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SNOW FELL IN soft flakes, a gentle flutter that came to rest on the pine needles like a dusting of icing sugar. The wind had died down enough to let the flakes tumble down from the sky uninterrupted by the gusts that stopped them from settling. The world was quiet. The trees hushed their whispers, silenced by the snow that weighed down their branches and anchored their roots, and the birds had ceased their caws as though the whole forest was on high alert, listening to every word inside the cabin.

Ainslie was the first to burst into action, tugging on the boots she had shed in favour of the fire, and she threw open the back door. "Come on!" she cried out, jerking her thumb at the garage. "If there's anything, it's down there. Come on."

"Give me a sec, Ains," Adele said as Caleb gave her a hand, steadying her on his feet. He helped her put her coat back on and he winced when she did: he felt stab of pain in her lower back, her bones bruised and her skin dented, and he wished he could do more to help her than simply take her mind off the pain.

That wasn't easy when every conversation on the table only hurt her more.

"We're going to figure this out," Ainslie said. "I know it. I can feel it in my bones."

"You know what I can feel in my bones?"

"What?"

"Creighton's wrath," she said, her words as blunt as the thudding in her head. "We need to be careful."

"We are being careful: we're only going to your bunker. You're the one who wanted to go into town half an hour ago."

"Well, I'm kind of struggling to think straight at the moment," Adele said. "I really thought I'd heard it all when this one dropped the whole mate bombshell, but this is a whole other level. I can deal with having a mate. I don't think I can deal with being a killer and not even knowing it."

"You won't have to," Ainslie said. "Because it's a load of rubbish and there'll be a perfectly good explanation. One that may involve Creighton being sectioned for being a total psychopath who invented a sister for an excuse to hate you."

Adele sighed and shook her head. As much as she wished that was the case, if only for her own sanity, it didn't make enough sense to be true. She had seen the fury in his eyes, the white rage that had gripped him. That couldn't be faked. He hadn't been lying, unless it was a lie he had fed himself. Something that had been fed to him.

Ainslie rushed out of the cabin. Caleb followed with Adele's arm looped through his elbow to support her, and he couldn't react quick enough when he was halfway down the stairs and a patch of ice pulled the ground from beneath Ainslie. She went down with a soft thump on the snow, landing flat on her back when her feet flew out in front of her. For a moment, she lay completely still and Caleb rushed to her.

She laughed, sitting up and brushing the snow out of her hair. "It's a bit slippy out here," she said, struggling to her feet with a little help from Caleb. "Careful, Adele! You're injured enough."

"I don't plant to run," Adele said, shaking her head at Ainslie's enthusiasm, and she tediously followed in her footsteps, making sure to avoid the patch that Ainslie had skidded on. Caleb took her hand, instant heat spreading through her at his gentle touch, and led her to safety in the garage. Stamping the snow off her boots, she stood helplessly by as he pulled the cupboard out as though it weighed nothing.

"He's very useful," Ainslie murmured.

"Mmm. Are you ok, Ains? You went down hard."

"Oh, I'm fine! Didn't hurt at all," she said with a sunny smile. "The snow's pretty soft. Took my breath away a bit but otherwise I'm all good. Now let's get in there."

She darted down the steps first once she grabbed a torch from the cupboard, but Caleb took Adele's arm before she could head into the bunker and he pulled her to a stop.

"Careful," he said. "The stairs are difficult." He passed her a torch and crouched at the entrance to the hatch, holding onto her elbow as she descended the steep steps, and he didn't let go until she reached Ainslie. Following her down, he held the torch between his teeth. The three lights cast an eerie glow around the cold bunker.

Adele was struck by a strange sensation that began in the pit of her stomach and twisted its way around her organs until it lodged itself as a lump in her throat. Her skin went cold as her eyes adjusted to the weird lighting, the torches pinpointing a line straight ahead, and she scanned the room. There wasn't much to see: the walls were bare; a few blankets were folded in a pile against the wall. Caleb was an incredibly tidy person, his things occupying as little space as possible when he took up so much.

