The nausea crept up her throat from the pit of her stomach; the realisation that yesterday was real. She had just had what a sorcerer in another world called a live dream.

Ade and Rowena The Goth, fell under this bus. They left Marsh Bank House traumatised. True, Rowena did not fall foul of Stringers prediction, a large part of that was a selfless course of action by Conrad, but death did fall upon part of her psyche. At the time of this book their nice solid friendship had failed. Things that needed talking about, were left in denial. School suffered, but both managed reasonable grades, and progressed into sixth form. Rowena tried going out with someone, but it failed after two hours. Ade never bothered. Both continued to stare at each other from a distance.

Rowena cried herself to sleep at night, while Ade sat looking at an old text message, “I love you Ade, never let anything come between us.”

It had. The smoking gun, and something they had both seen, that nobody else alive had, Elisabeth Beechwood.

Ade was dropping out of life in a big way, back to who he was before Rowena found him, looking at the world beyond the school fencing. She was looking at university courses, to escape Houghton, and the boyfriend she still wanted.

Emma Strickland knew how Rowena felt, the first man she had begun forming a real bond with was “missing.” It sucked, she wanted to bang Ade and Rowena's heads together. But she hadn't. Her own life was part of that collateral damage. She knew the house destroyed her parents. It's what it did, history said so. It ate you up, and spat corpses out. Sometimes it didn't even do that, it just swallowed you up whole.

It's why she took it off the market, and boarded it up. That was eighteen months ago, before her therapist, Kevin Whittaker, suggested taking a step back. Stop overwhelming, and start living again. Emma lapped that one up, and decided never going back to the house was the best thing since sliced bread.

Still, all broken jigsaws start in bits, and two years after the puzzle was smashed, Joseph and Allan were beginning to start picking them up. There was business to attend, friends to re-acquaint with, and lives demanding answers, that science and forensics drew blanks on.