AI The pendant flared against her palm, a quick, hot pulse that felt like someone had pressed a thumb to her sternum.
She had walked straight through the last ring of oak standing stones without thinking, the silver chain snagging against her collarbone. The clearing opened like a cut in the wood, wildflowers pretending to glow, and the Heartstone answered as if it recognised the ground beneath her boots. Aurora kept moving because she had a reason, because the warmth had started three nights ago in her pocket and had gotten louder on the train, a steady inner metronome that would not be ignored. She told herself the rational things—an object with a temper, a trick of memory, a prank—but reason sat small and alone behind the pendant's light.
The wrongness began as sound. Not the wind through leaves, not the usual fox bark you learned to dismiss in London, but a thin, rhythmical scraping, like silk pulled over coarse wood. It traced the edge of the clearing, a fingernail on the skin of bark. Aurora stopped, the silver catching faintly, the gem's warmth thawing her fingers. Her bright blue eyes scanned the trunks, picking out knots, lichen, the odd knot-hole like a closed eye. Time inside the Grove folded in on itself; she'd read that once and mouthed the lines in the tube. Her watch read an ordinary minute. That meant nothing here.
A voice unlatched from the dark, soft and close enough that the hairs on her forearm lifted.
"Rory."
She did not answer at first. Her name sounded like a summons, like someone tugging at the hem of a coat. The sound belonged to a childhood cadence that should have stayed behind in Cardiff, and yet it came threaded with an accent that slipped sideways. Aurora's hand went to the small crescent scar on her left wrist, fingers finding the old line as if to prove she was real.
"Who is it?" she said, the words blunt .
Silence folded, then something breathed through the clearing, a laugh too many notes long, like wind playing an old ruin's pipes.
"Eva," the voice said, and the name was both a lure and a question. It had the shape of the friend she had fled with, the woman who had pushed her to London, who had been a lighthouse in dark rooms. The voice wore that shape and then smiled grotesquely, something about the syllables pulled wrong. Aurora's jaw tightened. She had learned, the hard way, to trust her instincts. She also knew being alone in a place that bent rules was stupid. She exhaled slowly and stepped toward the centre of the clearing.
The undergrowth did not part the way it should. The grass seemed to press up against her ankles like a clammy hand. Wildflowers leaned in, faces too still, petals catching the pendant's faint inner glow and throwing it back in tiny pulses. The Heartstone answered with a warmer, steadier burn. It was a small thing, crimson like an old wound, but its warmth ate through the chill in her bones and spoke a single language: near.
Her boots sank into loam that was softer than the path had been, and the sound changed to a soft, deliberate crunch. She should have left then. She should have turned, run the sensible route back through the stones while the world still matched the one she knew. Instead, she checked the pendant's chain, felt the tremor of the silver, and moved on.
Something shifted at the edge of her vision, just the suggestion of movement. Aurora had the reflex of a delivery runner: split-second assessments, route planning, predicting obstacles. The movement did not read like animal. It read like attention. A pair of limbs rearranged, a shadow aligning into a shape that mimicked human posture and failed.
"Eva?" she tried again, sharper, as if naming might force truth out of mimicry.
The answer was a thin chorus, voices layered like old records playing out of time. Each voice took her name with slightly different inflection, one tender and childlike, one older and amused, one gravel-rough and smelling of river rot. They were not voices that came from a single throat. They threaded through the trees and tugged at memory like a hand under a dress.
Aurora moved toward where the ground dipped, toward the stump where mushrooms clustered in a black ring. The Heartstone pulsed faster, the warmth pushing into her palm now, and a distant humming threaded under the other sounds—low, like something being tuned . She kept her steps small, breath measured . Cool-headed did not mean fearless. Cool-headed meant you counted risks.
She found footprints that did not belong. They were small, too narrow for a man's boot, too long for a child's trainers, and the tread was odd, a repeated blossom of impressions. The soil had the sheen of something that had been there too long. It told a story without words: someone or something came through here recently and had not left.
A scent rose to meet her, impossible and immediate—copper, sharp and crystalline , tanging the back of her throat. Blood, the word blinked like a warning. Her nostrils flared. She tasted iron. It was wrong for a place that should smell of leaves and rot and the honest tang of fox and moss. The Grove had turned its own pages.
"You're alone," she said aloud, because silence was a thing it could fill and she wanted space inside the noise to plan. Her voice came back muffled, as if wrapped in damp cloth. A twig snapped behind her.
Aurora spun. Movement flickered between two oak trunks, a thing hunched and small. It was not quite an animal, not quite a person . It held itself with the wrongness of imitation: shoulders too square for the neck, a head that inclined in a way that denied the rules of bone. A smear of pale like a face reflected moonlight and then unmade itself. She forced her eyes not to linger; staring let those things learn.
