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A CROW CAWED in the depths of the forest, the sturdy flock roosting for the season in the bare branches of the mighty oak trees that stood tall in the woods, fighting for space amongst the thick firs that dominated the landscape once autumn came and the leaves fell. The wind whistled through the trees, whispering its secrets to the fauna that rose through the snow like a phoenix; the caustic gale that carried the promise of a bitter winter in its dewy hands.

It didn't matter how cold it was outside. It didn't matter that the sun had failed to break through the heavy clouds for three days straight. It didn't matter that the falling snow had given way to slushy rain that battered the cabin, drumming on the roof and lashing against the windows while thunder rolled overhead. A bright bolt of lightning had struck nearby, the surge of scorching electricity splitting a tree.

None of that mattered when the past three days had been the most serene in Adele's life, a mellow seventy-two hours in the kind of domestic bubble she had spent her life avoiding. She and Caleb had hardly left the house since she had brought him back to the cabin, angry and frozen: an entire day of talking had allowed her to clear her mind a little more, and she had made a concerted effort to understand Caleb, helping him as he had wrestled with the words he needed to explain himself.

Ordinarily, she hated to be trapped in her tiny house for more than a day, when the walls began to feel as though they were closing in on her. That feeling should have been intensified with someone else in the house, especially someone who took up so much space, yet claustrophobia had yet to set in. They had found a rhythm, as though their feet were dancing a synchronised waltz to a tune they couldn't hear.

The music wasn't in their ears: it was coursing through their veins.

The hearth had swiftly become their meeting spot each morning, gathering around the heart of the house as they blearily shared hot coffee in front of the warm fire until the caffeine kicked in and Adele could face the day. The week had started to melt into one long stretch with only her phone to remind her what day it was, minutes slipping into hours that wove together to confuse her.

Lunchtime had been and gone, a lazy affair that Caleb had taken care of: he had been proud to show off his skills, searing a couple of venison steaks and frying up a side of liver for himself; he had dug into the freezer to find broccoli and carrots, even remembering to salt the water before he boiled the vegetables along with a handful of potatoes. It was a simple meal, but it tasted so much better when Adele hadn't had to make it. She had sat back, at his request, and enjoyed the meal.

The cabin wasn't as silent as it had been for as long as her recent memory allowed her to recall. She had even dug out an old radio that picked up BBC Radio Scotland if she balanced it in exactly the right place with a fork jammed into the broken antenna, propped up by a stack of books. It was strange to have music in the house, the latest hits crackling through the battered speakers interspersed with voices that belonged to people Adele didn't know.

She was very out of touch with the world. The radio had shown her that, emphasising what she already knew: the news made no sense to her, talking of politicians she didn't know and singers she had never heard of. The world kept spinning and she turned with it, but she felt like she was whirling on a totally different axis. It could have bothered her, pushing her into an existential crisis, but she didn't care: Caleb was even more clueless than she was, unfamiliar with the concept of news alone, let alone what in entailed. His naivety was a comfort: they weren't so different after all.

Caleb shifted uncomfortably on the stool by the fire, wincing when a splinter of wood snagged his finger and drew blood. He pulled the shard out and sucked his fingertip, setting down the playing cards in his hand. Somewhere in a dusty corner of one of her store cupboards, Adele had found a deck of cards that morning and though Caleb couldn't read, the numbers foreign to him, he could recognise the patterns that the shapes made: after just an hour, he was getting a hang of snap, and Adele was learning to slow down her reaction time to give him a chance to spot the matching patterns.

She laid her hand face down on the arm and stood to put the kettle on, and she nodded at the comfortable armchair. "You can sit there."

"You're sitting there though," he said.

"And I'm giving it up to you," she said with a smile. "We're switching seats. No looking at my cards, ok?"

"Why would I look?" he asked as he took the seat, though he seemed a little reluctant to take it from Adele. Cheating wasn't in his vocabulary, his moral code blocking him from even comprehending what it was. Adele chuckled.

"You wouldn't," she said as she poured cold brew into a pan to heat up over the fire.

He sank into the soft chair, making himself comfortable and purposely avoiding Adele's cards. He didn't want to accidentally see her hand, to figure out what she was going to put down next. "Can we go out?" he asked, wincing when he caught his finger on a splinter of wood as he put down his hand of cards. "I want to go to town."

"Me too," Adele said with a sigh, "but it's Saturday. It's too busy today – it's too risky. Too many people around."

"Nobody knows my face," he said.

"I know," she said, swirling the coffee as it came to the boil, "but I just think it's a bit risky. We can go tomorrow. It's dead on Sunday."

