AI “It was only a bloody delivery,” Rory said, and the words hit the oak like a thrown coin.
She had crossed the grass in long steps, the city thinning behind her until the lights blurred into a single dull smear. The standing stones rose in a half-circle like patient, tired giants. Wildflowers made impossible knots of colour at their feet, bright as if someone had left jars of paint tipped over and forgotten.
The pendant lay warm against her palm. A thumbnail of crimson, set in silver, it pulsed faintly under her skin as if it had its own slow heartbeat. The glow tugged at the inside of her wrist scar until the crescent prickled in sympathy.
“Come on, then,” she told the Grove . “Show yourself.”
Her voice sounded small and indecisive between the trees. That was the first wrongness: sound felt thin, as if the clearing had borrowed its atmosphere from somewhere deeper. The night air should have been full of leaves and distant traffic. Instead there was a hollow, like someone had scooped the sound out and kept it in a jar.
A rustle answered, light as moth wings against linen. Not behind her; around her. Motion at the edge of the light. Something moved where the mulch made shadows thicker than they ought to be.
Rory pivoted. Her feet snagged on a root and she swore, sharp, and laughed at herself to keep the noise human. The pendant warmed again. The pulse tightened like someone drawing a thread through fabric.
“Did someone leave a note?” she asked. “A time and place? A—what, password?”
Her laugh skittered away. No reply. Just the forest breathing. She heard the trees whisper in the way leaves always whispered, but layered beneath them was a second sound, high and faint, like someone humming a tune badly remembered. The tune wandered through the clearing and left impressions—smudges—on the air.
“You picked the worst courier,” she said, because anger steadied the hands more than fear. “Next time, use an app.”
She listened for the app to beep. Nothing obliged.
A twig snapped, close. The sound did not come from any direction she could place. It was as if the Grove made its own rules for space, as if distances bent and wrapped around until 'close' meant everywhere. The pendant warmed again, steady now, a vein of heat that ran up her arm to settle under her collarbone.
Her phone read 01:17. When she had left the flat above Silas’ bar it had been midnight on the dot. Time worked in odd ways in Richmond Park, Eva had warned. Rory had rolled her eyes and come anyway. The pendant had tugged, an insistence through the day like hunger.
“You know me,” she said, voice low . “I don’t do spooky. I do delivery.” Her breath fogged . The wildflowers gave off a perfume that smelled like baked apples and something older and sourer under it.
Something moved between two stones—no larger than a child's hand at first, then longer, a line that slid like a seam in the grass. It left dew-slick tracks where there had been none. Rory stepped forward because she could not help herself. The pendant pulsed against her palm, brightening.
“Hello?” The word sounded naive in the hollow.
A reply came, and it had no shape at first. It felt like the air tightened. Then the voice folded itself into syllables she knew—soft and oily as river mud. “Hello, Aurora.”
The use of her full name made her spine go cold. No one in London had ever called her that except her parents, and they lived across the water. The voice was not quite a voice . It delighted in her name the way a cat delighted in a toy.
“Who—who’s there?” she said. Her words leaned forward, braced by indignation rather than fear. She put her back to a standing stone and let the oak hold her up. The bark was rough against her shoulder, solid and normal. That normal was a proof she clung to.
A laugh, very small, answered from the dark between the trees. It sounded like if somebody slit the throat of a weather-beaten violin and rubbed the strings with glass.
“You have a pendant,” the voice said. It made the syllables into gifts, unwinding them slowly . “You have my calling.”
“You gave this to me,” Rory snapped. Her tongue pressed into the gap left by the scar on her wrist. The skin there pulled at the silver chain. “So answer me. Why here? Why tonight?”
Silence. The kind that settled thick around her bones and made her teeth itch.
Then the flowers shifted. Not wind. The petals turned like many tiny heads toward her and the standing stones, aligning. Their faces held an expression that humans did not have names for; something between hunger and curiosity .
