AI
The pendant burned against her collarbone. Not the faint warmth Rory had grown accustomed to, the low thrum like a second heartbeat she could ignore on busy days. This was insistent. A coal pressed to skin through the thin cotton of her shirt.
She pressed her palm flat against it and felt the Heartstone pulse , twice, three times, then hold a sustained heat that made her fingers tingle. The crimson gem threw light through the gaps between her knuckles, painting the underside of her jaw red.
Richmond Park stretched around her in every direction, black and featureless past the reach of her phone's torch. She'd left her bicycle chained to the Sheen Gate and walked the rest, following a route she'd memorised from a hand-drawn map Eva had sketched on the back of a Golden Empress napkin. Third oak past the fallen birch. Left at the stream bed. Straight on until the grass stops feeling like grass.
Eva hadn't explained that last instruction. She hadn't needed to.
The ground beneath Rory's trainers shifted from damp earth to something drier, spongier, like peat compressed over centuries. Each step made no sound. Not muffled sound, not quiet sound. No sound at all, as though her footfalls landed in a substance that refused to participate in physics.
She stopped walking.
The torch beam found the first standing stone about four metres ahead, its surface not stone at all but petrified oak, grey and ridged with the ghost-memory of bark. It stood taller than her by half, leaning slightly inward like a drunk usher guiding her toward the aisle. Beyond it, barely visible, a second stone. And past that, the suggestion of a third, curving away into the dark.
The boundary of the Grove.
Rory released the pendant and let it fall back against her chest. The heat had dimmed to a manageable throb . She could feel the crescent scar on her left wrist itching, the way it always did when her body registered a threat before her mind caught up. Childhood reflex. Old wiring.
She stepped between the first two stones.
The air changed. Not temperature, not humidity, something less measurable. Density, perhaps. As though the atmosphere inside the ring carried more weight per cubic inch, pressed against her eardrums with the sluggish pressure of deep water. Wildflowers carpeted the ground, which should have been impossible in November. Bluebells. Foxglove. Something white and clustered she couldn't name, luminous even without direct light, as if each petal had swallowed a thimbleful of moonlight and refused to give it back.
She had come here for the map. A folded slip of vellum Eva claimed Isolde had left pinned beneath a stone near the Grove's centre, containing directions to a second portal, one that opened into Hel from the mortal side. Eva had been specific: go at night, go alone, retrieve it, leave. Don't wander. Don't speak to anything that speaks first.
Rory swept the torch in a slow arc. The beam caught stone after stone, twelve in total, forming a rough circle perhaps twenty metres across. The centre held nothing but flowers and a single flat rock the size of a dinner table, half-buried in the ground.
She moved toward it. Halfway there, her phone flickered .
The torch cut out for a fraction of a second, less than a blink, and when it returned, the beam had narrowed to a tight cone that reached barely a metre ahead. She tapped the screen. Full battery. Full brightness. The light just stopped cooperating past a certain distance, as if the dark had learned to push back.
Fine. She'd work with what she had.
The flat rock was smooth on top, worn by something more deliberate than weather. Rory crouched beside it and ran her fingers along the edge. Cold. Damp. Her fingertips found a gap between the stone and the earth, wide enough to slip her hand into up to the wrist. She pulled out a fistful of soil, then another. Nothing.
She circled the rock, probing the gap on every side. More soil. Roots. The papery husk of a dead beetle. No vellum. No map.
Rory sat back on her heels and wiped her hands on her jeans. The Heartstone pulsed once, hard, like a warning tap on the shoulder.
Then she heard it.
A footstep. Behind her, outside the ring, in the absolute dark where her torchlight refused to reach. Not a fox's skitter or a deer's careful placing. A deliberate, bipedal step, heel to toe, on that soundless peat. She heard it because whatever made it wanted her to hear it.
She held still. Fourteen seconds of silence . She counted.
Another step. Closer. To her left now, which meant it had moved laterally without a sound between the two audible footfalls. Covering five, six metres in the space of a held breath.
"Isolde?"
Her own voice came back to her wrong. Flat. Absorbed by the air before it reached the tree line, as though the Grove had cupped a hand over her mouth after the word escaped. She tasted copper on her tongue. Not blood. Something older, mineral, like licking a coin fished from a Roman well.
No reply.
Rory stood and turned a full circle, the narrow torch beam sweeping the perimeter stones. Each one stood where it had been. Nothing moved between them. The flowers didn't stir. Not even a breeze to account for the sound.
But.
The ninth stone, the one she'd mentally tagged as the tallest, the one leaning most sharply inward, had gained a shadow. A vertical dark stripe running down its left side, too straight and too narrow to be cast by the stone's own irregular shape. Like something stood behind it. Something thin.
She locked the torch on it. The shadow didn't move. Didn't breathe. Didn't have the subtle sway of a living body holding artificially still. It simply existed where it hadn't existed before, and it was shaped , she realised with a slow tightening in her chest, exactly like a person standing in profile.
The Heartstone flared. Heat bloomed across her neck and sternum, sharp enough to make her flinch. The pendant's crimson glow escaped past her collar and threw a red cast across the nearest flowers, turning the bluebells the colour of bruises.
She took a step backward. Her heel caught a root.
The shadow twitched.
Not a startled twitch. Not the involuntary shudder of a creature caught staring. It moved with the boneless, segmented articulation of a finger uncurling, one joint at a time, starting from what should have been its feet and rolling upward through the torso to the head, which, she now saw, was angled toward her. Had been angled toward her the entire time.
Rory stopped breathing. Old instinct, prey-brain logic, the part of her cortex that predated language and electricity and the comfortable fiction that humans sat at the top of any meaningful chain. Something in the dark was watching her with the calm attention of a predator that had already eaten.
She found her breath. Forced it out. In again.
"Right," she whispered.
She backed toward the gap between the first two stones, the ones she'd entered through. Three steps. Four. The shadow remained where it was, attached to the ninth stone, motionless again, as though the twitch had been a glitch in reality, a single dropped frame.
Five steps. Her heel found the boundary. The air thickened, pushing against her shoulders like wading into a current. One more step and she'd be outside the ring, back on the peat, back in the park. Cold mundane November Richmond Park with its foxes and deer and absolute absence of things that unfolded like origami in the dark.
Six steps.
The torch died.
Not a flicker . Not a stutter. The screen went black, the torch went black, and the only light in the Grove was the red pulse of the Heartstone, throbbing against her chest like a fist knocking on a door from the wrong side.
In that crimson half-light, she saw them.
Not one shadow. Twelve. One behind each standing stone, each one angled toward her, each one mid-twitch in that same rolling, jointless motion, uncurling from the ground up like dark ferns responding to a sun only they could see.
The one nearest to her, the shadow behind the first stone, the stone she needed to pass through to leave, opened its mouth.
Not a mouth. A gap. An absence shaped like speech, a rectangular void in the place a face should have been, and from it came a sound that was not a voice but the memory of one, played backward through waterlogged wood .
It said her name.
Not Rory. Not Aurora.
"Laila."
The name Eva had given her, the false name, the one printed on the fake ID she'd used to rent the flat above Silas's bar. The name no one in the Grove should know. The name she had whispered to exactly one person, in exactly one place, three weeks ago.
The shadows stopped uncurling. All twelve, frozen mid-motion, heads tilted at identical angles, mouths open, waiting.
The Heartstone went cold.