AI The grove should have been impossible to miss, and yet the second Aurora stepped between the ancient oak stones, she understood why people could walk past it for years without ever knowing it was there.
The night air changed first.
Not in any dramatic way. No gust. No cold hand at the back of her neck. Just a subtle thinning, as if the world had inhaled and was holding itself still. The trees beyond the boundary of Richmond Park looked the same as they had a few yards back—black trunks, heavy leaves, a smear of city glow somewhere far away—but the space inside the standing stones felt cut loose from everything else. Quieter. Sharper. The scent of damp earth and crushed grass came up strong enough to taste.
Aurora paused with one foot still half on the path, half in the clearing. Her fingers tightened around the strap of her bag.
Don’t be stupid, she told herself. You came because of a reason.
The reason rested cold against her sternum.
The Heartstone Pendant, silver chain hidden beneath her collar, gave off a faint warmth . Not enough to burn. Just enough to be noticed if she stood still long enough to feel it. She had started calling that warmth a pulse , though it wasn’t exactly a pulse . More like a restrained little throb , a secret pressure from within the stone. It had been quiet all evening while she was on the Tube, then stronger once she crossed into Richmond Park, and stronger still when she found the ring of oaks standing in the dark like old teeth.
Now it was warming steadily.
Aurora lifted a hand and touched the pendant through the fabric of her T-shirt. The little stone answered with a soft, living heat.
“Well,” she murmured to nobody, because speaking made the silence feel less complete, “that’s comforting .”
Her voice vanished into the grove without an echo .
She stood still and listened.
No traffic. No distant dog barking. No drunken shouts from the path or the scrape of a late jogger’s shoes. Nothing but the faint rustle of leaves overhead and the soft, almost breathable noise of insects in the grass. Even that seemed wrong. Too orderly. Too patient.
She took another step.
The wildflowers were the first thing that made her skin prickle. They grew everywhere inside the grove, tangled in the long grass, white and purple and gold in reckless clusters, though autumn had long since thinned the city’s green spaces. They shouldn’t have been blooming at all. Their petals caught the moonlight and held it, each bloom bright as a tiny eye.
Aurora forced herself to keep walking.
The stone boundary behind her blurred when she turned to check it. Not vanished. Just... slid away in her mind, like a word she almost knew but couldn’t say aloud. She blinked hard and the stones were there again, three of them visible through the trees, their oak-gray surfaces ridged with age and shadow. Beyond them, blackness. Beyond that, the rest of Richmond Park, or maybe not. It was hard to judge distance here. Hard to judge anything.
Her phone had no signal. It had no signal the moment she stepped inside, which was annoying in a practical way and unsettling in a more intimate one. She checked the screen anyway. 11:14 p.m.
The number stayed still in her hand for a beat longer than it should have.
Aurora frowned and looked again.
11:14.
Good. Fine. Time was normal, if she ignored the fact that it felt as if she had been walking for much longer than she should have been. She told herself that was nerves. She’d left the flat above Silas’ bar with a note on the counter and a vague message to Eva if anyone asked where she was. She’d followed a string of clues, half guessed and half earned: the anonymous note tucked beneath her door, the map marked with a red X, the mention of “the grove” and the silver chain, the strange certainty that the pendant in her chest had been waiting for exactly this place.
A person didn’t get to feel calm after that sort of evening.
Still, she was Aurora Carter. Rory when she was with people who mattered. She had learned to keep her face still and her breathing even and her mind working even when her life turned strange. Cool-headed, Eva had once said with awe and disbelief, as if Rory had been born with ice in her veins. If only Eva knew how much of that was practice.
Aurora moved deeper into the clearing.
The trees around the grove did not form a true ring. They leaned inward in places, then drew back, as if something in the center had trained them to make room. Their branches interlaced high above her head, creating a roof of darkness laced with silver moonlight. The ground dipped gently under her shoes. She could feel the soil springy beneath the grass, wet from an earlier rain she hadn’t noticed falling.
Her pendant grew warmer.
She stopped.
There, ahead of her, the light shifted.
It was nothing she could point to. No glow, no figure, no obvious source. Just a tightening of shadow between two clusters of wildflowers, like the air had developed a seam. Aurora narrowed her eyes. The seam seemed to draw the moonlight inward, as though something glossy and invisible had been placed upright in the grass.
Her heartbeat quickened .
This was it, then. The thing she had come for. A portal. A breach. Whatever the notes had called it, or hinted at, or refused to name.
She stood very still and tried to think around the sensation in her chest.
The pendant’s warmth had shifted from comforting to insistent. It pressed against her skin with a steady pressure, the stone alive with a heat that made her think of a hand closed around a coal. The closer she got to the seam in the air, the more it seemed to tug. Not physically. Just enough to set her teeth on edge.
She swallowed and took one cautious step forward.
The grass hissed.
Aurora froze.
The sound had come from behind her left shoulder.
She turned fast, all her nerves snapping into place, but there was only the grove. Flowers trembling on their stems. Tree roots knuckled beneath the soil. The standing stones at the boundary, half-hidden by darkness. Nothing moved.
She held her breath.
Another sound. A soft, wet click.
Aurora’s gaze dropped to the ground immediately.
A beetle, maybe. A snail.
But the grass there was still. The flowers stood untouched.
