AI Rory’s boots sank into damp moss with no sound worth trusting. The grove swallowed her lantern beam the second she stepped past the last oak standing stone, thick leaves knitting overhead into a roof that blocked the moon and left the clearing lit by a bruised wash of night.
She stopped with one hand wrapped around the silver chain at her throat.
The Heartstone Pendant rested cold against her collarbone.
“Right,” she muttered, and her voice came back thinner than it should have, as if the air had taken a bite out of it. “Here we are.”
Wildflowers crowded the ground in every direction, white and violet and a red so dark it looked black until the light caught it. They bloomed out of season, petals wet with a sheen that could have been dew or something else. The standing stones ringed the clearing behind her, ancient trunks split and weathered into shapes that made no sense when she stared at them too long.
She had come for answers. That was the reason. The woman at the pub with the silver hoop earrings and the cracked front tooth had spoken in a low voice and given her only this: Richmond Park, after dark, between the stones, bring the pendant, and don’t bring anyone who cared about you.
Rory had almost laughed at that. Instead she had gone home, sat on the edge of her bed in the flat above Silas’ bar, and watched the Heartstone warm and cool in her palm until midnight dragged itself across the ceiling.
Now she stood in the grove with a dead phone in her pocket, a backpack strap cutting into her shoulder, and a sense of being watched so clean and plain it felt like pressure on her skin .
She turned in a slow circle.
Nothing.
Trees. Moss. Flowers. Stone. The black mouth of Richmond Park beyond the boundary, though it looked far farther away than it had from the path in, as if the grove had stretched the distance while she wasn’t looking .
A branch cracked somewhere to her left.
Rory held still.
The sound didn’t come again.
“Funny,” she said to the dark .
A breeze slid through the clearing, cold enough to raise the hair at the back of her neck. The flowers bent with it, then settled. One patch near the far stones stayed pressed low after the rest lifted, as if something had passed over them and left the stems flattened in a narrow path.
She looked at that patch, then away, and immediately wished she hadn’t.
For a blink, something pale had stood there. Not a shape. Not enough for a shape. Just a vertical smear against the darker trees, tall and thin, with a brightness that didn’t belong to moonlight.
She dragged in a breath through her nose.
The pendant gave a single warm pulse against her skin.
Her hand tightened around it. “You only do that near Hel portals.”
The chain answered with a tiny shift of metal. No more. No less.
Rory crouched and set her backpack down gently . Her fingers worked the zip open. Torch. Water. The notebook she’d brought because she’d promised herself she’d write everything down if this went sideways. A cheap pen. Yu-Fei had laughed when she’d asked to borrow a knife from the kitchen and handed her a fruit one with a chipped handle.
She pulled the torch free and clicked it on.
A blade of white light cut across the flowers, across the wet stems and the stone ring and the underside of a branch.
Something moved at the edge of the beam.
Rory snapped the torch to it.
Empty space.
Her pulse knocked hard at her throat. She swept the light lower, across roots and ferns and a patch of mushrooms clustered like bruised coins.
There, again. A twitch. Not in front of the light. Beyond it. Something pale and quick, ducking behind a tree trunk at the fringe of the grove.
She raised the torch higher and held it there.
No one stepped out.
No footsteps . No breath. No rustle of cloth.
“Who’s there?”
The night did not answer.
She waited until her arm started to tremble, then lowered the torch and took a step forward.
The moss yielded under her boot. The pendant warmed again, a slow heat that crept from the metal into her skin. Not comforting . Never that. More like a warning hand laid flat over her chest.
The grove had shifted while she stood still. The stone to her right no longer lined up with the one opposite it. The clearing looked wider by a pace or two. Or maybe she had misjudged the circle when she came in, but Rory knew what that felt like in her bones: the sense that a room had rearranged itself while you blinked.
She swallowed.
“Fine,” she said. “If this is the welcoming committee, you can do better.”
A sound came from behind her.
Not a footstep. A soft scrape, like a fingernail dragged down bark.
Rory turned so fast her torch beam snapped across the trunks and caught nothing but wet bark and black leaves. She stared into the dark between trees until her eyes watered.
Another scrape. Closer this time.
Her shoulders went tight. She backed one step toward the centre of the grove, never taking her eyes off the trees.
“Come on out.”
Silence.
Then, from somewhere very near the ground, a child’s voice whispered, “Rory.”
Every muscle in her body locked.
No one knew that name here. Not in the grove. Not unless they had heard it before, and nobody in Richmond Park should have had any business saying her name like that, soft and familiar and wrong.
She swung the torch down.
The beam swept over moss, roots, a knot of briars, and stopped on a patch of bare earth where the flowers had opened in a ring around nothing.
Her own face looked back up at her from the ground.
Not reflected. Not in glass. A perfect wash of pale features in the soil, as if the earth had gone glossy with water and chosen her for a surface. Bright blue eyes. Black shoulder-length hair falling across one cheek. The small crescent scar on her left wrist visible because her hand held the torch just so.
Rory recoiled, and the image on the ground vanished.
She stared at the empty dirt, chest heaving.
“No,” she said. “No, that’s not happening.”
Something laughed. Not loud. A small wet chuckle from the trees behind her, as if someone had found a private joke.