"Where are the words?" she asked, turning her whole body to face him when he joined her. "You said there were words everywhere. There's nothing here."

He nodded at the shadowy corner and shone his light on the wall. It didn't quite meet the other: the room wasn't as square as it had seemed. There was a gap, only half a metre wide. Ainslie slipped through. Adele followed with her heart in her throat. Intrigue and nausea fought it out in her chest, unnerved by the fact that there was a whole extra room beneath her garage that she had never known about.

Caleb sensed her hesitation. His hand went to her elbow. She could hardly feel his grip through her thick coat but it calmed her just to know he was right there next to her. Nudging her towards the gap, he bent down and his lips almost touched her ear.

"It's ok," he said.

"None of this is ok."

"It's ok to be scared," he said, clarifying himself. Adele couldn't shoot back that she wasn't scared: ordinarily, she might have, even if she was terrified, but she couldn't lie to him. Even if she could get away with it, she didn't want to. She didn't want to do anything to push him away when he and Ainslie were the only people in the world she could trust.

"I'm terrified," she said instead. The admission only worsened the lump in her throat. Her eyes stung, her throat burning when she swallowed hard. It did nothing to dislodge the stubborn lump. As she stepped towards the gap, her feet stopped moving and Caleb bumped into her, knocking her bruised hip.

"We can find out what happened," he said. "If the answer is in there, then we can capisce." Taking her hand, he laced his fingers with hers.

"Adele?" Ainslie called, ducking back to the other side. She curled her hand around her wall and raised her eyebrows at her friend. "You're going to want to come in here."

That didn't help the knot in Adele's stomach. Every worst case scenario whizzed through her mind, all the maybes and the what ifs that were killing her. What scared her most, though, was the thought that she could have done something horrific and forgotten it. The tide shifted inside her, forcing her feet forwards. Ainslie took her hand, an appreciated ounce of support as she stepped into the nook.

The walls was covered in newspaper, pages stuck up like wallpaper. Each one was printed with another story about the Honour Guard, all from the local newspaper. The organisation's infamy didn't exist far out of Buck Pines, the town an eerie bubble in the middle of nowhere, but it was a source of pride for the majority of the villagers. The local newsletter consisted mostly of stories about the Guard, details of their members and their hunts, profiles of their leaders and their kills.

Mairi Shepherd had collected every single piece, the scraps dating from the eighties right up until her death in 2005. Creighton's face popped up several times, his father's even more. Adele struggled to breathe as she stared at her grandmother's secret, the signals getting crossed as she tried to focus on inhaling and exhaling.

"What the hell is all this?"

"I don't know," Ainslie said. She waved her hand over the wall. "I think all this is just a bunch of info on the Guard. I'm not sure if it's anything specific – it doesn't seem to be. But look at this, too."

Adele slowly turned around. She gripped Caleb' hand so hard that her fingertips paled but he didn't complain about the force with which her short nails dug into his skin. The opposite wall was lined with shelves that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, bowing beneath the weight of the boxes and books stacked on each one. Most of the books were notebooks, their spines inked with dates and shorthand, abbreviations that meant nothing to her.

Ainslie plucked one off the shelf at random, flipped through the pages of handwriting that Adele recognised all too well.

"Oh, God," she muttered, her eyes widening and her stomach sinking as she took it all in. "Oh, God. No. I don't think I want to know. Please don't tell me she did something horrible. I don't want to know."

"It's just notes," Ainslie said. "Kind of like a diary."

"She was always writing," Adele said quietly. "She used to make supper for me and Jade and the whole time she'd be writing away, and when we were eating. She just said she liked to remember everything." Her face fell. "Please don't tell me she was still in the Guard. She left after I was born. She told me she left. When's that book from?"

Ainslie checked the spine. "1994," she said, returning to the page she was reading. "Before you were born. She was in the Guard, but I don't think she believed in it."

Adele frowned. "What?"

"It kind of sounds like she was only in it to keep an eye on what was going on." She turned the book around, tapping a passage. "She never killed. She didn't agree with it."

