AI The park railings gleamed under the streetlights, slick with a thin skin of mist. Rory hooked her fingers into the cold metal, hauled herself up, and swung over before she could think too hard about the drop.
Her boots hit the grass with a damp thud. For a heartbeat she stayed crouched, watching the empty path on the other side of the railings, listening for the shout of a warden, the bark of a dog, anything.
Nothing. Just the far-off hiss of traffic and the soft drip of condensation through the leaves.
"Right," she muttered. "Breaking and entering on a Tuesday. Feels normal."
The word fell flat. The air swallowed it.
She straightened, tugged her coat tighter, and pulled the pendant out from under her jumper. The tiny crimson stone lay against her palm, dark and glossy, the silver chain cut into the skin between her fingers.
It pulsed once. A slow throb of warmth that moved from the stone into her hand, up her wrist, like someone pressed a small, hot coin to her skin.
Her throat tightened.
"You're keen, at least."
She slipped the pendant back against her chest, under the layers, and set off along the faint trail that left the main avenue and vanished into the trees. She had screenshotted the map Eva sent, the pin dropped deep in the park, past where the lights reached. Her phone rested in her pocket, a square of comfort and battery anxiety.
The further she walked, the more the sounds from the city thinned. Tyres over tarmac blurred into a low, distant hum. A fox barked once somewhere behind her. Leaves shifted above with no wind she could feel .
She checked her phone at the first break in the trees. 23:47. Signal weak but still clinging on. The map showed the blue dot inching toward a tiny blank patch that held the label she knew by now: Isolde’s Grove.
The name never appeared on the official park map. Only on the file Eva sent, drawn in a hand that pressed too hard with the mouse, lines jittery and deliberate.
"Meet me there," the note with the pendant had read. "Midnight. Bring this."
No sender. No explanation. Eva had only added a voice message, low and tight: "If it's real, the stone will prove it. Don't go alone." Then, a beat of breath and a muttered, "You won't listen, will you."
Rory had deleted the last part. Then she came alone.
The path narrowed. Bracken brushed her thighs. The trees closed in, their trunks dark and slick, branches knitting overhead until only a thin smear of clouded sky showed. Her torch beam shook across roots and patches of worn earth.
She switched it off.
The dark hit fast. Not total—London still leaked glow into the sky—but thick enough that depth blurred. The trunks became lean shadows. Space between them lost shape.
She waited for her eyes to adjust.
In the hush, something moved a little way off. A soft series of crunches like a deer nosing through leaf litter. The rhythm stopped when she stopped.
"Fox," she whispered. "Just a fox."
The pendant warmed again, a tiny furnace under her jumper.
Her fingers twitched toward it, then curled into a fist instead.
She walked.
The undergrowth grew sparse. Grass thickened. A smell of damp earth and something green and sharp slid into her nose, cut through the city fug that clung to her clothes. Crushed wild garlic. Primrose. She shouldn't know the scents, but her mother’s garden reached across years in one breath.
Her boots left the last of the roots behind and stepped out onto open ground.
The grove opened around her like someone had scooped a piece out of the forest and flattened it with a careful hand. A near-perfect oval, grass pale in the moonlight. In the centre, a circle of oak trunks rose from the earth, thick and gnarled, their bark stained almost black. They didn't grow like normal trees. They rose straight, unnaturally straight, no branches until high above where their limbs flared out and knitted together into a heavy canopy. Each trunk leaned inward a fraction, as if they listened.
Between them, the space inside the circle looked darker than the rest of the clearing.
"A fairy circle," she muttered. "Of course it is. Next I'll step on a mushroom and turn into a frog."
The joke landed somewhere behind her teeth and went stale.
Around the grove, flowers crowded the edge of the grass, a thick border of colour that didn't match November. Foxgloves bowed under their own weight . Bluebells trembled , their bells full and fresh. Buttercups scattered splashes of gold. The air above them held a faint shimmer, like heat over a road, though her breath still smoked.
Her hand went to her chest on its own.
