AI
The pendant burned against her collarbone. Not the gentle pulse she'd grown accustomed to, the one that felt like a second heartbeat nestled in the hollow of her throat. This was insistent. Demanding. The crimson stone threw ruby light across the underside of her jaw as Rory pushed through the last tangle of hawthorn and stumbled into the clearing.
She'd been here once before, in daylight, when the standing oaks had seemed almost welcoming. Ancient things, thick as barrels, their bark so old and dense it had turned to something closer to stone. They ringed the grove in a wide circle, evenly spaced, their branches weaving overhead into a canopy that should have been bare for November but wasn't. Green leaves. Fat blossoms of foxglove and evening primrose spilling between the roots, filling the air with a sweetness that belonged to July.
None of that was new.
What was new was the silence .
Richmond Park at night carried sound. Deer crashing through bracken. The distant hum of the A307. Foxes screaming their mating calls across Pen Ponds. Rory had heard all of it on the walk in, the reassuring background noise of a London that never stopped talking.
She couldn't hear it now.
The pendant's glow illuminated the nearest oak in stuttering red. Rory pressed her palm flat against the stone and held her breath. The Heartstone pulsed twice, hard, then went cold against her skin. Dead cold. Like pressing an ice cube to bare flesh.
"Right," she whispered.
Her voice didn't carry. The word dropped from her lips and fell straight down, as if the air itself had thickened into something that absorbed sound. She swallowed. Tried again, louder.
"Hello?"
Nothing. Not even an echo off the standing oaks, which should have bounced her voice back and forth across the thirty-metre clearing like a racquetball court. The silence didn't feel empty. It felt full. Packed tight with something she couldn't name, pressing against her eardrums until they ached.
She'd come for the journal. Eva's journal, the one with the hand-drawn map of ley lines across South London and the circled location that matched this grove exactly. Eva had scribbled a note in the margin: *3am, new moon, the door opens both ways *. Tonight was a new moon. Rory had checked. She'd checked everything, mapped her route, charged her phone, told no one where she was going because there was no one left to tell who wouldn't think she'd gone mad.
Her phone. She pulled it from her jacket pocket.
No signal. Expected, this deep in the park. But the time display caught her eye. 3:07. She'd entered the grove at 2:58. She was certain of it because she'd checked at the last stile, and the walk from there took no more than four minutes. Nine minutes. Except she'd only been standing here for what felt like thirty seconds, maybe a minute at most.
Time moves differently.
Eva's words. Eva's warning, buried in the journal between sketches of symbols Rory still couldn't identify. She pocketed the phone and turned a slow circle, scanning the edge of the clearing. The standing oaks stared back. Twelve of them. She'd counted twelve last time.
She counted again.
Thirteen.
Rory stopped. Backtracked. Started from the oak nearest the gap in the hawthorn where she'd entered and counted clockwise, pointing at each one, the way you'd count children in a schoolyard.
Thirteen.
One of them was wrong. One of them hadn't been here before, or shouldn't be here now, and she couldn't tell which because they all looked identical in the pendant's dead light, the same ancient grey bark, the same impossible branches, the same stillness.
Except.
The fourth one from the entrance. She stared at it. Blinked. Stared again. Its bark was darker than the others, or maybe the darkness between its roots was deeper, the shadows pooling there denser than shadow had any right to be. And the foxgloves growing at its base were leaning away from it. Every other cluster in the grove pointed inward, toward the centre of the clearing. These pointed out. Straining, almost, the stems bent at unnatural angles, petals trembling.
There was no wind.
Rory took a step back. The grass beneath her trainers made no sound. She looked down. The blades were pressed flat in a path that led from the centre of the clearing to the fourth oak, as if something heavy had been dragged , or had dragged itself, from one point to the other. The trail was fresh. The crushed grass still glistened with sap.
She followed the trail with her eyes, back toward the centre of the grove. A patch of bare earth, roughly circular, maybe a metre across. She hadn't noticed it on the way in. The wildflowers that should have covered it were gone . Not trampled, not dead. Gone. Bare soil, dark and wet, and in its centre a mark she recognised from Eva's journal. A spiral. Carved or pressed into the earth by something with more precision than fingers.
The pendant flared.