"Really?" Her heart sank further. She had thought it would sting to hear that her grandmother had lied, but somehow it hurt even more to hear that she was better than even Adele had thought. Caleb slipped his arm around her shoulders when he felt her weaken.

"Mmm." Ainslie smiled. "I think she was a coibhneil too."

Adele took the book from her, scanning the page of her grandmother's script. The paper smelled like her, the vague waft of her perfume that threw Adele right back to her ten-year-old self. The words blurred when her eyes welled up, blinking swiftly to get rid of the tears she didn't want to fall.

"She was a coibhneil?" Caleb asked. He glanced over the page but he couldn't make sense of the looping letters.

"She was," Adele murmured. She ran her finger over the words, the inky indents of words she had never read. In the twelve years since her grandmother's death, she had read every word over a million times, and now there was a whole library of things that had gone unsaid. Things she had hidden.

"I fell out with Fiona again today," she read from the book, murmuring her grandmother's words. "All she can talk about is getting a kill. She doesn't care what she's doing to her baby. She doesn't seem to care that her goal in life is to be a murderer, and she's raising Jade to be just like her. I can't get through to her. She's going to get herself killed. She's going to get my grandchildren killed."

"She was right," Ainslie said. "She sounds like you."

"Mmm," Adele murmured. "I don't think she liked my mother. She never let that show."

"She didn't want to hurt you," Caleb said.

"She never did." She shook her head and shut the book, passing it back to Ainslie. "My parents took care of that. The only time nana ever hurt me was when she died. And she had no control over that."

Swiping the back of her hand beneath her eyes to stop the tears before they fell, she gasped and sucked in a deep breath, running her hands over her face. "Ok, well, there's no point getting upset over her. She's been dead for twelve years. I've done my grieving. We're looking for the book."

Caleb left her side for the first time, leaving a chill in the space, and he ran his finger over the uneven spines of hundreds of books before he came to a stop on a thick hardcover book and pulled it out. "This?" He held it up. The cover was almost identical: all that was different was the edition and the name. Edition III: B Keir.

"Yes!" Ainslie cried out, launching herself across the room to grab the book and scurry through the pages so fast she risked shredding her fingers with papercuts. "He wrote this in 2000. If Katherine existed, she'll be in here. Now we just need to check the family tree."

Adele leant against the wall and slowly slid down it until she could sit and rest her head back. She felt dizzy, hot and cold rushing through her as she waited in sickening anticipation. Ainslie shuffled over to her side and Caleb sat too, his hand over hers.

"Here." Ainslie dropped her eyes to the bottom of the page. "Oh."

"She was real." Adele emptied her lungs and covered her mouth with her hand as she stared at the last addition to the family tree. Katherine Keir: 1995-1999. Beneath the date, a note. No-one else had a note. Not in this version; not in Creighton's.

Rest in peace, sweetheart. We miss you.

"Oh, no," Ainslie said, her voice shrinking.

"Does it say anything else?" Adele asked, forcing strength into her voice when all she wanted to do was curl up in the corner and wake up in a different year. "It must say something else. What does it say?"

Ainslie shut the book and opened the front cover, starting from the very first page. "There's a foreword," she said. "Want to read it?"

"Read it out," Adele said. She couldn't bear to read the words for herself. Closing her eyes, she rested her head on Caleb's shoulder and he held her, his eyes trained on Ainslie as she began to read.

"As a community, we have suffered. Tragedy has struck us hard, but we are strong. We will not let it defeat us. Five years ago, we were shocked and shaken to lose two of our best hunters and two of my closest friends, James and Fiona Shepherd. A year ago today, as this book was being written, I lost my little girl. We cannot give up. I will fight for justice until the day I died, for my Katherine, and for the Shepherd girls. I am thankful that they have closure; I pray one day I may too. Until then, we fight. Harder than we've ever fought before."

Ainslie let the book drop to her lap and she looked up at Adele, whose forehead was crinkled, her eyebrows sewn together.

"I don't get it," she said slowly.

"I know, right? Your parents were friends with Creighton's dad?"

