AI Rory eased through the gap in the iron gate and let it swing shut on its own weight . The clang wandered off through the trees. Her breath smoked in the cold. Frost bit the grass where the path met scrub, and in the tall bracken a fox nosed and stilled as if someone pressed pause on it.
"Right. In and out," she told the dark .
The Heartstone lay warm under her jumper. A steady ember against skin. Her fingers found it, heat seeping through the back of her glove. The chain pulled a little when she moved, a reminder , a leash.
"Yu-Fei would swear if she saw me traipsing through Richmond at this hour. She’d swear more if I came back without dumplings. Focus, Carter."
The phone’s torch threw a thin beam that caught on white bark and spider threads and a glint of glass from some old bottle. The air smelt like wet leaf and something sweet beneath it, sugar burnt on iron. The city lay out there with its horns and bus brakes and pub songs. In here, sound changed costume. Her steps came back delayed, and sometimes not her steps at all.
"Eva, if you’re listening to this later, you can yell. I know you said wait. But the pendant wouldn’t shut up, and the text—"
She stopped talking because she was listening . A soft tune threaded between oaks in a pattern like laughter through teeth. Not a song she knew. Not something a person would hum at night in a park where police cars liked to cruise the perimeters. It hit the inside of her ear and made the hairs there lift.
"Not funny."
A magpie hopped along a branch overhead, black and white flicking like castanets. It watched her with the interest of a collector. She watched it back and moved on.
Richmond’s track cracked open at the deer fence where posts twisted like old knuckles. Beyond that, the ground dipped. She recognised the line of ancient oaks. They didn’t stand so much as lean toward a centre, trunks grown round and holed, bark pocked as if something had sucked at it. They made a circle the size of a pub. Every other clearing in the park wore winter’s face. Here, the grass ran green and stiff, dotted with violets and primroses swimming in dew.
"That’s you then."
She kept the torch near her boots, wary of what the beam would do if it found a face. The pendant pulsed harder, warmth deepening. A heartbeat that didn’t match her own.
"You’re near a door, aren’t you. How close?"
She stepped toward the boundary and felt the air thicken. Not wind. Pressure. It pressed under her ears and down through the crown of her head as if the grove measured her and found bones and names it didn’t like. The oaks creaked in a language made of knots.
"Alright. Isolde’s grove. Whatever you’re called."
Her foot crossed onto the grass within the ring. Frost gave up and turned to cold wet. The pendant burned. Her wrist remembered the old scar, a faint crescent tiny teeth had left years ago. The sting now lined up with that memory with cruel accuracy.
"Someone thought a present round my neck would coax me in here. Brave of them."
On the phone screen the time read 00:17. She looked again when her palm cooled and it said 00:04. She swore and shoved it in her pocket.
"Not tonight with the clocks. Keep your tricks."
A flower near her ankle adjusted as if to face her. Petals angled minutely and held. The smell rose a notch. Honey edged with ash. The city’s sodium glare smoked the low clouds but under the oak boughs the sky shone too hard. Every star felt an inch away, blue-white and mad.
"Rory. Don’t."
That voice slid out from behind an oak. Eva’s voice. Belfast underneath London. Years of late-night stone soup and daft plans tugged in it.
"I know that isn’t you. You’d have kicked me in the shins and brought a torch with working batteries."
A pause. The oak creaked in reply. Something mimicked the way Eva inhaled when she’d run up stairs, that little scrape at the start of a sentence.
"You’ll twist your ankle," it tried again, patient, coaxing .
"Wrong line. Try telling me the curry’s getting cold."
Leaves shifted. In the corner of her eye, someone ducked. She looked and saw only two trunks sharing bark like the backs of lovers who’d fused.
"Don’t flatter me," she told the grove. "I know what I am. Delivery girl with a law textbook propping a wobbly table leg."
The warmth against her skin jumped. The Heartstone pulsed hard enough to shove at her sternum. The inner glow pushed through the settings. A deep red, damp as a tongue behind glass.
"You feel that, don’t you."
The pulse matched something beneath her boots. Not thudding. A sway. Like long grass underwater in a tide that knew old schedules and ignored the moon. It pulled at the soles of her feet with a rhythm that stole her balance for a blink.
