AI The gravel of the path crunched under Rory’s boots, a sound too loud for the hour. She’d checked her watch twice since leaving the car. 11:47 PM. The phone in her pocket had confirmed it. Yet the sky above Richmond Park was not the deep, star-dusted black it should have been. It was a bruised, twilight purple, the colour of a day that refused to end. The air hung thick and still, carrying no scent of damp earth or distant traffic, but of something else—old paper, crushed petals, and the metallic tang of a lightning strike.
She stopped, listening. No crickets. No rustle of foxes or scurrying rodents. Just the thrumming in her own ears and the slow, wet beat of her own heart. The Heartstone pendant resting against her sternum was a familiar , dull warmth , a second pulse beneath her shirt. It was the only comfort she had.
She was here for a reason. The anonymous note, slipped into the pocket of her delivery jacket at the Golden Empress, had been specific. *Richmond Park. The old circle of oaks. Midnight. Come alone. Know who you are.* It wasn’t the strangest thing that had happened to her since Eva dragged her to London, but it was the most pointed. The handwriting was elegant, feminine, with flourishes that seemed to squirm on the page.
The path veered left, toward the older, wilder section of the park. The trees here grew closer together, their canopies weaving into a solid roof that swallowed the strange twilight. The light didn’t fade; it was absorbed. Her footsteps became muffled, the ground beneath her boots shifting from gravel to a soft, yielding mat of fallen leaves and moss. They were undisturbed, as if no one had walked this way in years.
Ahead, a shape resolved itself from the gloom . A ring of trees, their trunks twisted and scarred, standing like sentinels . The Fae Grove. Or, as the whispered lore from Silas’s more eccentric patrons claimed, Isolde’s grove. Rory’s breath hitched. She’d heard the stories—every bartender in the city collected them. A place where the rules bent. Where time was a suggestion.
She pushed through a final curtain of ivy and stepped into the clearing.
It was not a natural space. The air was colder here, carrying a sharp, clean scent of ozone. The ground was carpeted in wildflowers that glowed with a faint, phosphorescent light—blues, whites, and a startling crimson that pulsed in rhythm with the pendant on her chest. Ancient oaks formed the boundary, their bark carved with symbols that didn’t belong to any language she’d studied in her reluctant Pre-Law courses. In the center stood two taller stones, rough-hewn and covered in lichen, leaning against each other like exhausted companions.
Wrongness.
It didn’t hit her all at once. It seeped in through the soles of her feet, a vibration in the stone beneath the soil. It was in the silence , which was not an absence of sound but a presence, a pressure against her eardrums . The pendant’s warmth was no longer a comfort; it was a frantic, fluttering heat, like a trapped bird against her ribs.
She stayed by the edge, her back to a thick trunk, and scanned the clearing. Nothing moved. But her eyes kept darting to the periphery, to the spaces between the trees where the shadows were too deep, too solid. A branch above her creaked, a long, slow sound, as if under great weight . She watched the spot. Nothing stirred. When she looked away, she caught it—a flicker in the corner of her vision, a shape detaching itself from the darkness near the central stones and then melting back. A trick of the light on the glowing flowers.
Her phone told her 11:52 PM. The sky outside the canopy was a deeper, richer purple, and the light hadn’t changed a degree. She was moving through time, but not forward.
A sound. A soft, wet slap, like a hand against damp leather. It came from her right. She spun, her hand dropping to the knife she kept strapped to her belt—a habit from Evan’s time. The trees were still. The leaves were still. But the moss at the base of the nearest oak was dark, as if freshly soaked.
*You came.* The voice didn’t travel through the air. It formed inside her skull, a whisper of dry leaves. It was feminine, laced with amusement.
Rory didn’t turn. “Who’s there?” Her own voice sounded flat, a stone dropped into a well.
Silence answered, thick and heavy. Then, a giggle. It came from behind the standing stones. She took a step forward, then another, her grip on the knife handle slick. The pendant’s heat was searing now, a brand against her skin. The glowing wildflowers at her feet seemed to lean away as she passed, as if repelled.
From behind the rightmost stone, a figure emerged. It was tall and willowy, draped in something that looked like woven shadow and mist . Its face was a blur, a smooth plane of pale skin without feature, as if the details were constantly shifting , refusing to settle. Only the eyes were clear—two points of emerald green fire, locked onto her.
