AI Aurora Carter snagged her boot on a root and caught herself on a rough oak standing stone before she hit the ground.
The Heartstone pendant thumped against her sternum, a hard little beat under her shirt. She yanked the chain free from her collar and stared across the clearing, where wildflowers crowded the grass in pale knots and the ancient stones rose out of the dark like teeth.
Nothing moved.
She kept her torch low and swept the beam over the ground. Ferns. Moss. A scatter of white petals that looked fresh enough to bleed.
“All right,” she said to the empty grove. “I’m here. You wanted me here. Congratulations.”
Her voice landed flat and came back wrong, thinner than it should have sounded, as if the grove chewed on it before it returned.
She tightened her grip on the torch and stepped past the first stone.
The pendant warmed.
Not enough to burn. Enough to make her look down.
The crimson gem held a faint inner glow now, a deep ruby shine under the silver chain. She touched it with two fingers and felt a pulse answer back, slow and steady, like a second heart that did not belong to her.
“Brilliant,” she muttered.
The path behind her had already gone vague. The trees at the edge of the grove crowded closer than they had a moment ago, or maybe she had walked deeper than she meant to. Richmond Park had swallowed up enough of her evening already. A few minutes more and she would be back at Silas’ bar, dripping mud across the stairs, pretending she had not just followed a cursed necklace into a fairy story.
She took another step.
A twig snapped behind her.
Aurora froze.
The torch beam flew wide, caught on a standing stone, then on a tangle of roots, then on nothing at all.
Silence pressed down again, thick and complete.
“Not funny,” she said.
A bird called from somewhere high in the trees. The cry sounded half-mimicked, half-choked, like someone had learned the shape of a bird’s voice without ever hearing one properly.
She turned in a slow circle. The grove held steady, all crooked shadows and pale flowers, but the darkness between the stones seemed fuller than the rest, layered. She had the sense that if she stared hard enough, she might see something moving inside it, a shape made of absence.
Her pendant warmed harder.
She shifted her torch to the other hand and followed the pull. The beam landed on a narrow gap between two stones, where the ground dipped into a shallow bowl of roots and black earth. Faint, silver threads ran through the soil there, like veins in a wrist.
Aurora crouched and brushed one of the threads with her fingertips.
The earth felt cold. Not cool, not damp. Cold, as if it had been kept in a cellar for years.
She pulled her hand back at once and flexed her fingers.
A breath touched the back of her neck.
She spun so hard that the torch nearly slipped from her hand.
Nothing stood there. No face. No figure. Only the trees, packed tight around the grove, their black limbs crossing and uncrossing in the dark.
Then another breath came, close to her ear.
Aurora backed into the stone behind her and thrust the torch out.
“Show yourself.”
For a moment, the torch beam caught what looked like a face between two branches, narrow and pale, all cheekbone and wet black eyes.
She blinked.
The shape vanished.
A laugh ticked through the grove. Light, childlike, and very far away.
Her skin tightened across her arms.
“Nope.”
She turned towards the gap in the stones and walked into it before her nerves could argue. The air changed at once. The grove’s sounds fell away, one by one, until she heard only the scrape of her trainers on root and soil, and the faint, insistent thud of the pendant against her chest.
The bowl of earth opened into a small clearing she had not seen from outside. The flowers here bloomed in thick drifts, white and blue and bruised purple, all tangled together as if they had grown in a rush and had never bothered with order. At the centre stood a low mound of stones wrapped in ivy. Something pale lay on top of it.
Aurora raised her torch.
A rabbit skull stared back at her, clean and white, balanced neatly on the stones. No flesh. No fur. Just the delicate curve of the jaw and the hollow of the eye sockets.
She exhaled through her nose.
“Cute.”
The pendant gave a sudden sharp pulse against her skin, so strong that she flinched and clutched at it. Heat flooded through the silver chain, enough to make her teeth grit. The crimson gem flared, a dark spark under blood-red glass.
The rabbit skull cracked.
Aurora stumbled back. The skull split down the middle with a dry, brittle snap, and something dark and wet shifted underneath it. She raised the torch higher, but the beam never held still. It jittered across the stones, across the ivy, across the mound, then snagged on a line of movement at the edge of the clearing.
A figure stood among the flowers.
Aurora swung the light towards it.
No one there.
The torch beam lingered on an empty patch of grass, but the flowers in that patch bent in a careful line, as if a body had just passed through them. A long, slow rustle moved across the clearing and stopped near the tree line.
Her mouth went dry.
“Fine,” she said softly . “If you’re going to lurk, at least have the decency to breathe like a person.”
A reply came from the trees.
“Person.”
The word emerged from somewhere low and close, spoken in a voice that sounded copied, not learned.
Aurora’s head snapped round.
