AI The moon hung low and bloated over Richmond Park, its silver light bleeding through the skeletal branches of ancient oaks. Aurora Carter pulled the collar of her worn leather jacket tighter around her neck, the silver chain of the Heartstone pendant cold against her sternum. The pendant had been pulsing for three nights now, a faint, insistent warmth that grew stronger the closer she came to this place.
She shouldn't have come alone.
The grove had called to her in dreams first, then in waking moments: a whisper in the back of her mind that sounded like her own voice but wasn't . *Come. Remember.* She'd left her flat above Silas' bar at midnight, telling herself it was only research, only following the clues the pendant kept offering. The Heartstone had led her here before, to the edge of what looked like an ordinary copse of trees in the northwest corner of the park. But ordinary places didn't make the air taste like iron and lilacs at the same time.
Her boots crunched softly over frost-killed grass as she slipped between two massive oaks whose trunks bore spiral carvings too precise to be natural. The standing stones. The air changed the moment she passed them, growing thick, almost syrupy. The distant hum of London traffic faded as though someone had drawn a heavy curtain between her and the world. In its place came the soft chime of wildflowers that had no business blooming in December.
Aurora switched on her torch, the beam cutting a pale tunnel through the dark. The Fae Grove opened before her like a wound in the fabric of the park. Wildflowers—bluebells, foxgloves, moon-white lilies—carpeted the ground in impossible profusion. Their petals shivered though there was no wind. In the center of the clearing stood a single oak, wider than three men could embrace, its bark smooth as skin and faintly luminous.
The pendant flared hot against her skin.
She took another step, and the wrongness settled over her like a second coat.
It began with the flowers. They turned their faces toward her in unison, thousands of tiny heads tilting with a collective rustle that sounded almost like breathing. Aurora froze, torch beam trembling slightly in her grip. She told herself it was the breeze. There was no breeze.
A soft footfall sounded behind her.
She whirled, light slashing across the tree line. Nothing. Only the ancient stones watching with their spiral eyes. The scar on her left wrist began to itch, the old crescent mark burning as though freshly cut. She rubbed it absently, the way she had since childhood, the way she had after Evan had—
No. She wouldn't think of him here.
The grove seemed to inhale. The flowers bent away from her now, creating a path toward the great oak. Aurora's heart thumped heavily against her ribs. She had come for answers. The pendant had shown her fragments in her dreams: a woman with her face but older eyes, standing beneath this very tree, speaking words in a language that made her teeth ache. *Laila,* the woman had called herself. *Remember who you were before they made you forget.*
"Show me," Aurora whispered, hating how small her voice sounded. "I'm here."
The temperature plummeted. Her breath misted in front of her face despite the unseasonable warmth that had clung to London all week. The wildflowers began to close their petals one by one, as though something had startled them. In the sudden hush, she heard it: a low, wet sound like someone trying to speak with a throat full of soil.
It came from everywhere and nowhere.
Aurora swept the torch in a slow circle. The beam caught something at the edge of the grove, something pale that darted behind an oak with inhuman speed. Her pulse spiked. She took one careful step backward, then another. The ground felt softer than it should, as though the earth itself was... listening.
The pendant burned now, a steady heat that bordered on pain. She pulled it from beneath her shirt, staring at the deep crimson stone. Its inner glow had intensified to a bloody throb , casting sickly light across her fingers. The silver chain felt alive, slithering against her neck like a living thing.
Another sound. Closer this time. A child's laughter, but stretched and wrong, like a record played at the wrong speed.
Aurora's mouth went dry. "Who's there?"
The flowers nearest her feet began to blacken at the edges, their petals curling as though touched by invisible flame. The corruption spread outward in a slow wave, turning the impossible garden into something necrotic and wet. The scent of lilacs grew cloying, sickly sweet, the way flowers smell when they've been left too long in a funeral parlor.
She should leave. Every instinct screamed at her to run back through the standing stones, to find the reassuring glow of streetlamps and the distant rumble of night buses. But her feet wouldn't move. The pendant anchored her here, its heat now bordering on agony, as though it had fused itself to her skin.
Something moved in the branches above her.
She jerked the torch upward. For a fraction of a second, she saw it: a face peering down through the leaves. Her own face, but wrong. The eyes were too wide, the smile too wide, the crescent scar on the left wrist glistening as though freshly opened and weeping. The thing that wore her features opened its mouth, and the sound that emerged was the wet, soil-choked voice she'd heard earlier.
*Rory.*
The name slithered through the air like a living thing, wrapping around her skull. Aurora stumbled back, nearly dropping the torch. The face vanished, but she could hear it now, moving through the canopy above her, the soft scrape of limbs that weren't quite human .
She spun toward the path she'd entered by, but the standing stones had changed. Their spiral carvings now flowed like water, twisting into new patterns that hurt to look at directly. The gap between them had narrowed, the space barely wide enough for a child to squeeze through.
