AI The air in Richmond Park after midnight held a damp, earthy chill that seeped through Aurora Carter’s jacket. The city’s orange glow was a smudge against the clouds to the east, but here, among the ancient oaks, the darkness was nearly absolute. She’d come on a delivery for Yu-Fei, a late-night order of lo mein and prawn crackers to an address that didn’t, according to her phone’s map, actually exist. The client had texted specific, strange instructions: follow the deer track west of the Pembroke Lodge car park until you see the three birches leaning together like gossips. Then go north.
She’d done it. Now, standing before a circle of towering, moss-clad standing stones that looked more like petrified oak trees than rock, she felt the first true prickle of unease. This was the Fae Grove. Silas had muttered about it once, a warning over a polished bar, his eyes serious. *Don’t go looking for it, Rory. Time gets funny there.*
But here it was. The delivery bag was a light, greasy weight in her hand. The client had promised a hundred-pound tip, cash. After rent, after sending a little something to her mum, it was too much to ignore. She took a steadying breath, the cool-headed logic she prided herself on asserting control. *In and out. Leave the food on the central flat stone, they said. Don’t wait.*
She stepped between two of the stones.
The temperature shifted instantly, from autumn chill to a soft, spring-like warmth that carried the cloying perfume of a thousand flowers. Wildflowers, impossibly vibrant, bloomed in velvety profusion across the clearing, defying the October night outside. The air itself seemed to thrum with a silent, living energy. Wrong. This was all wrong. The map pin had been a lure.
Rory set her jaw and walked forward, her trainers sinking silently into thick moss. In the centre of the clearing was a low, flat altar stone, pale in the gloom . The only light came from a feeble moon filtering through a canopy that looked… different. The branches seemed lower, more twisted, than they had from outside the circle.
She placed the paper bag carefully on the stone. “Delivery,” she said, her voice swallowed by the dense air. No one answered. Of course no one answered.
She was turning to leave when the Heartstone pendant, hidden beneath her shirt, gave a distinct, warm pulse against her sternum. She froze, her fingers instinctively going to the small lump of silver and crimson gem. Dymas had given it to her, a fae knight with shadows in his eyes, for ‘protection’. It only ever warmed near doors to Hel. There were no doors here. Just flowers and stone and wrong, wrong silence .
Then she heard the first sound.
It was a rustle, but not the gentle shiver of leaves. It was a dry, papery sound, like old parchment being slowly crumpled. It came from the treeline to her right. She snapped her head toward it, her bright blue eyes straining. Nothing. Just deeper shadow between the gnarled trunks.
*Get out. Now.*
She took a step back toward the stone circle. The rustle came again, this time from directly behind her, near the altar stone. She whirled, heart hammering against the warm gem. The delivery bag sat untouched. But at the very edge of the clearing, where flower met root, she saw something—a suggestion of movement. A patch of darkness that seemed to detach itself from the rest and then flow back, too quick to be real . It was the shape of a person kneeling, maybe, or a large animal crouched. It was gone before her mind could properly assemble it.
“Hello?” The word was out before she could stop it, a stupid, human challenge to the quiet.
The Grove drank the sound. No echo . The floral scent grew stronger, now edged with a hint of decay, like a vase of beautiful blooms left to rot in stagnant water. Rory began to walk backwards, keeping her eyes on the altar, on the treeline. The standing stones that marked the way out seemed farther away than they should have been . The geometry of the clearing was subtly off, the space stretching.
A soft, wet click echoed from her left. The sound of a tongue against teeth. Her skin crawled. She wasn’t imagining it. Something was making a noise, tasting the air.
She picked up her pace, the cool-headed thinker in her screaming to run, but the survivor, forged in quieter, more human terrors with Evan, knew running blind in an unknown place was a death sentence. Walk fast. Be deliberate.
The rustling began in earnest, a syncopated rhythm from multiple points around the clearing now. *Dry leaves, insect wings, scraping claws.* It kept time with her heartbeat. From the corner of her left eye, a shape darted between two far stones—tall, spindly, all wrong angles. When she looked directly, there was only the unmoving, ancient oak.
