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At once, his eyes narrowed, but he knew better than to suggest that scenario was ridiculous, not when he knew such a thing was more than possible.
“Like what happened to Athene Kappas?”
I blew on my tea. Part of my brain didn’t want to acknowledge that someone would wish me ill in such a way, but the Renegade had been a perfectly reliable car from the second I bought it. There hadn’t been any warning signs that the steering mechanism was starting to go bad, no reason to think anything was wrong with it at all.
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “But I need to see the car and feel its vibes to know for sure.”
My husband’s jaw set almost imperceptibly. Looking at him, most people would have thought he appeared utterly calm, but I knew him better than that.
The merest hint that someone might have been magically gunning for his wife and his unborn child had awakened a quiet, deadly rage. Although I had no reason to love the person who’d placed that hex on the car, I couldn’t help thinking they had no idea what they’d started.
“The same person who killed Jack Speros?” Calvin asked after a long pause.
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t have enough clues in hand to know one way or another. But getting a sense of that hex — if there really is one — might be one way to get started.”
“All right,” he said grimly. “Then drink that tea, and we’ll go check it out.”
No one at the body shop stopped us from going to look at the Jeep. It sat in a corner of the lot, looking forlorn, the front end completely smashed in.
That had been a very big tree.
“It’s all right,” Calvin said. He had his arm around my waist and had helped me walk from his Durango to the spot where the Renegade was parked. I hadn’t suffered any material hurt from the accident except a few bruises, but I had a feeling the shaky sensation in my legs was going to take a while to go away. “It doesn’t look like the frame was bent, so the insurance probably won’t total it.” A pause and a keen glance from under his straight black brows, and then he added, “Unless you find something here that makes you want to get a new car.”
On the surface, that might have been a good idea. However, something stubborn inside me balked at having to buy another vehicle just because some unscrupulous user of magic had meddled with this one. Once it was cleansed and protected, it should be good to go.
As long as Calvin was right and the insurance company didn’t declare it a total loss.
“We can worry about that later,” I replied, my free hand moving over my rounded belly. “I don’t think I’m going to be in any shape for car shopping for a while.”
He nodded. “Whatever you want to do.”
What I wanted to do was hit “rewind” so the events of the past couple of days had never occurred. All right, that wasn’t exactly true. I was very glad Chloe had come into my life, even if she seemed to have inadvertently brought a trail of destruction along with her.
Calvin’s steadying hand still on my arm, I went over to the Renegade. We’d told the manager of the body shop that I needed to get a few personal items out of the vehicle, which wasn’t even a lie. The EMTs had salvaged my purse from the wreck, but the bag of supplies from the home cleanse Chloe had performed was still sitting in the trunk, along with a few health and beauty odds and ends I’d bought at Walmart a while back and kept forgetting to bring into my house.
At any rate, fetching those items provided all the cover we needed for me to inspect the car and see whether I was merely the victim of bad luck…or a particularly nasty little curse.
I tried to tell myself it had to be the former, just a mechanical failure of some kind. Otherwise, shouldn’t I have sensed the hex the moment I approached the vehicle in Dr. Carlisle’s parking lot?
Maybe…maybe not. Although I’d felt much more on top of things psychically once I was past the first three or four months of my pregnancy, I couldn’t deny that I wasn’t operating at peak form, either. Many pregnant women experienced much the same sort of symptoms, except their occasional brain farts didn’t affect their psychic powers.
And I had to admit I hadn’t been paying much attention. Buoyed by the knowledge that the pregnancy was progressing completely normally and that my child would be here in only a little more than a week, I’d gotten into the car and started for the house, thinking of not much more than putting my feet up and relaxing until Calvin got home.
So it was very possible that I’d missed some warning signs.
However, when I went over to the Jeep and placed my hand on the hood, I didn’t feel a single thing. No warning twinges, no sense of something dark and twisted attached to the vehicle, the way I’d sensed that cloud of cold wrongness surrounding Travis Cox’s mangled Subaru all those years ago.
Calvin sent me a questioning look, and I gave him a very small shake of my head.
“Nothing.”
“Well, that’s only one spot,” he said. “Maybe the hex was placed somewhere else on the vehicle.”
I knew he was trying to be encouraging, but if someone had crawled under the Jeep and scrawled a dark sigil there, it wasn’t as if I could find it in my current shape. If I got down on my hands and knees right now, I kind of doubted I’d get back up again without a crane to assist me.
And although I knew Calvin would cheerfully get under there himself if he thought it would help, he wasn’t a witch. Even if someone had scratched a hex mark somewhere on the undercarriage or drivetrain, he wouldn’t have been able to detect it.
Rather than point that out, I moved toward the back of the Renegade. As soon as I got within about a foot of the license plate, creepy-crawly sensations began running up and down my back.
