AI The pendant burned against her collarbone.
Not the gentle warmth Rory had grown accustomed to, that low hum of proximity she'd learned to read like a compass needle. This was different. This was a warning.
She pressed through the last barrier of hawthorn and stepped into the Grove.
Richmond Park had emptied hours ago. The deer had scattered at dusk, and the joggers and dog walkers had filtered out through the gates like water draining from a bath, leaving the parkland to the foxes and the dark. Rory had climbed the wall near Roehampton Gate, scraping her palms on old brick, and followed the path she'd memorised from Isolde's instructions, the one that wound past the Isabella Plantation and veered left where no trail existed on any map.
The standing stones appeared first. Not stone, really , though that's what everyone called them. Ancient oaks, petrified into something harder than granite, their bark fused into smooth grey columns that formed an imperfect ring around a clearing no wider than a tennis court. Wildflowers carpeted the ground between them, poppies and bluebells and things she couldn't name, all blooming together in defiance of season and sense.
She'd come for the book. Isolde had been specific about that. A journal, bound in pale leather, left at the base of the northernmost oak. Proof, she'd said, of what had come through last month. Rory needed proof. She needed something solid to carry back to the others, something more convincing than her own instinct and the pendant's erratic pulse .
The journal sat exactly where Isolde had described. Pale cover, dark stitching, propped against roots that twisted out of the earth like arthritic fingers.
Too easy.
Rory crouched and reached for it. Stopped. The pendant flared hot enough to make her flinch, and she pressed her hand flat against her chest to muffle the glow bleeding through her jacket. Crimson light seeped between her fingers.
She listened.
The Grove had its own soundscape, one she'd learned on previous visits. Wind through canopy, though no wind touched the clearing itself. The creak of wood settling. A distant murmur, like conversation heard through walls, that Isolde attributed to bleed-through from the Fae realm on the other side of the pocket. These sounds were familiar . Rory catalogued them, confirmed them, set them aside.
Something else threaded between them now.
Breathing.
Not hers. She held her breath to confirm. The sound continued, a slow rasp, wet at the edges, positioned somewhere behind the stone to her left. Or her right. The acoustics in the Grove played tricks, sound bouncing off the petrified oaks and folding back on itself in ways that made direction meaningless.
Rory picked up the journal. Tucked it inside her jacket, against her ribs, opposite the pendant. She straightened and turned in a slow circle.
Nothing moved. The wildflowers stood motionless, unbent by any breeze. The standing stones threw long shadows in the pendant's red glow, shadows that stretched toward the centre of the clearing where she stood. Toward her.
She took a step back. Stopped.
The shadows hadn't shifted with her movement. They pointed at the spot where she stood now, not where she'd been.
"Right," she breathed. "Grand."
Three rules she'd set for herself about the Grove. One: never stay longer than twenty minutes; time slipped here, and she'd learned that lesson the hard way after losing an entire Tuesday in March. Two: never speak to anything she couldn't see. Three: if the pendant went from warm to hot, leave. If it went from hot to cold, run.
The pendant cooled against her skin.
Rory bolted.
She made it four strides before the ground changed. Not the texture of it, the wildflowers still crushed soft beneath her trainers, releasing the iron tang of something that wasn't quite pollen . The distance changed. The ring of standing stones had been maybe fifteen metres across when she'd entered. She'd counted her steps on the way in, a habit she'd developed since the Grove had started misbehaving. Fourteen steps from the hawthorn gap to the centre. She was thirty steps out now and the tree line hadn't gotten closer.
She stopped running. Panic was a luxury she couldn't afford, and it wouldn't help. She pressed her palm over the pendant. Ice cold. Her breath misted in front of her face, though the October air had been mild when she'd crossed the wall.
The breathing sound again. Closer. She could parse it now, not one set of lungs but several, slightly out of sync, a ragged choir exhaling in the dark.
"I'm not interested," she said to the clearing . Rule two, broken. She'd deal with that later. "I've got what I came for. I'm leaving."
Something laughed.
Low, guttural, the sound of it rolling across the wildflowers like fog. Not a human laugh. The cadence sat wrong, the rhythm inverted, as though whatever produced it had heard laughter described but never witnessed it firsthand.
Rory turned toward the sound. The nearest standing stone, the one she'd mentally labelled as east based on a compass reading that probably meant nothing here, had changed. A vertical split ran down its centre, hairline-thin, oozing something dark. Sap, she told herself. Petrified oaks don't produce sap, her brain corrected. The split widened by a centimetre. Then another.