“You have it,” the voice said, its lips not moving. “The little heart. It beats for you.”
Rory’s thumb found the knife’s hilt. “The note. You wrote the note.”
“I did.” The figure glided forward, its feet not touching the moss. It stopped a few feet away. “Aurora Carter. Born of Brendan and Jennifer. Fled the shadow of Evan. A clever girl. A useful girl.”
The recitation of her life, spoken in that dry-whisper tone, scraped against her nerves. “Who are you?”
“A friend. Or a beneficiary. Depends on the day.” The featureless face tilted. “You are in the right place. But you are early. And you are not alone.”
Rory’s eyes flickered to the trees, to the deep pockets of shadow. The wrongness was a physical thing now, a prickling across her scalp. “What does that mean?”
“It means the Grove is occupied tonight.” A long, pale hand, with fingers too slender and too many-jointed, rose and pointed past Rory, toward the entrance she’d used. “They followed your scent. The scent of a thing that does not belong.”
Rory turned her head slowly , not taking her eyes off the blur-faced figure. At the edge of the clearing, where the ivy curtain hung, the leaves were trembling. Not in a breeze. They pulsed , rhythmically, as if something large and slow was breathing against the other side. The branches of the sentinel oaks creaked again, this time in unison, a chorus of strained wood.
“The pendant,” the whisper -voice urged. “It calls. It warms. It tells you the truth.”
As if in response, the Heartstone flared. A jolt of heat, so intense it felt like a shock, shot through Rory’s chest. At the same moment, a shape moved in the deep shadow by the ivy. It was low to the ground, darker than the surrounding night, and it slid sideways, a movement that was all joint and limb, folding itself behind a trunk with a quiet, slithering sound.
Rory faced the featureless being again. “What’s here?”
“A curiosity. A hunger. It smells the Dymas stone on your neck. It thinks you brought it a gift.” The figure’s head tilted the other way, an owl-like motion. “It is patient. But the Grove’s time is not the world’s time. Midnight here… can be an age elsewhere. And it has been waiting.”
Her watch was useless, but she could feel the minutes stretching, becoming elastic and strange. The air was colder still, each breath a small cloud of vapor. The glowing flowers dimmed, then flared brighter, in a chaotic wave across the clearing. In one of those bright pulses, she saw it.
At the far edge of the grove, behind the leaning stones. A shape, crouched. It had too many elbows. Its skin, if it was skin, was the mottled grey-green of a forest floor. It was watching her. When the light flared, its head snapped toward her, and she saw the eyes—not points of green fire, but dozens of small, black beads, clustered where a face should be.
The light died. The shape was gone .
Rory’s hand was on her knife. Her other hand pressed the pendant against her sternum, the heat now a steady, throbbing ache. “You lured me here for it.”
“I lured you here for you,” the being corrected . “To see what you would do. To see if the clever girl from Cardiff could think outside the walls of a room, or the lines of a law book. This is a different kind of problem.” It gestured with one of its jointed hands. “The grove, the thing in the trees, the time… these are your tools. Or your traps.”
“Why?”
“Because you have something it wants. And you are now somewhere it hunts.” The being began to fade, the shadows in the grove seeping into its form, its edges blurring. “The rules are simple, Rory. Survive until the grove releases you. Or don’t. The stone will guide you. Or it will doom you. It is a Heartstone, after all.”
Its voice was a fading echo in her mind as its form dissolved completely , leaving her alone in the pulsing, dying light of the glade.
And then she heard it. Not a whisper . Not a creak. A sound from all around her, from the canopy, from the roots beneath her feet. A soft, collective sigh, as if the grove itself had taken a breath. The pressure in her ears shifted, and the silence that rushed in was different. It was hungry.
The pendant grew warm again. Not a pulse this time, but a steady, insistent pull, like a lodestone . It tugged her not toward the entrance, but toward the standing stones, toward the deeper, darker part of the park that lay beyond them.
Rory took a step, her boots sinking into the moss. The glow from the flowers around her feet dimmed in her wake, leaving a trail of darkness. From behind a tree, something scratched against bark. The hunt had begun.