"Door to Hel. That’s what you are," she told the red stone. "Or you fancy yourself that way."
An owl ghosted between trunks and took a perch on a branch above her left shoulder. It turned its head and measured her. Its eyes threw back colour that wasn’t its own. Red caught there and bled over to blue and then something like bottle green . When it blinked, the sound made a dry click that landed inside her. It trilled, short, and the air reached for the note like mouths.
"You watching for me or for what’s behind me?"
No answer that fitted over human words came. The grass nearest the oaks rippled. The ripples ran in toward the centre where Rory stood. The little flowers dipped and raised like nods.
"Right. I’m here. Whoever wanted me, you got your wish. Show me the point."
A new voice reached her then. Not a copy of someone she loved or hated. Thinner. As if it had only ever existed through wood. It drew circles around the syllables.
"Carter."
Her jaw clenched around her father’s face paging through memory. Brendan Carter in his robe, voice that could knock a man from a witness box without leaving a mark.
"Don’t try him on for size," she snapped. "You haven’t earned it."
The oak to her right shed something from a high branch. It landed near her boot with a thump. Not a branch. A knot. A dense twist of wood with holes grown through in the shape of a little face if you squinted. It rolled to point one black hole at her shoe and stopped there as if it had reached an assigned post.
"I’m not picking that up."
Her phone flogged a vibration through her pocket. She pulled it free. The screen lit with two missed calls from a number she didn’t know, then blank, then Eva’s face on the contact photo, then no service, then full bars with ‘Silas’ blinking. A text arrived: Are you in my roof? Except Silas never wrote like that and he never used punctuation either, yet there was a crisp full stop in it. She kept her thumb from opening. The little bubble notification pulsed out of sync with the pendant.
"Silas doesn’t care about punctuation," she told the air. "Nice try."
A moth drifted into the torch beam, fat and grey, wings dusty as if it had crawled under a bed for a decade. It fluttered , then stopped and hovered. In the second before it moved on, it showed a pattern on its back in the torch glare that spelled her name if you turned your head and had a bad imagination. She stepped back and heard leaves crush where no leaves lay.
"You can learn my names. Not hard. You’ve had time."
She placed her palm against one of the oaks. The bark came warm at first, then colder the longer she touched it. The cold bit through glove and skin. It tightened her knuckles to bone. Beneath the rough ridges lay a give like muscle. The tree leaned a touch into her hand as if to listen.
"I came because you took someone the last time the sky looked like this. I came because my dead won’t stay put if you keep lifting the latch. I came because some strange blighter sent me a red stone through my letterbox with a burr of hair caught in the clasp, and I’d like that to stop."
The tree stilled. The clothes she wore picked up damp in the way basements did. The oak beside the one she touched pushed a root out of the ground like a knuckle. It bulged the soil near her toe and split a little as though to form a mouth. No sound came from it.
"I’m going to lay this on your boundary." She lifted the pendant free of her skin and let it hang. Heat winked under her palm and the stone blinked again on its own pulse . "And you’re going to show me how to keep doors shut."
A gust came through then that didn’t belong to weather. It ran through her hair and pinned her to the spot, not with force but with a pressure that invited her to yield. It moved in the ground as much as in the air. The owl fluffed and settled with a noise like sand tipping in a narrow glass.
"Evan?" breathed the air as it left her. From her own throat, but not with her consent.
She tasted tin and took a breath that rubbed at lungs as if the grooves inside were too new.
"No. He’s nowhere near me again. Nice that you can scroll my history though. Keep out of it."
At the name, the far trees gave back a clap in the wrong direction. Sound came from behind her right shoulder, the echo of someone’s hand meeting someone else’s cheek. She didn’t turn.
"That’s done."
The humming deepened. She wouldn’t have called it a song. It wasn’t for ears. But bodies learned notes even if brains got none of it. Her hips wanted to shift to meet it. She tightened her knees and held.
"Is this the part where I’m meant to walk through like a mug and end up in some corridor full of bones? Not tonight."
Her own voice came back, but thinner, like tape wound loose. "Not tonight," it repeated.
