AI The November wind bit through Rory’s hoodie as she scaled Richmond Park’s iron gate, the metal cold enough to burn her palms through her thin gloves. She dropped to the other side, her scuffed work boots crunching on frost-crusted dead leaves, and paused to catch her breath. Her delivery scooter, dented and sticky with leftover soy sauce from a dozen Golden Empress orders, was locked to a lamppost a quarter mile back. She’d walked the rest of the way to avoid drawing park rangers’ attention, her pocket heavy with pepper spray and the crumpled note that had dragged her here three days after it slipped under her flat’s door above Silas’ bar.
Bring the Heartstone to the oak standing stones at midnight. Leave it on the central altar. The thing Evan tied to you stays here. You never have to run again.
Rory’s hand dove under her hoodie to curl around the silver chain around her neck, the small crimson Heartstone cool against her sternum. She’d found the pendant tucked into the same envelope as the note, a thumbnail-sized gem that glowed faint even in the dark of her closet. She’d laughed at the curse bit at first, until the taps on her third-floor window started. Until she woke up one morning to find Evan’s old leather gloves, the ones she’d burned after she left him, sitting on her kitchen counter. She’d take any out that was offered .
She trekked another half mile through the bare, twisted trees, her flashlight cutting a wavering white beam through the dark, until she found them: three ancient oaks grown into standing stones, their trunks gnarled enough to create a narrow gap between them, just wide enough for a person to step through. The note had described them exactly. She hesitated for three heartbeats, then slipped between the trunks.
The cold vanished.
Rory froze, her breath catching in her throat. The air that hit her was mild, sweet with jasmine and fresh cut grass, the kind of warm spring air she hadn’t felt since she was a teen visiting her nan’s cottage in the Welsh valleys. She shone her flashlight around the clearing, and her chest tightened. The ground was carpeted in wildflowers: bluebells, poppies, daisies, all bloomed bright, a mess of color that couldn’t exist in mid-November London. She told herself it was a microclimate, a weird little sheltered hollow that held heat year round. The note had said the grove was strange. It was supposed to be strange.
She pulled out her phone. The screen lit up to 11:59 PM. One minute to midnight. Perfect. She’d made it. She tucked the phone back into her pocket and stepped further into the clearing, her boots sinking into soft loam instead of frost. The Heartstone warmed, just a little, against her chest, the faint glow seeping through her hoodie. That was what the note had said it would do, that it would wake up when it was where it belonged.
The first wrong sound came ten steps in. A kid’s snort-laugh, bright and unhinged, the exact sound she’d made when Eva pushed her into the cold Irish Sea at Barry Island when they were 15. It echoed from the far treeline.
Rory stopped, her flashlight swinging toward the noise. “Who’s there?”
No answer. The clearing stayed dead quiet, no wind, no distant fox cries, nothing but the faint hum of her own breath. She shook it off, kept walking. Then a scooter horn beeped, right behind her. The same custom two-note beep she’d programmed into her moped to signal Eva when she was home late and didn’t want to wake the rest of the flat’s residents.
She spun, the beam slamming into the gap between the oak stones. The park beyond was dark, empty, no scooter, no one leaning against the trunks. The Heartstone grew warmer, now hot enough to prickle her skin. She pulled it out from under her hoodie, the crimson gem pulsing in time with her heart, its faint inner glow brighter than she’d ever seen it. She remembered the codicil to its description, the line the unknown sender had scrawled on the back of the note: it pulses near doors that don’t belong on your side of the world.
She pulled her phone back out to check the time. The screen still read 11:59.
Rory tapped the glass. The time didn’t shift. She swiped to unlock it, her thumbprint bouncing off the sensor three times before the screen flickered . The lock screen, the photo of her and Eva at Pride from this summer, was gone . In its place was a photo she’d deleted two years prior, the day she fled Cardiff: her and Evan at their university graduation, his arm slung so tight around her shoulders she’d looked stiff in the frame, the crescent scar on her left wrist peeking out from the sleeve of her gown. She dropped the phone like it had burned her, the clatter of plastic on dirt loud enough to make her jump. It landed screen down, and she didn’t move to pick it up.
