AI The pendant seared against Rory’s chest as she squeezed between two oak-dark standing stones and stumbled into the clearing.
“Christ.”
She yanked the silver chain off her skin for a second, hissing through her teeth, then let it fall back under her collar. The deep crimson stone did not glow so much as breathe. Warm, cool, warm again. A steady pulse, like a second heart that had taken offence at being ignored all week.
Behind her, the park path had already thinned into a black slit between trunks. She turned at once and fixed the way out in her head. Two leaning stones, one split near the base, a crooked ash snagged with old ribbon, then the path. Easy. In and out. Find what had set the thing off. Leave before the place decided to be clever.
The Grove smelled wrong. Not foul, not rotten. Too sweet. Wildflowers crowded the clearing in thick drifts, white and blue and yellow under her torch, all in bloom though the rest of Richmond Park had long since gone plain and sensible. Their scent sat on the back of her tongue like perfume spilled in a lift. She had to swallow against it.
Rory slipped her mobile from her pocket. No signal. That part did not surprise her. The battery did. Ninety-two per cent at the stones, fifty-eight now.
“Brilliant.”
She opened the stopwatch and set it running. Then she crouched by the nearest standing stone and wedged a folded Golden Empress receipt under its rough base, bright red print facing out. If the Grove chewed time, she wanted proof of where she had started. If it moved paths, she wanted proof of that too.
The pendant knocked once against her sternum. Hard.
“All right. Lead on.”
Her own voice sounded thin here, trimmed down to the bare shape of words. No echo . No carry. The Grove swallowed sound and kept it.
She moved deeper into the flowers, boots brushing damp stems. The clearing looked small from the edge. It stretched once she entered it. A child’s trick of a room with mirrors, except there were no mirrors, only more flowers, more trees, more stones half-hidden in the dark as if the place had kept building itself while nobody watched.
Her torch beam skimmed over foxglove bells and star-shaped white blooms she did not know by name. Moths flickered through the light and vanished. Every few steps the Heartstone grew hotter, then eased, as though it argued with itself. The warmth drew her left, then straight on, then left again.
She stopped and listened.
Nothing at first. Then, far off, a neat metallic tap-tap-tap.
Rory held still. The sound came again, quick and even, with a pause after every sixth strike.
A knife on a chopping block.
Yu-Fei had that exact rhythm in the kitchen at Golden Empress, brisk as a metronome, her cleaver clipping through spring onions, duck skin, pork bone. Rory knew it well enough to hear the missing sizzle that should have followed. Knew it well enough to feel, for one weak second, the urge to call out and ask if she had finally lost her head.
The chopping stopped.
In the silence that followed, something breathed near her right shoulder.
Rory swung the torch.
Flowers. Stone. A silver-barked birch with its bark peeling in thin curls. Nothing else.
She backed one step and forced her grip to loosen. A panicked hand shook. A loose hand did work.
“Not funny.”
The Grove gave her no answer. A petal drifted past her torch beam and landed on her sleeve. It was warm.
She brushed it off and kept walking.
The ground changed underfoot. Soft leaf mould gave way to a firmer patch, almost smooth, as though many feet had worn it down. That made no sense. The clearing was hidden . People did not stroll in and out for a look round. She angled the torch down.
A path ran through the flowers.
Not a human path. No crushed stems. No mud. The blooms simply stopped in a thin winding line, leaving bare earth the colour of old tea. The path bent around a ring of stones and vanished behind a yew so broad it looked less like a tree than a wall.
The pendant throbbed hot enough to hurt.
Rory crouched and touched the path with two fingers. The soil felt cold, colder than the air, a cellar chill that sank straight into her knuckles. She jerked her hand back.
Then she noticed the flowers on either side.
All their heads faced the path.
Not turned toward the torch. Toward the path itself, as if something had passed and every stem had craned to watch.
A rustle stirred behind her.
She rose and turned in one clean motion. Her light caught the standing stone where she had left the receipt.
No. Not where she had left it.
The stone stood twenty feet farther back, across a swathe of flowers she knew she had crossed.
Rory stared at the red corner of the receipt poking from under the base. Same stone. Same split near the bottom. The Grove had shifted it, or shifted her, or changed the distance between one breath and the next. None of the options pleased her.
“All right,” she said softly, because calm needed noise, “you can pack that in.”
Something moved between two trees to her left.
Not a shape. Less than that. The dark there drew in on itself and slid behind a trunk before the torch reached it. Her scalp tightened. She took three steps sideways, fast, so she could catch the thing emerging on the other side.
Nothing came out.
