AI Rory shouldn’t have come alone.
The thought came to her the second the iron gate of Richmond Park swung shut behind her with a long, disgruntled groan, as if the place itself resented being disturbed after dark. She stood with one hand on the cold bars, listening to the sound die away behind her and trying not to look like someone who had just made a spectacularly stupid decision.
The park beyond the gate was all black trees and thin silver grass under a moon that seemed to have been washed in milk . Richmond Park by day was broad and open, full of dog walkers, cyclists, deer nosing through the bracken. At night it changed. The paths narrowed. The dark packed itself thick between the trunks. Every shape looked deliberate. Every silence felt arranged.
She tugged her coat tighter around her ribs and shifted the delivery satchel on her shoulder, though she wasn’t carrying food tonight. The bag held a flashlight with fresh batteries, a bottle of water, a phone on thirty-four percent, a compass that had stopped behaving like a compass an hour ago, and the Heartstone Pendant tucked inside a folded handkerchief in the inner pocket of her jacket.
The pendant gave a faint, steady warmth through the fabric, like a fever held in miniature against her skin.
“Helpful,” Rory muttered under her breath, and the sound seemed too loud in the open dark.
She moved down the path, her trainers whispering over damp gravel. The air smelled of wet earth and leaf rot, but beneath that was something sweeter, old and floral, as if some hidden garden had been left to bloom in secret through every season of the year. The scent should have been comforting . Instead it made the back of her throat tighten. Wildflowers, she thought. That was what the grove did. It kept wildflowers blooming where they had no business blooming.
The Fae Grove was supposed to be somewhere inside Richmond Park, hidden where the map gave up and the paths ceased to matter. Isolde’s grove, the old notes had called it, though Rory had no idea who Isolde had been or why every reference to the place sounded like a warning disguised as folklore. She only knew what she’d learned from scraps, from half-trusted whispers and a message that had arrived with no name attached: come after dark, bring the pendant, and do not arrive with anyone who loves you.
That last instruction had nearly stopped her.
It hadn’t stopped her enough.
She checked the phone again. No signal. The time glared back at her from the cracked screen: 11:17 p.m. She had left Silas’ bar three hours ago, after telling herself, and then Eva, that she was just going for a walk to clear her head. Eva had looked at her like she was lying , because Rory was apparently incapable of leaving a room without looking like she was carrying a secret. But Eva had let her go, because that was what friends did when there were no better options.
Now the park swallowed the light behind her, and the path ahead bent into stands of trees that didn’t belong this close together. Rory knew the route. She’d come once before, in daylight, with a man who’d spoken too softly and had vanished between one breath and the next when he’d stepped too near the standing stones. She hadn’t found him again. The grove had given her only the barest sense of itself then: ancient oaks like boundary markers, wildflowers underfoot, a pocket of air that had made the hairs on her arms rise as if the world had leaned in to listen.
Tonight she found the first stone almost too easily.
It stood to the side of the path like a broken tooth, pale in the moonlight, its bark rough as knuckles. Beyond it, another. And another. Ancient oaks arranged in a loose ring, their trunks thick and bowed, roots pushed up through the earth in swollen ridges. The path ended there, though the park should have stretched farther. Instead there was a clearing ahead, dimly visible through curtains of leaves.
Rory stopped.
The pendant inside her jacket pulsed once. Warmth, quick and unmistakable.
Her stomach tightened. “So we’re here,” she whispered.
The grove waited.
She stepped between the stones.
The air changed immediately. It was subtle enough to miss if she hadn’t been looking for it; the temperature didn’t drop so much as sharpen. The silence altered. The distant rush of a road, the occasional thump of some late runner, the hiss of leaves over gravel—all of it dulled as if she’d pressed her hands over her ears. In its place was a deeper quiet, one that felt crowded.
Wildflowers bloomed all around the clearing, thick and bright in impossible colors under moonlight. White petals. Blue spears. Tiny red stars. They brushed her boots as she crossed the grass. The scent rose stronger here, lush and damp and almost cloying. Rory forced herself to keep breathing through her nose.
At the center of the grove stood a ring of stones half hidden in ferns, their surfaces slick with age. There was a shape there, too. A low altar, maybe. Or a flat slab. She couldn’t see clearly from where she stood, and some instinct—sharp, animal, immediate—kept her from stepping closer too fast.
The pendant warmed again.
“Fine,” Rory said quietly. “I’m listening.”
No answer.
She hated that she’d said it anyway.
Her flashlight trembled once in her hand. She snapped it on and swept the beam over the clearing. The light caught wet stems, silver grass, the pale undersides of leaves. It also caught something pale near the stones that made her breath snag before she realized it was only a fox, crouched low in the grass.
Except foxes didn’t sit still like that.
It watched her with eyes that reflected the light too cleanly, its body small and drawn tight, head tilted with an almost human attentiveness. Then, with no visible shift of muscle, it turned and vanished between the trunks.
Rory lowered the flashlight a fraction. “Nope.”
A sound answered her from behind the stones.
Not a branch breaking. Not a footstep.
A laugh.
Very soft. Very close. The kind of laugh someone makes when they think they’re alone and have just remembered they aren’t.
Rory went still.
The grove held its breath around her.
She angled the flashlight toward the sound, but the beam found only a wall of roots and dark trunks and a spill of flowers moving in a breeze she couldn’t feel. The laugh didn’t come again. Not from any one place, anyway. It seemed to linger in the air itself, as if the clearing had learned the shape of it and was keeping it for later.
Her pulse ticked hard in her throat.
She told herself the sound had been a bird. Some animal. A trick of the acoustics. The grove bent things. Everyone said that. Time, distance, hearing. It was easier if you believed the place was only odd. It was harder if you admitted it might be alive in the wrong way.
