Josh leans forward then, straining against his seat belt to get closer to Harper. “He’s right. You can pull over. You can do this.”

No response.

Josh reaches over the seat, slow and hesitant. Then he pats her shoulder, once. Gently. “Harper? Trust Brecken. Let him tell you what to do. Just follow his directions. You can do it.”

“She definitely can,” Brecken says. “She’s killing it.”

“I don’t need directions.” Harper sounds nervous. Really nervous.

They keep encouraging her, but it’s part patronizing man and part fear, and it’s one hundred percent annoying as hell. There might be a sliver of kind intention, so I try to hold onto that instead of grinding my molars at the “follow directions” comment.

“Go right here,” Brecken says.

Harper nods and inches the wheel to the right until we’re stopped on the side of the road. She fiddles with controls and frowns, presses the wiper fluid button and the two beside it. “I don’t know how to stop them.”

“What do you mean?” Brecken asks.

“The wipers. They’re automatic. They keep kicking back on—I don’t know how to turn them off.”

Brecken leans over and fiddles with some of the buttons and displays on the high-tech dashboard. Hazard lights start up and then the radio, and then I’m pretty sure the car tries to send a text message to God knows who, but the wipers keep wiping.

“I’ll just turn the car off.”

“Don’t bother, we can do this with them running. Might even work better since it’ll clear off the ice we knock free,” Brecken says. He turns and winks at all of us in the back. “We’ve got this.”

“I’m a believer,” I say with a laugh.

“I knew you would be,” Brecken smirks.

Harper follows him outside, her heels traded in at some point for stylish boots that probably aren’t providing any better traction. She doesn’t close the door completely, and the alarm dings incessantly, a succession of pleasant chimes alerting us that something is not as it should be.

Outside, Brecken demonstrates his windshield-wiper-thwacking technique while Harper watches with somber focus. He pulls back his wiper and smacks it against the glass and says something to Harper while the blade arcs across the windshield. Then he repeats the action, shattering more and more ice off the blade until his side of the windshield swipes clean. He steps around the hood of the car just as Harper grabs the wiper.

Harper doesn’t have Brecken’s sense of timing. She pulls back the blade just as the motor tries to drag it back from the glass. It jerks from her grip, hitting the glass at the exact moment she screams.

Her sleeve is caught. For a second, I think that’s the problem. Then, she rips it free and a crimson drop hits the windshield.

Blood.