"Okay." Dread settled more heavily on my shoulders as I hung up. Wherever this is going, I thought, there's no way it can end well. No way at all.

On Monday morning I got up early and grabbed the morning paper before anyone else could see it. Widow's Vale doesn't have its own daily paper, just a twice-monthly publication that's mostly pickup articles from other papers. I quickly paged through the Albany Times Union to see if there was any mention of a body being fished out of the Hudson. There wasn't. I gnawed my lip. What did that mean? Had his body not been found yet? Or was it just that we weren't close enough to Albany for them to cover the story?

I drove with Mary K. to school and parked outside fie building, feeling like I had aged five years over the weekend.

As I turned off the engine, Bakker Blackburn, Mary K.'s boyfriend, trotted up to meet her. "Hey, babe," he said, nuzzling her neck. friends.

Mary K. giggled and pushed him away. He took her book bag from her, and they went off to meet their Robbie Gurevitch, one of my best friends and a member of my coven, strolled up to my car. A group of freshman girls stared admiringly at him as he passed them, and I saw him blush. Being gorgeous was new to him — until I'd given him a healing potion a month ago, he'd had horrible acne. But the potion had cleared up his skin and even erased the scars.

"Are you going to fix your car?" he asked me.

I looked at my broken headlight and smashed nose and sighed. A few days ago I'd thought someone was following me, and I had skidded on a patch of ice and crunched my beloved behemoth of a car, fondly known as Das Boot, into a ditch. At the time it had seemed utterly terrifying, but since the events of Saturday night, it felt more in perspective.

"Yep," I said, scanning the area for Cal. That morning I'd noticed the Explorer was gone from my block, but I didn't know If he'd be back at school today.