After a few days of basking in the safety of her own home, she didn't feel like going out. Going to Buck Pines meant risking seeing Angus, and that wasn't something she could face right now. Judging by the way he had joked with her on the porch as he had smoked before he had left, he was under the impression that nothing was wrong, but she felt the churn of her insides when she even contemplated bumping into him.

"What's wrong?" Caleb asked.

"Huh?"

"You don't feel good," he said. Facing the fire, she grimaced. She forgot how perceptive he was, how strong his bond was. While she was slowly getting better at sensing his feelings, mostly when they were visible on his face, he instantly knew if her spirits dipped.

She couldn't lie to him. That wouldn't get them anywhere. Two days ago, they had sworn on a pinky promise that they wouldn't hold onto secrets, that no matter how much time Adele needed to adjust to the situation, it wasn't an excuse to hide or to lie.

"I don't want to see Angus," she said, poking the fire with one hand while she held the pan in the other. Caleb held back a growl of discontent at the name alone. His jealousy had fled, replaced by pure anger when he felt the myriad of emotions swirling around Adele's head.

"Oh. He's there?"

"He's always there," she said, before she amended her hyperbole for Caleb's benefit. He took everything a little too literally and it amused her, but sometimes it meant that their conversations took a lot longer than necessary. "It's his job to be on patrol in Buck Pines. He's a police officer: he spends a lot of time in town to make sure everyone's safe."

Caleb frowned, thinking it through slowly before he said, "That doesn't make sense."

"What, police officers?"

"I understand that," he said, "but he is supposed to make people safe. Yes?"

"Yes."

"He didn't make you safe," he said. "He did the ... what's the word, the backwards?"

"The opposite," she said. She sighed and pulled the pan away from the fire, doling out the coffee into two mugs. Caleb leant forward and took the chipped one before she could offer him the good one.

"He did the opposite. He didn't do his job."

Adele held in another sigh. She had spent the past few days thinking just that, though each time she got into a cycle, she only found herself to blame.

"No," she said. "It's complicated. But I don't want to see him, and I know he's there today, so do you mind if we stay?"

"Yes."

"Yes you do mind, or yes that's ok?"

"Yes, that's ok," he said. "I don't want to see him."

"Good. We'll go tomorrow. It'll be fine to go tomorrow," she said as she took her seat once more, scooting the stool a little closer to Caleb. Setting down her coffee to cool, she picked up her cards to resume the game, slapping down the three of spades. When Caleb played his turn, her mind began to wander and she didn't even register until he slapped his hand down on the pile.

"Snap!" he cried out, moving his hand to show the three of hearts that he had put down on top of her cards. "Yes? Is that right? That's a snap?"

"That's a snap," she said, shuffling the pile to join her own hand. They had gone a while without a snap and now Caleb only had a few cards left. He put down the five of clubs on top of Adele's queen of hearts, scrutinising the arrangement of each new card until he had none left to give.

"I'm empty," he said. "I don't have any snaps left."

"You won," she said, shuffling all of the cards together ready to deal out again, until the shrill tring of her phone snatched her attention away. Dread settled on her shoulders as she reached back to answer it but that feeling faded when she saw Ainslie's name on the screen. "Just Ainslie," she said to Caleb, whose ears perked up at the sound of the phone. "Hey, Ains. Not like you to ring."

"To be honest, I was about to set off and Mum said I should probably ring first," Ainslie said with an infectiously light laugh. "Are you home? Do you mind if I come over?" She lowered her voice. "There are some ... things I want to talk about. You know."

"I can guess," Adele said. Ainslie's code wasn't hard to crack considering the last time they had spoken, she and Caleb had dropped the bombshell on the poor girl that her cousin was alive, but still missing. "Of course you can come over. We're just playing card games."

"Oh, awesome! I love cards. I'll see you in ... within an hour," she said. "See you!"

"See you then, Ains," Adele said, the call going dead on her when Ainslie disappeared to find her bike helmet. "How do you feel about Ainslie coming over?" she asked, turning to Caleb. He wore an enthusiastic smile and he nodded.

"I like her," he said. "She smiles a lot. She's very happy."

"That's Ainslie," she said with a fond nod of her head. "She's an optimist."

He slurped his coffee. "What does that mean?"

Adele pursed her lips, scouring her brain for the right words, ones that would make sense to the way Caleb thought. None of her analogies would work for someone who took a half-empty cup so literally. "She always sees the good side, in every situation," she said. "And in life. Even if it's raining and the weather's horrible, she'll focus on the flowers."

"Oh!" The word clicked in his head. "She's a sona. The world makes her happy, even if it is ugly. Is that the same?"

