AI Rory stopped where the tarmac path thinned into dirt and bracken and let the dark swallow the city behind her.
Richmond’s distant glow still pressed at her back, a smear of orange behind the trees, but ahead the park sloped into something older. The air cooled in a single step. Street smells—exhaust, chip fat, wet concrete—fell away and left damp earth and crushed fern.
She thumbed the pendant through her T‑shirt.
“Right,” under her breath. “In. Out. Meet the mysterious benefactor, don’t die in a park. Easy.”
The Heartstone lay against her sternum, no heavier than usual, a small hard circle on a cheap silver chain. It glowed a murky dark in her mind even when she couldn’t see it. She had caught herself checking it all afternoon while she’d ferried foil boxes through Soho; Yu‑Fei had sent her home early with a sharp look and a muttered comment about “haunted eyes”.
Rory stepped off the path.
The park grass rustled around her trainers, wet from some earlier drizzle she hadn’t noticed in the city. Her phone buzzed once in her pocket—a phantom notification she couldn’t afford to check. The note had been blunt enough: Come alone. Midnight. The grove. Answers.
She had tried to laugh it off to Eva, then watched the ink rearrange itself when Eva held the page.
We can’t go. Her words from then still pressed at her, sour and serious. Not together. It wants you.
So now she walked alone, under branches that knitted closer overhead with each step.
Sounds dropped away in layers. She lost the faint sigh of traffic first. Then the echo of the city’s constant rumble. Then, after a dozen more paces, even the breeze. Leaves on the trees hung flat and heavy, darker shapes against the night sky.
Rory checked her phone anyway.
No reception. The time read 23:57. The lock screen photo of Eva and Silas behind the bar looked wrong in this light. The two of them beamed at some unseen joke; the reflection of her own face over them pulled her mouth into a thin, flat line.
She slid the phone back into her pocket.
“Just a clearing,” she told the trees . “In a national park. With extra weird landscaping. And possibly homicidal pixies. No problem.”
The trees did not answer. Their trunks rose in pale columns, bark silvered where the low light from the city brushed them. She picked her way over exposed roots and thought of case notes and cross‑examinations, things with rules, places where the worst thing that could happen involved losing a precedent, not vanishing in a patch of off‑brand fairyland.
A faint warmth bloomed against her chest.
Rory stopped.
The Heartstone pulsed once. A small push of heat, no brighter than a swallowed mouthful of tea, but definite. She pinched the pendant through her shirt and lifted it. It swung out on its chain like a compass needle that had forgotten what magnets were, then stilled, pointing toward the depth of the trees.
“You’re really doing this, then.”
Her voice came out thin, swallowed at the edges. No echo . The dark in front of her felt thick enough to lean on.
She went on.
The first oak stone loomed up out of the dark without warning. It tore out of the ground higher than her head, a twisted trunk that didn’t belong to any living tree. Roots had fused, bark smoothed and hardened, the core hollowed and polished by hands or wind or both. It leaned at a slight angle, frozen in the act of falling.
Another stood twelve paces past it, then another. Old oak that had forgotten how to be trees and chosen something else.
Rory brushed her fingers along the nearest one.
The wood felt dry, not cold, and didn’t flake under her touch. Faint grooves crossed its surface where something had carved spirals and knotwork in lines that made her eyes itch when she followed them.
The Heartstone flared again, stronger. She winced and pulled the pendant out over her collar to look.
The gem burned a deep, steady crimson. It painted the inside of her cupped hand with blood‑coloured light.
“I liked you better when you just did the occasional warm flush,” she muttered.
Something moved past the edge of her vision.
Rory’s head snapped up. Nothing stood between the stones. Wildflowers crowded the bare earth where grass should have choked tight. Cowslips, foxgloves, star‑shaped things she didn’t know, white and purple and yellow, all open as if noon sun hung above them instead of a bruised London night.
The petals didn’t stir. No wind.
She watched the nearest foxglove.
One bell‑shaped flower contracted, as if a thumb and forefinger pinched it from the inside. Its lip folded in on itself, then smoothed out again.
“Right,” under her breath. “Plant biology’s cancelled.”
She stepped between the first two oak stones.
The pendant burned against her skin like live coal for a heartbeat. The temperature of the air changed. Her breath came out in a pale cloud.
Behind her, a car horn blared faint and distant. Then another, overlapping. London, only muffled. She turned, caught a smear of moving lights between trunks where the city lay.
The sound shut off.
Not faded. Not distant. Cut, as if someone had pressed a button.
Silence pooled around her ankles and crept upward. Even her own breath felt wrong, shallow, too loud.
A twig snapped to her right.
She jerked around. No one stood near the stones. The undergrowth crowded close in a ragged band, bramble and fern and tucked shadows, the sort of darkness that suggested shape without committing to one. Her skin tightened across her shoulders.
“Someone there?”
The words hung in the air . Something in the grove caught them and held them.
“Someone there?”
The echo came back a fraction late. Not from the trees around her. From somewhere deeper, as if the grove had rolled her voice around its tongue first.
She swallowed.
“Very funny.”
“Very funny.”
The second version dragged on the last syllable. A near match, but not quite . A child reciting lines in a language it half understood.
Rory backed up until her spine met the nearest oak stone. The carved grooves pressed into the blades of her shoulders through her jacket.
The Heartstone throbbed in time with her pulse . She hooked it out and gripped it in her fist until the edges bit into her palm.