"Show yourself," she said. Her fingers found the pendant and tightened. The silver bit into her skin; the gem's glow shivered stronger. Warmth spread up her wrist, and with it a certainty that the Heartstone was keyed to something beneath the Grove. Keyed to a door, or to what passed through doors.
Something moved in the clearing's centre—a ripple across air, like heat above tarmac in August, although summer had nothing to do with the Grove's seasons. A shimmer opened the space between oaks, a slit that swallowed light, and the flowers nearest it bowed inward, their mouths closing. Aurora's appetite for explanation narrowed to a single bright point of attention: the pendant, and what it had brought her to.
Faces pressed at the edge of that slit. Not faces so much as the memory of faces, borrowed and half-stitched. A grandmother's laugh, an old lover's scowl, a child's open curiosity. They peered out like animals at a threshold. They had eyes that reflected light in too many directions. Each time one blinked, she felt a tiny shift in the shape of the grove as if it recalibrated to contain them.
"Please," said a voice that was almost kind, almost the sound of somebody offering a hand at a bus door.
Aurora's hand hovered over the pendant, thumb tracing the silver. It thrummed now, not just warm but rhythmic, like a pulse in a throat . She had always imagined the unknown as dramatic, a crash of thunder, a demon unfurling. The Grove did not have the decency to be gothic. It had the cruelty of patient things.
"Why are you here?" she asked, the question more practical than pleading . She pictured the flat over Silas' bar, a tea mug with a chip, the menu board at the Golden Empress. Small lives anchored her. She had not come to be admired.
Something laughed, a sound like pebbles sliding down a tin roof. The forest answered with a rustle that sounded panoramic, like an audience shifting in its seats. Then there was a movement close enough to make the hair on her arms stand upright—fingers, perhaps, or roots, tangled and sinewed, bridging between trunk and earth. They reached for the light around her throat.
Aurora stepped back. Her boot caught a blossom and petals stuck to rubber. The pendant's glow stabbed brighter, searing enough that she brought it up, holding it like a torch. Light pooled at the cut in the air. The faces leaned forward, not predatory, but inquisitive, like children inspecting a new toy .
"Rory," the chorus intoned, this time not a voice but a thousand little voices in one , and the sound thrummed against her teeth.
She had rehearsed leaving, logically and clinically. Step back, pass through the stones, keep the pendant hidden, never show what it felt like . She had also imagined confronting whatever the Grove wanted, and she had imagined herself clever, able to barter with rules. Neither rehearsal matched the sudden, clean terror of having something decide you were interesting.
The Heartstone's warmth became hot, a bead of heat running along its casing, and when Aurora glanced down she saw the gem's inner glow pulse like a heartbeat, faster and faster. The slit widened. The faces thanked each other with tiny nods and then stepped through in a motion that was less arrival and more unzipping of the world.
One of them, the one that took the shape of a young woman with hair like riverweed and eyes that held far too many reflections, came no closer than arm's length and then smiled as if she offered a favour.
"We've missed you," she said.
Aurora's mouth went dry. She had not expected tenderness dressed as trap. Her instincts told her to run, but her feet answered with another calculation. If the pendant had found a portal, if the Hel had opened here, then whatever came this way could follow her out. She could close it. She could close it and still keep the Heartstone.
"How do I close it?" she asked, because questions bought time and time might buy tactics.
The woman's smile widened, revealing teeth too small and too perfect . Around them the other faces leaned like flowers at a window. Their voices answered in a soft, sing-song chorus, a cadence that fit in the fossil hollows of ears.
"Come home."
Hands, many and thin as twigs, slipped from the slit and fastened to the edge of space, threading into the clearing like roots seeking water. They did not shake the air; they simply were. One wrapped itself around Aurora's wrist with an insistence like ivy. It was warm. It smelled of copper and old seashells. The pendant flared, so bright it seared the inside of her eyelids.
Aurora's teeth clenched. She breathed in, and the voice that had been kind in three-part harmony took on a new timbre, lower and heavier and satisfied.
"You're almost late," it said, and as it spoke the world rearranged. The wildflowers leaned away, the standing stones hummed under their bark, and the slit in the air widened into a mouth of velvet dark.
Aurora drew back, the ivy-hand dragging across her skin. Her fingers closed on the pendant as if she could smother its light, twist it, wrench it out. The gem pulsed like someone hammering from within, like a trapped heart. The thing at the slit smiled wider, and for the first time Aurora saw teeth as teeth should not be—too many, layered like a stack of old coins.
She moved the pendant forward, half an offering, half a shield. The light it threw cut a cone into the dark and the faces at the slit stilled, as if remembering how to look .
"Leave," she said.
The ivy tightened. The woman's smile did not answer for a moment, then unfolded into something like pity .
"Not to-night," she said, and stepped through.