AI Stop fluttering, you little liar.
Aurora pinched the pendant between forefinger and thumb. Heat pulsed against her skin, soft as a breath and out of sync with her heart. The silver chain slid over the pad of her wrist and found the crescent scar like a lover who knew the route in the dark. She stood within a ring of old oaks that pretended to be stones, trunks thick as pillars and bark scored with scars of storms she refused to name. Richmond Park fell away behind her as if she had stepped through a bead curtain. No traffic hum. No foxes screaming at bins. Only the hush of something waiting to be acknowledged.
She eased a step forward. Flowers caught the corner of her eye, a little crowd of white and saffron heads peering through shaggy grass. They should not have been open at this hour. She matched each footfall to the slow pump of the Heartstone and let the familiar rhythm of planning settle in, like unrolling greaseproof paper before slicing cake. Observe, test, adjust.
Her phone read 22:08 when she checked. No bars, of course. She took a breath that tasted green and sap-sweet and something a fraction sour, like apple left too long on a windowsill. She slid the phone away and listened. Leaves shifted. But not where her eyes said they should. Something brushed her sleeve from behind, then from in front, a double tap that made her arm hair pebble.
All right. Not alone.
She kept her hands where any watcher could see them and walked. The ground underfoot felt carpet thick. Not spongy. Not crunchy. Not right. Each step met the faintest give, as if roots flexed to accommodate her. A memory nudged, an evening with Eva in the cheap seats at the Richmond Theatre, a dodgy production where the stage floor rippled because the set crew had mislaid a brace. The actors smiled and pretended their feet did not lie. Rory had laughed then, low and helpless, because the lie had been so generous.
She did not laugh now.
A shape shifted at the edge of vision, an inkblot that snapped into leaf when she looked directly at it. Another moved, rabbit-small, then taller. A slim figure. A stag. A woman. No, a shadow cast by nothing she could find. Her cool, clever mind stacked the wrongness into neat piles. Sounds a beat behind her own. Movement that refused eye contact. Temperature a few degrees warmer where the pendant touched skin.
The Heartstone warmed and cooled. Warmed. Cooled. Warmer. A heartbeat between worlds, perhaps. She rolled the chain around her fingers until it tugged, the silver biting into skin to anchor her here. She ran a palm over her jeans to dry the sweat that had gathered and then dug fingers into the back pocket for loose change. Two coins dropped into her hand, a fifty pence and an old penny with a sloppy green smear on the edge. She held the penny, turned it so it winked in the weak light, then pressed metal to oak. The bark hissed very softly , like steam drawn back through a kettle spout. Iron of a sort. Steel under copper. Good enough.
The tree’s skin drank the mark and then smoothed it, and when she lifted the coin the faint circle had already faded.
Fine. She adjusted.
She took a hair tie from her wrist, bright yellow and snagged with tiny broken hairs, and snapped it around a low branch where the bark joined the trunk. She walked a short arc and counted her steps in Welsh to steady herself. Un. Dau. Tri. Pedwar. The numbers slotted into place with the weight of Sunday dinners and homework sheets marked in red by a mother who had never spared softness when clarity did the job better.
At count thirty-two she met her own hair tie. It gleamed band-new in a place she had not reached yet. The branch sat a fraction higher. The sap smelled fresher, the cut her nails had left when she fumbled it gone.
She glanced down at the screen. 22:08 still. A minute hand that had lost interest.
All right then.
The pendant beat two quick notes. Her father had called such things tells, movements that betrayed a liar’s nerves. Brendan Carter could sniff out an omission from behind a brief the thickness of a bread loaf, and he had taught his daughter to smile while she told the truth in pieces. She smiled now at the empty Grove and waited.
A second footstep fell a half-beat after hers. She stopped. It took one extra step to catch up. It arrived too close.
She did not turn.
If you can speak, speak now.
Silence flowered. She felt it press along her teeth and settle over her tongue like a paper you could not tear. The pendant cooled to a steady hum against her breastbone. She reached up, slid it free of her shirt, and let the little crimson thing hang where any watching eye could admire it.