The pendant heated against her chest.
Rory drew it out at last, lifting it by the chain so the silver caught the moonlight. The little crimson stone glowed with a faint inner fire, pulse by pulse . It looked almost wet, like a bead of blood sealed in glass. She had never liked how it felt when it warmed near a Hel portal. It made her think of a pulse under skin. Of a thing that wanted to be touched.
The glow strengthened.
Ahead of her, near the center stones, something shifted.
Rory froze with the pendant dangling from her fingers.
The movement was slight. A passing shadow. Yet she knew, with a certainty that turned her mouth dry, that it had not been wind. The shadow had moved wrong. Against the direction of the moonlight. Toward her, not away.
She lifted the flashlight again. Nothing.
Then, from somewhere beyond the ring of stones, a voice said her name.
“Rory.”
Soft. Familiar enough to hurt.
Her chest tightened before her mind caught up. “Eva?”
There was no answer, only the hush of flowers in the dark.
Rory swallowed. Her throat felt raw. “Not funny.”
The voice came again, from a different angle this time. Behind her left shoulder.
“Rory.”
She spun, heart slamming. The beam of the flashlight sliced through the trees, catching bark and leaf and nothing else. Her own breath sounded ragged and loud in her ears. No one stood behind her. No shape. No face. Only the standing stones and the wildflowers and the black spaces between trunks where darkness pooled thick as water.
She pressed the pendant hard against her palm until its warmth bit into her skin.
“Okay,” she muttered. “Okay. You’re doing that. Great. Good trick.”
A memory surfaced, unwanted and vivid: her childhood wrist, skin split by the edge of a bicycle handle, blood on pavement, her mother’s hands warm around the wound while her father said, very calmly, that pain often got louder when you watched it too closely. The scar on her wrist, a small crescent, itched now as if it remembered. Rory wrapped her fingers around it.
The clearing answered with a rustle.
Something moved at the edge of the flashlight beam. A figure, tall and narrow, just beyond the nearest tree.
Rory swung the light.
The beam struck empty bark.
No. Not empty.
There was a mark there now. A smear of paler color against the trunk, human-height, as if someone had leaned close enough to fog the wood with their breath. Rory stared at it, waiting for it to resolve into a face, a handprint, a body. The mark remained featureless, but her skin crawled all the same.
Then another sound came: the unmistakable crunch of a footstep on wet grass.
Directly behind her.
Rory didn’t turn. Her body reacted before her thoughts could shape themselves. She stepped forward and to the side, whipping around with the flashlight raised like a weapon.
Nothing.
The grass behind her lay undisturbed.
Her stomach rolled. She could feel the thing in the grove now, a pressure behind her eyes, a certainty gathering like storm cloud. Not alone. Not alone. Not alone.
“Show yourself,” she snapped, because fear had a way of making her sound angrier than she felt.
The words vanished into the trees.
A second later, every flower in the clearing turned in unison.
Rory stopped breathing.
It wasn’t dramatic. Nothing snapped or reared or bared its teeth. The flowers simply shifted, stem by stem, until all their pale heads faced her. White blooms, blue blooms, the tiny red stars among them, all angled toward her as if a wind had passed and told them where to look.
Her scalp prickled.
The pendant burned hot enough that she yelped and dropped it. It struck the grass with a soft metallic hiss. Rory crouched instinctively to grab it back, and as she did, the flashlight beam swept low across the ground.
Something stood just beyond the light.
Not a person. Not exactly.
A shape as tall as a man, thin as a stalk, with shoulders too narrow and limbs too long to belong to any human body. It remained at the edge of illumination, where details frayed and slipped away. Rory could not make out a face. Only the sense that there should have been one, and that the lack of it was somehow intentional.
Her lungs forgot how to work.
The figure tilted its head.
A voice, close and intimate as a whisper against her ear, said, “You brought it.”
Rory lurched backward and scrambled to her feet. The flashlight beam jittered wildly over the clearing. The figure was gone . Or the light missed it. Or it had never been there at all. Her mind tried to make room for every possibility and failed all of them.
“Who are you?” she said, and heard the tremor she couldn’t hide.
No answer.
The pendant lay in the grass between her boots, glowing like a tiny open wound.
She bent for it anyway, because leaving it on the ground felt worse than touching it. Her fingers closed around the silver chain. The warmth rushed up her hand, shocking and immediate. For one awful moment she thought she heard breathing inside the stone itself.
Rory straightened so fast she nearly cracked her head on the branch above her.
At the top of the nearest oak, something watched from the dark fork of the limbs.
Not an animal. Too still. Too shaped.
She caught only the suggestion of a face, white as fungus in the moonlight, and then it was gone , hidden behind leaves that had not been there a second before. Her breath came shallow and fast. The grove had gotten smaller. She was sure of it. The clearing no longer felt broad enough for the number of trees that ringed it. The stones pressed inward. The dark between trunks had thickened to a wall.
A sound came from the path behind her.
Footsteps.
Several.
Rory turned, relief and terror colliding in her chest, and nearly shouted for help before she saw what was coming through the trees.
Not people. Not exactly.
Only the impression of figures moving between trunks, their outlines interrupted by branches and shadow, heads bent in the peculiar way of things that were used to being seen only in dreams. One paused at the edge of the clearing. Another. Their faces were hidden , but Rory had the sick certainty that they were all looking at her.
The first spoke in a voice that might have belonged to a child if children knew how to make their words sound old.
“You came late.”
Rory backed toward the stones, every nerve in her body ringing. The pendant throbbed hot in her fist. Behind her, the grove seemed to inhale.
She knew, with a cold and horrible clarity, that the path she had come by was gone .
And that whatever had been waiting in the dark had already decided she was staying .