AI The air in Richmond Park had turned cold and sharp, the kind that bit at any exposed skin. Rory zipped her leather jacket higher, the silver chain of the Heartstone pendant cold against her throat. The pendant itself, a deep crimson stone the size of her thumbnail, rested under her shirt, a familiar , inert weight . She’d come here because of a feeling, a persistent, nagging pull that had started hours ago, a faint warmth from the stone that had grown into a persistent thrum against her chest.
She’d followed it on her delivery bike, long after her shift at the Golden Empress had ended, weaving through the darkening streets of London until the urban sprawl gave way to the vast, shadowed expanse of the park. Now, on foot, she pushed through a thicket of hawthorn, its branches scratching at her arms. The map on her phone had flickered and died ten minutes ago, the signal dropping to nothing.
And then she saw them. The standing stones.
They weren’t on any map. Three ancient oaks, twisted and gnarled, formed a rough triangle around a small clearing. They were too perfectly placed to be natural. This was it. The Fae Grove. Silas had muttered about it once, late one night after closing, a story she’d dismissed as drunken rambling. A place where time went funny.
She stepped between two of the massive trees, and the world shifted.
The sounds of the park—the distant hum of the A-road, the rustle of a fox in the undergrowth—vanished. It was replaced by a profound , ringing silence , the kind that felt heavy and expectant. The air lost its chill , becoming unnervingly temperate, like a perfect spring evening. And the smells… the damp earth and decaying leaves were gone , replaced by the overwhelming perfume of night-blooming flowers. Wildflowers, she realized, looking down. Dozens of varieties carpeted the clearing, all in full, impossible bloom under a sky where no moon shone, yet the grove was lit by a soft, sourceless twilight.
This was wrong. All of it was wrong.
The pull from the pendant was stronger here, a steady, warm pulse against her sternum, a silent drumbeat guiding her deeper in. She wrapped her fingers around the stone through her shirt, its warmth a small comfort in the overwhelming strangeness.
She took another step, her boots making no sound on the velvety moss. The silence was beginning to press in on her ears. It was too complete. No wind sighed through the branches of the guardian oaks. No insects chirped. Nothing.
Then, a sound.
A faint, dry rustle, like old parchment being slowly unfolded. It came from her left, somewhere deep in the ring of trees that bordered the clearing. She froze, her head snapping toward the noise. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic counter-rhythm to the pendant’s calm pulse .
Nothing moved. The shadows between the trees were deep and solid.
She forced a slow breath out, the air catching in her throat. Her mind, usually so quick to offer solutions, provided nothing but static. Out-of-box thinking required a box, and this place had none.
Another rustle. Closer this time. It wasn’t a natural sound. It wasn’t an animal moving through undergrowth. It was sharper, more deliberate. A scraping.
Her hand fell from the pendant, clenching into a fist at her side. She turned slowly, trying to pinpoint the source. The sourceless light seemed to play tricks, making the shadows twitch and writhe at the periphery of her vision. She kept seeing movement, a flicker of something pale and long just beyond the circle of oaks, but when she looked directly, there was only stillness.
The warmth of the Heartstone intensified, becoming almost hot. It wasn’t a comforting warmth anymore; it was a warning. A beacon .
She was the beacon .
The realization landed in her gut like a stone. She hadn’t been pulled here. She’d been led .
A soft, wet click echoed from directly behind her.
Rory spun around, a gasp tearing from her lips.
The clearing was empty. The flowers swayed gently , though there was no wind.
Her breath came in short, sharp clouds in the peculiar air. She was not alone. The certainty of it was a physical weight on her shoulders. Something was here with her, something that moved in the gaps between her blinks, that hid just outside the range of her focused sight.
A low, melodic hum began, so faint she felt it more than heard it, a vibration in the soles of her feet. It was a tune without a melody, a discordant series of notes that felt ancient and deeply wrong. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, weaving through the trees, threading between the flower stems.
She took a step back, toward the entrance between the oaks. Her escape route. Another step.
The humming stopped.
The silence that rushed back in was worse, thicker, charged with a malevolent attention. She could feel it watching her now, whatever it was. The pretense of hiding was over.
From the corner of her right eye, a figure detached itself from the deeper darkness of an oak’s trunk. It was tall and impossibly thin, a man-shaped cutout of shadow that didn’t move so much as it unfolded, rising to its full height in one smooth, silent motion. She didn’t dare look at it directly. Every instinct screamed that to acknowledge it fully would be a mistake.
She kept walking backward, her eyes fixed on a point in the empty air just ahead of her, her peripheral vision locked on the thing standing motionless twenty feet to her right. It hadn't moved again. It just stood, a stain on the twilight.
A whisper , papery and close, brushed against her ear. “Laila.”
Her blood went cold . A name from a life she’d buried. A name Evan had used when his hands were around her throat and his words were sweet and poisonous. No one here could know that name .
She broke. She ran.
She sprinted for the gap between the stones, her boots finally finding sound, thudding dully on the moss. The air resisted her, thick as water. The gap, only ten yards away, seemed to stretch, the trees leaning inward to block her path.
A rustle of dry leaves to her left, keeping pace. A flicker of that same tall, thin darkness matching her stride for stride without seeming to move at all.
The pendant was burning hot against her skin now, a brand of panic.
She wasn’t going to make it. The exit was receding . The grove was closing in.
She skidded to a halt, chest heaving, and whirled around, finally forcing herself to look, to confront the thing hunting her.
The clearing was empty.
The standing stones stood sentinel . The flowers bloomed. The soft, false twilight glowed. There was no tall figure. No whispering presence. Just the overwhelming, silent wrongness.
And then she saw it. Lying on the moss where she had just been standing was a single, perfect white flower. It hadn’t been there a moment ago. As she watched, the petals began to curl inward, blackening at the edges, withering and crumbling to dust in the space of a single heartbeat.
The Heartstone pendant gave one last, searing pulse of heat against her chest and fell still, cold and inert once more.
The exit between the oaks was just a normal gap again. Beyond it, she could see the familiar , moonlit outline of Richmond Park. The distant sound of traffic returned, a mundane and beautiful symphony .
Rory didn’t move. She stood rooted to the spot, her hands trembling, staring at the pile of black dust that had been a flower. The thing was gone . But it had known her. It had called her by a dead name. And it had let her go.
She turned and walked, then ran, out of the grove and back into the world, the feeling of its attention lingering on her skin like a cold touch long after the trees had disappeared behind her.