The circle of oaks leaned another fraction. A gap fitted itself between two trunks, black enough to eat the torch beam. The pendant flared in her hand and yanked forward as if something had taken the chain in a fist from the other side.
"Easy," she warned the thing she couldn’t see. "You pull, I cut the chain and drop it here, and then you’ve got a toy and I’ve got a story. Let go."
The tug eased. The chain cooled again. The red heart stayed alight but steadied. She curled the pendant into her fist and let the edges cut half moons into her lifeline.
"Talk to me, then. We aren’t doing dumb charades."
A drop of water fell from nowhere and landed on the back of her free hand. It left a little welt like a nettle sting. Another drop found the curve of her ear and ran down her neck inside her collar with an intimacy that raised bile.
"Right," she said with a breath that warmed the bite. "We’re past subtle."
Her phone chimed once. A voice memo app she didn’t open started recording, red line creeping forward. She watched the seconds. They hiccuped. 6, 19, 8, 42. She hit stop. It kept going. A voice slid out of the speaker.
"Rory?"
Eva’s. Clean this time. Worn and awake.
"Where are you?"
"I told you not to come alone."
"I’m not alone."
"You don’t sound alone," Eva said through the phone. "You sound like somebody’s holding their mouth near yours."
The phone’s light dimmed, then flared and burnt white at a point. It flickered out. The grove’s own light took over again, which wasn’t light at all but the way shapes announce themselves without asking eyes.
"You can borrow her voice all night," Rory told the dark. "She’ll still hit you with her boot if you touch me."
A coil of ivy shifted on the left-hand oak. It unwound from a branch it had girthed and hung down. The leaves pivoted so their faces all turned toward her palm. A single tendril reached. It didn’t touch. It waited.
"Fine. We’re doing questions."
She raised the pendant until it hung just inside the circle written by ivy and bark. Heat pooled in her palm and then climbed her wrist like an animal intent on bone.
"You after that? You want it more when it burns me than when it burns you. That’s a mood."
Something exhaled near her ear. Not breath. The idea of a breath. It cooled the throb at her wrist and took a little of her name with it.
"Laila," it tried.
"No," she hissed. "No aliases tonight."
"Aurora," it said, and the oaks gave . Not much. Enough to let the gap between two trunks breathe.
She stood a step from that gap, toe to threshold. The pendant sat in her fist as if it grew there. The hum in the soil climbed her shins. She could taste iron as thin as a pin on her tongue.
"Door," she said, flat .
The gap deepened. Not a tunnel. Not a hole. Just more night stacked behind night, too much of it, wrong weight . The heartbeat in the stone found a twin inside that dark. The two beats counted one another.
"I won’t go through. You bring it here."
The oak at her left shook, a confinement shiver, and dropped a slick sheet of bark that slapped the grass. The scent of rot rose rich and warm and wrong this deep in frost. The owl leaned and stared down the dark.
"You’re going to reach," she told the gap. "And you’re going to hand me what you took."
The first vine crossed the threshold. Not ivy. A black root thin as wire, glassy, with shine trapped inside it like bits of sky. It came out slow and tremored when the torch beam hit and fizzed and died again. It stretched and stopped within a breath of her boot. It knew the edge like an old map.
"Closer."
It twitched and held. The wire root never touched air and yet she felt it on her shin, a lick of cold through denim.
"Closer, or I stand here till your dawn and yours might not match mine."
The pendant jerked again, a dog at lead, eager to hurl itself where it shouldn’t. She kept a tight fist and held her ground. The wind, if this could be wind, moved hair along her jaw and found the scar on her wrist by heat and sought to climb that way . Her skin crawled from palm to elbow, then stilled under her.
"Enough," she breathed into her own teeth.
The wire root inched; then another slid beside it, followed by a third that carried a knot of something dewy and pale cradled at its end. It lifted the knot up in a poor attempt at a hand presenting a trinket, and held it for her to see.
Her torch caught it. Light slid off its surface. Not bone. Not fungus. The shape of a ring turned down into itself. Inside, something black swam like oil in a spoon.
"Closer," Rory repeated, arm steady under the itch and the heat and the new pull of a dark that wanted her whole.