“You came,” the Grove purred, or the voice gathered itself from fifty leaves and one hidden throat . “You came like all the other warm things.”
“I came because it pulsed ,” Rory said, because the safest thing in the world was the truth. Her voice steadied, sharpened by the fact. “It started in the night, first at my flat when I wasn't thinking about anything but sleep. Then at work—numbing little pulses when I handed Yi a bag. It called me. So I'm here.”
The pendant hummed against her skin. The pulse matched the cadence of her heart and then moved ahead of it, a metronome that knew the steps she had not yet taken.
“You have scars,” the Grove observed. The voice sounded curious, not cruel. Rory had never told anyone about the crescent on her wrist. She traced it with a thumb. The skin was pale, an old story.
“Everyone has scars,” she said, and her voice scraped. “Mine are boring.”
A twig cracked to her left. Then to her right. The hair on the back of her neck lifted in a line like bristles on a startled animal. Shapes lurked in the birch trunks, not quite trunks . Limbs—that might have been imagined —leaned as if listening .
“You ran,” the voice said. It sounded not just like the Grove but like someone who had sat with a mug too long . “From a man who was loud and heavy. You ran and took the sky with you.”
Rory gripped the pendant. Her stomach dipped. She had fled Evan's fists and his loud promises and his beautiful rehearsed apologies. She had come to London with bruises skinned and a suitcase of old arguments. The Grove knew things it had no business knowing.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked. Her tone thinned to barbs. “What do you want?”
The flowers leaned, almost pressing their faces to the ground between her boots. The voice answered with no one mouth. “You have taken my thing. You carry it like a secret treasure. I would see.”
She swallowed. The pendant pulsed . The warmth it gave was no longer pleasant. It pressed like a palm.
“You sent the pendant?” she asked.
The answer became a rustle, an acknowledgement that slid through the leaves. “It was given. The hand that sent it was not the only hand.”
Rory's pulse thudded. Detail filled in small, hyphenated pieces in her head: the man’s handwriting on the card she had found tucked into the chain, the single line—Find the Grove—and the lack of a name. An anonymous gift had weight she had not expected.
“You could have left a note,” she said. “You could have said—look , the whole portal thing? Not exactly on my CV.”
The grasses laughed. The laugh became the skitter of insects, then a hush. A movement passed at the edge of her vision: something not quite a shadow but a collection of them, folding itself around a stump . It watched with many small glints that were not eyes but did the same job.
“I wanted you to come,” the Grove said. “You are useful when you are stubborn.”
Useful. The word tasted like metal. Rory pressed her teeth together. Use was what Evan had wanted—to see her as a tool to bash the world into another shape. She had escaped that small tyranny; the thought that another shape might be ready to take her was a cold, thin terror.
“Useful how?” she asked, voice clipped . Her knuckles whitened around the pendant’s chain.
The answer stepped closer. Not words at first. The air changed; it thickened as if someone had turned a page in a book. Time tugged at her ankles. A sense came that the clearing had folded a layer over her, one where the hours could be rearranged like tiles.
“You are between,” the Grove said. “You walk both places.” The voice spread itself into accents, some like the wind over stone, some like children talking in the bottom of a well. It pleased itself in the richness of its tones. “You carry a heart that breaks other hearts. You left a place that would grind you. You are ready.”
“Ready for what?” Rory demanded. Her throat worked. The idea that she was 'ready' belonged to pages and brochures and people who sold recipes for strength. It did not belong to her, here, under open sky and too-bright flowers.
A twig snapped behind her. Rory did not turn. She felt rather than saw the presence take a place of honour, settling into a hollow under a root like a cat curling. The pendant flared once, painfully bright, and she instinctively pressed it to her chest.
“I wasn't asked,” she said. The apology in her voice came because she had learned to say sorry before fists fell. “I left. I didn't volunteer.”
No reply came that sounded like pity. The Grove's tone was businesslike. “You left because you could. That is the difference.”
