"Are you all right?" he asked, his voice slightly shaky.

I nodded. "You?"

"Yes. That could have been bad."

"You have a knack for understatement," I said weakly. "That was bad, and it could have been deadly. What happened to the brakes?"

"Good question," Hunter said. He peered through his window at the dark woods.

I looked around, too. "Oh. We're near Riverdale Road," I said, recognizing this bend in the road. "We're about a mile and a half from my house. This isn't far from where I put Das Boot into a ditch."

Hunter unsnapped his seat belt. "Can we walk to your house?"

"Yeah."

Hunter locked the car where it sat neatly and quietly by the side of the road, as if it hadn't almost killed us. We started walking, and I didn't speak because I could tell Hunter was sending out his senses, and I realized he was searching for other presences nearby. And then it hit me: he wasn't sure the failure of the brakes had been an accident.

Without stopping to think, I flung out my own senses like a net, letting them infiltrate the woods, the night air, the dead grass beneath the snow.

But I felt nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently Hunter didn't, either, because his shoulders relaxed inside his coat, and his stride slowed. He came to a stop and put his hands on my shoulders, looking down at me.

"Are you sure you're all right?" he asked, his voice quiet

"Yes." I nodded. "It was just scary, that's all." I swallowed. "Do you think that part of the road is spelled? It's so close to where I had my wreck. And Selene—"

"Is nowhere around here. We check every day, and she's gone," said Hunter. Selene Belltower was Cal's mother and the one who'd urged him to pursue me. She'd wanted me and my Woodbane power and my Woodbane coven tools under her control. Failing that, she'd wanted me dead and out of the way. Though she'd fled Widow's Vale weeks ago, I still felt my pulse race whenever I thought of her.