AI The pendant burned against her collarbone.
Rory pressed her palm flat over it through her jacket, felt the crimson warmth pulse once, twice, three times. Steady as a second heartbeat. It hadn't done that since the night she'd found the thing in her delivery bag, nestled between two containers of char siu like someone had tucked it there on purpose. Now the Heartstone throbbed with such urgency that she could feel it through three layers of fabric, and the silver chain had gone hot enough to sting.
She ducked beneath a low-hanging branch and stepped into the clearing.
The Fae Grove opened before her like a wound in the park. Ancient oak standing stones, six of them, ringed the space in a rough circle maybe twenty metres across. They weren't stones at all, not really . Petrified wood, gnarled and dark, each one taller than she stood. Wildflowers carpeted the ground between them, bluebells and foxglove and things she couldn't name, all in full bloom despite it being the dead of February. Their colours looked wrong in the torchlight. Too vivid. Oversaturated, like a photograph with the contrast cranked up until reality started to buckle.
She switched off her phone torch.
The flowers still glowed.
Not brightly. Not obviously. But in the sudden dark of Richmond Park at two in the morning, with the nearest streetlamp a fifteen-minute walk behind her, those petals held a faint luminescence that had nothing to do with moonlight. The sky above the grove sat thick with cloud. No moon. No stars. Just the soft, bioluminescent shimmer of impossible flowers and the warm pulse of the pendant against her chest.
Rory stepped between two of the standing stones.
The air changed. She'd expected it, or told herself she had. The temperature dropped, but not in the way cold normally worked. This wasn't wind chill or frost. The warmth simply ceased to exist, replaced by something still and depthless that settled against her skin like wet silk . Her breath didn't fog. She checked twice. The cold was there, she could feel it in her fingers and the tips of her ears, but it produced no vapour. As if the air itself refused to participate.
She'd come because of the note.
Three words on a torn corner of receipt paper, stuffed through the letterbox of her flat above Silas's bar: GROVE. TONIGHT. ANSWERS. The handwriting matched nothing she recognised, but the ink was the same deep crimson as the Heartstone, and when she'd held the note close to the pendant, both had pulsed in unison. That was enough. She'd spent four months carrying a mysterious artefact, four months of dead ends and half-truths, and she was tired of waiting for information to come to her in manageable doses.
So here she stood. Alone in a pocket between worlds, armed with a phone at twelve per cent battery and the stubborn conviction that she could handle whatever came next.
The first sound reached her about thirty seconds after she crossed the threshold.
A crack. Sharp and close, like someone stepping on a thick branch. It came from her left, beyond the ring of standing stones, somewhere in the dark tangle of Richmond's old-growth oaks. Rory turned towards it and held still. Listened. Nothing. Just the silence of a park after hours, the distant murmur of the A307, the papery rustle of winter branches overhead.
She waited a full minute before she moved again.
The centre of the grove held a shallow depression in the earth, barely visible beneath the flowers. She knelt beside it and pulled the pendant free from her collar. The Heartstone swung on its silver chain, crimson light pulsing from somewhere deep inside the gem. Thumbnail-sized, the woman at Camden Passage had said when Rory showed it to her. Pre-Roman setting. Possibly Mesopotamian. The woman had wanted to touch it. Rory hadn't let her.
The pendant pulled.
Not dramatically. Not like a magnet snapping to metal. More like the gentle tug of a fishing line with something small but insistent on the other end. It pulled downward, towards the depression, towards whatever lay beneath the roots and the flowers and the centuries of accumulated earth. Rory lowered it until the gem hung six inches above the ground.
It stopped pulsing.
The glow held steady, a deep arterial red that painted her fingers and the flowers and the nearest standing stone in shades of old blood. In that light, the foxglove looked like columns of bruised flesh . The bluebells looked like veins.
Then something answered.
A sound rose from below. Not from any specific point. From everywhere at once, vibrating up through the ground and into her kneecaps, her hip bones, the base of her spine. Low. Subsonic, almost. She felt it more than heard it, a resonance that set her teeth on edge and made the small bones of her inner ear ache. It lasted three seconds. Four. Then it stopped, and the silence that followed felt heavier than before. Thicker. Occupied.
