AI Rory hit the fourth oak at a run and the bark shuddered under her palm.
She snatched her hand back as if she had touched hot metal. The trunk did not move again. It stood straight and harmless, part of the rough ring of ancient oaks that hid this pocket of Richmond Park from anyone without the right kind of bad ideas. Her breath misted in front of her face, too fast and too loud. The silver chain at her throat bit into the back of her neck as the pendant swung free, the small crimson stone knocking against her sternum with an eager little tap, tap.
She curled her fingers around it to keep it still.
The stone pulsed once against her skin, warm as a live coal.
She froze.
Nothing else moved. No foxes in the bracken. No distant traffic hum. No late jogger cursing at a twisted ankle. Even the far-off city roar, the familiar ocean of engines and drunk shouts, cut off at the ring of trees like someone had closed a door.
Her fingers tightened on the pendant.
Someone had texted an hour ago, a number she did not know, a message as blunt as a threat.
Come to the grove. Midnight. Bring the stone. Come alone.
She had nearly deleted it. Nearly turned her phone off, made tea, gone back upstairs to her cramped room above Silas's bar, and pretended nothing in her life counted as unusual. Then the Heartstone had woken in its box, heat seeping through cheap cardboard and tissue like something buried and restless.
So here she stood.
Her trainers sank into leaf mould, damp and cold. Between the oaks the clearing waited, black on black, a bowl scooped out of the park. The wildflowers that locals raved about when they stumbled on this place glimmered at the edge of her vision, colours flattened by the dark. They should not have bloomed this thick in February. Logic scratched at the inside of her skull.
She stepped forward.
The city vanished behind her like it had never existed. No sodium glare, no buzz of bulbs, no single distant shout. Just the soft tick of cooling bark and her own footfalls.
She swallowed.
The Heartstone shifted its rhythm, a second pulse under her own. It beat too slow, like something drowning miles below.
Her phone glowed in her free hand. 00:01.
It had said that when she passed the second oak. And the third. And when she stopped to breathe, counted to fifty, and checked again.
00:01.
She locked the screen and shoved the phone into her pocket as if that would fix anything.
A branch creaked above her, long and low, like someone dragging a bow across a cello string. The sound prickled along her arms.
She tipped her head back.
The branches knitted together high overhead, a tangled ceiling. Nothing moved among them. No perched crows, no restless squirrels. The leaves whispered without wind.
She smelled wet earth and green things crushed underfoot. Under that, faint and sharp, copper. Like a nosebleed starting.
Her jaw set.
She cleared her throat.
"All right then," she said. Her voice walked out into the clearing and went nowhere, as if the trees sucked the sound down and chewed it. "You got me here. Where are you?"
Silence folded over her again.
A fly buzzed past her ear, a tiny angry motor. It veered to the left, straight into nothing, and stopped. No body hit her skin. No insect drifted past her face. The sound snapped off mid-flight.
The wrongness flowed in behind it, thin at first, like trickling water.
Rory eased the pendant out on its chain and let it hang. The tiny crimson stone glowed, dull and steady, as if lit behind smoked glass. It warmed the hollow of her throat. It had never shone like that in her room, in London light. Even when it woke earlier, it had only throbbed once.
"You like it here," she muttered.
The stone answered with a heavier beat, slow and delighted.
Something laughed at the edge of the clearing.
Not a person. Not exactly.
It sounded too high, like a child gulping air between fits of giggles, thin and breathless. The sound skittered around the trunks, never landing anywhere solid. It did not echo . Echoes needed walls and distance. This noise came from everywhere at once, as if the grove itself remembered laughter and tried to copy it.
She turned a slow circle.
"That the welcoming committee?" she said.
The laughter cut off, as if a hand had closed over a small mouth.
Standing stones, people called the oaks here. Old bark split and ridged, bulging out of the ground in crooked circles. Someone in a pub had once mentioned druids and sacrifice over a pint, the way you shared legends to pass the time. She had nodded along. At the time she still thought these pockets belonged to story and tourist boards, not to the kind of creatures that bled when you stabbed them.
The trunks loomed in a rough ring, twelve of them, maybe thirteen, no two the same thickness. Their roots ran out like dropped ropes, weaving under leaf litter. As she watched, one of the roots eased further across the soil. Just a fraction. The movement made no sound. The earth did not crack, no leaves stirred, but the root writhed like a slow, pleased snake.
Her chest tightened.