"She's definitely a sona," Adele said, feeling that warm fizz that scrawled up her spine each time she and Caleb found a link in their languages, as though each similarity marked the tightening of the shoelaces of their bond, the threads weaving together with each word that they learnt to translate.

A red-covered notebook held each one they discovered: her Caleb dictionary, she called it, where she made a note of the words he taught her, words that she endeavoured to use when they spoke, if only for the light that flickered in his eyes each time she made the effort. It lived on the mantelpiece and she reached for it, flipping to the third page and scrawling it in with the pen she had tied to the binding.

"Sona," she murmured as she wrote it in. Caleb was transfixed by her handwriting. Although he couldn't understand the words on the page, he couldn't tear his eyes from the swirl of Adele's script. To most, it was verging on indecipherable. To him, it was beautiful.

He reached across and took the cards, focusing hard as he separated them into two even piles and passed one to Adele when he had double checked that there were twenty-six cards in each. He couldn't count, the numbers meaning nothing to him yet, but Adele was teaching him. Slowly but surely, it was sinking in.

*

Fifty-six minutes passed before there was a knock on the back door. Ainslie knew better than to sneak up to the front of the house, something Adele had drilled into her recently: now she skidded round to the back and stashed her bike away in the garage to stop it from freezing over, and she knocked in the same pattern each time. Once, then three short raps, then another knock.

"Hi!" she said when she burst into the room, her backpack slipping to the floor before she shrugged off her coat and Adele took it from her, draping it over a log pile in front of the fireplace.

"Hi," Caleb said. He stood to offer the good chair to Ainslie – she was the guest after all – but she declined with a shake of her head, dusting off a sturdy log.

"So, I brought some things," she said, loosening the drawstring on her soft bag. Rather than rifle through it for what she needed to find, she tipped the whole thing out on the kitchen floor. Adele stepped over the clutter to take her seat.

"You have a mug," Caleb said. "Do you want some coffee? We have coffee."

Ainslie wrinkled her nose. "No, thanks. I don't like coffee. It makes me hyper."

Adele raised her eyebrows. "Moreso than usual?"

That earnt a childish giggle. "I know, right? Mum won't let me have it. But I did bring some hot chocolate." She shook a tub of powder and Caleb's eyes widened.

"Can I have some?"

"Sure!" She jumped to her feet, gathering up the empty mugs and the one she had brought, filling up the kettle as though she lived there. Adele carefully nudged through the pile on the floor when she saw a flash of orange: a photograph of Ainslie and Reed. It must have been taken several years ago, two grinning prepubescent redheads in the picture.

"You wanted to talk about Reed?" she asked, her face falling as she looked at the photo. Ainslie had hardly changed, but the Reed in the picture was nothing like the one in the posters that had littered the town. When he had gone missing, he had been an angry and troubled boy. He had reminded her of herself, struggling to stay in school until a fight with his parents had ended with him running away. He hadn't been seen since. Not by anyone but Caleb, at least.

"Yeah," Ainslie said. "Don't worry. I haven't breathed a word to anyone. I just brought over a few things. Photographs, things like that. It's just nice to have someone believe me."

Caleb reached out to push aside a book, his eyes fixed on the picture. He picked it up so carefully, as though it might crumble in his hands, and stared at Reed. He traced his thumb over his face, his breaths slowing.

"I just ... I miss him," Ainslie said, her voice quietening. The kettle came to the boil. She stirred hot water into three mugs of powder, whisking them up with a spoon until the lumps disappeared, and she doled them out before sitting back down on the log she had claimed as hers. "I never gave up hope. Even after my auntie had a memorial service for him; even after Craig told me to stop hoping. I just knew."

"The bond," Caleb said.

"Oh, no. No, no. He's my cousin," she said, wrinkling her nose.

"No, no, not mates," he said. "He's your pack. It's a pack bond. You feel it. Yes?"

"Yes," she said. "I guess so."

Caleb smiled. "The pack is growing," he said, looking up at Adele. "You and me and Reed and Ainslie."

Ainslie beamed, blue eyes shining. "I'm in your pack?"

"Of course," he said, as though that was obvious. He tapped the photograph. "You have been for always."

"Aw." Her cheeks went pink, her lips pulling into a grin. "Thanks, Caleb. So does that mean I'm, like, your sister?"

He nodded. Her grin grew. Adele watched the exchange, her heart softening. Her eyes fell on the pile Ainslie had strewn across the floor, a heavy book catching her eye.

"What's that?" She poked it with her toe. Ainslie hauled it onto her lap.

"It's all about the Honour Guard," she said. "Their code, their history, everything."

Caleb pulled a face. "Why do you have that?"