Rory spun again, torch up.
This time the beam caught movement high in the branches. A shape clung there for half a breath, limbs folded wrong around the trunk, too thin and too still. Pale skin or bark, she couldn’t tell. A face turned toward her. No features she could trust. Just an oval smooth as peeled wood, except for a slit where a mouth should have been.
The thing dropped out of sight.
Rory stumbled back a step and nearly hit one of the stones.
The pendant flared hot enough to sting.
She jerked her hand up to her collarbone. “All right. All right. That’s enough.”
The word died in the grove.
No echo . No wind. Even the insects had gone quiet.
She listened with all of her body. Nothing. Then the sound of breathing.
Not hers.
Behind the left side of her neck.
Rory froze so hard her jaw hurt.
The breath was shallow, cool, and close enough to stir a strand of hair.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
The breathing stopped.
She turned one inch at a time.
A woman stood three paces away, half hidden by a curtain of hanging leaves. Tall, dark-haired, dressed in clothes that looked old and new at once, the fabric drinking the light. Her face held a strange stillness, as if she had been carved from someone’s memory of kindness and left out in the rain too long. Her eyes fixed on Rory’s pendant.
“You brought it.”
Rory stared. The woman’s mouth never quite matched the sound, as if the words had travelled some distance before reaching the air.
“I didn’t bring anyone else,” Rory said. Her grip on the torch burned her palm. “So you’re not here to be helpful.”
The woman tipped her head, listening to something beyond Rory’s shoulder.
“Helpful,” she echoed , tasting the word like spoiled milk. “No.”
Rory didn’t look away from her. “Then what are you?”
The woman smiled without warmth . “You came for the gate.”
The pendant throbbed against Rory’s skin.
The grove answered with a low shiver. The flowers bent all at once, all in the same direction, as if a hand had swept over them.
Rory felt the hairs rise on her arms.
A second voice spoke from the dark to her right.
“Too late.”
She flinched, torch lashing toward it, and the beam caught another figure standing behind a stone. Then another. Then a third at the treeline, and another just beyond the roots, faces turned toward her from every angle the light could reach, each one half-seen, each one a little wrong.
Some had eyes too far apart. Some had mouths that didn’t close. One wore what looked like a police uniform from the waist up and nothing beneath but a shimmer of darkness where legs should have been.
Rory’s mouth went dry.
“They don’t talk,” she said, more to herself than anyone else .
The woman at the leaves smiled wider. “They do, when they want something.”
Rory took one backward step, then another, keeping the torch up while her other hand slid under her jacket and found the fruit knife in her pocket. Cheap little blade. No use against this, probably. Still, her fingers closed around it like it mattered.
“What do they want?” she asked.
The woman’s gaze flicked to the pendant and back to Rory’s eyes.
“You.”
A pulse of heat burned the chain.
Rory yanked the pendant free and held it out in front of her. The crimson stone glowed from within, faint but bright enough to paint her knuckles red. The whole grove seemed to draw in a breath.
The figures in the trees shifted.
One of them—thin, bent, with arms too long—crawled down the bark headfirst and paused halfway, as if waiting for permission . The woman by the leaves stepped back into shadow and did not return.
Rory’s throat tightened until her voice came out rough.
“Back off.”
The thing in the tree laughed in a voice that sounded like broken reeds dragged over stone.
The torch flickered .
Once. Twice.
Rory slapped it against her palm. The beam steadied for half a second, then dimmed to a sickly cone. The edges of the clearing blurred. The standing stones seemed to lean inward, every one of them inclining by degrees, closing the ring.
“No,” she said, and her breath came fast now. “No, no, no.”
Something brushed her ankle.
She looked down.
A hand, small and pale, lay flat on the moss beside her boot.
No arm attached. Just the hand, fingers curled slightly , nails dark with earth. It shifted, as if feeling for her .
Rory jumped back with a gasp and the torch finally died.
Darkness flooded in.
Not absolute. The pendant still glowed faintly at her throat, enough to show the shape of the nearest stones and the red smear of flowers underfoot. Enough to show movement where there should have been none. Enough to show that the grove had filled with people who did not have to stand where people belonged.
Her breath tore in and out of her chest. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
A whisper slid across her ear.
“We’re not.”
She whipped around, knife out, and the blade met empty air.
A hand closed around her wrist from behind.
Cold. Too cold. Fingers like wet twigs.
Rory drove her elbow back hard. It hit something solid. A grunt answered, inhuman and strangled, and the grip loosened just enough for her to wrench away. She stumbled sideways, nearly lost her footing, and felt the moss suck at her boots.
The pendant pulsed . Warm. Hot. Hotter.
A low hum began somewhere in the grove, so deep she felt it in her teeth. The stones answered with a faint tremor. The air near the centre of the clearing shimmered .
Rory stared at it.
“No,” she breathed, and the word came out with a crack in it .
The shimmer split.
For a heartbeat there was a seam in the night, a vertical tear full of light so dark it looked almost red, and from within it came the smell of iron and rainwater and something older than rot.
The humming rose.
The figures around the edge of the grove leaned in, every pale face angled toward the opening.
Rory lifted the pendant by its chain until it dangled in front of her eyes, crimson glow trembling against her knuckles, and took one careful step toward the seam.