The pendant burned now. Not enough to hurt, but enough that she couldn't ignore it. It pushed heat into her through bone and muscle, as if her body had turned itself toward some buried sun.
"Alright," she breathed. "You brought me. I'm here."
No reply. No rustle of someone shifting behind a tree. No Eva stepping out with that half-smirk that always took the edge off whatever mess they met.
She let the silence stretch.
Far off, something hooted. An owl, except the call came again before the first note reached a natural end, then again, looping in on itself until it sounded less like a bird and more like a recording stuttering on repeat. On the fourth hoot, it stopped.
The skin along the back of her neck prickled.
Her eyes moved around the edge of the grove. Tall bracken. Oak trunks. Dark shrubs.
On the other side, just between two trees, something pale shifted out of sight.
Her chest hitched. She set her feet, forced the words out before fear glued her mouth.
"Hello?"
The pale shape stepped back into the gap. A strip of bleached bark on a fallen branch. Nothing else.
She exhaled, too fast, almost a laugh.
"Yeah. Jump at sticks. This'll go well."
She moved toward the ring of oaks. Each trunk looked wide enough that three people holding hands might not reach around it. Deep grooves ran in spirals up the bark, not the usual rough lines she knew from other oaks in the park. Fingers had carved those lines. Or something like fingers.
A breath touched the back of her neck.
Cold, damp, a gust from a mouth that shouldn't be there.
Rory whipped around.
Grass. Flowers. Empty tree line.
Her heart hammered so hard it blurred her vision for a second. She pressed her nails into her palms until pain cut through.
"Who's there?"
The words came out sharper than she expected. The grove caught them and swallowed them, left nothing to bounce back.
The crunch in the trees started up again. Not behind her this time. To her left. Three steps, stop. Three steps, stop. Leaves shifted high up, but no wind reached her hands.
Her phone weighed heavy and useless against her hip.
"Eva, if this is you, come out," she called. "You get one scare. Use it wisely."
Silence.
Then, from somewhere to her right, her own voice came back.
"You get one scare. Use it wisely."
Same pitch. Same rhythm. The same scrape of humour over tightness.
Her lungs forgot how to work for a second.
She turned toward the sound. Every tree looked the same now, their trunks ranked soldier-straight in the gloom .
"That's not funny."
Her copy answered from behind her this time.
"That's not funny."
The grass under her boots trembled . The flowers at the grove’s edge quivered , each stem shaking in place as if a heavy footstep thudded somewhere she couldn't hear.
She yanked the pendant out.
The Heartstone’s inner glow had thickened into a visible pulse . A faint crimson beat rolled through the gem, matched the rush in her veins. Between pulses the stone darkened, almost black, then flushed red again, like an eye opening and closing.
It vibrated in her palm in a slow, steady rhythm.
"Stop."
She clenched her fingers around it. The heat pressed between her knuckles.
The movement in the trees shifted nearer. Not louder—the sound stayed small, like a child stepping with care—but closer, circling.
She forced her gaze away from the trunks and back to the ring of oaks. At least those didn't move.
Except they had.
She knew they had.
When she first stepped into the grove, the gap between the two nearest trunks lay directly in front of her. A straight line from where she stood. Now, that gap sat half a body to the left. The tree on the right had edged closer to its neighbour. Only a little. A fraction. Enough that moss got crushed between their roots.
She didn't blink while she checked the others.
The gaps all changed. Just a little. Each trunk leaned in more, angles not quite the same . The ring tightened.
"Okay," she whispered. "Right. That’s… new."
From the dark between the trees on her left, a voice floated out.
"Rory."
Soft. Not her own this time. Wrong in another way.
Her skull rang with the name.
She tasted metal.
"Eva?"
The name came out like a question, but she hated the way it sounded, desperate and small.
"No."
The answer rode on something like breath and not breath . The sound brushed past her ear even though the word came from three places at once: behind her, ahead, above.
