Silence pressed against her senses, green and heavy with the rich sense of a profligate summer. The sound of her tense breathing filled the interior.

She tapped a fingernail against the brand-new GPS mounted on the dashboard. It was dead as a doornail. The only thing she knew for certain was that she was several miles south of Shrewsbury, either near or over the border of Shropshire, and a few miles away from her destination, the village of Westmarch.

Just for shits and giggles, she checked her new cell phone and Pocket Wi-Fi. While it was supposed to be fully charged, the phone was also dead.

Naturally.

Climbing out of the car, she looked north and south. There wasn’t a soul to be seen. The rolling countryside was intersected with lines of green—hedges, bushes, and dense, tangled copses of trees.

It seemed like as good a time as any to cut loose. After several weeks of deep physical trauma and emotional stress, a switch flipped in her head, and she melted down. Swearing at the car, she kicked the tires and slapped the windshield like a bitch while she counted up all the what the fucks in her life.

Of which there were oh, so many.

The most relevant what the fuck at the moment was how her technology curse seemed to have grown exponentially overnight. Up to this point, it had been limited to small electronics. Alarm clocks, the stupid Keurig. Her computers constantly went on the fritz, and she burned through an average of three iPads a year. Phones came and went with depressing frequency—although usually, she managed to get five or six months out of them if she left them to recharge in places other than her bedroom. She glared at her current phone.

She ought to be grateful the curse hadn’t caused her 747 to fall randomly out of the sky. That thought sent a chill running over her skin, and she slapped the car again.

A spark of awareness began to insinuate itself into her exhausted brain.

Snap out of it, Sophie, she scolded herself. You’re pounding on an inanimate object like it knows or cares. Get your act together. You’re acting like a whack job.

As quickly as her meltdown had come, it faded. Mostly, if she were to be honest, because she was too jet-lagged to sustain it, not because of any self-control on her part. Her partially healed injuries throbbed, and the major muscles in her thigh ached. The journey had taxed her body’s resources to the limit.

Sucking in a deep breath, she took a step back and considered her choices.

She could sit in the car and feel sorry for herself, and she was tempted. Even more tempting—she could climb back into the car, flip the locks, and take a nap.

But she really couldn’t see anybody. No person, piece of farm equipment, power line, or any kind of building was in sight—not even a pile of ancient ruins, which were sprinkled throughout this area of the world like so many Starbucks in Manhattan.

Last time she had checked, it had been close to 6:00 P.M. Summertime in England meant she had a good three and a half hours of sunlight left.

She could watch and wait, but it was entirely possible that nobody would be traveling on this road until tomorrow.

And she was so hungry. It hit with an urgency that felt like a spike piercing through her middle. Her confused body didn’t know if it was supposed to be day or night. The lunch she had eaten before she met with the solicitor in Shrewsbury had been hefty, but that had been several hours ago.

She had a couple of packages of sweet nuts and crisps from the plane flight, but at the thought of eating more of them, she got a queasy feeling. Her body needed real nourishment, not empty calories.

So, walking it was. The village of Westmarch had to be just a few miles away, maybe as many as five. Normally that kind of hike wasn’t an issue. Now she had to brace her tired spine at the thought.

All she had to do was reach the village. Paul, the solicitor in charge of overseeing the old entailed estate, had said Westmarch had a pub with rooms for rent, where she could get a hot meal and spend the night before she bought supplies and headed to the gatekeeper’s cottage in the morning.

That idea had appealed, so he had called ahead to reserve a room for her. Once she reached the village, someone could come back for the car and the rest of her things in the morning.

She still wore the skirt and blouse that she had worn to the solicitor’s office. Moving quickly, she opened the boot, rummaged through one of her suitcases, and pulled out jeans, a black T-shirt, a jean jacket, and black Doc Martens boots, which would be comfortable and sturdy for walking. Or running, if need be.

Last, she fingercombed her dark, curling hair back and snapped a band around it. Instinctively she reached to check for her Glock before she remembered she didn’t have it with her.

She’d had no problem leaving her apartment or notifying the precinct she would be taking an extended break. The most difficulty she’d had in leaving was when she had said good-bye to Rodrigo. When she had told him the news, she had reached out to hug him in the same moment he had reached for her.

Somehow the good-bye hug had turned into a tight clench, and they clung to each other for a long moment before letting go. They’d always worked well together and over the last couple of years had become good friends. Now they were the only two survivors of a confrontation nobody had expected to turn fatal.

After that, she had left LA without a backward glance, but she missed her gun with a passionate intensity that some felt over losing a best friend or a lover. Despite the array of offensive and defensive spells in her repertoire, she felt naked without her gun.

The Glock was streamlined and understated, and unlike her taste in the guys she’d dated or her curse with electronics, the gun was utterly reliable. It had saved her ass more times than she could count.