Cooper couldn't stay in town after they took her.

He couldn't look anyone in the eye.

He couldn't bear to be in that place where he had found and lost her.

His heart was in tatters there wasn't much that he could take anymore.

It hurt too much.

It felt like all his nerves were alive, firing at once. And there wasn't a single thing to do to stop it.

He drove.

He drove with no direction.

But like all times before, he didn't end up at Ruelle's memorial.

He didn't end up at his house.

Or even the hotel.

Cooper ended up at the cabin. He needed his father's counsel. His silent disapproval to help him find the right path.

Whatever path brought him back to Ruelle.

The car door bangs shut echoing through the forest. It's been a long time since Cooper has been up at the cabin. For many reasons, firstly because it was a hunting cabin, and Ruelle was strictly against hunting. Once he lost her, he stayed a few nights while he was in the forest searching when it was too cold and dark to continue searching but couldn't shake the fear that she was watching and judging him so he stopped staying there.

The truck is parked nearby. So, his father's still up there.

Cooper stand and stares at the cabin, it seems too quiet up here and for the first time he realizes that there was no animal life that came close to this cabin. That realization gave him shivers and made him even more nervous was before.

There's a slight whooshing sound and when he turns he finds that an owl has landed on the roof of his car. It's large, with giant silver horn like tufts on its head. It's a dappled grey kind of owl, like a great horned owl, except there's no brown to camouflage it with the bark. It's bright eyes are golden like two giant coins. Cooper can't stop staring at them.

It's in that moment that a memory flashes in front of his eyes.

His father's truck. On a rainy night. On the stretch of highway where Ruelle had gone missing.

The memory sucker punches him.

The breath leaves his body and he finds himself staggering back from the car as if it's on fire. The owl is startled by this movement and takes flight while Cooper finds himself forcing himself to take ragged breaths in.

He knows without a shadow of a doubt that the memory is from the night Ruelle went missing. His father was there? How had his father been there and not said anything?

Trepidation washes over him as he turns back to the cottage.

The realization comes to him suddenly.

The cottage has the answers. He knows it. But he's afraid to go inside.

Afraid to ask those questions.

He forces himself to go to the door. He doesn't knock, just lets himself in. The door has never had a lock.

His father would say: No one is stupid enough to just walk into the Sherriff's cabin, and if they were then they probably needed help of some sort.

His father isn't there.

The forest has seemingly come instead.

Like it's reclaiming the cottage, branches stick in through various windows, the back door is completely blocked. A tree must have come down in the storm.

The cottage is musty. It smells like neglect and sweat. He feels like a dark presence had taken over the place and it worries him more than he can say.

For a minute he swears there's a fox standing in the middle of the room, on the rug his mother had made herself for this cottage. It's a deep midnight black colour with grey streaks running through its fur. Its eyes are a midnight blue and seemed to hold the stars in them.

There's something so startlingly familiar about the fox that he just can't place. But in the blink of an eye the fox is gone, like it hadn't even been there in the first place.

Cooper is suddenly worried that he's losing his mind.

He crosses to the rug.

To stand in the middle of it.

He looks down to his feet. Where the fox had just been before he blinked and it was gone. But there's nothing there.

Nothing to prove a fox with the night sky in its eyes had been there previously. But he did however feel the difference in the ground. Like it was suddenly sagging under his weight.

He gets off the rug and pulls it away. Quick. Like removing a plaster.

A trapdoor is exposed.

He didn't think there was a basement to the cottage, had never known that there was a space under it. Would make sense though, to deal with plumbing or electrical. He figures it's a crawl space he never noticed before.

Then he notices that there's a ring for padlocking the door shut, but it's not locked. Why lock up a crawl space?

He pulls it open.

The smell is what hits him first.

Like a festering decay.

The smell of someone who was forced into the dark. No bathroom. No showers. It smells like captivity and he doesn't dare go down into it.

He slams the trapdoor shut.

He's seen things like this before.

In kidnapping cases.

He stumbles away from it.

He doesn't want to think about it.

He doesn't want to know why there's a trap door to a dungeon in his father's cabin.

He knows the answer. But he can't bring himself to ask himself the question.

The door opens and fear hits Cooper again.

He turns and his father is at the door with a shot gun raised. Cooper freezes and even though his father lowers the gun he finds he can't move.