The pendant lurched against her chest with such force that the chain bit the back of her neck. She grabbed it through her shirt. The stone pulsed hard under her palm, pulling towards the yew.
Rory exhaled once. Slow in, slow out. Then she took the narrow path.
The yew swallowed her torchlight. Its branches drooped low and thick, making a tunnel that smelled of resin and earth packed shut for years. The sweet flower scent fell away. In its place came a colder smell, clean and thin, like air from a freezer left open in an empty room.
Halfway through, she heard footsteps behind her.
One.
Two.
Three.
They matched her pace with neat, patient care.
Rory stopped.
The footsteps took one more step after hers and stopped too.
Every muscle in her back drew tight. She did not spin at once. She slipped her hand into her jacket pocket instead and closed her fingers around the small folding knife she used for parcel tape and string. It would do very little against anything worth fearing, but metal in hand counted for something.
“Do us both a favour,” she said into the dark, “and be honest about what you are.”
Silence.
Then, from behind her, in her own voice and her own flat Cardiff edge,
“Do us both a favour, and be honest about what you are.”
The words came back perfect , right down to the hard little snap on favour. Not an echo . An answer.
Rory turned.
The tunnel behind her stood empty, a black rib of branches and the faint spill of flowers beyond. No face. No body. Only the aftertaste of her own voice hanging in the needles.
She walked on. Faster now.
The tunnel opened into a second clearing. Smaller. Tighter. No riot of flowers here. Only a low ring of pale blooms around a patch of bare ground in the centre. The earth there had split from top to bottom in a line no wider than a finger. Dark sat in it, not shadow, not soil. A seam. As though the world had been sliced and the cut had forgotten to close.
The Heartstone burned.
Rory dragged it free of her shirt. The crimson gem glowed from within, dim but angry, and the silver chain quivered in her hand. Heat crawled across her palm. The seam in the ground gave off that same cellar-cold air, and when she angled the torch into it the beam did not strike earth. It slid down the crack and vanished, swallowed whole.
“No,” she whispered.
So that was why she had been dragged here. Not just Fae. Not just one of the city’s hidden rot spots with glamour painted over the edges. A Hel tear, small but real, opening inside a place that should never have allowed it.
The pale flowers around the seam trembled .
Not in wind. In rhythm.
One after another, clockwise around the ring, they dipped their heads and rose. A curtsy. A bow. A welcome.
Rory stepped back. Her heel struck root. The pendant kicked in her grip so hard she nearly dropped it.
A voice drifted up from the crack.
Child’s voice. Soft. Clear.
“Did you bring the key?”
Rory’s throat closed. The question carried no strain, no ghostly hiss, nothing theatrical. It sounded like a child behind a closed door , polite enough to be invited in.
“I brought nothing for you.”
The seam widened by a hair.
Cold burst from it and struck her face. Not winter cold. Dead cold. The sort that lived in hospital corridors after visiting hours, in walk-in freezers, in the metal rails of a mortuary drawer. Her eyes watered at once.
The child laughed.
Another sound answered from the trees beyond the clearing, a second laugh, lower, older. Then another from her right. Then another behind the yew. Not children now. Men. Women. Voices she knew and voices she did not, all keeping the same light amusement, as though they had shared a private joke at her expense.
Rory backed towards the tunnel entrance and hit bark.
The yew branches had knitted shut behind her.
She spun and shoved at them. The boughs looked thin. They did not move. Their needles pricked her palms and held firm as wire.
The voices in the trees began to speak at once, low and overlapping.
Aurora.
Rory.
Laila.
Carter.
The names came from different mouths, different ages, different moods. One fond. One sharp. One coaxing. One full of a private disgust that made the hair rise on her arms.
Then, close to her ear, warm enough to feel real breath,
“Malphora.”
Rory whipped round, knife up.
No one stood there.
The pale flowers had all turned towards her.
She slammed the knife into the branch wall and tore sideways, sawing for a gap. Green needles rained over her hands. Resin smeared the handle. The branch gave a little, then healed under the blade, wood flowing slow as wax. The voices swelled behind her. The child in the crack spoke again, no longer polite.
“You have it. I can hear it.”
The pendant jerked in Rory’s hand.
The silver chain snapped.
The Heartstone ripped free of her grip and shot across the clearing like a hooked fish. Rory lunged. Her fingers brushed hot crystal . Missed. The gem struck the ground beside the seam and skidded to the edge.
The earth split with a sound like a sigh drawn through teeth.
The crack opened wide enough for a hand.
It came up pale and small, with dirt packed under the nails and a silver chain looped round its wrist, and closed around the Heartstone.
Then a second hand seized the rim from below, and something began to climb out.