I knew I couldn't board the train without Harriet, so I stepped back and let the rest of the crowd surge on. I stood for a moment to double check she definitely hadn't just gotten on the train, then I stepped back from the platform as it began to sweep magnificently away.

I had just lost my ride to safety, but Harriet could be in trouble. I knew I couldn't leave without her.

But where to go now? I glanced around, trying to catch a glimpse of fiery ginger hair, but there was simply too many people for that. And deep down I knew, that if she hadn't got in the train, Kat must have captured her. If I was working for the government and wanted to catch a Cupid, where would I take her?

The answer wasn't down here, anyway. I walked back towards the shops, and even considered checking the toilets but if I was Kat I'd never take her somewhere so public. I'd want to get her away as quickly as possible, which is the instinct the drove me back up the escalator and towards the street. It would make sense to get a cab or pick up a car from here, but again, there was far too many people around to question even remotely suspicious actions. At least I had eliminated some options, but the truth was I didn't know where to look next.

I let my feet do the thinking and they ambled slowly back into the train station, then headed over towards another set of doors I hadn't noticed before. 'Authorised staff only'. The sentence filled up with far more delight than necessary. There wouldn't be many people back there, making it the ideal place to hide someone. I tugged at the doors eagerly, but as to be expected they didn't open. I spotted a fingerprint reader, making my eyebrows shoot up. It seemed like a little bit too much security for a train station, which only gave me further cause to believe something was going on back there.

But I needed a fingerprint to find out, and I'm sure none of the ticket staff were authorised enough to get access back there.

Hesitating slightly, I pulled my phone out of my bag, and opened it up at Juliet's number. If there was ever an emergency, this was it. My finger hovered over the call button for a second, then firmly pressed down.

After two rings she picked up. "Rosie? Is that you?" She asked frantically, her ice queen persona finally gone. "You weren't on the train back. Have they got you?"

"No, I'm fine." I hissed quietly down the phone, aware that there was tonnes of people surrounding me. "Harriet's been taken, and I missed my train trying to find her-"

"No!" She barked suddenly. "You must come back immediately. I'll organise another portal and you will get on it and come straight back."

"But what about Harriet?" I argued. "I think I know where they've taken her!"

"There's a team out from the cover-up department to deal with that. It's not your job." Juliet corrected me sharply. "Now go into the girl's bathrooms. Hi into the second stall on the left and wait patiently to be transported back."

"But-"

"Now." The call cut off suddenly and the phone beeped twice. With a sigh of annoyance, I stuffed my phone back into my pocket. I stared down the door, certain my friend was behind it. But I had no way of accessing it, and if I could get back to WA I could tell someone important where Harriet was. My decision made, I weaved my way through the crowd towards the girl's bathrooms.

To my surprise, it was completely deserted. I knew immediately something wasn't right, and as I turned back to walk away a cool, collected voice cut through the layer of silence. "Hello, Rosie."

Run. The single word pounded through my mind, but my feet seemed to be stuck to the ground. With my mind screaming at me to get the hell out of there, I turned round to face a girl with pink candy floss hair. "Hello, Kat." I practically spat. "Or should I even call you that?"

She gave a tinkling laugh as she stepped out of the shadows, the needle in her hand now painfully obvious. I nearly hyperventilated at the thought of the long, sharp, silver needle piercing my skin, and my eyes locked upon it. "Took you long enough to realise I wasn't your precious best friend." She mocked.

"Then who are you?" I whispered, my words barely audible. Kat lunged forward suddenly and sank the needle into my arm before I had time to react.

"Oh, Rosie." She smiled as my eyes dropped heavily. "Haven't you figured it out by now?"

***

My eyelids snapped open mere minutes later, according to my watch. I was strapped to what resembled a hospital bed, in a grey room completely devoid f colour. There was a massive mirror in the middle of the wall, which only gave me shivers as I remembered all the cop shows I'd watched in which mirrors were one way windows. Speakers hung from the walls, and a large steel door was almost directly in front of me.

There was also three more patient beds in the small room, all of their occupants unconscious. The one to my right contained a girl with droopy brown hair and hard facial features, but I couldn't see the two girls to my left.

I heard the rusting creak of a key being turned, and the iron door opened stiffly to Kat. She closed it behind her with a thud.

"Where am I?" The first question that escaped my lips wasn't the one I thought it would be. I guess I was hoping to be right more than I'd originally thought. She smiled chillingly at me.

"Have a guess."

"Behind the locked door in the train station."

"Clever girl." She sat down gracefully on the edge of the other girl's bed. "We've had access to the underground for years through the train station, and that's where you are now. We like to retreat here every so often, whenever we get enough captives. We call this our little torture chamber. From so far below the city, nobody can hear the screams."

I tried to shake off the feeling of dread the simple sentences left me with, but I couldn't help recoiling in horror as Kat reached forward to stroke my cheek with an abnormally long nail. "Oh, Rosie. How you've grown. But I can see you now. I've seen you since I came, but only snatches. Glitches, if you must." She crooned, and as I looked in the mirror, I saw that the disguise Juliet had give me had somehow been taken away. "We have anti-magic barriers down here. Even your little friend is normal again."