She flipped it open with a heavy thump, spinning it round on her lap with her finger on a paragraph that was too small for Adele to read from a distance. "Their code," she said, tapping the page with her nail. "It's very strict. They have to have definitive proof before they kill. They get fined if they kill a regular wolf, and obviously they go to prison if they kill a regular person. So everything should be ok as long as they don't have the proof, right? If they never see Caleb or Reed as a person and as a wolf, they can't kill him." She winced at Adele's expression. "Right?"

"Technically," Adele said. "That's how it was supposed to be. But Creighton doesn't care about the rules. He's brutal, Ains. I don't think we can rely too heavily on a technicality. He'd take the fine for killing a wolf just on the off-chance it's a werewolf."

Ainslie's face fell, her shoulders slumping. The book almost fell off her lap. "Oh." She pouted. "But it's in the rules. It says they have to have evidence, in case there's disciplinary action."

"He wrote the rules, Ains," Adele said, her voice quiet. She reached out to run her finger over the embossed spine that read Edition IV: C Keir. "He made them; he breaks them."

"But he can't do that. He can't do any of this."

"I know. It's awful. But we can't take on the Guard. We can just make sure they don't hurt our pack."

"I hate this," Ainslie mumbled, flipping through the book, the papery leaves dancing before her eyes.

Caleb slapped his hand down on a page. "Snap!"

"What?" Adele frowned at him. He took the book from Ainslie, turning back a couple of pages to the one that had caught his attention.

"Snap," he said again, tapping a photograph and lifting his gaze to Adele. "That's you."

She twisted round to look at it from his point of view. "Oh. No, that's Jade," she said, shaking her head. She pointed at the infant in the picture. "That's me."

"Your parents?" He touched the faces of the smiling couple in the black and white photograph. Ainslie scurried over to look closer at the picture.

"Oh my gosh, they're your parents?" she asked, peering at the grainy page. "Your mum was so pretty! Why're you in here?"

"You know the story, Ains."

She frowned, shaking her head. "No I don't. You never talk about your family. You've only ever told me that you don't like your sister and, I mean, that makes sense, seeing as she's in the Guard. I don't know anything about your parents."

"Well, they died," she said. "Pretty soon after this photo was taken." She squinted at the caption. "This was July. I was born in May. They died in November."

Ainslie scanned the paragraph beneath the photo, holding her breath as she read about the story. The tragic slayings of the Shepherds. It didn't mention that ten years later, the Honour Guard had been responsible for the death of another. Three murders from the same blood line, all in the name of protecting families.

"Oh my goodness, that's awful," Ainslie whispered, her eyes filling. "I had no idea, Adele."

"They were bad people," she said. "The Guard make them out to be heroes but they weren't. They were murderers. Don't be upset."

"But-"

"Please, Ainslie."

She shut her mouth and turned the page. In the centre, a proud photograph depicting the bodies of the wolves responsible for the deaths of James and Fiona Shepherd. The werewolves they had slaughtered. One was big and black, the other smaller and tawny brown, their bodies strung up in the town square like a prize.

Caleb shoved the book away. It fell to the floor with a heavy thud, the spine creasing. He flew to his feet, his mouth open and his hand in his hair. Adele felt the ache in his chest as though her own heart was being squeezed, as though it was about to burst through her ribs: she felt his pain before he spoke it out loud. Ainslie was clueless.

"Did you know them?" she asked, leafing back to the picture to look closer for herself.

Adele's eyes were fixed on him. His cheeks were pale, his gaze tortured. Wincing as though he couldn't bear to keep his eyes open, he looked down at the photograph again and when he did, she felt the swell of emotion that coursed through his chest, the ache that took over his whole body.

"They were your parents," she said. It hurt to say the words, Caleb's agony forced onto her body. When she outstretched her hand to him, closing her fingers around his, the misery intensified. Her voice failed her, her words swallowed by the heaviness in the air, but she didn't let go of his hand even when it killed her to feel the burn of his agony. She dropped her forehead to his shoulder. It was the closest they had ever been. "I'm so sorry."

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sona (so-nah): an optimist

i hope you enjoyed this chapter! it would have been up a lot earlier but my coffee and i had a bit of a falling out and took it out on my laptop - after buying an emergency replacement USB keyboard, it started working again a few hours later!

i was also struck with the realisation today that i'm getting kind of tired of anonymity - partly because i'm a natural oversharer so it's incredibly unnatural for my actual self to be a secret; partly because i want to abuse snapchat's filters; partly because i've now lost count of how many people know who i am anyway. i never even intended for this account to be anonymous for long anyway, but it's become a bit of a security blanket. i've chickened out of doing some kind of reveal several times already, but i'm getting a little tired of the heart attack each time i almost post a selfie to my snapchat story instead of my sister

but . . . i love being henn