AI The pendant pulsed twice against her collarbone before she even stepped through the tree line.
Rory pressed her palm flat against it, felt the warmth bleeding through her jacket. Not the gentle hum she'd grown accustomed to over the past three weeks, the one that felt like a second heartbeat syncing with her own. This was different. Insistent. The crimson glow leaked between her fingers, painting her knuckles red.
She should have turned back. She knew that now, the way you know a dream is a dream but keep walking through it anyway, pulled along by some idiot logic that dissolves the moment you wake up.
But she didn't wake up.
Richmond Park after dark held a quality that no amount of daytime dog-walkers and Sunday cyclists could prepare you for. The open grasslands she'd crossed from the car park had been manageable, just the wind and the distant amber glow of London's light pollution smeared across the underside of the clouds. But the moment the ancient oaks closed around her, the city vanished. Not gradually. Not the way sound fades with distance. It simply stopped existing, as though someone had pressed a thumb over a speaker.
She'd brought a torch. Standard issue, the kind Yu-Fei kept behind the counter at the Golden Empress for the alley out back. Its beam cut a narrow corridor through the undergrowth, catching on ferns and fallen branches and the pale undersides of leaves that twisted in a breeze she couldn't feel on her skin.
The standing stones appeared sooner than they should have.
She'd walked this route twice in daylight, mapping it on her phone, timing the distances. Twelve minutes from the Isabella Plantation fence to the first stone. She'd been walking for four. Maybe five.
Rory stopped. Swept the torch in a slow arc.
Five stones. Weathered oak, petrified over centuries into something closer to granite. They rose from the earth at odd angles, the tallest one reaching her shoulder, the shortest barely clearing the bracken. In daylight, they'd looked almost quaint. Remnants of something forgotten. Heritage Trust material.
Now they looked like teeth.
She stepped between the two nearest stones, and the Heartstone flared so hot she gasped and yanked the chain away from her skin. The pendant swung free, its deep crimson glow casting a circle of light that moved independently of her torch beam. It pointed inward. Toward the grove.
The clearing opened around her like a held breath.
Wildflowers. In November. She'd seen them before on her scouting trips and had told herself they were late bloomers, some resilient strain she didn't know the name of. But these weren't late bloomers. Foxglove and bluebell and something white she couldn't identify grew in thick, impossible clusters across the grove floor, their petals open and turned upward as though basking in a sun that wasn't there . The air smelt of summer. Warm grass and pollen and the sweet green decay of a garden in July.
Rory crouched beside a cluster of bluebells. Touched one with her fingertip. It was warm. Body temperature warm.
She pulled her hand back and wiped it on her jeans.
The recording equipment. That's why she'd come. Eva had insisted on proof, something more than blurry photos and Rory's increasingly frantic voice notes. The digital recorder sat in her jacket pocket, a solid rectangular weight against her hip. She pulled it out, pressed the red button, and held it at arm's length.
Nothing but the ambient hum of the grove. A low, subsonic vibration that she felt more than heard, like standing too close to a transformer.
She panned the recorder in a slow circle, narrating in a whisper .
"Fae Grove. Twenty-three forty hours. Eleventh of November. Flowers are, same as before. Air temperature feels ten, fifteen degrees warmer than outside the stones. Pendant is active. No visible—"
A branch snapped somewhere behind the tallest stone.
Rory killed the torch.
The grove didn't go dark. The wildflowers held their own luminescence, a faint bioluminescent shimmer that painted the clearing in shades of blue and violet. She hadn't noticed it with the torch on. Her eyes adjusted and the grove revealed itself in a new register, the flowers glowing like runway lights along a path she hadn't seen before, curving away between the oaks and into deeper woodland.
The sound didn't repeat. No second snap. No rustle of an animal moving through undergrowth. Just the absence of sound that followed it, the grove holding still the way a room holds still when someone enters it.
She turned the torch back on. Swept it toward the tallest stone.
Something had been scratched into its surface. Fresh marks, pale against the dark wood-stone. She stepped closer. The scratches formed a pattern. Not words. Not any symbol she recognised. Just lines, dozens of them, scored into the stone at roughly hip height, parallel and evenly spaced, like tally marks.
She ran her thumb across one. The groove was deep. Whatever had made it had applied serious pressure.
The wildflowers behind her dimmed.
Not all at once. A slow recession, like a tide pulling back. The blue glow faded from the far edge of the clearing and crept inward, a circle of dimming light that shrank toward the centre where Rory stood. She watched it happen. Watched the luminescence retreat until only the flowers within arm's reach still glowed, a small island of blue in a growing sea of black.
Then the smell changed.
The summer warmth curdled. Turned. The sweet pollen scent thickened into something meaty, organic, the reek of wet soil and copper and something underneath both that she couldn't name but that made her salivary glands clench the way they did before vomiting.
The Heartstone pendant, which had been swinging freely, stopped moving.
Not slowed. Not settled. Stopped, mid-swing, the chain pulled taut at an angle that defied gravity. It pointed toward the path between the oaks. The path the flowers had illuminated. The path that led deeper.