He still sees that cold glinting blue behind the silver steel of the muzzle and he's taken back 18 years to that rainy night.

Realization dawns on him.

"What are you doing here Coop?" his father asks, a shaky smile on his face. His eyes travel to the trapdoor behind him and then his eyes turn back to Cooper. He's staring at him with a wariness about his features.

Cooper has seen this look on perpetrators too.

He's wondering how much Cooper knows. How much has Cooper seen? How much has Cooper pieced together. The grip on his gun is so tight that Cooper sees that his knuckles are white with the strain.

"It's you," he breathes out. His father takes a step forward. Cooper doesn't know if he means harm but he's still frozen.

And just like that, the blank space in his memory returned.

[----]

Cooper was half way down the mountain when he spotted Errol.

For who else's dog would be out in a rainstorm rushing up the mountain?

He thought he would have come across Ruelle before now. He hadn't waited that long to start out after her. But he knew, if Errol was coming up the road, either she was in trouble or he was coming to meet her.

A sort of nervous fear settled into his stomach. A dread crept up over him stiffening his shoulders. He pulled over to let the dog in and Errol wasted no time in jumping up into the passenger seat. He didn't even care if the soaking wet dog ruined his leather seats.

He knew by the way the dog was heading that he either missed Ruelle or she had taken a short cut so he turned his car around and headed back up the way he came. It wasn't until he got to a fork in the road that Errol got insistent. He was staring at the left fork and whining in a distressed kind of way. As if to tell him to hurry.

That nervous dread was spreading icy tendrils of fear through him.

He turned without question, going down this small road that lead up different branch of the highway, mostly used for emergency response vehicles to travel faster instead of going around the long way. As he got to the other side of the highway, he saw a truck, one that he recognized.

His father had been up at the cottage that weekend.

Said he was hunting.

It made no sense for him to be down here with his truck. Hovering over something by his back-wheel. The only thing he can think is that the truck slid in the mud and he lost his trophy for the weekend.

Ruelle must have recognized the truck and gotten his dad to give her a ride.

She was probably sitting in the passenger seat waiting for his dad to load up whatever he had killed. Knowing she hated hunting and she was mad with Cooper, she wouldn't have offered to help his dad move the carcass.

Errol was barking. His loud resonating braying sounding more aggressive than usual. Cooper pulled up behind his dad and let Errol out, thinking he was just excited to see Ruelle. He was in the process of getting out himself when he heard the shot.

His head whipped up and he saw Errol fall out of the air.

He had been lunging at his dad.

Everything in him went still. Errol wasn't just Ruelle's dog, he was her other half, arguable the only other being she loved more than Cooper. She was already angry at him, now his dad had shot her dog.

She'd never for give him. Either of them.

But then his eyes turned down to the mud and saw just what it was his dad had been hovering over. A body not paces away from where Errol had fallen.

Not a buck. Not an animal of any kind.

He was standing over Ruelle.

There was a strange stillness about her. Her green eyes were glossy and empty. A dull green he wasn't used to. Red splattered her jaw, though the rain was starting to break it up. The worst of the grisly red went from her throat to her navel when he could see organs spilling out. Bile hit the back of his throat as realization dawned over him. He knew that maneuver. Knew those kinds of slicing.

She had been gutted like a deer.

Pain and anger slammed into him, shocking the breath back into his body.

He was roaring as he rushed his dad.

Ready to hit him, to kill him with his bare hands.

It hadn't occurred to him to think of what life would be like without Ruelle because to him there was no life without her.

He didn't want to know how it happened, he didn't want to know why.

He wanted to gut his own father.

To stop him.

To save her. If he could.

Rage had a hold of him, but he didn't get far.

The second shot stopped him in his tracks. It tore through his shoulder and threw him back landing in the mud. For a moment the world was nothing but stars and he lost himself in the pain. He was only dimly aware when his father picked up what was left of Ruelle and hauled her into the back of his truck. He was even less aware when Errol forced himself to stand and left Cooper behind.

He was only aware of the pain.

Of a distant urgency to find Ruelle.

Of a bone deep betrayal and a breaking in his heart.

They say your life flashes before your eyes as you die, and Cooper had hours in the mud, but it wasn't his life he remembered.