Rory let the pendant cool against her skin. The temperature of the air seemed to shift as if someone had opened a door into a cellar. A smell rose—iron and wet earth, undercut with smoke. Not fire. Something older: the warmth of living things in a place made for un-dead things. She imagined pockets of time where breath hung between two heartbeats and found herself unable to stop.
“You promised me nothing,” she said. “I owe you nothing.”
The voice laughed, soft and old. “You will give us a night.”
“You think I’m a sacrifice.” The statement came out sharp as glass.
“For a night, perhaps,” the Grove said. “For a crossing. You will not be alone.”
Rory's throat closed at the last words. The wrongness, which had been a series of small cuts all night—soundless gaps, petals turned like pages, names said out of season—took a new shape. Not merely observation. Intention.
“Not alone,” she repeated. Her hands trembled . The pendant hummed. Something moved just beyond the ring of stones and the motion was slow and patient, like a hand exploring a table for a coin.
“Who else?” she asked. The question was a blade and she pushed it to the voice.
Silence stretched. It was full of expectation. The Grove waited like someone waiting at a window for a train to arrive. The answer slid through on a breath that was almost a word. It used a voice she trusted.
“You are not alone,” the voice said, and it sounded like Eva, soft against a shared joke. “We are with you.”
Rory's spine uncoiled, then recoiled. She took a step back. The trees seemed to lean closer. The pendant pressed hotly against her chest, a fist demanding she look down. She could see the glow, crimson as a wound, and it beat in rhythm with the hum of something underfoot.
“Eva?” she called, because naming comforted, because naming might break the trick. Her voice pitched higher than she meant. She heard her own laugh like a nervous animal.
There was a rustle that might have been agreement or amusement. Then another voice answered, and this one sounded like a man she did not know but felt he should be afraid of, like an empty robe filled with breath. “She came with a scar,” it observed. “She wears her runes well.”
Rory's breath went small. The pendant flared brighter. The flowers leaned as if aware of an audience. The standing stones held their patient, indifferent posture but the light at their bases burned a slow, red ember that pulsed with the same cadence as the pendant.
“I’m leaving,” she said. She tried to step back toward the path she had taken, toward London, toward lamps and bars and the predictable noise of humanity. The Grove made the path recede as if pulling a cloth away . Distance folded.
“You will stay until the dawn is not ours,” the Grove said. “Until the clock outside has spun its hour. You will bind what walks with you.”
The ground under her boots warmed as if a slow thing breathed through the soil. Shapes uncurled at the edges of vision, still not full bodies, just ideas of limbs, but the air between them seemed to thicken with voices . The wrongness now was not only what she heard; it perched in her joints and taxed her breath. She found herself moving toward the hollow under a root because the pull in the pendant was a physical thing now, like gravity in a different world.
“I don't bind anything,” she said. Her spine braced. “I ran. I left. I won’t be—”
“You were given a choice,” the Grove cut in. The voice was not unkind. It was simply a fact, like the tide or the approach of frost. “You chose wrong.”
Rory's laugh disappeared. The pendant's pulse quickened into a staccato. The flowers closed a little, like fists. A sound threaded through the trees—steps that sounded like sand. It circled the clearing counterclockwise, practiced and precise.
“You're not alone,” the voice promised again, with the warmth of someone telling a bedtime story. “We are with you.”
The trees breathed as if in answer, a slow chorus. Something moved to her left so close that the air shivered. The pendant sang in her hand.
Rory opened her mouth to throw the chain in a furious, reckless arc, to end the calling by breaking its shape. She did not finish the motion. The voice filled her mouth for her.
“Stay,” it said, and it sounded like the city and the sea and the inside of a skull, all folded into one. “Stay.”
She had a hundred answers. She had fares to collect. She had Eva’s face and Silas’ laugh and the certainty of the flat above the bar. She had a life scraped into the careful grooves that kept her safe. She also had a pendant that thrummed and called, and a clearing that had already decided for her.
“I—” Rory began, and the word became the hinge on which the night turned .