The click came again, from farther off this time, and she knew with a cold, absurd certainty that it had not come from any insect. It sounded too deliberate. Too measured . Like something testing its teeth.
Her skin went cold despite the warmth from the pendant.
She looked up.
The far edge of the clearing had changed.
Only slightly . That was the worst part. A person could miss it if they blinked. One of the standing stones at the boundary was no longer where she remembered it. Or maybe it was. Maybe the others had shifted around it. Maybe the whole grove had subtly rearranged itself while she stood there. The stone nearest the path seemed farther away than before . The trees behind it looked denser, their trunks overlapping in a way that made the air between them appear thicker, as if woven.
Aurora drew a slow breath through her nose.
No panic. Panic was stupid. Panic made people run before they knew what they were running from.
She turned in a slow circle, trying to map the grove.
That was when she saw the movement at the edge of her vision.
Something pale slipped between the trees behind her and vanished when she looked straight at it.
Aurora’s stomach tightened.
She did not move. She did not blink. She stared at the place where it had gone, waiting for her eyes to adjust, for reason to catch up with fear. The grove answered with stillness.
Then, from the same direction, came a sound like a woman humming under her breath.
It was not loud. It was almost tender. A broken little tune, three notes repeated, soft enough that she might have imagined it if she hadn’t instantly felt the hair lift on her arms.
Aurora slowly turned toward it.
Nothing.
The humming stopped.
Then it resumed, from behind her this time.
She spun around so quickly her bag slapped against her hip.
There was nobody there. Only flowers bending in the grass, leaves shivering overhead, the dark trunks of the trees. The sound had been close enough to feel against the back of her neck.
Aurora took a step backward without meaning to.
Her heel struck something solid.
She jerked around.
A stone. Small, rounded, one of the pale fieldstones half sunk in the earth. She hadn’t noticed it before. That made no sense; she should have noticed it. She should have noticed the line of them, a half-ring breaking the grass behind her, each one no higher than her knee.
Her pulse thudded harder.
The pendant flared warm against her chest. Not bright. Just undeniable. The heat was increasing with each second, as if she stood close to an unseen fire.
Aurora looked toward the seam in the air again.
This time she could see it better.
A narrow vertical distortion hanging over the grass, no wider than a doorway, as if the night had been sliced and the edges were refusing to close. The moonlight around it bent strangely. The wildflowers nearest it leaned outward despite the lack of wind. Something behind the distortion seemed deeper than darkness, a depth that swallowed the eye .
She had the sudden, irrational thought that if she walked through it, she might come out in a place where the sky had too many stars.
The humming started again.
Not from the trees. Not from the stones.
From inside the seam.
Aurora’s throat went dry.
“No,” she whispered, though she hadn’t consciously decided to speak.
The sound ceased instantly.
Silence flooded the grove, absolute and heavy.
Aurora realized she was gripping her bag so hard her knuckles hurt. Her other hand had gone to the pendant again, fingertips pressed flat over the heat. She could feel the little stone throbbing beneath the chain, each warm beat stronger than the last, matching something she couldn’t see.
As if it knew.
As if it wanted to go.
She forced herself to look away from the seam and scan the edges of the clearing again, because looking too long at one thing made the rest of the world feel less real. The flowers shifted in the moonlight. A branch swayed without wind. Something white moved low among the grass and vanished.
Aurora held very still.
There it was again.
Not white. Pale. A face? No—only an impression of a face, gone the instant she tried to focus on it. Two dark holes where eyes should have been. Too long a shape. Too narrow.
She backed away one step, then another.
The ground had changed under her feet. That wasn’t possible, but the slope had altered or the grass had grown thicker or she had simply entered a different part of the grove without noticing. The path to the boundary looked farther off than it had before. The standing stones were harder to see. The trees seemed closer together, hemming her in .
Her breath came shallow now, little careful pulls that did nothing to settle the cold in her stomach .
“Okay,” she said softly , to herself, because if she didn’t keep speaking, the silence would swallow her. “Okay. You’re fine. Just find the thing, take a photo if you need to, and leave.”
But the portal—or whatever it was—was already dimming and brightening at the same time, like an eye barely open.
A sound came from somewhere above her.
A branch creaking.
Aurora looked up.
The branches overhead were thick with shadow. Moonlight threaded through them in silver strips. At first she saw nothing but bark and leaves and the joined black shapes of limbs against the sky.
Then she noticed that one of the branches was moving against the others.
Not swaying.
Reaching.
Her entire body went rigid.
The branch extended from the canopy like a thin arm, bending with a terrible patience. It didn’t snap or tear. It simply lengthened, joint by impossible joint, until something at its end—something like a cluster of leaves, or a hand made of leaves, she couldn’t tell—hovered over the clearing.
The humming returned, louder now, as if the grove itself had opened its mouth.
Aurora’s pendant burned hot enough to sting.
The thing above her twitched.
And in the exact same moment, from the seam in the air, a voice spoke her name. Soft. Familiar enough to freeze her blood.
“Rory.”
She had not heard that voice in years. Not in this place. Not in any place. It came out of the dark with perfect certainty, with all the intimate wrongness of someone wearing a dead man’s face.
Aurora could not make herself move.
The grove watched her. The flowers trembled . The standing stones held the boundary behind her like teeth around a tongue.
And somewhere in the black seam of the portal, something smiled in the dark.