It looked like a wound trying to become a mouth.
She backed away, keeping her eyes on it, and felt her shoulder blade connect with something solid. Another stone. She spun. This one had a split too, wider than the first, and something glistened in its depths . Not sap. Not resin. It caught the pendant's dead crimson glow and reflected it back, and for a fraction of a second Rory saw an eye.
Not set in a face. Not attached to anything recognisable. Just an eye, enormous, the iris the colour of spoiled milk, the pupil a horizontal slit like a goat's, watching her from inside the wood with the patient attention of something that had been waiting a long time.
The pendant pulsed once, sharp and cold, like a heart stopping.
Every stone in the ring split open.
Rory didn't look. She'd seen enough. She oriented herself toward where the hawthorn gap should be, where it had to be, and moved, not running this time but walking with the deliberate pace of someone who understood that running in the Grove meant the Grove decided when you stopped.
The wildflowers grabbed at her ankles.
Not metaphorically. Not in the way tall grass tangles around your feet on a night walk. Stems coiled around her trainers with articulated precision, each one curling independently, tightening in sequence from heel to toe. She kicked free. More replaced them. The iron scent thickened, coating the back of her throat.
Twenty metres to the gap. She counted. Fifteen. The hawthorn rustled ahead of her, its thorns catching the last of the pendant's glow.
Behind her, something stepped into the clearing.
She heard it. One footfall , heavy enough to compress the earth, and then a second that was lighter, placed differently, as though whatever walked had legs of unequal length. The breathing sounds converged on the footsteps , synchronised, became a single wet rasp that she felt as much as heard, a vibration in the soil that travelled up through her shoes and settled in her molars.
The hawthorn gap was three steps away. Two.
A hand, or something shaped enough like a hand to earn the word, closed around her left wrist. Cold fingers found the crescent scar and pressed into it as though they knew it was there, as though they'd been looking for it specifically. The grip carried the strength of old stone and the texture of bark, rough and grooved and impossibly dry against her skin.
Rory didn't pull away. She dropped her weight , pivoted on her right foot, and drove her left elbow back into whatever stood behind her. The impact jarred her entire arm, bone against something dense and unyielding, but the grip loosened for half a second.
Half a second was enough.
She ripped free and threw herself through the hawthorn. Thorns tore at her jacket, her hair, the backs of her hands. She hit the ground on the other side and rolled, came up in a crouch, and stared back at the gap.
The Grove was silent. The standing stones stood whole and unbroken in the darkness, their surfaces smooth, unsplit. The wildflowers swayed in a breeze that touched nothing else. Pretty. Peaceful. A scene from a nature documentary.
The pendant warmed against her chest. Gentle again. A compass needle settling.
Rory looked down at her left wrist. Five bruises formed a perfect ring around the crescent scar, each one the deep violet of something that should have taken hours to develop. They'd appeared in seconds. She touched one and felt the shape of the fingerprint embossed into her skin, the whorls and ridges of something that had grabbed her and known exactly where to hold.
The journal pressed against her ribs, hard-cornered and real. She stood, brushed dead leaves from her knees, and backed away from the hawthorn without turning around.
Behind her, across the black expanse of Richmond Park, London hummed. Orange light pollution smeared the southern horizon. Traffic murmured on the A307. Normal sounds. Human sounds.
In the Grove, something exhaled.
Rory walked faster. Ten paces from the hawthorn, she reached for the pendant and pulled it free of her collar. The crimson gem sat in her palm, thumbnail-sized, its inner glow steady and warm. Safe, it seemed to say. For now.
She closed her fist around it and felt the bruises throb in answer, five points of cold that pulsed against the pendant's warmth like a counter-rhythm, like a heartbeat that didn't belong to her.
She opened her hand. The pendant's glow had changed. Faint threads of black stitched through the crimson, hairline fractures in the light, there and then gone when she blinked.
Rory tucked it back under her collar and pulled out her phone. Three missed calls from a number she didn't recognise. A text from Eva: *where are you its been two days *.
She'd been in the Grove for twenty minutes.
Her hands shook as she typed a reply. She deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that too. Settled on: *Richmond. Coming home. Don't wait up.*
She pocketed the phone and looked back one final time. The hawthorn had closed. Where the gap had been, a wall of thorns stood flush and seamless, as though no opening had ever existed.
And hanging from the topmost branch, pale against the dark, something that looked like a strip of her jacket sleeve twisted in a wind she couldn't feel.