AI Rory’s boots crunched through frost-heavy dead leaves as she closed the distance between herself and the three oak standing stones. She’d snuck past Richmond Park’s last ranger patrol an hour earlier, her delivery backpack slung over one shoulder, the weight of the Heartstone Pendant a warm thrum against her chest through her hoodie. Two nights prior, she’d spotted Evan loitering across the street from her flat above Silas’ bar, his familiar denim jacket slung over his shoulders, the thin scar slicing his left jaw visible even in the dim streetlight. She’d grabbed the pendant—left on the Golden Empress’s back counter three days prior with a scrawled note promising safety if she fled to the oak stones in Richmond—and ran before he could track her up the stairs.
She squeezed between the middle two oaks, ivy scratching her cheeks, and stepped into the Grove. The cold dropped away instantly. Outside, the November air had nipped at her cheeks and turned her fingers numb through her gloves. Inside, the air hung soft and warm, like a May afternoon in the Cardiff hills she’d grown up exploring. She yanked off her gloves and pushed her shoulder-length black hair out of her face, her bright blue eyes adjusting to the clearing spread before her. Wildflowers carpeted the ground: bluebells, daisies, poppies, clover, all blooming bright and healthy, a contradiction to the frost and bare trees she’d left outside. The note had mentioned the Grove’s year-round blooms, so she’d written the oddity off as part of the magic the anonymous benefactor had hinted at.
The first prickle of wrongness pricked her neck when she realized no wind stirred. For the entire trek across the park, gales had whipped her hair into her eyes and sent dead leaves skittering across the path. Inside the Grove, not a single strand of hair moved. The wildflowers didn’t sway. The leaves on the oak trees lining the clearing’s edge hung perfectly still, black and bare, as if frozen mid-fall.
She pulled her phone from her pocket. The screen flared to life: 11:17 PM, 42% battery, no signal. That matched the reading she’d gotten ten seconds earlier, right before she stepped between the stones. She counted to sixty under her breath, slow and deliberate, then pressed the power button again. 11:17 PM. 42% battery. The note had warned time moved different in the Grove—an hour inside could be minutes or days outside. It hadn’t said it could stop.
The Heartstone warmed, pushing past the comfortable thrum it had held on the walk over, until it burned like a mug of boiling tea pressed to her sternum. She shifted her weight, shining the flashlight she kept for late Golden Empress deliveries into the trees. The beam cut through the silver moonlight, which hung too bright, too steady, no clouds scudding across the sky to dim it. Outside, she’d watched clouds swallow the moon full minutes before she crossed the stones. Inside, the sky stretched clear and unchanging, the stars fixed in place like painted onto a ceiling.
Hello? She called, her voice bouncing off nothing, vanishing into the warm air before it could carry more than a few feet. I have the pendant. The note said someone would meet me.
No answer. She swept the flashlight left, and for half a second, she saw a man leaning against the boundary oak behind her. Denim jacket, scuffed work boots, the familiar scar on his jaw. Evan. Her throat locked. He’d found her, even here, even across the country, even in a place that wasn’t supposed to exist. She blinked, and the flashlight beam settled on nothing but glossy ivy wrapped around the oak’s trunk. She laughed, the sound thin and reedy, her hands shaking. She hadn’t slept more than three hours a night since she’d fled Cardiff, hadn’t stopped looking over her shoulder since Evan had slammed her into a wall for forgetting to pick up his dry cleaning. It was just stress. Just her mind playing tricks.
She rubbed the small crescent scar on her left wrist, the mark from a childhood bike crash that always itched when she was scared . It burned now, the raised skin rubbing raw under her nails as she scratched. She’d had the same reaction the first time Evan had grabbed her hard enough to bruise that same wrist, the scar flaring up like a warning she’d been too stupid to heed.
A soft crinkle split the silence , right behind her right ear. The crinkle of a salt and vinegar crisp packet, Evan’s favorite, the sound she’d heard a hundred times as he crumpled empty Walkers packets and tossed them around her Cardiff flat. The crinkle came again, closer, as if someone was leaning over her shoulder, twisting a packet between their fingers. She spun, flashlight swinging, the beam cutting over empty grass. No one stood there. The wildflowers were undisturbed, no footprints, no sign anyone had been near that spot in years.
The Heartstone burned so hot it seared through her hoodie and t-shirt, and she yelped, yanking the silver chain over her head to hold the pendant away from her body. The deep crimson gem, the size of her thumbnail, glowed so bright it painted the entire clearing red, the wildflowers bleeding scarlet under the light. It pulsed , fast and ragged, like a heart having a heart attack. The benefactor’s note had mentioned it only pulsed that hard near a Hel portal, a line she’d brushed off as nonsense when she’d first read it. She didn’t brush it off now.
A voice drifted from the trees, soft and warm, her mother’s. Jennifer, the Welsh teacher who’d read her Tolkien every Christmas, who’d baked her Welsh cakes every birthday. Rory? Come here, love. I brought your favorite. They’re still warm.
Rory shone the flashlight toward the sound. For a split second, she saw her mum’s blue cardigan, the one she’d worn every winter of Rory’s childhood, peeking around an oak trunk. She blinked, and it was just a patch of bluebells, glowing under the beam.
What are you doing out in the dark, Rory? Her dad’s voice boomed next, the sharp barrister’s timbre she’d grown up obeying. Come home. Eva’s here, she brought those terrible vegan brownies you like.
Eva’s voice cut in next, high and scared, the same tone she’d used when they’d snuck out to a Cardiff club at 17 and gotten lost on the walk home. Rory, he’s coming. Evan’s coming for you. Stay here with us. Don’t leave.
The voices piled up, every person she’d ever loved, every person who’d ever cared about her, all talking at once, their words mixing into a low hum that rose from the ground, loud enough to rattle her teeth. She backed up, her boots slipping on the soft grass, and tripped over a hard edge half-buried in the wildflowers. She fell, her left wrist slamming into the stone, the crescent scar splitting open, blood dripping onto the rock’s surface. She swiped the blood away, and saw the name carved deep into the stone, the letters filled with centuries of dirt: Evan Moore.
She scrabbled backward, her hands sinking into the flowers, and stared at the stone next to it. Jennifer Carter. The next. Brendan Carter. Eva Marlow. Silas Voss, the owner of the bar below her flat. Yu-Fei Cheung, her boss at the Golden Empress. Hundreds of stones stretched as far as her flashlight could reach, every name carved into the rock belonging to someone she knew, someone who could get hurt because she’d run.
Shadows rolled out from under the bare oak trees, thick as tar, swallowing the wildflowers as they came. No rustle, no sound, just the hum of the voices growing louder as the black mass crept closer. The only thing holding it back was the glow of the Heartstone, still clutched in her hand. She pushed herself to her feet and ran, her boots slamming into the ungiving grass, her eyes fixed on the gap between the two boundary oaks she’d entered through.
Halfway there, she skidded to a stop. Evan stood in the gap, his denim jacket smudged with dirt, the scar on his jaw glowing red. He held out a hand, and the shadow wrapped around her ankles, cold as ice, yanking her off her feet. She screamed, the Heartstone slipping from her grasp as the shadow pulled her under, the last thing she saw her phone, discarded in the grass, the screen finally flaring to life. The time jumped from 11:17 PM to 3:47 AM, four hours lost in what felt like twenty minutes, the Heartstone’s glow cutting out behind her as the dark swallowed her whole.