Not warm. Not the comforting pulse of proximity to something fae. This was heat, sudden and sharp, as if the stone had been held over a flame. Rory grabbed it through her shirt and yanked it away from her skin. The crimson light strobed through the fabric, painting her hand in flashes of arterial red.
Then she heard the breathing.
Low. Rhythmic. Coming from behind the fourth oak.
Not animal breathing. Animals panted, snorted, huffed. This was measured . Deliberate. In for four counts. Out for four counts. The breathing of something that had lungs and knew how to use them and wanted her to know it.
Rory's fingers tightened around the pendant. The silver chain bit into the back of her neck.
"I can hear you."
The breathing stopped.
Worse. The silence that replaced it had weight , had substance, filled the grove like water filling a glass. Rory's ears popped. She worked her jaw, swallowed, felt the pressure equalise and then build again, mounting, squeezing.
The fourth oak moved.
Not much. A shift. The kind of movement that, if you saw it from the corner of your eye, you'd dismiss as a trick of light, a branch settling, the natural sway of a tree in wind. But there was no wind, there were no tricks, and Rory wasn't looking from the corner of her eye. She faced it dead on, and she watched its trunk rotate, just two or three degrees, like a head turning to look at something.
Looking at her.
She should run. The logical part of her brain, the part that had aced every exam and argued every mock trial and navigated every back road of Cardiff in the dark, that part screamed at her to move, to get back through the hawthorn and across the park to the car park where her bicycle waited under a functioning streetlamp like a beacon of the rational world.
Her legs disagreed. Her legs had turned to something cold and rigid from the knees down, and the ground beneath her feet had gone soft, yielding, the grass sinking under her weight as if the earth itself had opened its mouth.
The pendant went dark.
Total darkness. The kind that doesn't exist in London, that can't exist when there are ten million people throwing light at the sky from every direction. But the canopy overhead had sealed, leaves knitting together so tightly that not a single photon of ambient light filtered through, and Rory stood in a blackness so complete she couldn't see her own hand pressed against her chest.
She heard something step out from behind the fourth oak.
One footfall . Soft. Bare skin on wet earth. Then another. Then a third, and a fourth, and they weren't following a bipedal rhythm. Too many steps, too close together, the sound of something with more limbs than it should have crossing the grove toward her.
Rory found her voice.
"Stay back."
The footsteps paused. Somewhere in the dark, close now, close enough that she felt the air displace, something exhaled. The breath washed over her face. It smelled of turned soil and copper and something beneath both of those, something sweet and rotten that coated the back of her tongue.
Then a voice, if it could be called a voice, more a vibration in her jaw, in her teeth, in the soft palate of her mouth, as if the words originated inside her own skull.
"You brought the stone."
Not a question.
"You opened the door."
Also not a question.
Rory's left wrist throbbed . The crescent scar, the one she'd had since she was seven, since the garden shears and the trip to A&E and the eight stitches her mother had counted while her father argued with the nurse. It burned with a cold that sank into the bone.
Something touched her face.
Not fingers. Too many points of contact, too smooth, tracing the line of her jaw with a delicacy that spoke of fascination rather than malice. It mapped her features the way a blind person reads Braille, moving from jawline to cheekbone to the bridge of her nose, lingering at the corners of her eyes.
"Brendan's daughter."
The name of her father, spoken in that boneless voice, hit her like a slap. Rory jerked back. Her feet came free of the softened earth with a wet sucking sound, and she stumbled, caught herself, and the pendant blazed back to life.
Red light flooded the grove.
The thing stood three metres from her. Tall, taller than the standing oaks, folded in on itself to fit beneath the canopy, limbs like branches, too many of them, jointed in all the wrong places. Its skin, if skin it was, had the same grey-stone texture as the oaks, but beneath it something pulsed , something that matched the rhythm of the pendant, something with its own red light that seeped through cracks in the bark like magma through cooling basalt.
It had no face. Where a face should have been, the bark spiralled inward, a tight whorl like a fingerprint or the mark in the centre of the clearing, and at its deepest point, a single opening that might have been a mouth.
The mouth moved.
"The door opens both ways, little Carter."
Rory's hand shot to her back pocket. Her fingers closed around Eva's journal, the leather cover soft and warm as living skin.
Behind her, the hawthorn gap had sealed shut.