Her feet wanted to run. Every muscle pulled toward the railings, the path, the oily safety of streetlights. She stayed where she was because the thought of turning her back on the trees felt worse.
The pendant dug into her palm. She loosened her grip enough to look.
In the red glow, thin hairline cracks traced across the surface of the gem, a vein of darker red within red. The glow leaked along them, up beneath her skin, the light running through the old crescent scar on her wrist. For a second it lit up like someone drew a sickle moon under her flesh.
She shut her hand.
"You called me," she said, picking a direction and facing it. "You dragged me out here. Show yourself."
The trees to her left shifted. Just a shiver through the leaves at first. Then an opening between trunks that hadn't been there a breath ago. The branches above knitted tighter, blocked more of the sky, yet somehow a thread of moonlight stabbed down through the canopy and lit the new gap.
Beyond it, the dark felt thick. Not empty. Full.
Rory swallowed.
"Fine," she muttered. "We’re doing this."
She stepped forward.
The moment her boot crossed the invisible line at the edge of the oak circle, sound collapsed.
No distant traffic. No stuttered owl. No rasp of her own breath in her ears.
Silence hit with weight .
Her skin lost the feel of air on it. The temperature didn't drop. It didn't rise. It simply stopped existing, as if someone had wrapped her in absence.
Her second step landed on ground that felt too smooth. Grass still lay under her sole, but there was no give. No small unevenness. It felt like walking on a painted picture of grass.
Her pulse climbed into her throat.
She whispered, just to hear something.
"If this is Hel, it's overrated."
Nothing bounced back.
The pendant at her chest pulsed faster, the heat now a steady burn. Sweat broke along her hairline despite the still air.
In the dead hush, another sound threaded in. Not from the trees. From above.
A soft, wet drip. Then another. A slow, irregular pattern.
Her head tilted back before sense blocked it.
The canopy blocked the sky now. No scrap of cloud or moon. Only a woven ceiling of branches and leaves, as tight as thatch. Each leaf glowed at the edge with a faint, cold light, enough that she could make out the shapes near her.
Dark stains spread along some of the branches. Thick, almost tar-like, seeping from cracks in the bark. Drops gathered, stretched, and fell.
The first landed on her cheek.
It wasn't rain. Too thick. Warm. It smeared when her hand flew up to wipe it. No colour in the dim glow, just a darker streak across her skin.
Her stomach clenched hard.
"Nope."
She took a step back.
Her heel hit something solid.
Not a root. Not a rock.
She knew the feel of a calf under her boot, the give of flesh over bone, the involuntary twitch of muscle.
She didn't look down.
"Move," she hissed.
Whatever she stood on did not.
The drip overhead quickened . Drops ticked against leaves, grass, the back of her neck. Warm lines crawled down under her collar.
"Get off."
She forced herself not to look, dragged her foot forward.
The resistance went with it, pressed against her ankle like fingers. Thin, wrong-angled fingers.
Rory’s breath turned ragged.
"Let go."
The words tore out through clenched teeth.
Her double answered from the dark to her right, exact tone, exact crack in the middle.
"Let go."
The pressure around her ankle eased. Something slithered away through the grass with a faint hiss.
She stumbled free, out from under the branches, back into the open ring.
Sound crashed in around her. The owl picked up its glitched call mid-note. Distant traffic roared back into existence as if someone turned a dial. Wind moved across her face, sharp and real.
She dropped to one knee, hand braced on the damp grass.
Her jeans clung cold and wet around her ankle. In the weak moonlight it looked stained darker, but the colour refused to settle into anything she recognised.
Her phone vibrated against her hip.
She jolted.
For a second she stared at her pocket as if it might grow teeth.
Then she dragged it out.
The screen lit her face in harsh blue. 23:49. Same minute as before. Battery at a sliver. One new notification blinked red at the top.
No signal bar.
The message preview showed no number. Just a name.
Unknown Benefactor.
Her thumb hovered over the screen.
Behind her, grass whispered as if someone crossed the grove toward her with careful, measured steps.