I brought you your dog whistle. That the idea, then?
She stepped up to one of the oak columns. Ancient, yes, but alive in a way stone failed to be. The surface under her fingers danced with tiny shivers, ants or sap pulsing, she could not decide. Someone had cut shallow signs into it, years ago or yesterday, fine focus lines that made the bark’s scale slip. She leaned in. The lines did not belong to English. Or Welsh. The longer she stared the more they resembled veins.
The double-footfall came again, not trying to mask itself, now that it knew she knew. It mimicked. When she shifted her weight forward, it followed. When she breathed in, it breathed a moment late.
She lifted the penny and drew a small circle on the damp earth at her feet. She dug the coin with a firm hand, shallow groove, a ward she had picked up in a book that had set itself on fire after three pages. The ground gave her nothing back except the scent of disturbed soil and the faintly wrong sweetness of crushed wildflower. She stepped inside the ring and stood like a woman in a witness box.
An owl floated above her, soundless. She saw it when it crossed the space between two trunks, white wings a brief ghost. It did not bank. It did not move away. It unspooled sideways and rewound. The third time, she did not look up to greet it.
A laugh trickled from somewhere ahead, as if water had found a narrow pipe and forced its way through. Child’s laugh. Man’s laugh. Her own voice, cut up and stitched wrong.
Very clever, she said. Show me the bit that is supposed to make me cry and we might trade.
Leaves rustled. A line of foxgloves nodded in a wind that puckered one side of the clearing and left the other side calm. A moth struck her cheek with a sound like string on a finger and left a dust kiss when she brushed it away. Insects reoriented in the air, then stilled. The ground shifted again. Not much. Enough.
The Heartstone flared under her hand.
Heat licked along the chain and ran under her skin as if a match had been dragged from collarbone to wrist. She swallowed and tasted metal. A tone rose and sank, almost too low to hear, a bass note that rode her bones.
The space between two oaks across the ring thickened. Air turned to water, to glass, to something with weight but no form. It bowed inwards as if pressed by a palm on the other side. The ancient line of the park reeled here, trained over cotton reels and tangled thread. She saw, not saw, a glimpse beyond. Trees that might have been birch if birch bark held bruises. Ground powdered white, not snow, the drift moved upward on a listless current. A shadow at the far end of the not-place shifted and watched her with the same patience as a cat when a mouse forgets the cat exists.
Warmth spread out under her shirt, a sun the size of a thumbnail sitting over her heart. It filled her head with an ache. She fought the urge to press the stone into the base of her throat where it would nest and be safe. Instead she curled fists and let the chain bite.
The thing at the edge of the portal leaned closer. She kept the word portal off her tongue. Words shaped outcomes. She had learned that in a court once, halfway through a hearing where a judge had taken one stray adjective and written an essay with it. If she named it, she would own it. She preferred to watch it without a leash for another moment.
Laila.
A voice lifted from the not-place and salted the air. Not her father’s this time. A woman sweet as a lullaby who had never met her. The syllables did not touch her ear. They burrowed through the little bones at the back of her neck and popped into her head like trapped bathwater.
That is not my name.
The chain tightened of its own accord. It did not choke. It did not strangle. It simply shortened. Each link moved. Each a tiny muscle. Her hand flew up to grab it, quick as a striking adders he had watched on a school trip to the wetlands. The silver felt alive.
Malphora, the woman sang. Such a pretty toy for a pawn .
Pawn. The old rage rolled over like a tide and receded. She let it go. Anger tightened the world until you walked ten feet and thought you had run a mile. She needed space. She needed angles.
She squatted, slow and careful, and dug the point of a house key into the circle line she had scratched in the soil. The key squealed. Sparks prickled and went out. The foul-sweet rose and folded around her tongue again. She felt the ring of earth answer. Not a barrier. A speed bump. Enough to make both sides trip.
The double step came again, now heavier, as if it had decided to weigh what her presence cost. It stopped outside the circle, not because it had to, she sensed, but because it enjoyed good manners.
If you want it, come take it.