"No," she said, more to herself than the trees . "That did not happen."
The root lay quiet and innocent.
She dug her nails into her palm.
Escape routes. She picked two gaps between trunks and memorised them. One to her left, narrow, with low hanging branches, the other straight ahead, wider and cleaner. She could sprint. Sprinting solved a lot.
The pendant flashed, a brief sharp flare.
She stopped thinking about sprinting.
The air in the middle of the clearing rippled.
Not much. A small shift, as if the space had exhaled. Dark on dark, a faint stripe where the clearing sagged in on itself, the way hot air made a summer road waver. Her eyes strained for detail. Her brain refused to give it.
Her hand went to her wrist before she thought about it, thumb tracing the thin crescent scar there, old and pale. She never did that unless she felt cornered.
"Right," she said. "This is where the mysterious bastard steps out and explains everything. That is how this goes."
She waited.
The grove listened.
Her own breath grew too loud. Her pulse roared in her ears, and underneath it, that other beat, slower, heavier, woven through like a second drummer.
She swallowed.
"Rory."
Her mother’s voice came from behind her left shoulder, crisp and low and edged with the sharpness of a hundred childhood tellings off.
Her spine locked.
She did not turn.
"Late again," Jennifer Carter said, clear as church bells, close enough to touch. "I told you what happens when you do not listen."
Rory stared at the far oak, at a scar in the bark that looked like a knotted fist .
Her throat burned.
"Nice trick," she said. "Jesus, you things learn quick."
Something behind her breathed in. The intake rasped, dry leaves rubbed together.
"Turn around, Aurora."
Her full name slid over the damp air in that familiar cadence, syllables that had once meant hot tea and plasters, now thick with something else. The voice sounded right, every clipped consonant, every Welsh lilt softened by years in Cardiff classrooms.
Her mouth filled with the taste of pennies.
Rory let the silence stretch until her fingers relaxed on the pendant. Then she moved.
Not the slow, terrified half-turn the grove expected. She shifted two steps to the side, eyes still forward, and sidestepped again until the speaker fell out of her blind spot.
Only then did she look .
No one stood between the trees.
Empty air mocked her.
The wildflowers at the base of the nearest oak trembled , though nothing brushed them. Something had stood there, recently enough to disturb fragile stems. The impressions in the leaf mould beside them looked like bare toes, long and narrow and wrong.
She met the empty space with a cold, flat stare.
"You do better impressions when you stick to goblins," she said. "At least they fetch their own bones."
The wildflowers stilled.
Somewhere above, wood cracked with a pistol-shot snap. A branch slammed to the ground halfway across the clearing, showering damp mulch. It landed a metre from her boots.
Her body flinched on instinct.
She drew a slow breath through her nose, tasted the bite of sap and old rot, and let the air out again.
"Temper temper," she said.
Her voice shook only a little.
The Heartstone warmed. Heat seeped into her palm, into the thin skin over her breastbone. The stone’s inner glow thickened, deep crimson clouding and clearing in slow pulses. The rhythm no longer matched either her heart or anything human. It beat to its own measure, like distant machinery.
The soil beneath her left foot quivered .
Rory froze, weight balanced to move.
A faint sound crawled up from the earth. Not the fat chew of worms or the brittle sprint of beetles. A hum. Low and steady, like a far underground train grinding against rails. Mixed under that, thin as a frayed radio signal, came voices.
Dozens, hundreds, all layered. Some screamed. Some sobbed. Some muttered in languages she did not know. All sounded muffled, buried, like they spoke through packed dirt.
Her stomach turned.
She shifted her foot.
The hum faded.
"Hel," she whispered before she could stop herself.
The stories Silas told on slow nights, half drunk over polished wood, edged in from the corners of her mind. Old names, old places where the world thinned and other things pressed up against the skin of it. He had traced one such place with a beer bottle on a napkin map once. Richmond Park. Quiet voice. Do not go alone.
She had come anyway.
The air cooled against her teeth when she drew in a breath.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, a small frantic shiver.
She jumped.
Her hand jerked to her jeans, fingers digging for it. She dragged it out, thumb smeared over the cracked screen. No new message icon blinked. No missed call. The battery symbol sat smugly at half. Time read 23:14.
She stared.
She had watched it tick over to midnight on the bus. She remembered the grainy reflection of her own face in the window and the small glowing numbers above. She remembered thinking, you promised Eva you would stop doing stupid things after dark.
