AI Rory pushed through the last curtain of yew and bramble and the park fell away behind her like a door easing shut.
The air inside the grove sat wrong on her skin. Not cold, not warm. Just thick, as if the night had weight and it had settled around her shoulders. She stood still for a beat, one hand on the trunk of an oak standing stone, and listened.
No traffic. No distant dogs. No scrape of bikes on gravel from the paths outside Richmond Park.
Just the hiss of leaves shifting overhead and the small, bright sound of something dripping.
She looked up.
Moonlight cut between the trees in pale bars, laying silver on the grass. Wildflowers crowded the ground in messy drifts, blue and white and a yellow that looked almost bruised in the dark. They should not have been blooming now. Not like this. Not in the middle of the night with frost still waiting in the damp.
Rory let her hand drop to the inside pocket of her coat. Her fingers closed around the Heartstone Pendant through the fabric. It gave a low, steady warmth against her palm, like a mug held too long.
“Come on,” she muttered to herself, and the sound died quickly among the trunks.
She had come for a reason. That reason sat in her head in neat, stubborn lines: Isolde’s grove. Fae-touched ground. A place where things slipped sideways. A place where time bent. A place where answers got lost if you waited too long to ask for them.
The pendant had gone hot in her hand the second she crossed the park fence. Not blazing, not enough to burn, just enough to make her pay attention. It had pulsed once, then again, like a heartbeat catching up after a run.
That had been enough to bring her here.
She moved deeper into the clearing, boots pressing damp blades of grass flat beneath her. The standing stones rose around her in a rough ring, ancient oak dark in the moonlight, the bark ridged and split like old knuckles. She’d seen photos, heard stories, even sat through Eva’s half-panicked, half-delighted explanations, but none of that had prepared her for the way the grove seemed to watch her cross it.
Not with eyes.
With patience.
Rory stopped beneath the nearest stone and tilted her face to the sky. No stars. The branches braided overhead too tightly , and the dark above them looked pressed and opaque, like smoke trapped under glass.
A sound came from somewhere behind her.
A footstep.
She turned at once.
Nothing. Just flowers, grass, and the pale bases of trees. The standing stones stood in their places, unmoving, blunt as teeth. Rory held her breath and listened until the blood in her ears started to sound like a tide.
Then another sound, softer this time.
A twig cracking.
Her hand slid out of her pocket and her fingers closed around the pendant. The crimson stone rested in her palm, its inner glow dim but steady.
“Not doing this with you tonight,” she whispered to it .
The warmth deepened, a little pulse against her skin.
She had no idea whether that meant reassurance or warning.
The grove smelled of wet earth and something sweeter under it, sap or crushed stems. The scent kept shifting every few breaths. For one instant it reminded her of her mother’s garden after rain, then the memory slipped and she caught something sharper, almost metallic, with a bitter edge she could not place. She frowned, slow-turning on her heel.
The trees around the clearing had changed.
Not enough to make sense at a glance. Enough to make her stomach tighten. The trunk she had faced a second ago had shifted a few feet to the left. Or she had. The moonlight on the grass had rearranged itself in narrow strips. The ring of stones looked farther away than it had when she entered, though the clearing itself had not grown.
Rory’s jaw tightened.
“Fine,” she said, and heard the small strain in her own voice. “Do what you like. I’m still here.”
Something moved at the edge of the grove.
She caught it the way she caught a cyclist in her periphery on a narrow road: a blur, a suggestion, a dark line disappearing behind a tree before she could turn fully. She faced that direction at once, every muscle in her body setting hard.
No one stood there.
A flower stem shivered near the ground, though nothing touched it.
Rory took one careful step back until the stone behind her met her spine. The bark bit through her coat. She held the pendant low in her fist and watched the trees. Her breathing stayed quiet, but the night seemed louder for it . The drip-drip sound had gone. In its place came a faint rustle, like fingertips combing through leaves.
She did not move.
The rustle stopped.
Then, from somewhere just beyond the trees, a woman’s laugh floated into the grove.
It was light. Warm. Close enough to sound like it had come from the path outside.
Rory’s eyes narrowed .
No one had followed her through the park. She’d checked twice, then a third time, because leaving her flat had already cost her enough nerves without dragging someone else into the mess. The grove sat too far from the normal paths for casual walkers. No joggers. No dog owners. No teenagers with torches and cheap cider. This place did not open its mouth for ordinary people.
The laugh came again, a little farther off.
Not a woman’s laugh this time. A child’s.
Rory exhaled through her nose and did not answer it.
The pendant in her hand heated sharply enough to make her flinch.
She looked down.
The red stone glowed brighter now, a deep heart-colour under her fingers, the silver chain curled around her wrist like a thread of cold wire. She should have brought gloves. She should have brought Eva. She should have brought anyone with a steadier pulse and less history of making bad decisions alone after midnight.
The child’s laugh came a third time, and this time it sounded as if it had come from directly behind her ear.
Rory spun.
A pale shape lingered at the outer edge of the clearing.