He remembered Ruelle, and how happy she made him. Of Grandma Tala who took him in as her own. Of Aaron who had always stood by his side.

It didn't register to him that he was dying, down from his still running car with the doors still wide open. The rain pouring down on him like tears from above.

He didn't understand that he was actually crying. Or that he was convulsing with pain.

He didn't feel it when his body was too tired, too drained to even convulse. His breathing was slowing. The rain had finally stopped and the clouds cleared leaving nothing but stars.

The flashes of his life had played like movies on a home screen though he was too delirious to focus on them. When the stars came out he was taken back to his happiest moment.

It had been their first time sleeping together.

He had tried to make it as romantic as possible because girls liked that sort of stuff.

He had taken her out to the forest, plied her with a moonlight picnic and then when the time came, they lay together on the blanket under the stars and finally became one.

He had been a typical boy, desperate for this moment, waiting semi-patiently for her to be ready, for it to be the right time. But when it came to that moment, he was afraid of hurting her.

He let her guide him, he was gentle and the result was mind-blowing. He felt as if she were made for him, as if their souls were fusing together in this one moment. He kissed her everywhere he could, worked hard to please her before he was too far gone to keep himself contained.

When they were done, he lay back, physically exhausted but mentally charged. An electricity flowed between them and he found that he was comfortable lying there with her. Naked as the day they were born. Staring up to the stars.

They didn't talk. They didn't need to. They just watched the stars and smiled, getting their breath back. The fireflies had danced around them and as his eyes grew heavy, they looked like streaks of lighting going through the sky.

It was like that now. The fireflies and the stars were blending in, streaking against his tired eyes. He barely felt the weight of something landing on his chest, but he dimly realized that he was looking into giant golden eyes.

It was then that he started to forget.

That urgency to find Ruelle left him, that feeling of betrayal faded away.

He forgot why he was up on the mountain.

He forgot what he was looking for and how this happened to him.

But that feeling of heartbreak, that didn't leave him. That burned a hole into his chest matching the burning in his shoulder.

But he felt peaceful.

Like if he just let the eyes continue to pull the memories away it would quell the pain everywhere else too.

When his eyes finally closed, he didn't know what was happening to him. And it didn't matter. He embraced the darkness. He was ready for it. He wanted it more than anything. Because in the darkness all he felt was cold.

[----]

Chaos reigned in the precinct.

Cops were running wild.

Their witness was still in shock.

Outside the braves were rioting celebrating the freedom of their idol. Cheering as they watched her, astride a magnificent green stag ride through the town and disappear into the trees.

Carol returned to the screams, the cheers and the panic of the officers.

Carol returned stained in her blood and Andrew's.

Carol returned angry and afraid.

A head injury, she told herself.

She hallucinated all she saw on that lonely stretch of highway. That was the only explanation.

Trick wires, fake blood, Ruelle wasn't injured she was faking it. The bear and the stag staged. Trained animals. The tree cut down in advance. And everything else after that was her head injury.

It had to be.

Andrew was delivered to the hospital. He looked like a fragile baby bird wrapped up in gauze with protruding bones like wings at his sides. Barely breathing, barely alive, lucky it wasn't worse.

But Carol didn't feel lucky.

She was enraged.

She returned to the precinct to exact revenge.

To collect reinforcements to ride out into the forest with her.

To brave the dangers that had no doubt been set up for them to get back the little psycho in wolf's clothes.

To win back her boyfriend's heart.

To remind him that he was hers.

That Ruelle chose madness over love.

"What's going on?" she asks.

She can't make heads or tails of the chaos in front of her.

They ask for Andrew, they need Andrew's guidance.

They don't believe their witness.

They don't.

They can't.

They won't.

But they'll take the FBI chick here on a voluntary basis in this pinch.

"It's the witness, she's I.D.ed her attacker," one of the officers tell her. He sounds sceptical.

So soon? She thinks. Someone they saw in the crowd? Ruelle? Aaron Sharrow? Grandma Tala?

"Who?" she asks.

"Sherriff Booth," was not what she expected to follow that question.

Cooper's dad? Really? By the looks on their faces they were really not taking it well. Probably didn't quite believe her either.

"I'll talk to her, see what she says," Carol offers though it doesn't surprise her.

Harvey Booth had been giving her bad vibes since she got there.

