AI Rory tore her palm on a hidden bramble before she saw the stones.
The sting snapped her out of the rhythm of her steps. She sucked the copper from the cut and glared at the dark shapes ahead. Oaks, not normal ones, hunched in a rough circle where the park map showed nothing at all. Their trunks bulged in strange angles, grown into crude pillars, the bark slick and black in the half light.
The note in her pocket crinkled when she shifted her weight . Richmond Park. Midnight. Wear the pendant. Come alone. No name at the bottom, just the same tight hand that had addressed the envelope to the flat above Silas' bar.
The Heartstone pressed against her chest, hot as skin straight from a bath. It had started to glow on the bus out from Hammersmith, a faint crimson throb under her T-shirt whenever she turned her head toward Richmond. Now, ten paces from the circle, the heat burned through cotton.
She stepped closer.
As her boot crossed the invisible line between the last normal tree and the first standing oak, every sound flattened. Traffic hum vanished. No distant shouts from late drinkers on the road. The park, so full of small noises a moment before, emptied.
Her ears rang in the quiet.
She took another step. The pendant quickened against her sternum, matching the beat in her throat.
"Right," she muttered, more for the shape of the word than anything. "Secret creepy grove it is."
Her voice dropped dead against the trunks. No echo .
She slipped between two of the oak pillars. The bark brushed her arms, rough and damp, as if the trees had just dragged themselves up from a river. A sour, green smell rose from them, like bruised nettles left in a plastic bag.
Inside the circle, the ground changed. Grass under her boots gave way to a soft carpet of wildflowers. They spread out in a dense ring, petals tight shut in the dark, yet they still showed slices of colour, thick purples and bruised yellows, as if someone had painted them in the wrong palette.
Rory crouched and brushed two with the back of her fingers. The stems felt warm.
She straightened slowly .
The grove refused to settle into a clear shape. The trees stood still enough, but the space between them seemed to bend, the dark beyond stretching in that way a hallway did in a dream when you tried to reach the door and it slid away.
She glanced back.
The gap she had walked through sat behind her, the same two oaks, the same narrow slice of shadow between them. Her stomach loosened a fraction.
"Get in, do the weird mystical errand, get out," she told herself under her breath. "Then a stiff drink and Yu-Fei's spare ribs."
The instructions said nothing about what she would find here. Only that the Heartstone would answer, at last, if she came. Whoever wrote the note knew about the pendant. That crawled under her skin more than the grove did.
She walked to the middle of the ring.
The air grew heavy as she moved, like wading through clear water. Her injured palm throbbed . She rubbed it against her jeans, felt dried blood tear.
Something cracked to her left.
She spun. A slim branch, no more than finger-thick, snapped from one of the oaks and toppled. It hit the flower bed with a dull thud, petals rustling.
Nothing else moved.
"Fox," she said, out loud again . "Or a deer."
Deer lived here. She had cut through the park with Eva once, years ago, on some doomed girl trip before Eva left Cardiff for London. They had laughed at the sight of antlers moving in the bracken like ghosts. That memory did not fit the current silence .
She checked her phone, a reflex. No bars. The time read 00:03.
She had left the bus at 23:45 and walked straight in. That seemed about right. Relief made her shoulders drop a fraction.
The pendant pulsed .
The glow bettered itself, a deeper core of red in the already dark gem. It threw a faint wash over the front of her T-shirt, a sad imitation of torchlight. Heat gathered under it, a tight, insistent point.
Rory cupped it through cloth and felt a steady, slow beat. Not her pulse . It kept its own rhythm, a second heart, stubborn and off.
"Alright," she said softly . "You dragged me here. What now?"
The pendant answered with another flare of warmth .
A dull chime sounded at the edge of the grove, soft as wind through empty bottles. She froze.
It repeated. Not random. Three notes in a row, then a pause. Three again. The sound had no clear source. It did not travel from left or right. It slid in under her hearing like a thought she did not want.
The hair on her arms stood.
Rory forced herself to move. Standing still meant thinking. She walked the inner circle, skirting the flowers, fingertips trailing over the bark of each oak. The trunks felt drier away from the entrance, pulled thin, like skin over knuckles. Knots in the wood had swirled into shapes that edged toward faces without getting there, too many whorls, too many almost-eyes.
The chime faded.
In its place, a new sound crept in. Leaves. No, not leaves. Something like paper rubbed together, soft and constant, right at the edge of the wildflower ring.
She halted.
The flowers nearest her boot shook.
Rory stared at them. No wind brushed her cheek. The rest of the grove stayed still.
She bent, slow, hand dropping to brush the petals aside.
The soil between the stems breathed.
Dark earth rose and fell in a flat, shallow swell, like the chest of something asleep and buried an inch under the surface.
She withdrew her hand.
"Not cute," she said.
A breath touched the back of her neck.
She spun again, palm coming up, useless weapon. The air behind her pressed in, thick and empty. The standing stones watched, silent.
She swallowed.
"Eva?" The name escaped before she caught it.
A voice answered from the trees to her left.
"Rory."
Her own nickname. Same vowels, same soft drag on the R that Eva's Cardiff accent always had. It came from behind a trunk deep in the circle, on the far side of the flowers.
Rory's legs moved before her brain caught up.
She stepped over the wildflower ring. Warm petals brushed her ankle. The soil under her boot gave in the slightest way, like thin pastry before it flaked. Her foot sank a centimetre, nothing more.
The pendant flared against her chest.
"Eva?" Her throat felt tight. "You bastarding cow, if this is you."
The trunk where the voice had come from waited, a tall oak with a split up its middle that suggested a gaping mouth. Shadow thickened in the cleft.
She reached it and circled, expecting the sight of her friend leaning against the bark, grin already in place, some stupid explanation ready.
