Read Chapter 8: The Vanishing

The surgery clock read half past six when Iona locked the front door and pocketed the keys. Evening rounds—two farms on the eastern road, a lame pony at the MacNab place. She'd just reached her Land Rover when she heard voices around the side of the village hall, low and urgent.

She didn't mean to eavesdrop. But the name stopped her cold.

"—found her bag down by the Bothy Burn, didn't they? Same place they found the other one."

"No," another voice said, sharper. "They found a *scarf*. Nothing else. Same as Morag, they found nothing else."

Iona's hand went to the locket at her throat. The metal was warm against her skin, warmer than it should have been. She stepped closer to the corner, keeping to the shadow of the hall's stone wall.

Three figures stood in the fading light: Hamish the farrier, old Mrs. Kinnear from the post office, and Dougie, who ran the petrol station. Mrs. Kinnear was shaking her head.

"Year tomorrow," she said. "A full year, and that girl never got a proper burial. It's a scandal. It's a—"

"She was asking questions about the Blackwoods," Dougie cut in. "Everyone knows it."

"Careful," Hamish muttered, glancing toward the moor. "They've got ears everywhere, that family."

Iona's blood went cold. The locket warmed further against her collarbone. She stepped back from the corner, her boots crunching on gravel, and the three of them fell silent, dispersing like startled birds.

She drove the eastern road with the windows down, the Highland air sharp with peat and rain. The MacNab pony had a stone bruise, nothing serious. The first farm had a ewe with mastitis that needed antibiotics. Ordinary work. But her mind kept snagging on Mrs. Kinnear's words.

Morag. Asking questions about the Blackwoods. Gone on a full moon.

And her mother, Maeve. Asking questions too, perhaps. Gone too.

The call came just as she was packing her kit back into the Land Rover. Angus's voice, gruff and hurried.

"Miss MacRae? The old dog at the estate's not eating. Lady Isobel's worried. Can you come?"

Twenty minutes later, Iona pulled up the long gravel drive of Blackwood House. The place loomed against the twilight, all dark stone and watching windows. A pair of Land Rovers sat in the courtyard, both packed with supplies—canvas bags, what looked like bedrolls, a Thermos.

Odd. The moon wasn't full for another week.

Angus met her at the kitchen door, his weathered face tight with something she couldn't read. The bite mark on his arm was hidden beneath his shirtsleeve, but she remembered it—the clean, human-shaped arc of teeth that no animal had made.

"The dog's through here," he said, not meeting her eyes.

The old Labrador—Bramble, they called him—lay on a threadbare blanket by the Aga stove. He raised his head when she entered, tail giving a single, weary thump. She knelt, running her hands over his flanks, checking his gums, his eyes, his belly.

"Has he eaten anything unusual? Got into anything?"

"No," Angus said. "Just stopped, two days ago. Won't take so much as a biscuit."

Iona worked methodically, feeling for blockages, checking for fever. Nothing obvious. She was reaching for her stethoscope when she heard footsteps in the corridor. She looked up.

Through the open kitchen door, she saw it—a photograph in a silver frame on the hallway sideboard, half hidden behind a vase of dried heather. A girl with red hair and a scatter of freckles, smiling at the camera. She wore the plain apron of a household servant.

Iona knew that face. She'd seen it on a missing poster in the village café, curling at the edges, a year old.

Her hands stilled on the dog.

"What is it?" Angus asked.

"Nothing. Just—who is that?"

Behind her, a voice answered. "A girl who worked here one summer."

Iona turned. Lachlan Blackwood stood in the doorway, his dark hair damp, his jaw tight. He was wearing a heavy jacket, boots laced, as if ready to go out. He looked thinner than when she'd last seen him, shadows carved beneath his eyes.

"Morag MacIntyre," she said. It wasn't a question.

He didn't blink. "She helped with the gardens for a season. A long time ago."

"A year ago," Iona said. "She disappeared a year ago. On a full moon."

Something flickered in his eyes—pain, or fear, or both—before he smoothed it away. He stepped into the kitchen, deliberately putting himself between her and the photograph.

"I wouldn't put too much stock in village gossip," he said. "People talk. They fill in the gaps with stories."

"Are you telling me she's not missing?"

"I'm telling you she left. People leave the Highlands all the time."

"And don't take their belongings?" Iona pressed. "Don't tell their families?"

Lachlan's jaw tightened. The muscle in his temple jumped. "The dog," he said. "Is he going to be alright?"

Iona held his gaze for a long moment. Then she looked away, back to the Labrador, and forced her voice to level. "I'll leave you some medicine. If he hasn't eaten in another day, call me."

She packed her kit quickly, not meeting his eyes. Angus walked her to the door, and as she stepped out into the cold evening air, she heard it—the low murmur of voices from the courtyard. Two vehicles, engines turning over. She watched through the kitchen window as the Land Rovers pulled away, headlights cutting through the gathering dusk toward the moor.

The moon wasn't full. It wasn't even close.

She didn't go home. She parked her Land Rover at the edge of the moor road, where the heather turned to scrub and the track narrowed to nothing. She killed the engine and waited.

The Land Rovers' lights were already far ahead, bouncing over the rough ground. She watched them crest a rise, dip into a hollow, crest again. Then, impossibly, they were gone. No lights disappearing over a distant hill. No engine sound fading. Just—gone, as if the moor had swallowed them whole.

She sat in the dark for a long time, the locket burning against her skin.

That night, in her small cottage, Iona lay awake, staring at the ceiling. Her mother's letters sat unopened in their box on the dresser. The locket pulsed with a low, steady warmth, the way a heartbeat would.

And then she heard it.

A howl—long, lonely, and utterly inhuman—rising from the direction of the moor. It was answered by another. Then another, closer.

Her breath caught. She pressed her hand to the locket, and through the window, in the thin moonlight, she saw two dark shapes slip past the edge of her garden—large, fast, moving like wolves.

But wolves didn't run on two legs. Not usually.

The howling came again, closer this time. And Iona understood, with a certainty that settled cold in her chest, that the vanishing on the moor had nothing to do with the moon being full.

It had to do with the Blackwoods wanting to be seen.