasped the wheel, turning it hard to the right. I’d already lifted my foot from the gas the second the steering wheel started acting up, and now I frantically reached for the brake with my foot, straining to touch it, cursing myself for pushing the seat so far back. I really hadn’t had a choice, but —
The Jeep swerved across the road, straight for an old oak tree that had stood at the corner of Broad Street and Maple for at least fifty years. My foot finally found the brake and I slowed.
Not enough, though.
In the next second, the front end of the Renegade crashed into the tree, and everything turned white as the airbag exploded around me.
“I’m fine,” I said irritably, for what felt like the hundredth time.
All right, shaken up, and with some inevitable bruising where the seatbelt had held me in place during the crash, but I hadn’t gone into labor, hadn’t seemed to have suffered any real injury except the aforementioned bruises.
Standing next to me, Calvin shook his head. A tight line between his brows signaled his worry, and he looked paler than anyone with his dark-toned complexion ever should. “I knew you shouldn’t have been driving this late in the pregnancy.”
After the world stopped spinning, I’d dug my cell phone out of my purse and called 9-1-1. The EMTs arrived almost immediately to transport me to the emergency room at Cobre Valley Medical Center. Since Calvin was my contact, they’d called him as well — and Dr. Carlisle, since I’d retained enough presence of mind to let the paramedics know she was my OB/GYN.
Now, after a thorough check-up to ensure the crash hadn’t caused havoc with the baby, both the doctor and I were satisfied that I’d escaped relatively unscathed.
Calvin, on the other hand, didn’t seem nearly as convinced.
“I cleared her to drive,” Dr. Carlisle said crisply. “Yes, I said it was better if someone could be her chauffeur, but many pregnant women can drive right up to their due date. Luckily, Selena had her seat pushed fairly far back, and that was what helped lessen the impact on the baby from the airbags deploying.”
Thank the Goddess for that…well, except for the part where I might not have crashed at all if I’d been able to adequately reach the brake pedal.
And what the hell was going on with the steering wheel? Had the mechanism failed? The car was less than two years old, so that scenario didn’t seem very likely.
Then again, mechanical failures happened all the time, even on new or almost-new vehicles. We’d have our local mechanic check it out, and if he couldn’t find anything, then we’d have the Jeep towed to the dealership in Gilbert where we’d bought it.
“Well, she’s not driving anymore,” Calvin said, his tone flat.
I might have argued that it wasn’t his place to tell me what I could or couldn’t do, except I was in whole-hearted agreement with my husband on that point. Although I was fine except for a few bumps and bruises, my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and I didn’t think I wanted to get behind the wheel of a car again for a long, long time.
Especially a wheel that had felt as if it was possessed.
An image flashed into my mind of Travis Cox’s car after its rollover, right after I came to Globe all those years ago. Someone had put a hex on it, causing him to crash the Subaru he used as the town’s single Uber/Lyft driver….
His words from the scene of the accident came back to me.
It’s, like, something just grabbed hold of the car and rolled it.
No, my car hadn’t rolled, but whatever had taken hold of the wheel had been doing its best to make me crash.
“What is it?” Calvin asked, his expression shifting to one of worry.
I wasn’t going to tell him I’d just seen a ghost, because I hadn’t. All the same, I couldn’t stop thinking about Athene Kappas, Lucien Dumond’s right-hand woman. She’d been killed in that rollover because she hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, while Travis had managed to escape with only some bruises on his forehead and a nasty mark on his neck from the very seatbelt that had saved his life.
Because Dr. Carlisle was standing right there, I responded the only way I could.
“We can talk about it when we get home.”
A tow truck had already taken the Renegade to the local body shop, so inspecting it would have to wait. Besides, I knew Calvin would never agree to that kind of field trip without getting me home first so I could put my feet up for a while and drink some chamomile tea to calm my nerves.
“All right,” he said, once I was settled and he’d fetched me that much-needed cup of tea. “What was it you couldn’t talk to me about back at the emergency room?”
“I think someone might have put a hex on my car.”