Adele shook her head. "I get that. That doesn't surprise me: they were determined hunters who died for the Guard. He probably loved them. No, I don't get what he said about closure. He said he got no closure."

"What's closure?" Caleb asked. That stumped both Adele and Ainslie for a moment.

"He means ... well, Jade and I got closure because we know what happened to our parents. We didn't have to wonder what happened. We could close our worries," she said. "But he said he didn't get closure."

"How?"

She frowned deeper. "Well, that must mean he didn't know what happened to Katherine, right?" She looked up at Ainslie, who was now just as confused as her. "If Bernard didn't know what happened to his own daughter, why is Creighton so sure I killed her? Why would he know if his dad didn't?"

"Maybe he did something," Caleb said. "He's bad. Maybe he knows more than his father did."

Adele reached out for the book, turning the page, and she was struck by a family photo, a version of the Keirs she had never seen. Bernard, portly and smiling, and his wife Rose beaming for the camera. In front of them, a sullen fourteen-year-old Creighton. Next to him, his sister. A full colour photograph of Katherine Keir. Dark hair swept down her back, her eyes the most piercing blue. She was a beautiful child, a charming smile on her lips and laughter in her eyes, a teddy bear in her hand.

"Hold on," Ainslie said, racing to her feet, and she rushed out of the bunker. Adele pulled the book closer, staring at the photograph.

"Do you remember her?" Caleb asked.

"The bear." She touched the bear in the photograph, the quickest flash of an image crashing into her mind and disappearing just as fast. "I ... God, I don't know. I feel like I remember it."

"The bear? Not the girl?"

"I've seen it. I've seen it somewhere. The tartan ears." Closing her eyes, she willed the image to come back again but her memory failed her. She had felt the jolt of familiarity as though the bear was staring right at her, imploring her to find the place in her mind that the image had scampered out from.

"Are you sure?"

"I ... no. I'm not sure of anything right now," she said, squinting at the teddy. "One of the photos, maybe. One of nana's photos."

Ainslie thudded down the steps, swinging back into the nook with a box in her hands and an ashen face. "I heard a car," she said, her eyes popping.

"What? Who? Where?" Adele sat straight, yanking herself out of comfort.

"I don't know," she whispered. "I heard it coming up to the cabin so I locked the garage. I didn't see who it was."

"Did you see the car?"

"Um ... it was silver. Or grey. Kind of old. Oh my goodness, please say it's not Creighton."

Adele's eyes narrowed. "Angus," she said. Caleb growled. "For fuck's sake."

"Don't go," Caleb said. She shook her head.

"I'm not going anywhere. None of us are. What the fuck is he doing here?"

Ainslie pressed her fingers to her lips when a car door slammed. She held her breath, cowering against the wall. Adele curled her hand around her phone in her pocket. The three of them listened in utter silence to the muffled knock of knuckles on the front door. A minute later, a knock on the back door. Then the garage. The door knob rattled.

"I locked it," Ainslie whispered.

"Thank fuck for that."

Another knock. He called her name. Caleb growled under his breath.

The car door slammed again; the engine started. The muffled rumble faded until it disappeared. Ainslie let out a mammoth breath.

"I'm going to fucking kill him," Adele muttered, suppressing the sudden sickness that had flooded her at the sound of him outside her door. "That was too close."

"Oh my goodness," Ainslie whispered, sinking down. "I got the box. The pictures." She tipped it out again before Adele could tell her to just look through the photographs.

"Wait," she said, picking one out of the pile when a flash of tartan caught her eye. Her heart froze. "That's it. That's the bear." She placed it next to the photograph of Katherine. The one in her hand was of her fourth birthday. May, 1999. A couple of months before the family photo of the Keirs had been taken; seven months before Katherine's death.

"She was there," Caleb said. "Your birthday. You knew her."

"I knew her," she said, the same tone of disbelief and despair in her voice as his. "Oh my God."

"Here's your school picture," Ainslie said, sticking her tongue out as she scoured the faces and laid it down next to Katherine's innocent face in the book. She poked one of the girls. "There she is. That's her. Next to you."