Still she walks into the interrogation room where one officer is glaring down at the woman wrapped up in a blanket.

She's shaken and afraid but as soon as she sees Carol, a fellow woman, she sighs with relief.

"Hello, I'm Carol Rodriguez with the FBI," she says.

"You have to get me out of here. Before he... before..." she stutters. Behind them the cop scoffs. In general law enforcement was a loyal crew, but in small towns like these it was worse.

"All right, let's take a deep breath. Can you tell me what happened?" Carol asks.

The woman eyes the man behind her, she seems hesitant to talk with him there. "Don't worry about him," she assures. "Just focus on me, Mary."

The woman jerks when Carol say her name but it seems to calm her a bit. She lets her breath out in a shaking sigh whispers okay and then leans forward. "I saw the news, saw the disappearances, saw the pictures of the wolf-guy," she explains. "I thought it was a fever dream, you know? I was detoxing, I thought I made it up."

"You saw Silver Sight?" Carol breaths out, this was what she needed, Harvey Booth wasn't the bad guy, Ruelle was.

"He saved me," Mary told her. She has an almost reverent tone to her voice and Carol tries to stifle her disappointed sigh. Of course Ruelle had.

"Start from the beginning," Carol orders, flicking the switch under the table. This would record the audio for them.

"My boyfriend died during my second year at Harvard. I didn't take it well. I got really into drugs, crack in particular and dropped out shortly after. I basically travelled. I used the last of my money on backpacking and drugs, and once the money wore out... well I did a lot of things to keep the buzz going if you know what I mean," she says to her, she avoids Carol's eyes, probably out of shame, but Carol's not judging. Not really anyway.

Everyone else responded to grief differently. Cooper's grief manifested in commitment issues. Hers manifested in a blatant jealous rage. Mary's had been to drown herself in illegal substances and derail her whole life.

"I got here, was only here for one day really, and I was hiking that day. Up into the mountain. I saw a waterfall. Got high out of my mind. And on the way back down I got approached by that guy. He said he'd take me to a place where I could sleep, for free, so I got in his truck. He took me up to a cabin in the woods, threw me through a trap door and kept me there," she says. Her story is short and clipped, embarrassment covers her cheeks. She's not proud of this, so she wants to give me the least amount of detail. For the first half it's not that big of a deal. For the rest of it she would have to be clearer.

"The man kept me for god knows how long. I was forced to do... terrible things. He kept me naked, hungry, and dejected. When that trap door opened, I was happy to see the light, but I knew that it came at a price. I had accepted that. And then he came down," she whispers. Carol leans forward because the he she's referring to has to be Ruelle. And if she can pin something on her, anything on her, she'll do it.

"I thought I was high again. Or finally dying. But I wasn't. It was a man in a wolf suit. He offered me a blanket. And then a hand. He got me out of the hole I had been put in, he got me down the mountain but he wouldn't go past the river. He left me there with nothing more than a blanket and vanished into the trees. Just like that. Gone. I got myself to a shelter. Got myself home. And got myself clean. I had no intention of ever coming back here, but as soon as I saw the wolf on the news, that another girl was taken, just like me, I knew I had to come back," she finishes.

"River?" she echo, because that sticks to her. She remembers there being a river on the map. It may help them find the cabin she's speaking of.

"It's the border between here and Redbank," the officer behind her says.

The border. Ruelle had said she couldn't cross the borders of Silver Pines that was why she wouldn't go over the river.

"How many cabins are close to that river?" Carol asks and the officer shrugs again.

"A good few. The mountain is littered with hunting cabins," he says with a shrug and a frown. Oh, he wasn't going to like the next question.

"And is one of them Sherriff Booth's?" she asks. The dark look that crosses is his face is her answer. "Then we're going up there."

Mary grabs her arm. She holds on tight, a wild look in her eyes. "That man saved me when the world forgot about me. You shouldn't punish him for saving me."

Carol rips her arm out of Mary's grasp and tries not to shoot her a look of disgust.

Everything was always for Ruelle, why couldn't anyone else see that she was sick? That she needed serious help. If she knew who Harvey Booth really was it would have been better for her to turn him in to the authorities, not to become some twisted wolf vigilante.

Still Carol leaves the room and announces to the men staring at her that she plans to go up that mountain to search the cabin. They all seem shocked, but when she tells them: "If we prove her wrong, we can look for a more suitable suspect," they all get on board.