A breath stumbled out of her. Not a laugh. An acknowledgement of the line she had chosen to draw. Negotiation time. She gripped the pendant and let her arm fall loose, weighting it like a lure on a clear water line.
Two more moths bumped into her throat and died in tiny sighs.
The space between the oaks bowed lower. A ripple ran across it, then another. The sound came next, a series of knocks like knuckles on a heavy door, felt rather than heard. The trees around the ring responded, a small tic she would not have noticed if she had not fixed eyes on them. Leaves turned their pale backs to her.
The time on her watch read 22:08, then 12:80, then 08:22, then a thin line that meant nothing and everything.
She did not swallow. Her mouth had no room.
The woman’s voice turned patient. Aurora then. Come home.
Odd choice of home, Aurora said.
You brought the key.
I brought curiosity. The key came with me.
Same thing.
The wrongness poured into the clearing like water tipped from a cracked bowl. It found the dip of the ring and swirled. When it reached Aurora’s ankles her bones ached with cold that did not belong to temperature. She thought of Cardiff in winter, breath on the air, fingers stiff. This cut different. It moved up through blood instead of over skin. She gritted her teeth and lifted a foot in slow motion. The circle line tugged. The ground wanted her to stand where she had chosen.
Something pressed against the other side again. A hand perhaps. A face. The surface whose name she would not speak bulged, rolled, and, with a slick sound, the bulge slid along until it found a weak spot. The Heartstone banged against her sternum and sent a note through her ribs that felt like the point in a song where the chord changed. Her stomach dropped.
Behind her, the double step sighed a shoe against earth. She watched the air in front of her thicken and refused to give the thing at her back the first look it wanted.
A thread of dark ran from the bulging centre to the ground as if someone had painted a hairline crack in the air and it had turned three-dimensional and wet. It glistened. It did not drip. It ran up. When it touched the lower curve of an oak to the left the bark dented as if a thumb had pressed it hard.
Aurora slid one foot along the earth to widen the circle. The chain jerked. The pendant wanted to go forward. Her shoulders shifted to compensate. She used the turn to let her left hand fall into her hoodie pocket by accident. Cold metal met her fingers. She pulled out a small, cheap lighter from the bar upstairs, translucent blue netted with pocket lint. She flicked it. Flame jumped and held. She had always been good with finicky things.
You think fire makes you brave, the voice said. The lullaby leaked a smile.
I think fire lights a thing’s edges, Aurora said. Makes choices clearer.
The woman laughed again, softer, as if she sat across a table and liked the shape of this conversation. The laugh stepped forward. Not nearer. More here. The thin crack in the air widened a finger’s width and showed nothing but grey. Not colour. A lack.
Leaves overhead shuddered with a steady beat now. Not wind. A drum that shook the undersides until their paler green showed and held. The owl above unspooled a final time and did not rewind. It hung like a cut-out pinned by invisible wire.
The double-footfall at her back shifted its weight . A pressure edged against her spine that had nothing to do with touch, a notice of mass. It waited just outside her circle. It watched for her to flinch and give it an excuse.
Aurora raised the lighter and reached it toward the seam in the air. The flame bent in a polite way towards the thing beyond and shortened. Cold turned it blue at the tip.
The pendant burned. She did not drop it. She wrapped chain twice around her fist. The links dug in and left their shape, neat little ovals. Her scar shone white.
She fed the flame into the crack.
The air screamed like a kettle boiled dry. The sound pitched high and then bottomed out into that bass thrum again. The lighter hiccuped and popped and sent a hot lick across her knuckles. She swore under her breath, clipped and unkind. The circle line flared a dull orange and went dark.
The crack widened.
A hand slid out.
It did not belong to a woman or a man. It had too many knuckles, and the nails sharpened to points without curving. Its skin looked like wax left on a radiator too long, blurred and sagging near the edges. It reached, then stopped when it hit the slow place of the circle, and pressed as if testing for give .
Behind her, the double-footfall decided the game had run its course and laid a palm on the back of her neck.
Cold fingers, firm pressure, and a voice she had sworn she would never hear again breathed in her ear.
Rory. Miss me?