I glanced over at the droopy haired girl, in total shock that she could be Harriet. But I supposed Harriet was just a fake name, like Jessica had been. Everything I knew and loved about Harriet was fake. It was all made up by WA.

"How much I've grown." I repeated, looking Kat straight in the eye. "You know me. How?"

"It's not that hard." She smiled, standing up and slipping a ring off her finger. Immediately her key features began to change, her pink hair shooting outwards in a fabulous caramel colour. I watched Kat rearrange herself into someone completely different, but who I knew. The colour in my face slowly melted away, and I threw my head over the side of my bed and what little I had eaten flew back out of my mouth. Staring at the puddle of sick on the floor, I wiped my mouth. "Come on, my little Rosie Posie. Surely you're more happy to see your aunt than this?"

"You're not even my aunt." I snarled, speaking the words I had been coached since childhood not to say. "You're just my real aunt's stupid friend."

"Come on, Rosie. I've known you since you lived in your mother's stomach. I'm your godmother. I'm your aunt's best friend. I've been at every Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving celebrations your family have ever had. I'm practically a Parker. Heck, your granny even calls me her second daughter. You've called me Aunt Lily all your life. I'm as good as any blood relation." Aunt Lily countered, with a dastardly smile.

"Ever since you killed Aunt Kate you've been dead to me." I spat, unleashing the fury I'd been hiding all these years. "My family may have forgiven you and left you to live your life in peace, but you killed my favourite person in the world. That's not something I'm ever going to forget."

"I hardly think it's fair to blame me for Kate's death."

"Really?! You were the one driving the stupid car and you didn't even get hurt! Instead, Aunt Kate took all the injuries!" Tears rolled down my cheeks, as I glared at the murderer of my aunt. Over the years, my parents had told me meant times it wasn't Aunt Lily's fault. But I stopped trusting my parents the moment Mom's true sex orientation became apparent to me. In grief, I had blamed Aunt Lily for everything and shut her out, forgetting everything we had done together over the years. I did realise now I was older that Aunt Lily maybe wasn't solely to blame, but seeing her again after all this time just dragged up the unwelcome memories. It was all too easy to throw the accusations around.

"I am a murderer, but I only joined that profession after Kate's death." She replied. "I must say, I'm not very happy with you. Not only did you have to join WA, you're also being extremely mean to me. Bad girls get punished." She held up the knife, stroking a finger lovingly over the blade. "When I joined the government, I had no idea how much I'd grow to love my work. Killing people gives me such a rush. At that boring old office job I was no one. Now, I'm someone." She smiled, and fear ran through my veins as I realised that my aunt's death might just have driven her over the edge.

She walked up to one of the girls on my left, and raised the knife. I closed my eyes just in time as the sound of crunching bone and slicing knife filled the air. I shakily reopened them a few seconds later, and couldn't help myself from staring at her. Immediately I retched, but no vomit came up as If deposited everything earlier. She had gone mad. She was going to kill me.

But Juliet said there were people coming. I had to stall. I had to make her stop for long enough for me and hopefully the other to escape with our lives.

"What I don't get," I began, my heart pounding intensely, "is how you knew so much about me whenever you were pretending to be Kat. You weren't there any of those years."

Aunt Lily's eyes met mine, and for a moment, I thought she'd cottoned onto what I was doing and was resolving to kill me right on the spot. But the open invitation to boast about her successes was too alluring to resist. Her lips curled into an arrogant smirk, as she twirled the blade around in her hand. "You wrote letters to Kate every week and left them at her graveside. I went back and took them. It was wonderful to hear all about your life again, as I did miss my favourite niece."

I remembered everything she had told me under the pretence of Kat, and I realised the exact wording she'd used had been the same in my letters. I'd described Kat's personality so thoroughly that an impersonation of her wasn't too difficult, and I mentally resolved to never put so much personal information on public display again. Most people learn that lesson nowadays through creepy Facebook or Instagram stalkers online. I however, had learnt that lesson through my non-blood aunt coming back to pretend to be my best friend and then kill me.

Death was so much more complicated than I could ever have imagined.

"Of course." Aunt Lily picked up again after a moment's pause. "You stopped writing after the letter about your sixteenth birthday party. I was very disappointed. You upset me. I don't like being upset." Her tone was light with a menacing quality behind her words, making my brain turn to mush as I tried to think of new ideas to stall her.

"Why are you doing this?" I half-whispered, the words catching in my throat. "You loved me once. Now you want to kill me."

For a moment, I saw a flash of my old aunt in her eyes, but that was instantly replaced with a hard look. "You chose the wrong path. You should never have gotten involved with such people. And you shouldn't have shut me out of your life like the rest of your family. What happened to all that talk about how blood doesn't just make a family?"

"Well, I think you chose the wrong path in taking this job." I said defiantly.

"I had no idea how boring my first job was until I came here. I can do what I like here. I have a license to kill." She glanced up at the clock. "And now, it's time to sort you."

Don't know if I'm entirely happy with this chapter. I'll probably come back and edit, but can't be bothered to do it right now.

Zoe xxx