AI The air in Richmond Park after midnight held a damp, earthy chill that seeped through Rory’s leather jacket. She stood at the edge of the tree line, the city’s distant orange glow a faint smear against the clouds. Before her, the path vanished into a wall of shadow. This was the place. Isolde’s grove. The Fae-touched clearing that shouldn’t exist, according to any rational map.
She’d come because of the dreams. For three nights, the same fragment: a woman’s voice, frayed at the edges like old silk , whispering coordinates that resolved to this grid reference in the park. And the pendant, the Heartstone, had grown warm against her skin each time she woke, its deep crimson gem holding a faint, sleepy glow in the dark of her flat above Silas’ bar. A part of her, the Cardiff pre-law student she’d tried to bury, argued fiercely against this midnight trek. But the other part, the one that had fled Evan and now delivered dumplings for Yu-Fei Cheung, knew that ignoring the whisper felt more dangerous than investigating it.
She pushed through the low-hanging branches. The transition was instantaneous. One moment she was in the ordinary, if dark, English woodland; the next, the air was several degrees warmer, thick with the perfume of blooming jasmine and night-scented stock. Wildflowers, impossibly vibrant, glowed in subtle bioluminescent hues of blue and white at her feet, illuminating a path she hadn’t seen from outside. The Fae Grove.
It was beautiful. That was the first wrong thing.
Rory’s hand went to the pendant, resting under her shirt. It was warm, not with the urgent pulse that signaled a Hel portal, but with a steady, low-grade heat, like a creature breathing in sleep. She scanned the clearing. In the centre, a ring of ancient oak standing stones, their surfaces smooth as if water-worn over millennia, caught the faint starlight filtering through the impossible canopy. According to the codex Eva had helped her compile, time moved differently here. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside. She checked her watch; the digital face was a scrambled mess of symbols.
“Okay, Carter,” she murmured to herself, the sound swallowed by the dense, perfumed air. “You’re here. Now what?”
The silence was the second wrong thing. Not true silence, but a blanket over sound . The distant hum of London was gone . The rustle of night animals was absent. There was only the soft, almost imperceptible sigh of the warm breeze through the flowers. It was a listening silence .
She took a step toward the standing stones. Her boot, usually crunching on twigs, sank soundlessly into moss. As she moved, a flicker of motion caught the corner of her left eye. She snapped her head around, her straight black hair whipping across her cheek. Nothing. Just the gently swaying flowers. But the movement had been higher up, at the level of the stones. Something darker shifting against the dark.
Cool-headed, she told herself. Out-of-the-box. Don’t panic. Observe.
She continued, reaching the outer ring of stones. Up close, they were taller than she’d estimated, maybe nine feet. She placed a palm on one. It wasn’t cold like stone; it held a residual warmth , like skin long after the life has left it. She pulled her hand back, wiping it on her jeans.
A sound then. Not from the clearing, but from the woods beyond its boundary . A dry, rhythmic scrape. *Scritch-scritch-scritch *. Like a large branch being dragged over bark. It was slow, methodical . Rory froze, her bright blue eyes straining against the gloom outside the flower-lit clearing. The trees there were just shapes, black on black.
The scraping stopped.
She held her breath, counting heartbeats. Ten. Twenty. The pendant’s warmth intensified, not a pulse, but a climb . A warning.
When the sound came again, it was from the opposite side of the grove. *Scritch-scritch-scritch *. Closer this time. The same pace, unhurried. It was circling her.
Adrenaline, cold and sharp, shot through her veins. Think. The exit was behind her, but the path through the flowers seemed to have shifted, the glowing blooms now curving away to her right. The geometry of the clearing felt fluid, unstable.
*Scritch-scritch-scritch .* From her left now, just beyond the stone circle.
“Who’s there?” Her voice was steadier than she felt, echoing with a hollow quality in the thick air. No answer. The scraping ceased again.
This was a game. A predator testing the edges of its prey’s awareness. She remembered Evan’s tactics, the way he’d hover just outside a room, letting her feel his presence before he entered. This was older, wilder, but the principle was the same. It wanted her to know she was not alone.
She turned slowly , a full three-sixty, forcing herself to look at the deep shadows between the stones. For a fraction of a second, she saw it. Or didn’t see it. A space where the starlight didn’t fall, a humanoid shape of absolute blackness, standing motionless between two oaks. It was tall, too tall, and its head was cocked at an angle that suggested a curiosity that was not human.