Rory tucked the pendant back inside her jacket and stood.
"Right." Her voice sounded flat . Absorbed. The grove swallowed the word before it reached the standing stones. "If someone's here, this is the part where you stop pissing about."
Nothing.
She turned a slow circle. The six standing stones watched her like teeth in a dark mouth. Between them, the flowers had changed. She was certain of it. When she'd arrived, the blooms had faced upward, open to the empty sky. Now they tilted inward. Towards her. Every petal in the clearing angled slightly , subtly, unmistakably towards the spot where she stood.
She hadn't moved since she knelt down.
The second sound came from her right. Not a crack this time. A breath. Long, slow, deliberate, drawn in through what sounded like too many passages at once . A wheeze and a whistle and something wet underneath both, like lungs that had spent too long submerged. It lasted five seconds, maybe six, and when it ended, Rory could still feel the displaced air against her cheek.
Whatever breathed stood close enough to touch.
She didn't run. Running in a place where time moved sideways struck her as a poor strategy. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside, she'd read that in one of the mouldering journals Eva had dug up from the UCL archives, and the author had underlined "days" three times in frantic red pencil. Running meant panic, and panic meant mistakes, and mistakes in a place like this meant losing track of which direction the standing stones lay. Losing track of the way out.
Rory pulled her phone from her pocket. Eleven per cent. She opened the torch, swept it in a wide arc.
The beam cut through the air for about three metres, then stopped. Not faded. Stopped. The light hit an invisible wall and piled up against it like water against glass, illuminating nothing beyond. The darkness past that point had texture. Depth. Layers. It folded in on itself the way fabric does when something moves beneath it, and Rory watched one of those folds ripple outward from a point directly in front of her.
She lowered the phone.
"I got your note."
The flowers leaned closer.
"I brought what you wanted me to bring."
The breathing started again, but from behind her now. The same bubbling, multi-chambered draw of air, and this time it didn't stop after five seconds. It continued, a single endless inhalation that went on and on, as though whatever produced it possessed lungs the size of weather systems. The ground trembled . The petals shook.
Rory placed her hand over the pendant again. The Heartstone had resumed pulsing, faster than before, its rhythm climbing towards something frenetic. The heat against her chest bordered on painful.
"I came for answers," she said. "That was the deal."
The inhalation stopped.
In the silence , something shifted at the edge of the grove. One of the standing stones, the tallest, the one to her left with the split running down its centre like an old wound, she could have sworn it stood two metres farther away when she arrived. Now its shadow fell across her feet. She hadn't moved. The stone had.
Or something standing behind the stone had pushed it.
A voice came then. Not from any direction. From the ground, from the air, from the flowers, from the resonant hum of the pendant against her ribs. Not words. Not yet. Syllables in a pattern she recognised as language without understanding a single sound. Vowels that bent in the middle. Consonants that arrived before they started. The voice spoke for perhaps ten seconds, each syllable landing in her chest like a struck bell, and when it finished, the flowers released their scent all at once, a smell like honey and copper and something underneath both that made her stomach clench.
Then the pendant cracked.
A hairline fracture, visible through her jacket as a seam of white light splitting the crimson glow. The heat surged past painful and into searing , and Rory gasped, grabbed the chain, yanked it free from her collar. The Heartstone dangled before her, cracked down its centre, bleeding white light into the dark, and in that light she saw the ground of the clearing for what it actually was.
Not earth. Not soil.
Skin.
The depression in the centre of the grove was a navel. The flowers grew from pores. The roots of the standing stones plunged into flesh, not dirt, and the flesh pulsed with the same rhythm as the pendant, the same rhythm she'd mistaken for her own heartbeat since the moment she stepped between the stones. The entire clearing, twenty metres across, was alive. Was breathing. Had always been breathing, and she'd been standing on its surface like a flea on a sleeping dog, and now the dog was waking up.
The ground beneath her right foot shifted. Rose half an inch. Settled.
"Answers first," Rory said.
The standing stones began to close.