Nobody.
The shadow between the roots pooled deeper, black as oil. Her reflected outline stuttered across it, as if two versions of her stood there, a fraction out of sync with each other.
Behind her, in the direction of the stones, something moved.
This time she did not turn. She watched her jittering double in the slick shadow.
The shape behind her closed in, edge of vision only, tall and narrow. Not a deer. Deer did not glide. This shape slid, as if the air had birthed it.
Her heartbeat climbed.
"Not funny," she said. The words came out flatter than she wanted.
The thing at her back stopped.
In the shadow at her feet, her double turned her head. Rory had not. The reflected face angled, eyes pale in the black, then smiled a touch too wide.
Rory jerked back.
Her shoulder hit something that felt like cold bone under cloth .
She sprang away on instinct. Her boots tangled in roots, and she went down hard in the flowers. Stems snapped under her hands. Warm sap smeared her palms like spit.
She rolled and looked.
Nothing stood where she had been.
The space between the oaks gaped, empty. No tall narrow form. No person. Only the straight trunks and the blank dark between them.
Her breath rasped in her ears.
She dragged herself to her knees. The pendant beat furiously now, red light spilling from under her shirt in slow, sick pulses. She snatched it out by the chain.
The gem glowed like a small captured heart. The heat bit her fingers. Its rhythm did not match hers. It belonged to something older, heavier.
The note had not said why it would answer here, only that the grove touched the Fae. Old stories circled that word like vultures. Her grandparents had filled her head with tales of people who walked into mounds and walked out wrong, if they walked out at all.
"Alright," she said through her teeth. "Enough."
The air listened.
She pushed the pendant out toward the middle of the grove, arm fully extended, chain biting into the back of her neck. The glow spread. Crimson light licked over bark, caught in the hollow eyes of failed faces.
The wildflowers reacted.
Stems turned, all at once, toward the Heartstone. Buds unfurled in a murmur of petals, opening not to stamens but to small mirrors of the gem, each flower holding a drop of dark red shine in its throat. The scent punched at her then, thick and honeyed, with a sharp sour note beneath, like meat left on a sunny windowsill.
She gagged.
The earth's breathing deepened. Mounds rose between the flowers, smooth and regular, as if knuckles pushed up from below in a slow curl.
The chime came again. Closer now. Inside her ears. Three notes, pause, three notes, relentless. They matched the Heartstone's pulse .
She glanced at her phone without thinking.
00:03 blinked back.
Her jaw clenched . She had walked the circle, listened, called out, fallen. Her sense of it said ten minutes at least. The display refused.
A low chuckle unfurled behind her teeth.
Not her.
The sound vibrated in her jaw, inside her head. She clamped her mouth shut. It continued, muffled, pressure building like trapped gas in her skull.
The pendant seared her palm.
She dropped it.
The chain snapped against her skin, then the gem thudded into the soil at the centre of the wildflower ring. Flowers recoiled, stems bending away from it in a ripple.
Silence fell.
Then the ground split.
No dramatic crack, no roar. The soil around the Heartstone parted in a slow, neat circle, like a polite mouth opening. Dark widened, ate light. The pendant slid a fraction and steadied, held on nothing, suspended above a widening hole.
Cold climbed out of the gap. Not air. Something absence shaped, raw and deep. It stroked her cut hand and sank to the bone.
She shuffled back on her knees, heels digging furrows.
A whisper rose from the opening. It did not sound like any language she knew. It sounded like all of them at once, words overlapping, cancelled out, leaving only intent. The skin at the back of her neck crawled as if insects woke under it.
"Rory."
Her name drifted up, carried on that knot of wrong syllables, dragged into a shape she recognised. It did not come from above. It came from under the ground.
She flinched.
"Who sent the note?" she shouted. Her own voice shook.
"For you," the whisper answered. "Always for you."
Shadows along the rim of the hole thickened. They bled out from under the flowers, thin at first then crowding, gathering into a ring of black, more absence piled on absence. The pendant hung in the centre, red heart beating slow.
The shapes around the edge began to rise.
They stood up as if they had knelt all this time, waiting. Human height, roughly, yet wrong in proportion. Too long in the arms, too round at the joints, like people drawn by a child who had seen a person once and guessed the rest. No faces, only smooth dark where eyes and mouths should sit.
Rory scrambled to her feet.
The nearest shadow-headed thing turned toward her. No features, yet she felt watched, the way you felt a CCTV lens on the back of your head in a shop.
The note in her pocket rustled.
One of the figures flowed closer without moving its legs. The ground did the work instead, rippling under it in tiny waves, carrying it forward.
She took one step back, hit the split oak trunk behind her, and stopped.
The featureless head tilted.
From the blank front of it, Eva's voice poured.
"Rory," it said, calm and warm, the same tone Eva had used that night in Cardiff when she had helped Rory pack her bag and leave Evan's flat. "You came."
Rory's nails bit into her palms.
"You are not her."
"You came," it repeated, with that same gentle patience. "You wore it like she asked, clever girl. Always clever."
The other shapes around the hole began to sway, slow and in time with the chime. Petals quivered at their feet. The Heartstone's glow deepened again, and a hairline crack appeared across its surface.
The sound in Rory's jaw returned, the chuckle turned now to a desperate pressure, as if something inside her skull pushed for space.
The shadow-thing that spoke with Eva's voice reached out a hand, fingers both too short and too many, writhing a little at the ends like white roots breaking through soil.
"Come closer, Rory," it said. "You have something for us."
The hand did not stop at arm's length. It kept extending, new length pouring out of the darkness of its wrist, the extra distance forming in mid air, fingers questing, the skin glistening like wet bark.
Cold brushed the inside of her ankle as the first root-finger closed around her leg and pulled.