AI Rory's breath fogged in the January air, but the vapor vanished the moment she crossed beneath the oak arch. Richmond Park had loomed behind her, all bare branches and frost-crisped grass, yet here—where the standing stones marked a boundary her eyes struggled to focus on—dandelions poked through soil that smelled of midsummer. She unzipped her jacket. The heat pressed against her cheeks, unnatural, cloying.
The Heartstone Pendant thrummed against her sternum. She touched it. The crimson gemstone felt feverish, its silver chain conducting heat straight to the crescent scar on her left wrist. That old childhood mark itched.
She had followed the pulse across London. Yu-Fei would dock her wages for abandoning the delivery scooter outside the Pembroke Lodge car park, but the pendant's rhythm had grown insistent, a second heartbeat drowning out the traffic noise from the A307. Now, inside the grove, the stone blazed with an inner glow that painted her fingers red.
"Hello?" Her voice fell flat . No echo . The sound died two feet from her lips, swallowed by the wildflowers nodding in a breeze she couldn't feel.
The standing stones encircled the clearing, ancient oaks warped into vertical slabs. Rory counted seven. She counted again. Eight. She blinked. The eighth stone hadn't been there a moment ago. It stood closer than the others, its bark etched with spirals that seemed to rotate when she looked away .
Her phone screen cracked with static when she checked the time. 11:47 PM. The digits dripped downward like melting wax, reforming into Roman numerals she couldn't read. She pocketed the device. The grove operated on different mathematics.
Something rustled. Not the wind. The wildflowers—bluebells and poppies and foxgloves that had no business blooming together, let alone in winter—bent aside as if pressed by passing feet. Rory turned. The path she'd followed through the stones had sealed shut, brambles weaving together in a braid too thick for her delivery satchel to fit through.
The pendant pulsed . Once. Hard enough to bruise.
She moved deeper into the clearing. Her trainers sank into moss that shouldn't exist in a London park. Each step released the scent of rotting petals and ozone. Above, the stars shone wrong. Orion's belt hung askew, the stars themselves pulsing in time with her pendant.
A branch snapped behind her. Rory spun. The eighth stone had moved again. Now it stood ten feet closer, and the spirals carved into its trunk wept sap that smelled like iron .
"Is someone there?" The question tasted stupid in her mouth. Of course someone was there. Something was there.
The temperature spiked. Sweat beaded along her hairline, matting her black hair to her neck. She backed toward the center of the grove. The wildflowers parted for her, then closed ranks, cutting off retreat. The bluebells chimed like bells when they touched. The sound harmonized with the pendant's vibration in her chest.
She reached the center. A flat stone slab lay there, covered in the same crimson shade as her gemstone. The pendant leaped against her skin, pulling toward the altar-like rock. Rory gripped the silver chain, fighting the magnetism. Her knuckles whitened. The crescent scar on her wrist burned.
Whispers threaded through the air. Not words—textures. The sound of velvet dragging across stone, of water circling a drain, of Evan's voice in the dark corners of their Cardiff flat before she'd fled to London. The whispers knew her name. They knew about the bar upstairs from Silas' place, about the abusive ex, about the way she checked locks three times before sleeping.
"You're not real," she said. Her voice shook. She steadied it. "Projection. Psychological warfare."
The eighth stone groaned. It tilted forward, roots tearing from the soil with the wet sound of teeth pulling free from gums. It wasn't a stone. It had never been a stone. The bark split open, revealing not wood but a cavity lined with rows of thorns that curved inward like a lamprey's mouth.
Rory ran. She bolted toward the gap between two standing stones, her satchel bouncing against her hip. The wildflowers grabbed at her ankles. Poppy stems wrapped around her left wrist, pressing against the crescent scar. She tore free. Skin peeled. Blood welled.
The grove stretched. She sprinted for what felt like minutes, yet the standing stones retreated, maintaining their distance. Her lungs seared. The air had grown thick, honey-sweet, impossible to breathe. She checked over her shoulder.
The thing that had pretended to be a stone moved through the wildflowers without disturbing them. It flowed, a vertical slash of darkness that absorbed the starlight. The spirals on its surface rotated now, visibly spinning, creating a vortex that pulled at the edges of her vision.
Her phone buzzed. She yanked it out, desperate for signal, for time, for proof that the world outside still existed. The screen displayed a text from Eva, timestamped three days from now: *Don't look at the ninth stone.*
Rory's thumb hovered over the reply button. The screen went black. In the glass reflection, something stood behind her left shoulder. Tall. Thin. Smelling of summer and carrion.
She didn't turn around. She knew better than to turn around. In every story Silas told over the bar at closing time, turning around was when the teeth closed.
The pendant scalded her. She clutched it, using the pain to focus. The stone's glow intensified, casting her shadow forward onto the moss. Her shadow didn't match her posture. It stood upright while she crouched, and it raised an arm that she kept pressed to her side.
The whispers coalesced into a voice. It spoke from the flowers, from the soil, from the scar on her wrist. "Laila."
Her birth name. The name her mother used when she was angry . The name Evan carved into her fear.
"Wrong girl," Rory whispered. She forced her legs to straighten. The shadow mimicked the movement, but with a delay—half a second too slow, like a video buffering. "You have the wrong girl."
