AI Aurora caught her sleeve on the oak and swore under her breath as the standing stones loomed out of the dark like rotten teeth.
The branch sprang back and brushed her cheek with damp leaves. She steadied herself, phone torch clenched in one hand, the other pressed to the warm little weight at her throat. The Heartstone pendant pulsed against her skin, slow and faint, as if it had found a second heartbeat in the grove ahead.
“Brilliant,” she murmured. “That’s never meant anything good.”
The old oak ring marked the boundary exactly where Eva’s half-drunk source had said it would, past the usual paths in Richmond Park, beyond the dog walkers and cyclists and the broad lawns where London pretended to be civilised. Out here, the park lost its manners. The grass rose in ragged swathes around the stones. Brambles clawed at her boots. The trunks seemed to lean in, bark silvered by the weak beam from her phone.
She should have brought someone.
That thought had followed her all the way from the gate, and she had ignored it all the way from the gate.
Aurora crouched by the nearest stone. Lichen frothed over its surface in pale patches. Under the moss, shallow marks cut the face of the rock, loops and slashes that looked less carved than worried into it by nails. Her torch shook once when she angled the light. There were fresh scratches over the old ones.
Not animal. Not weather.
Fresh.
She touched one line with the tip of her finger. The groove felt slick, as if the stone had been sweating.
The pendant warmed sharply .
She snatched her hand back.
“Fine,” she said to the empty clearing. “I see you. Boundary, portal, cursed nonsense, whatever tonight’s flavour is.”
No answer, unless the soft rustle beyond the stones counted. It came from the left, then stopped when she turned. The beam combed over bracken, roots, low white flowers growing where no flowers should have bothered this late in the year. She heard her own breathing, too loud. Then, beneath it, another sound.
A child’s laugh.
It rose thin and quick somewhere deeper in the grove, no more than a few notes, then cut off so cleanly the silence that followed felt placed there by hand.
Aurora stood still.
A fox, she told herself at once, because London foxes screamed, barked, laughed, cried like babies and generally behaved as if they had been designed to ruin sleep and sanity.
A fox did not fit what she had heard. She knew that, and the part of her mind that still functioned like a barrister’s daughter started listing objections. The sound had been too neat. Too close to human. Worse, it had carried from inside the clearing, not beyond it, and the clearing should have been empty.
She stepped between two stones.
The world gave way with no drama at all. No thunderclap. No gust. Just a soft slide, like walking through a curtain of cold silk .
Her ears popped.
The torch dimmed, then steadied. The air changed first. It smelled sweet, thick with crushed petals and water standing too long in a bowl. The grass underfoot softened into something almost springy. In front of her spread the Grove itself, the hidden clearing she had heard of in scraps and jokes and warnings no one would put plainly. Wildflowers quilted the ground in impossible colour, blue and gold and white under the weak light. Trees ringed the place, taller within than they had looked outside, their branches woven so tightly they turned the sky into narrow black seams.
The city had vanished. No distant road. No aircraft. No siren. London might have been a lie she had once believed.
Aurora let out a slow breath.
“Right,” she said. “Now we’re doing this.”
She had come because the pendant had started reacting three nights ago whenever she passed mirrors after dark, faint warmth at first, then a steady pulse when she crossed Hammersmith Bridge, then a flare hot enough to sting when she unpacked a takeaway order behind Golden Empress and found, tucked beneath cartons of char siu, a folded scrap of paper with no writing on it except a single line.
Find where time bruises.
No signature. No explanation. The paper had smelled of old roses.
She had burned it in the sink. The ash had stayed pink until morning.
A sensible person would have handed the pendant to someone older, stranger, and better armed. A sensible person had not escaped Evan by waiting for rescue. Aurora had learned long ago that if something wanted into your life, you got more from meeting it head-on than from pretending not to hear it scratching.
So here she was, alone in a place where time slipped, with a relic from somewhere called Dymas hanging at her throat and no weapon apart from a torch, a keyring, and an ugly talent for solving problems after they had already gone bad.
The centre of the clearing held a low pool, black as spilled ink. She had not seen it from outside. Flat stones formed a broken ring around it. Several had toppled inward. One stood upright and narrow, like a marker over a grave .
The pendant grew warmer as she approached.
Every flower near the water faced the pool. Their stems bent that way. Their heads tilted down, petals open in a posture that looked too much like listening.
Aurora stopped on the ring of stones.
“Hello?”
Her own voice came back a beat late.
Hello.
Not quite an echo . Softer. Closer to the ground.
The hair rose on the back of her neck.
She turned in a slow circle. Nothing moved. The clearing looked patient. That was the worst part of it, the lack of effort. If something hunted her here, it did not need to rush.
A shape slipped between two trees.
She swung the torch. Empty trunks. Silver bark. Flowers. No shape.
