Spun by Sorcery by Barbara Bretton Page A

snow.”
    “Thanks,” Luke said, glancing at Janice in the rearview mirror. “I owe you.”
    “Wish I had that on tape,” Janice said.
    They bantered back and forth, which on another day might have made me happier than owning my own alpaca farm, but, given a choice, I would have preferred less talking and more driving.
    Want to know why I pretty much walked everywhere from November until April? This was it: that sick, out-of-control feeling as you sailed over the icy road trapped in almost two tons of screaming metal.
    Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little. It wasn’t really that bad; it just felt like it. The second time we went into a mild skid Luke expertly steered us back onto the road in no time at all but the pit-of-the-stomach queasiness took longer to go away.
    I have a long history with icy roads. A patch of black ice conjured up by Isadora’s son Dane took out my parents when I was a little girl. I was in the car with them when it happened but was somehow thrown clear. I don’t have any real memory of the accident. They say that’s a good thing but I’m not sure.
    I really don’t remember much about my life before that terrible night, either. I remember a shadowy human who was my father and the image of my mother, a beautiful sorceress who chose to be with him in another dimension rather than live in this one with me.
    So I don’t trust cars. I don’t trust ice. And I’ll always be looking over my shoulder just in case Isadora is gaining on me. I thought I’d banished her forever the night her son Gunnar died saving Luke and me from disaster. I’d inadvertently killed Gunnar’s twin, Dane, without a twinge of regret, and then I’d sent Isadora spiraling into isolated entrapment that had been meant to end her influence on Sugar Maple. But she was as resourceful as she was powerful and less than twelve hours ago I’d completed Isadora’s banishment in a way that only the cosmos in its infinite wisdom could undo.
    Or had I?
    An icy road. A human male at the wheel. And the last of Aerynn’s descendants sitting next to him.
    This wasn’t going to end well.

8

CHLOE
    Hard to believe but things quickly went from bad to worse.
    Penny the cat seemed to sense my unease. Her motorboat purr cycled down into something closer to a low growl and the hairs on the back of my neck lifted in response.
    “I hate this,” I murmured into the cat’s soft black fur. “I can’t believe we’re driving in a blizzard. We weren’t supposed to be driving in a blizzard.”
    The blizzard that should have stayed over Sugar Maple.
    “Take it easy,” Luke said in a tone of voice meant to calm a crazed suspect. “I’ve been driving in snow since I was sixteen years old. We’ll be fine.”
    “It really wouldn’t kill you to slow down.”
    “I’m going with traffic.”
    I opened my eyes and looked out the window. “There is no traffic. We’re the only fools on the road.”
    “Chloe,” he said, “I’m going fifteen miles an hour.”
    “That’s not slow enough.”
    “I changed my mind,” Janice said from the backseat. “Chloe’s right. The snow is freaking me out, too. Slow down!”
    “Why don’t you find a place to pull over?” I suggested. “We can wait for the storm to ease up a little.”
    “Not a good idea,” he said, jaw settling into lines of granite. “Just because you don’t see cars doesn’t mean they aren’t there. We could end up with an eighteen-wheeler in the trunk. It’s better to keep moving.”
    He was probably right. Visibility was less than zero out there. We’d be a sitting target.
    I scrunched my eyes closed and poured myself into the knitting.
    “You can knit with your eyes closed?” Luke asked.
    “I can knit in my sleep,” I said and started to tell him about the time I woke up after a nap to discover I’d cast on for a Pi Shawl, when the car fishtailed wildly to the left and we sailed across the oncoming lane, through the guardrail, and over the