The ninth stone rose from the earth between her and the exit. It hadn't been there before. It had always been there. The math of the grove shifted, seven becoming eight becoming nine, the geometry of a nightmare where counting offered no safety.
The stone cracked open. Inside, something pale uncurled. Fingers. Too many fingers, each jointed backward, reaching toward her with the inevitability of roots finding water.
Rory stepped back. Her heel struck the altar stone. The Heartstone Pendant went silent, its warmth vanishing, leaving her chest cold and hollow. The silence was worse than the whispers. In the silence , she heard breathing that wasn't hers—steady, patient, hungry.
The fingers from the ninth stone touched the grass. The wildflowers died where they brushed, turning to ash that floated upward instead of falling. Rory pressed her back against the altar. She had nowhere else to go. The grove had shrunk while she wasn't looking , the standing stones now forming a tight circle twenty feet across, a courtroom where she stood accused by things that wore the shapes of trees.
Her scar bled. The blood didn't fall. It floated toward the ninth stone, drawn like iron to a magnet. Rory clamped her hand over the wound. The blood seeped between her fingers, warm, steady.
The thing that had been the eighth stone spoke. Its voice was the sound of her jacket zipper catching, of delivery scooters backfiring, of Evan's knuckles cracking. "You brought the key."
Rory looked down at the pendant. The crimson gemstone had gone black. In its depths , something watched her back.
She closed her fist around the chain. The silver cut into her palm. She wouldn't give it up. She wouldn't hand over the only thing that had guided her here, even if here was a trap, even if the benefactor who'd mailed her the pendant three weeks ago had known exactly what would happen in this grove.
The ninth stone's inhabitant pulled itself free from the crevice. It moved like a marionette with half its strings cut, jerking upward, unfolding at angles that made Rory's eyes water. It had no face, only the spirals, and they spun faster as it approached.
Rory's phone buzzed again. She ignored it. The sound came from her satchel, insistent, vibrating against her hip. The thing paused, tilting its head—a gesture so human it made her stomach clench.
She reached into the bag. Her fingers closed around cold metal—not her phone, but the taser Eva had forced on her before she'd moved into the flat above the bar. The weight grounded her. The grove had no rules she understood, but electricity worked everywhere. Probably.
The creature took another step. The wildflowers beneath its feet turned to glass, then shattered .
Rory raised the taser. Her hand trembled . She steadied it. The creature stopped. The spirals on its face slowed, curious, predatory.
Behind her, the altar stone shifted. She felt it move through her spine, a grinding vibration that traveled up her vertebrae. She didn't look back. Looking back meant death. She knew this with the certainty of prey.
The grove held its breath. The temperature plunged. Summer became winter in an instant, frost crystallizing on the wildflowers, on her eyelashes, on the thing's reaching fingers.
Rory pressed the taser's activation switch. The arc snapped blue-white in the darkness. The creature recoiled, its body folding in on itself like a closing book.
She ran. Not toward the standing stones—they would only retreat again—but toward the space where the eighth stone had first stood, where the soil looked churned and raw. She plunged through brambles that cut her cheeks, through air that resisted like water. The pendant flared back to life, burning hot, pointing the way like a compass needle.
The grove screamed. The sound wasn't audible; it manifested as pressure in her sinuses, as blood weeping from her nose. She tasted copper. She kept running.
Her foot struck the boundary. The oak arch loomed ahead, visible now, the exit a rectangle of true night beyond the false summer. She dove toward it.
A hand closed around her ankle. The fingers were cold, smooth, wrong. They pulled.
Rory struck the ground. Her chin bounced off stone. She tasted dirt and nectar. She kicked backward, her trainer connecting with something that gave like wet clay. The grip loosened. She scrambled forward on elbows and knees, the pendant swinging free, its crimson light strobing against the darkness.
She reached the arch. The hand grabbed her again, this time her left wrist, fingers pressing into the crescent scar. The pain was exquisite, surgical. It knew exactly where she was weak.
Rory twisted. She looked back.
The grove had emptied. The standing stones stood in their circle, seven of them, innocent, ancient. The wildflowers swayed in a wind she couldn't feel. The thing that held her wore no face, only the spirals, and they spun counterclockwise now, unwinding time, unwinding her.
"Not yet," it said.
It let go.
Rory stumbled backward through the arch. Frost bit her face. Traffic noise rushed back—distant, but real. The A307. London. Earth.
She lay on her back in Richmond Park, staring up at Orion's belt, aligned correctly now, distant and indifferent. Her chest heaved. The pendant lay cold against her skin, dormant, innocent.
In the grove behind her, visible only as a shimmer at the edge of vision, something moved between the stones. Counting. Always counting.
She didn't wait to see if it followed. She ran toward the car park, toward the scooter, toward the city lights that never slept and never watched. Behind her, the grove remained, patient as stone, hungry as winter.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She didn't check it. She knew what it would say. The message had already been sent . It was always going to be sent.
Rory reached the scooter. Her hands shook so badly she dropped the keys twice. The third time, she managed to slot them into the ignition. The engine coughed to life.
She looked back once. The grove entrance had vanished, replaced by ordinary hedge and frost-bitten grass. But in the air above where it had stood, the stars pulsed . Once. Twice.
A third time.
She gunned the engine and did not look back again.