Then she blinked, and it was gone . A trick of the light. A fear-born phantom. But the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, the relic of a childhood fall from an apple tree, began to itch fiercely.
The flowers at her feet began to wilt. It happened in a wave, starting from the point where she’d seen the shape and rolling outward. The bioluminescent glow died, plunging patches of the clearing into profound darkness. The perfume soured, turning to the scent of damp rot and turned earth.
*Time moves differently.*
Panic, raw and electric , threatened to short-circuit her thoughts. She fought it down. The pendant was hot now, a steady burn against her sternum. It wasn’t near a Hel portal; this was something else. Something native to this between-place.
A new sound: a whisper . It didn’t come from a direction but from everywhere, layered, as if many voices spoke at once from a great distance. She couldn’t make out words, only a sibilant, rushing cadence that curled around the standing stones and into her ears. It spoke of forgotten things, of roots that drink deep in dark places, of invitations that are not invitations but compulsions dressed in pretty light .
The last of the flowers near her died. She was standing in a shrinking island of faint light, the standing stones now looming monoliths around her. The warm air grew cold. Her breath plumed before her.
*Scritch-scritch-scritch .*
Right behind her.
She didn’t turn. Every instinct screamed to run, but which way? The path was gone . The trees outside the grove were a solid wall of night. Running might mean plunging into the thing’s arms.
The whisper grew louder, resolving for a moment into a single, clear sentence in her mind, spoken in that same frayed-silk voice from her dreams: *“Stay a while, Laila .”*
Laila . An alias she’d used only once, in a desperate week before she fled Cardiff. How could it know ?
The thing was close. She could feel a pressure against the space between her shoulder blades, a cold spot in the air. She could smell it now—ozone and decay, like a storm over a forgotten grave .
Slowly, mechanically, her hand closed around the Heartstone pendant through her shirt. Its heat was almost painful. She focused on that pain, using it as an anchor. She was Rory Carter. She had survived a courtroom of her father’s expectations and a different kind of terror in a Cardiff flat. She would not freeze here.
With a final, deliberate effort, she willed her body to turn, to face the wrongness.
What she saw was not a monster in the classical sense. There were no fangs, no claws visible. It was a silhouette, a cut-out of starless sky in the shape of a man, but elongated, its limbs too many-jointed. Where a face should be, there was only a deeper darkness, though she had the unbearable impression of being studied by something ancient and utterly indifferent. It didn’t move. It simply was, occupying the space where the path had been, its presence bending the light and the very reality of the grove around it.
The whispering stopped. The scraping stopped. The only sound was the frantic hammer of her own heart.
It took a step forward. No, it didn’t step. The space between them simply diminished. It was now ten feet away. The cold radiating from it washed over her, making her bones ache.
The pendant flared. A single, blinding pulse of crimson light erupted from beneath her shirt, casting stark , jumping shadows from the standing stones. The thing recoiled, not with a sound, but with a sudden vacuum of presence, as if the air itself rushed in to fill a void.
In that instant of shocked reprieve, Rory saw it—a sliver of ordinary night between two stones to her left, where the twisted trees of Richmond Park stood in their proper, mundane darkness.
She didn’t think. She ran. She crashed through the wilted, brittle flowers, her boots finding purchase on suddenly solid ground. She didn’t look back. The cold pursued her, a wave at her heels, and the whispering returned, not as invitation but as a chorus of dry, rustling fury .
She burst through the tree line, stumbling onto the gravel path of the real park. The city’ sounds rushed back—a distant siren, the wind in normal trees. She fell to her knees, gasping, her hands scraping on the gravel.
When she dared to look back, there was only the dark, familiar woodland. No glowing flowers. No standing stones. Just shadows.
She stood on trembling legs, fumbling the Heartstone pendant out. It was cool again, inert, its inner glow extinguished. But as she clutched it, she felt a faint, final tremor pass through the silver chain, like an echo of a distant slamming door.
She was out. But as she began the long, shivering walk back towards the lights, the memory of that whispered name—*Laila *—hung in the air around her, a hook in the fabric of her world. It knew her. It had called her by a buried name. And things that know your true names, Rory understood with a dread that settled deep into her marrow, have a claim on you.