"No," Rory said aloud. The word fell flat. Absorbed by the air before it reached the trees.
Something breathed.
Not behind her. Not ahead. Above. The sound came from the canopy, a long, wet inhalation that lasted four seconds, five, six, far longer than any pair of lungs should manage. It pulled at the air around her. She felt her hair lift, felt the draught against the back of her neck, felt the flowers at her feet lean toward the sound as though drawn by it.
The exhalation never came.
Rory's grip on the torch turned her knuckles white. She tilted the beam upward. Slowly. The light climbed the trunk of the nearest oak, caught the knots and whorls of bark, found the lowest branch.
The branch held leaves. November oak leaves, brown and curled and clinging on past their season. They hung motionless. No wind. No breath disturbed them. But among them, between them, something occupied a space that the torchlight refused to fill. A gap in the beam. Not a shadow, shadows had edges, had shape. This was a hole. A place where the light went and didn't come back, roughly the size of a crouched person, nestled in the crook where the branch met the trunk.
It shifted.
The movement was small, a redistribution of weight , the way a cat adjusts before it springs. And with the movement came a sound. Not the breathing. Something worse. A clicking. Rhythmic. Patient. Like fingernails drumming on wood, starting slow and building toward a tempo that matched her heartbeat.
Click. Click. Click-click. Click-click-click.
Rory backed toward the nearest standing stone. Her heel caught on a root and she stumbled, caught herself, kept the torch aimed upward. The hole in the light had grown. Or moved. Hard to tell. The clicking had stopped.
"I'm leaving." Her voice came out steadier than her hands. "I'm walking back through those stones, and I'm leaving."
The last of the wildflowers went dark.
Total blackness, except for her torch beam and the pendant's crimson glow. She turned, oriented herself by the stones, found the gap she'd entered through.
The gap had closed.
Not physically. The two stones still stood where they'd always stood, a metre apart, ferns growing at their bases. But the space between them, the threshold she'd crossed minutes ago, had become something else. The air between the stones shimmered like heat haze, and through it she glimpsed the park she'd left behind. Except wrong. The grasslands beyond were bathed in sunlight. Midday sun in a cloudless sky, and the shadows of clouds raced across the ground at impossible speed, and the grass grew and yellowed and grew and yellowed in cycles that took seconds instead of months.
Time moves differently, she'd read that in the text Eva had dug up from some crumbling archive. An hour inside can be minutes or days outside.
She hadn't asked which.
The breathing started again. Closer. No longer above her. Beside her. Just beyond the torchlight's reach, to her left, at the exact distance where the beam dissolved into murk. She tracked the sound, and it tracked her tracking, sliding along the boundary of visible and invisible like something pacing a cage.
The Heartstone wrenched sideways. The chain bit into her neck, straining toward the shimmer between the stones, and the pendant's glow flared from deep crimson to arterial red. It wanted out. Whatever intelligence lived inside that thumbnail-sized gem, it recognised what was happening and it wanted no part of it.
The clicking started again. Both sides now. Left and right, out of sync, creating a staggered rhythm that her brain insisted on resolving into a pattern. Not fingernails on wood, she realised. Teeth.
"Right." Rory killed the torch. Shoved it in her pocket. Grabbed the pendant in her fist and squeezed until the silver chain dug grooves into her palm. "Right."
She ran.
Three strides to the gap between the stones. The shimmer rushed up to meet her, hot and electric , tasting of ozone and old pennies. She felt something snag the back of her jacket, a grip that was neither fingers nor claws but something articulated, something with too many joints, and it pulled, and the fabric tore, and she threw herself forward into the light, into the wrong-sunlight between the stones, into whatever broken version of time waited on the other side.
The grove spat her out onto wet grass in darkness.
November darkness. London darkness. The orange smear of the city glowed on the horizon where it should. Wind hit her face. Real wind, cold and carrying rain.
She rolled onto her back. Gasped. Stared up at a sky full of clouds and nothing else.
The standing stones stood behind her. Quiet. Ordinary. The ferns at their bases stirred in the breeze.
Rory sat up. Looked at her hands. The Heartstone had gone cold. Its glow had faded to the faintest ember, barely distinguishable from the darkness. The crescent scar on her left wrist stood out white against her flushed skin.
Her jacket. She reached behind her and felt the tear. Four parallel slashes through the fabric, each one precisely spaced, running from her left shoulder blade to her right hip. She touched the skin beneath. Unbroken. Whatever had grabbed her had wanted the cloth, not the flesh.
Or had missed.
She pulled out her phone. The screen lit up: 23:47. Seven minutes since she'd last checked the time at the car park. Seven minutes for all of it.
One notification sat on the lock screen. A text from Eva, sent at 23:44.
*Don't go to the grove tonight. Found something in the archive. It's not fae.*
Rory looked back at the stones. In the gap between the two she'd stumbled through, a single bluebell grew where no bluebell had been before. Its petals were open. It faced her.
It was breathing .