Carol makes sure that they issue her a gun. She wouldn't do it on purpose, of course, but if a stray bullet took down the almighty Sliver Sight she wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

[----]

His father still points that shotgun at him. Cooper stares at him in muted horror.

His memories.

Those stolen bits of time had all come back.

He remembered.

He finally remembered.

"You... you... it was... you?" he found himself whispering.

He shouldn't have.

He should have just let it go, he should have faked not remembering.

He didn't have his gun. He didn't have any way to protect himself against another shot from his father's shotgun.

But the words tumble out of his mouth before he can stop himself.

"I didn't want to..."

"You shot me!" Cooper thunders. "You shot your own son!"

"I had to!" his father shouts at him. "You saw. You saw everything and I knew, I knew you wouldn't stay quiet. You loved that girl too much."

Bile rises to Cooper's throat.

It over powers him.

The memory of her body, slashed open, the red vibrant against the cold blue of his mind.

His father had gutted Ruelle like a deer. "You killed her," he gasps out. "You... why?"

"Because she saw," his father cries again. Fuck. Was everyone a witness?

"You're the serial killer," Cooper breathes out. "You're the one who's been taking women, torturing them and killing them. Aren't you? That's what Ruelle saw. She saw you dump a body!"

"She just came out of no where. One second, I'm alone the next thing she's there. I knew that lippy bitch wouldn't stay quiet. She was always so concerned with everyone else's business. Protecting the forest. Protecting the animals. She always had to do what was right, she never would have kept it to herself. She had to be silenced. I didn't want to do it, you have to believe me," he tells Cooper.

Cooper is reeling from this information. His father looks almost sincere. Like he believes it's the right choice.

"I should have known you weren't far behind. You were never away from her for too long, but you showed up before I expected you and you just went wild. I knew I couldn't talk you down so I..."

"You shot me and then you left me to die," Cooper growls.

"But you didn't, you didn't and I had to... I had a choice. If you remembered, I didn't know what I was going to do but you woke up and..."

"I didn't remember a thing," Cooper finishes for him. "You must have felt like you hit the jackpot.

"I have lived in fear of you remembering for years. Every therapy session, hypnosis treatment, every shock therapy or scare therapy or whatever else you were doing. I knew there would be one day where I'd get a call that you had come to put in your statement. Then I thought if I tried to keep you from her, banished her from our lives that you might never remember. Then you moved. I thought that was it. But it was never going to be it. You were never going to forget that girl."

Cooper is looking for any way out. His dad had no issue shooting him before, he wouldn't hesitate now. But he doesn't know how he's going to get out of this when he knew his dad was a crack shoot with a shotgun and he was too close to avoid the buck shot spread.

Outside the little cabin the wind rages. Like it did when Ruelle was arrested. He could feel the cabin bending, could hear it creak against the pressure. It was ominous, it was worrying, even his father looked unnerved.

But then again, his world was crashing down around him.

"What are you going to do dad? You going to shoot me again? Make sure this time you kill me? What are you going to tell everyone?"

"You think it will be hard? With the amount of times you've gone into these woods looking for her body. Never did find it did you? Why would you, you were looking in all the wrong spots," his dad spits out. Except Cooper know something he doesn't and that Ruelle climbed out of that grave he put her in.

"There isn't a single person in that town that won't believe me when I say you went looking and didn't come back. And just like you, they'll look in all the wrong places. But if you're good, I promise. I'll bury you right beside her. How about that?"

"Really dad. I mean, killing strangers, that's easy, and maybe even killing Ruelle was easy, despite knowing her almost all her life. But I'm your son, do you really think, after killing helpless women, you'll be able to kill me? I mean, you couldn't the first time..."

He had been stalling, in hopes of distracting his dad long enough to run but his time has run out. And he knows that. His dad is going to kill him.

He pulls back the hammer instead of even bothering to answer Cooper's taunts.

And he might have even shot him too if it wasn't for the forest making its way into that cabin. A tree fell, and not just any tree, a large silver pine, right through the roof. Releasing the raging wind to whip through the house.

It was just the distraction that Cooper needed. He was gone the second his father was unbalanced. Running right out that door and into the forest. The aim was to get into the car, but nothing in life was ever that easy.