The torch beam skated over bark and shadow. It caught on a shape between the trunks, narrow shoulders, black hair hanging to the chin, a face pale as bone.
Her own face.
She did not move.
The thing in the trees smiled first, slow and small, and the expression looked wrong on her features. Her eyes, bright blue in every mirror she had ever hated, stared back at her from the shadowed face with no warmth in them at all.
Aurora swallowed.
“Not even subtle.”
The figure tilted its head. Her scar, tiny and crescent-shaped on the left wrist, gleamed white as the thing raised the same hand and held it out, palm up.
The torch flickered .
Aurora stepped sideways, and the figure stepped too, staying half-hidden among the trunks. She drove the beam straight at it.
The shadow tore apart.
Branches. Bark. Empty dark.
Her breath hitched once, sharp and hard.
Then the grove answered with another sound, one she had not heard before. Not a laugh this time. A wet, dragging step. Then another. The noise came from behind the stone mound, from a place where the flowers bent in a wide crescent around the roots.
Aurora did not look away from the mound.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m in no mood for theatrics.”
Something answered from beneath the stones.
A soft knock.
One. Two.
As if knuckles tapped from inside the earth.
The pendant burned hot enough to sting. Aurora fumbled for the chain and dragged it out from under her shirt. The gem blazed red for the length of a heartbeat, then dimmed to a coals-deep glow, and the air around her changed. A smell drifted through the clearing, sharp and metallic, like rain on copper, like the inside of an old coin pressed against her tongue.
The knock came again.
Three times.
The stone mound shifted.
Not by much. Just enough to make her eyes catch on the wrongness of it. One of the flat stones on top tilted, then settled back into place, as if something underneath had pressed up and then withdrawn.
Aurora edged backwards until her shoulders brushed the trunk of a yew tree. The bark scratched through her jacket.
The groove of silence broke at last. It did not return to normal. It opened wider instead, filled with a faint whispering from all sides at once, too soft to catch, too patterned to ignore. Not wind. Not leaves. Words. Old ones. Repeated around the clearing like a prayer spoken by a mouth with too many teeth.
She shut the torch off.
Darkness swallowed the beam in one neat gulp.
Every sound sharpened at once. The whispering. The soft shift of flowers under pressure. The pulse of her own blood in her ears.
A hand touched the back of her neck.
Aurora whipped round and struck out with the torch, hard enough that her wrist protested. Her fist hit nothing. The air where the hand had touched her felt colder than the rest of the grove, colder than water, colder than metal.
She stumbled forward and the torch clattered from her grip. It struck stone, bounced, and rolled into the flowers beside the mound. Its glass lens flashed once in the dark, then guttered out.
“No, no, no.”
She dropped to a crouch and reached for it. Her fingers brushed the dirt and then froze.
A row of footprints ran from the mound to the tree line.
Bare feet. Small ones. Child-sized.
The print on the right foot sank deeper than the other, as if the weight had dragged.
Aurora stared.
The tracks had appeared in the soft earth in the seconds since she had turned.
A whisper brushed the back of her knee.
She jerked upright so fast that she nearly fell.
“Don’t do that.”
The grove answered by going still.
Every flower stood rigid. Every branch held. Even the whispers died off in a single, sudden cut, as if something had closed a mouth.
Aurora’s chest tightened.
Then the pendant flared so brightly that the crimson glow leaked through her shirt in a red wash, staining her hands, her sleeves, the stones at her feet. A crack opened in the air between the mound and the tree line, no wider than a door at first, then widening with a sound like skin splitting.
Cold rolled out of it.
Not night air. Something older. Foul with sap and iron and a sweet rot underneath, like fruit left to blister in a sealed room.
Aurora backed away until the yew pressed against her spine.
The split in the air widened further, and shapes moved inside it. Pale shapes. Elbows. Fingers. A face pressed close to the other side, all mouth and eyes and stretched white skin, then flattened as if against glass.
The thing spoke without moving its mouth.
“Laila.”
Aurora’s hand flew to the pendant. The chain burned her palm.
“No one calls me that.”
The mouth on the other side of the split widened in a grin that did not belong on any human face.
“Carter.”
Something shoved at the crack.
The air around it shuddered. The flowers around the stone mound bent low, as if bowing .
Aurora snatched the torch from the grass and hurled it at the opening.
The torch hit the edge of the split and burst. Glass sprayed the stones. A sharp crack of light flashed through the clearing, and for one brutal second she saw what stood beyond the gap, a narrow corridor of black branches and pale roots, crowded with faces that watched from between the trees.
Then one hand reached through.
Long. White. Jointed wrong at the wrist.
It hooked around her own wrist with a grip like ice and snapped her arm straight.
Aurora cried out as the chain jerked tight against her throat. The Heartstone pendant flared like a wound ripped open in the dark.
Something stepped through with it.