Then she saw movement again on the far side of the pool, a dark line gliding low through the blossoms. She caught only the end of it before it passed behind the standing stone. Long. Narrow. Not a fox. Too smooth for a person.
“Not funny,” she said, because silence invited panic to set the terms.
The thing did not answer. It scratched once against stone.
Aurora licked dry lips and moved round the pool. Each step sank a little, though the ground looked firm. Water glimmered at the edges of the turf. The sweet smell thickened until it turned rotten underneath, a faint sour note like fruit left in heat.
The standing stone bore more of the same scratched marks as the boundary rocks. Only these were deeper, layered over one another so often they made a dark, furred patch in the stone. At its base lay a silver chain.
She froze.
Not a chain. The silver chain.
Her hand flew to her throat.
The pendant still hung there.
Yet another one lay at the foot of the stone, half buried among flowers, looped exactly as hers always looped, with a deep crimson gem the size of a thumbnail resting against the moss. Her skin tightened over every bone in her body.
“No.”
She did not bend for it. She took one step back instead.
Something moved in the pool.
The surface had looked still. Now a circle spread from the centre, then another, as if drops had started falling from above, though nothing fell through the black seams of sky. Aurora pointed the torch at the water. The beam sank only a little way before darkness swallowed it.
A face floated up beneath the surface.
Her own.
Eyes open. Black hair drifting. Mouth slack. Skin pale and greenish in the drowned light below. It pressed from under the water as if from under glass.
Aurora stumbled away hard enough to jar her ankle. The beam skittered sideways. When she snapped it back, the face had gone.
The laugh came again.
Not from the trees now. From just behind her right shoulder.
She spun and the torchlight caught a girl standing at the edge of the flowers.
About eight years old. Bare feet. A dark dress gone old at the hem. Black hair to the shoulders. Bright blue eyes wide and steady in a narrow face Aurora knew at once, because she saw pieces of it each morning over the sink.
The child smiled.
Aurora’s left wrist throbbed . The crescent scar there burned as if pressed to a hot coin.
“No,” she said again, sharper this time. “You don’t get to do that.”
The girl tilted her head.
“You came late.”
Her own voice, younger, thinner, but hers.
Aurora held the torch like a weapon.
“What are you?”
The girl glanced at the pendant. Her smile widened by a fraction.
“That’s the wrong question.”
She took one step forward. Flowers folded under her feet without springing back.
Aurora stepped back to match it.
“I’m not playing.”
“You already are.”
The child lifted one hand and pointed past Aurora.
Aurora looked despite herself. The duplicate pendant at the stone was gone .
Something cool brushed the back of her neck.
She jerked round, hand slamming over her throat. The chain there had tightened. The crimson stone burned against her chest now, no gentle pulse left in it. Real heat, enough to bite through fabric. She sucked in a breath.
The clearing had changed while she looked away. More figures stood between the trees. Not solid at first, just pale interruptions in the dark, but once seen they sharpened . A woman with no face, only smooth skin from brow to chin. A bent man in a long coat made of leaves. A deer too thin to live, with blossoms stuffed into its eye sockets. They stood at even distances around the ring, silent and attentive.
The girl had moved closer.
“Who sent you here?” Aurora asked.
The child ignored that.
“You shouldn’t have worn it in.”
The pendant’s chain drew tighter again. Aurora hooked two fingers under it and hissed. Silver bit her skin. The gemstone glowed through her shirt, a deep red stain over her sternum.
“Take it off,” the girl said.
“I gathered that.”
Aurora tugged at the clasp behind her neck. It would not give. Her fingers had gone clumsy. The metal felt fused. She dragged the chain forward instead, and pain lanced across her skin as if the pendant had grown hooks.
The faceless woman took one soundless step nearer.
Aurora backed into the standing stone. Cold slickness soaked through her coat. The scratches at her spine seemed to tremble.
“Take it off,” the girl said once more, and now there was strain in that borrowed young voice, urgency cracking through imitation. “Before it opens.”
The pool answered with a loud, wet knock from below.
Aurora snapped her head towards it.
Another knock. Then another, faster. Not from water shifting. Not from branches falling. It came from under the surface, from depth, from something striking upward with patience and growing force.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The black water bulged.
Every figure around the clearing bent its head towards the pool.
Aurora seized the pendant in her fist despite the heat, wrapped the chain round her hand, planted one boot against the stone and pulled with all her weight .
The clasp tore free.
Not from the chain. From her skin.
A bright line of pain ripped across the back of her neck. She fell sideways into the flowers with the pendant clenched tight, silver links slick and warm, something darker than blood running down under her collar.
The pool convulsed.
Water surged up in one hard column and hung there, shaped around a long head with no eyes and a mouth packed with small white human teeth. The thing inside the water turned towards her without a face to turn, and the child by the flowers opened her mouth far too wide and screamed in Aurora’s own voice.