The phone vibrated again.
Her hand spasmed. She nearly dropped it.
The lock screen did not change.
The vibration went on, not the intermittent buzz of a call or a text, but a steady low shudder . It crawled up the bones of her hand into her arm, numbing the skin. She turned the phone over. The plastic case looked ordinary. Her thumb found the seam and picked at it.
The hum from the ground matched the phone now, in perfect ugly harmony.
She closed her fingers around the device until the edges dug into flesh, then opened her hand and let it fall.
The phone hit the earth.
The hum cut off.
For a heartbeat the world held its breath.
Then, under the thin layer of leaves where her phone had landed, something knocked, three hard raps from below, like knuckles against a coffin lid.
Rory took one step back.
The pendant flared in her hand, bright enough to cast a feverish smear on her knuckles. It felt heavy, leaden, like a solid drop of fresh blood. The warmth shifted towards heat, not burning yet, but close .
Her thumb brushed the stone.
It answered.
Not in words. In sensation. Weight, depth, invitation.
The air thickened in her lungs, as if she breathed through wool. Her vision sharpened around the edges of the clearing, every fern frond and wildflower head picked out in mean little detail, while the centre blurred and throbbed with dark.
"You brought it back," a voice said.
This one did not pretend to be familiar .
It came from in front of her, from the soft black wobble where the air bent. It sounded old and smooth and patient, like water that had spent centuries carving its own bed. The words rolled, strange cadence, as if they cared more about the shape of her than the language.
Her mouth dried.
"I did not bring anything back," she said, lifting her chin. "Someone shoved this into my life and thought I would make a nice delivery girl."
"You wear it," the voice said. "It chose skin. It remembers."
A shadow flashed across the blurred centre. Not solid, not yet, a ripple with the suggestion of limbs.
Rory felt her jaw clench until it ached.
"Who are you?" she said.
"You opened the gate," the voice said. It ignored her question the way adults ignored children in courtrooms. "You stand in the mouth, little heart. The hungry side listens."
"Brilliant," she said, dry . "So I am bait."
The laugh slid out of the air, soft and delighted.
"The stone knows its work," it said. "Blood to blood. Bone to bone."
Under her boots the soil shifted.
Not much, not like an earthquake, not like cinema. A small subsidence, like the top layer sagged over a hollow space. The wildflowers around her ankles tilted towards the centre of the clearing, their thin stems bowing.
Rory’s body screamed at her to run.
Her legs did not move.
Because the oaks had closed their ring.
Sometime between her stepping through and now, the gap she had chosen, the clean path out, had narrowed. Roots had crept across it, thick and gnarled and patient. The branches reached lower, their crooked fingers interlaced. The other exit, the narrow one, bristled with new-grown twigs that would rake any face that tried to push through.
She swallowed.
"You did not mention the part where the door locks behind me," she said.
"It prefers not to share," the voice said.
The centre of the clearing yawned.
The blur deepened. Darkness there grew teeth. Not bright cartoon fangs, nothing so simple. This took the form of absence, an aching whisper of shape her eyes struggled to accept. A slight oval hung in the air , ten feet wide at most, an area where the world had been scooped out. Through it, she saw nothing.
Not black.
Nothing.
The pendant burned against her palm.
Her fingers opened without her consent.
The Heartstone slid off her skin, chain snaking after it. It hovered for a fraction above her hand, held in place by no visible force, then drifted, slow and determined , towards the hollow in the air.
Her muscles locked.
"Stop," she said.
The stone did not stop.
Heat rolled off it, hot and intense, searing the tiny hairs on the back of her hand as it slipped past. Sweat burst along her spine. The crimson glow filled the centre of the clearing with sick light, painting bark and leaves in shades of fresh meat.
The voices under the ground rose.
They howled now, full throat, urgent and wild. The sound passed through her soles, through tibia and femur, rattling her teeth from the inside.
She lunged.
Her fingers closed around empty chain.
The Heartstone floated a foot beyond her outstretched hand, crimson gleam aimed at the waiting hollow in the air like the point of a spear.
The voice in front of her sighed, pleased.
"It remembers," it said. "It hungers."
The air behind Rory stirred.
No breeze. A pressure. A presence walking up quiet, careful, on feet that did not disturb leaves.
Cold breath touched the back of her neck.
A palm settled against her bare wrist, right over the thin white crescent of the old scar, and squeezed.