The grove was closing.
Panic clawed up her throat, but she swallowed it. Cool-headed, her mother had always called her. Quick-thinking Rory Carter. She forced herself to breathe, to assess. The pendant was screaming now, heat radiating down her chest in waves. She clutched it in her fist, feeling the stone's jagged edges bite into her palm.
"I'm not afraid of you," she called out, though her voice cracked on the last word .
Laughter answered her, coming from multiple directions at once. Some of it sounded like Eva's laughter, bright and mocking. Some of it sounded like her father's baritone, the one he'd used when he was disappointed in her for abandoning Pre-Law. Beneath it all ran that child's laughter, high and broken.
The flowers were almost entirely black now, their stems bending toward her like accusing fingers. Something dripped from the great oak's trunk, thick and dark, pattering onto the dead grass with the sound of heavy rain. Aurora didn't want to know what it was.
A shape detached itself from the shadows near the oak.
It was tall, too tall, its limbs jointed in places that made her stomach turn. It wore her face the way a child might wear a mask, the features sliding and reforming with each step. The thing that was almost-Aurora tilted its head, the movement too fluid, too wrong. Its eyes—her eyes—reflected the torchlight with an animal shine.
*You left us,* it whispered, though its mouth didn't move. The voice came from the ground itself, from the blackened flowers, from the spaces between her heartbeats. *You changed your name and ran away. But names are just skin, Rory. They peel so easily.*
The scar on her wrist split open.
Aurora gasped as blood welled up from the old wound, running down her hand in hot rivulets. The pain was exquisite, fresh as the day she'd gotten it falling from the apple tree in her grandparents' garden. Except she remembered now, with sudden terrible clarity, that there had been no apple tree. No childhood accident. The scar had come with her from somewhere else, from somewhen else.
The almost-Aurora smiled with too many teeth.
*Remember.*
The pendant exploded with light, the crimson glow bursting outward in a sphere that illuminated every nightmare corner of the grove. For one crystalline moment, Aurora saw them all: dozens of figures wearing her face at different ages, different moments of her life. The child version with bleeding wrists. The teenager with Evan's fingerprints bruised into her throat. The woman who'd fled Cardiff in the middle of the night, changing her name to Laila for three months before becoming Rory again.
They all watched her with identical bright blue eyes.
The light from the pendant began to fail, the sphere collapsing inward like a dying star. The figures surged forward, their movements jerky and wrong, as though their bones weren't quite connected properly . Aurora turned and ran.
The ground had grown treacherous , roots rising like veins beneath the dead grass to trip her. She stumbled, catching herself against one of the standing stones. The spiral carving moved beneath her palm, tracing itself across her skin like a brand. Pain flared up her arm, but she pushed off, sprinting for the narrowing gap between the oaks.
Something snatched at her hair, yanking several strands free. She didn't look back. Couldn't look back. The wet, soil-choked laughter was all around her now, inside her skull, echoing in the hollow places where her memories should be.
The gap was closing. The ancient trees were bending toward each other, their branches intertwining like lovers' fingers. Aurora threw herself forward, feeling the rough bark scrape her shoulders as she forced her way through. For one horrifying second she was stuck , the grove clutching at her like a jealous thing, reluctant to let its prey escape.
Then she was through, tumbling onto the ordinary frost-covered grass of Richmond Park.
The sounds cut off instantly.
London traffic hummed in the distance. A night bus rumbled along the road beyond the trees. Aurora lay on her back, chest heaving, staring up at a perfectly ordinary December sky. The pendant had gone dark and cold against her chest. The wound on her wrist had closed again, leaving only the familiar crescent scar.
She sat up slowly , every muscle trembling.
The copse of trees looked utterly mundane now. Just a cluster of old oaks in the corner of the park. No wildflowers. No spiraling stones. No faces wearing her own features like ill-fitting masks.
But as she pushed herself to her feet, brushing dead leaves from her jacket, she heard it.
Faint, almost lost beneath the sound of her own ragged breathing.
A child's laughter, coming from somewhere deep within the trees. High and broken and terribly, terribly familiar .
Aurora touched the scar on her wrist, feeling the raised tissue beneath her fingertips. It was warm. Warmer than her skin should be on a December night.
She turned away from the grove and began walking toward the distant lights of the city, her steps measured and careful. Behind her, the wildflowers began to bloom again in the hidden clearing, their petals opening like hungry mouths beneath the watching moon.
The pendant, nestled once more beneath her shirt, gave one final, faint pulse .
*Soon,* it seemed to whisper against her heart. *We'll remember together.*
Aurora Carter didn't look back. But she felt the grove watching her go, patient as only ancient things can be. The scar on her wrist itched with the promise of old wounds reopening, of names peeling away like dead skin.
She walked faster, the taste of lilacs and iron still coating her tongue, the sound of impossible laughter following her all the way home to the flat above Silas' bar.