She saw only a thin hand, fingers long as stems, and a face half-hidden behind a tree trunk. Not a face. The shape of a face. A suggestion of cheeks. A line where eyes might have been. It vanished when she tried to focus on it, as if the dark had decided against holding still.
Her throat tightened.
“Who’s there?”
The question left her before she could stop it. The grove took it and gave nothing back.
The temperature dropped.
Not a clean cold. A damp one. The kind that worked under clothes and settled along the spine. Rory drew her coat tighter around her and kept her eyes moving. The clearing seemed larger again. The standing stones no longer made a neat circle. One stood a little too far inward. Another leaned at a wrong angle, as if the ground had shifted beneath it while she blinked.
She swallowed once.
The pendant pulsed in her hand.
Then the grass in front of her bent.
Not under a step. Not under a breeze. It folded in a narrow line, as if something unseen had pressed a knee into it and risen again. Rory stared at the patch of flattened stems, then at the space beyond, and the certainty hit her hard and sudden.
She was not alone.
The thought did not arrive like fear. It arrived like recognition. Like a memory she had not meant to keep.
Her skin prickled along her arms. She heard her own breathing, measured and thin, and beneath it another sound had begun — slow, careful, a whisper of movement circling the ring of stones.
Rory kept her body still and turned only her eyes.
There.
Between two oaks, a shift of dark against dark. A shoulder? A head? The shape had no clean edge. It seemed to gather itself from shadow, then unwind again when she looked straight at it. Something pale flashed near the ground, gone before she could name it.
Her mouth went dry.
“Alright,” she said into the trees, and the words came out flatter than she felt. “You’ve had your joke. I’m not impressed.”
A breath answered her.
Not from her own chest. Too close. Right beside her left ear.
Rory jerked away so fast the stone at her back scraped along her coat. Her heel skidded in the wet grass. She nearly went down, caught herself, and whirled with the pendant raised like a blade.
Nothing stood there.
But the scent had changed again. Now it carried a trace of smoke, faint and stale, like a candle guttering in a closed room.
The standing stones around her gave a low, almost inaudible hum.
Rory froze.
The sound did not come from any one point. It ran through the ring itself, through the old wood and the earth beneath it. Her teeth felt the vibration before her ears did. The pendant warmed hard against her palm, and for one sharp instant it seemed to tug in a direction she could not see.
Her pulse kicked.
She lowered the pendant a fraction and watched the ground.
The flowers nearest her boots leaned away.
No wind touched them. They bent in a slow, deliberate curve, petals brushing the damp grass. One by one, the stems angled as though something moved through them, unseen and close, parting the bloom in a silent line.
Rory stepped back.
The thing in the flowers stopped with her.
Her breath snagged.
A second line pressed through the grass, crossing the first at right angles. Someone walked there. Someone careful. Someone light on their feet. The flowers bowed, held, then slowly rose again after the invisible weight passed.
Rory’s grip tightened on the pendant until the silver chain cut a thin line into her skin.
“Show yourself.”
Her voice did not shake, but the plea underneath it did.
The clearing answered with a child’s voice, clear and plain.
“Wrong place.”
Rory turned toward the sound and found a figure seated on one of the stones near the far edge of the grove.
The shape looked like a girl at first glance, small and thin in the moonlight, knees pulled up, dark hair hanging forward. Then Rory blinked and the outline changed. The shoulders narrowed. The head tilted too far. The legs were not quite the right length for the body above them . The figure wore something pale that shimmered once and then seemed to soak up the light.
Rory stared.
The figure leaned its head to one side.
“Too late,” it whispered.
The voice came from the left, though the figure sat on the right.
Rory’s heart thudded hard enough to hurt. She took one step, then another, not toward it but sideways, searching for a path, a gap, anything that looked like the way she had entered . The ring of stones had tightened again. She knew it had, though every stone remained where it had stood. The distances between them no longer matched memory. The gap she had passed through at the edge of the grove looked narrower now, half-hidden by trunks that had not been there before.
Her pendant burned warm in her fist.
The seated figure smiled without showing teeth.
Behind Rory, something brushed the back of her coat.
She spun so fast the chain bit into her skin and the pendant swung. A shape stood within arm’s reach, tall and still, its outline broken by the moonlight. She saw a hand first. Pale fingers, too long, hanging loosely at its side. Then a face lifted out of the dark, and the features were not one face but many, layered wrong over each other as if several people had been pressed into the same skin and not all of them had agreed to stay.
Rory sucked in a breath and took a hard step back.
The thing did not follow.
It only tilted its head, as though listening to something deeper in the earth .
The seated figure laughed softly .
The sound travelled through the clearing like water seeping under a door.
Rory stared from one shape to the other, her mind refusing the scale of it, the shape of it, the simple fact that both stood there and neither had made a sound when they moved. Her fingers loosened on the pendant and it hung warm against her palm, its glow brightening, brightening, as if it recognised what stood around her.
The tall thing took one slow step forward.
Then another voice rose from the trees, low and close and not human enough to trust.
“Carter.”