"This is bad," Adele murmured, her voice wavering. "This is really bad. I knew her?"

Ainslie stood. Scouring the shelves, she pulled out one of the boxes. After a quick rifle, she put it back and did the same with another three until she found what she was looking for. Digging inside, she took out a thick handful of photographs that she passed to Adele without a word. Each one depicted a different scene of childish joy; each one showed Adele and Katherine. Laughing and playing; eating and making a mess.

The box's faded label was peeling, but it was clear. Addie and Kitty.

"You knew her," Ainslie said. "She was your best friend."

Adele dropped the photos. She didn't mean to but her hand was shaking, her aching palm stiffening. "If she was my best friend, why don't I fucking remember her?"

Ainslie said nothing. She didn't know what to say. It was Caleb who broke the silence, his voice low.

"Because she didn't want you do."

"Because I killed her? Is that what you're saying? You think I killed Katherine and nana tried to cover it up? Why the fuck don't I remember her, Caleb?" Her voice was shaking, her eyes wide and blazing.

"No," Ainslie said. "You didn't."

"What?"

"You didn't kill her."

"How can you say that? Look at all this shit!"

"He lost her," she said. She pulled over the book again, tracing her finger over Bernard's foreword. "I lost my little girl. And he didn't get closure. Not because he didn't know how she died: because he didn't even know if she died."

"You don't think she died?" Adele looked up at Ainslie as she stood, watching as she searched through the notebooks that filled the shelves.

"When was the book written? Look in the front cover – the month."

Adele did as she was told. "December, 2000."

"A year to the day that he lost Katherine," Ainslie muttered. "December 1999." She pulled out one of Mairi's notebooks and flipped through. A slip of paper fell out, floating over to Adele's feet. Caleb picked it up and passed it to her. When she unfolded the sheet, she was met with a bigger photo of Katherine.

A missing poster.

MISSING: Katherine "Kitty" Keir, age 4. 3'1" / Brunette / Blue eyes. Last seen at her home on Saturday the 11th of December.

"If she disappeared from home, why did Creighton say I killed her?" she asked, staring up at Ainslie as though she had all the answers.

"Because she never came back," she said, sitting down again, "and he thinks it was your fault." She picked up the other piece of paper that had fallen out. A newspaper article, a full page: THE SEARCH FOR KATHERINE. A family photo dominated the top half of the article. Creighton's face was circled in red pen, Mairi's writing scrawled alongside it.

"I don't trust him," Ainslie said, reading out the words. "Your nana wrote that."

Adele read on, scanning the article for information. "I was there," she said, dread sinking deeper into her veins. She tapped the second paragraph of the article and read it out for Caleb. "Katherine was last seen by older brother, Creighton, 14, who was babysitting her and her friend, the orphaned younger daughter of celebrated Honour Guard hunters murdered by werewolves in 1995."

"He blames you," Ainslie said. "Did you read his quote?" She pointed at a highlighted line halfway down the page. "They were playing hide and seek. Adele told Kitty to hide. That's the last time I saw her."

Adele read the article all the way through and then again, and a tear spilled down her cheek before she could wipe it away. A sob shook her shoulders. "I didn't hurt her. I didn't do anything. I didn't kill her."

"Of course you didn't," Ainslie said. "Did you really think you did?"

"I don't know ... maybe. I couldn't remember. And Creighton said it so convi-"

"No," Caleb snapped. "He says only one thing and he makes you think you killed your small friend. You didn't." He pushed away the article and held Adele when she cried, turning his body so she wept against his chest. Ainslie lifted her eyes to Caleb's, her lips downturned.

"This is bad," she whispered. "How many things has he made Jade think?"

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in case anyone got a little confused, yes, i changed adele's grandmother's name. she was originally aileen but i have far too many A names in this story already, what with adele and ainslie and angus and archie! she is now mairi, pronounced my-ree, the scottish form of mary

i hope you guys don't mind the last few chapters. i know they've been very detective-focused but that was fairly unavoidable! don't worry, they're not going to be stuck in the cabin for the next 16 chapters. that'd get boring fast.