The pendant pulsed again, warmer, a tiny heartbeat of warning. The warmth was not comforting . It was a brand.
A whisper brushed the air, not in her ears but inside her skull . It was a thread of sound, a single word she couldn’t quite grasp, in a language that felt old and cold and hungry . It was followed by a low, resonant hum that seemed to come from the stones themselves .
She was halfway to the boundary. The flowers here were different; their colours were bleached in the weak light, pale blues and yellows giving way to bruised purples and charred blacks. They smelled of damp soil and copper.
Something brushed against her ankle.
Rory stifled a cry, jumping sideways. A vine, thick and ropy, was snaking across the moss where she had just stood. It hadn’t been there a second ago. It moved with a slow, sinuous purpose, not blown by any wind. As she watched, frozen, another vine uncurled from a nearby flower cluster, its tip questing like a blind worm.
They were coming from the flowers. The beautiful, impossible flowers.
Forget quiet. She ran.
The clearing erupted. The rustling became a frenzied chorus, the whispering a chaotic babble in her mind. Shapes flitted at the edges of her vision—a tatter of shadow that might have been a cloak, a gleam that could have been an eye, a long-fingered hand resting for a second on a stone before vanishing. They never stood still when she looked. They were always just leaving, impressions burned into her peripheral sight.
Something cold and damp grabbed her wrist—the left one, with the small crescent scar. She yanked it back with a force born of pure panic, stumbling. There was nothing there but a tendril of mist, coiling and dissolving. Where it had touched, her skin was numb.
The standing stones were right there. Thirty feet. Twenty.
The air directly in front of her *warped *. It was like looking through heat haze off asphalt, but cold, a lens of distortion through which the stones looked melted and strange. A figure stood within that warp, silhouetted against the darker trees beyond. It was tall, too tall, and thin. It didn’t move. It just watched her with a terrible, patient stillness.
She skidded to a halt, breath sawing in her throat. The thing blocking the path didn’t feel like the flitting shadows. This felt solid. Intentional. The source of the lure.
The Heartstone flared, a sudden, painful heat against her chest. Not a pulse , but a sustained burn, as if shouting a warning it had only whispered before .
Rory did the only thing she could think of. She stopped trying to look at the thing head-on. She fixed her gaze on a point just to the left of the distortion, a trick she’d learned in a different life, when direct eye contact was a provocation. With her peripheral vision, she could see it more clearly—a suggestion of elongated limbs, a head that tilted with a bird-like curiosity. And it was holding something. A small, dark shape. The delivery bag.
It had her food. It had been behind her, at the altar, and now it was here. Time moves differently here, Silas had said.
She didn’t think. She ran, not at the gap it blocked, but veering sharply to the right, toward the space between two other stones. She kept her gaze averted, focusing on the black, familiar leather of her own trainers pounding the moss. The whispering rose to a hiss. The cold spot in the air seemed to reach for her, the temperature plummeting as she passed near it.
Then she was through, bursting between the standing stones and into the familiar , biting cold of the October night. The oppressive floral stench vanished, replaced by the clean, rotten-leaf smell of the park. The silence was broken by the distant hum of a night flight coming into Heathrow.
She didn’t stop running until she hit the tarmac of the car park, her lungs burning. She bent double, hands on her knees, and vomited into the gutter. The Heartstone at her neck was cool again, an inert piece of jewellery.
When she finally straightened, wiping her mouth, she looked back toward the deer track. It was just a path into black woods. No strange perfume, no whispering. But on her left wrist, where the mist had touched, the skin around her old crescent scar was blanched white, as if touched by frost. It ached with a deep, bone-deep cold.
And in the pocket of her jacket, her fingers, trembling, found something they hadn’t put there. She pulled it out. A single, perfect flower, the colour of a fresh bruise. It was still warm from the Grove. She dropped it as if it were a live coal, watching it wither and turn to black dust on the wet tarmac before the wind scattered it.
The hundred pounds didn’t matter. The delivery didn’t matter. Something had seen her. Something knew her name. And it had let her go. For now.