“Alright,” a breath in. “You want me in there. I came. Where are you?”
Where are you?
That didn’t come back yet. The grove seemed to think about it.
She waited.
A soft dragging sound passed through the undergrowth to her left. Leaf on leaf. Cloth on bark. Almost footsteps , but too smooth, no heel‑toe rhythm. It circled partway round the clearing, always just out of sight.
Rory slid sideways off the stone, keeping her back to the carved wood, refusing to let anything stand behind her.
“Show yourself, then.”
Her voice cracked in the middle. She clenched her jaw .
A chuckle answered. Not above her, not around her. Inside the hollow trunk of the farthest stone. It vibrated in the air like a tuned string.
She focused on that one. The carved spirals there met around a fist‑sized hollow that opened into the heart of the old wood.
Red light flickered inside it.
The pendant burned. The gem in her hand flared in answer; shadows jumped across the clearing as if there were ten of her, all shifting, all a heartbeat out of step.
She moved toward the hollow.
Something shifted in the wildflowers along the way. They angled their faces toward her. Poppies, daisies, unknown creeping things. She took another step; they leaned farther in, more than stalks should allow, heads tipped, unblinking.
The hollow in the stone drew her. Voices murmured faint and overlapping inside it now. Not words. Not at first.
Then one voice separated.
“Rory.”
Her name, clear. Male, with her father’s clipped vowels and the dry court tone he used when he cross‑examined.
Her feet stopped moving.
The wildflowers fell still, every head raised.
She licked dry lips.
“You’re not Brendan Carter.”
“You’re not Brendan Carter,” the hollow repeated, but the voice shifted mid‑sentence . Her father’s tone blurred into another’s. Lower now, rougher, with a Cardiff street edge Evan had worn when he lost his temper.
Heat crawled up her throat.
“Not playing that game.”
“Not…playing…that…game.”
Each word landed in a different voice. Eva’s exasperated drawl. Yu‑Fei’s brisk bark. Silas on a busy Friday night, laughing against the music.
Rory pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead.
“Stop it.”
The voices cut off.
The grove breathed in.
Leaves that had hung motionless rustled all at once. The sound rolled around the circle of stones, branches grazing one another above her, but no wind touched her face. The oak trunks stood still, yet shadows at their bases crept forward, lengthening toward her boots.
Her fingers dug into the Heartstone. The heat faded to a low, steady warmth , like a resting animal against her skin. Not a warning this time. A hum.
Something else moved at the very edge of her vision.
She kept her eyes locked on the hollow.
“No.” The word grated out of her. “You stay where I can see you.”
The dragging sound resumed to her right. Another twig snapped. A breath brushed the nape of her neck.
Rory whipped around with her fist raised.
Nothing stood between her and the gap in the stones. The way she’d come looked narrower. Trees on either side had moved closer together, or perhaps had always stood that way and her brain had only just noticed. The smear of city light had thinned to a faint gauze.
Her own breath sounded too loud.
“You’re alone,” she told herself. “In a weird magic garden. Hearing things because you hiked out here at midnight like an idiot. That’s it.”
A second breath puffed against her ear, warm and damp this time.
She flinched sideways, shoulder hitting oak. Bark cut the back of her neck. Fingers curled in the hair above her collar and lifted, gentle as a parent searching for nits.
“Rory.”
This time the voice came inches from her ear. No hollow, no echo . A woman’s voice, low and smooth as smoke.
Her throat closed. She forced words through it.
“You wanted me. I came. What now?”
The fingers hesitated in her hair.
“What now,” the voice near her ear repeated, softer, as if testing the shape of the words . “You came. Alone.”
“That was the instruction.”
She fought the urge to twist away. The oak stone at her back anchored her; she dug her heels into the packed earth.
“You brought it.”
Pressure against her chest. Not fingers now. Not quite. Something pressed the pendant flat against her sternum from outside, as if a magnetic twin lay just beneath her skin and pulled.
“That thing?” A harsh little laugh scraped out of her. “Already welded to me, isn’t it.”
A hum of approval.
The grove shifted. The shadows of the stones drew closer, narrowing the clearing. The wildflowers at their bases turned their heads, every bright cup and tiny bloom now angled toward the centre. Toward her.
Beyond the stones, deeper in the grove, something like distant surf rose and fell . No sea lay anywhere near Richmond, but the sound rolled in slow, relentless beats. Between each wave, a high tink‑tink‑tink rang out, metal on stone, tick of a clock with its gears exposed.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
Rory snatched it out one‑handed, the other still trapped between pendant and invisible pressure. The screen lit her face blue.
00:03.
Her stomach lurched . She checked the battery, the network, as if either would explain it. She had left the road less than ten minutes ago. Less than that.
The fingers in her hair slid lower, combed through the length, lifted the ends.
“Time,” near her ear again. “Never enough, is there.”
The ocean sound swelled, then cut, then swelled. The metallic ticking grew louder, seeped into the beat of her blood.
Rory’s thumb hovered over the phone’s call icon. Eva’s name sat near the top.
The screen faded to black.
Her reflection stared back at her in the dark glass. Only it didn’t quite line up. Her own eyes looked a fraction to the left. Her mouth curled at a slightly wrong angle.
She watched herself.
The reflection’s lips moved.
Her hand went numb around the phone.
The grove watched with her.