Movement flickered at the edge of her flashlight beam. A flash of white fur, her old cat Mochi, the fluffy white tabby she’d had as a teen that got hit by a car when she was 17. The cat sat on a fallen log ten feet away, staring at her. Its eyes were bright blue, the exact shade of her own, no slit pupils, no whites, just flat, unblinking blue.
“Mochi?” she whispered.
The cat opened its mouth. It wasn’t a meow that came out. It was Evan’s voice, rough from years of smoking, the same tone he’d used when he’d screamed at her for leaving the coffee pot out. “Why’d you run, Rory?”
She stumbled back, her boot catching on a root, and she fell hard on her ass, her left wrist scraping against a sharp rock. The crescent scar there stung, the old wound throbbing like it had the night she left Evan, when he’d grabbed that same wrist and squeezed so hard he tore the scar open, blood soaking through the sleeve of her sweater as she ran for the door. She scrambled back until her back hit a tree, her pepper spray in her hand, the safety clicked off before she even thought about it.
The sounds started then, piling up so fast they blurred into a low, thrumming roar that pressed against her eardrums. The order bell from Golden Empress, the high ding that went off every time a new ticket printed in the kitchen. The jingle of the bell above Silas’ bar door, the one that rang every time a customer stumbled in at 2 AM. Her dad’s voice, the rich baritone he used in court, arguing a case she’d heard him practice a hundred times. Eva’s voice, calling her name as they played hide and seek in her nan’s garden when they were seven. All of it, every sound she’d ever run past, every piece of the life she’d built to escape Evan, echoing through the clearing, overlapping until she couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began.
Her flashlight dimmed, the beam shrinking from thirty feet to three, the shadows around the clearing creeping in, black and thick, not the soft dark of night but something solid, alive . Wildflowers grew up around her ankles, their stems lined with tiny thorns that pricked through her jeans, sticky sap gluing the fabric to her skin. She swatted at them, the stems snapping only to regrow in front of her eyes, climbing higher, up her calves, her thighs. The Heartstone burned against her chest, the silver chain hot enough to leave a mark on her skin, and she could smell Evan’s cigarette smoke, the mint gum he chewed to cover it, right behind her, the smell of his breath on her neck the way it used to be when he’d corner her in their flat.
She remembered the altar, the flat grey stone the note had said sat in the center of the clearing. Leave the Heartstone there, and it’s over. She pushed herself up, the thorns tearing at her jeans and her arms as she ran, her boots slipping on the soft loam, the roar of voices swelling behind her. She could feel something breathing down her neck, cold and damp, and she didn’t look back, didn’t dare, her flashlight bouncing as she ran, the beam cutting just far enough ahead to show her the grey stone sticking up out of the flowers, ten feet away, five, three.
She threw herself at the altar, her palms slamming against the flat stone, and she reached up to yank the Heartstone’s chain over her head, to leave it there like the note said. Her flashlight slipped from her grip, clattering to the ground at the base of the altar, and the beam swung up to illuminate the stone’s surface. Carved into the grey rock, in her own messy handwriting, the same scrawl she used to write order notes on Golden Empress takeout bags, was a line she’d written in her journal the night she left Evan: You can’t outrun the things that refuse to be left behind.
A voice whispered right in her ear, the same voice that had written the note, soft and sweet and old as the oaks at the gate. “You did good bringing it home, little runner. I do love a girl who runs fast enough to deliver my packages.”
The Heartstone pulsed , once, bright enough to light the entire clearing, and Rory saw them then, the things that had been moving at the edge of her vision, hundreds of them, all people who had run to the grove before her, their faces stretched and wrong, all staring at her, all waiting for the next thing that would chase her, the new curse that would keep her running forever. The time on her phone, still screen down in the dirt, flipped to 12:00 AM. It had only been two minutes outside. It had been a lifetime inside.