AI Rory froze with one hand on the oak standing stone and the other curled around the silver chain at her throat.
Something moved in the clearing ahead, low among the wildflowers, too quick for a fox and too deliberate for wind. The dark shape vanished between the pale stems before she could fix it in her mind.
“Brilliant,” she muttered, and her voice came back to her from the trees in a thin, late echo .
She stepped fully inside the grove and let the gate behind her go. The brush of leaves closed over the path she had used to enter, and the world outside Richmond Park seemed to fold away with an ugly, neat finality. The air held the damp green smell of crushed stems and old bark. Moonlight, caught in gaps between branches, slicked the standing stones with silver and made the clearing look bruised.
Her Heartstone Pendant warmed against her collarbone.
Rory’s fingers went to it at once. The little crimson gem sat against her skin, faintly alive, pulsing once, twice, like a heartbeat with no body attached.
“Don’t start that now,” she said.
The pendant answered with another warm throb .
She took a slow breath and kept moving.
The grove always looked wrong if you stared too hard. Not in the obvious way, not cracked mirrors or blood on the grass. The wrongness hid in the balance of it. The wildflowers grew too thick, too healthy, all year round, their heads heavy with bloom despite the season. The oaks around the clearing bent inward in a loose ring, their roots knuckling through the earth like clenched fingers. Stone faces, half-erased by age, wore expressions that shifted when she blinked.
Rory walked towards the centre and stopped beside the shallow dip in the earth where she had found the last trace of Hel magic three nights ago. Yu-Fei had called it a “weird little job”, then paid her in cash and spring rolls to deliver a sealed parcel to a cottage near the park. The parcel had never mattered. The man who had received it had asked about a pendant he had never seen. Then he had gone pale when Rory lifted her shirt collar and the Heartstone flashed red in the dark. He had swallowed hard, shut his door in her face, and by morning the cottage stood empty.
So she had come back.
The grove answered with a rustle.
Rory turned. Nothing. Only flowers nodding in a breeze she could not feel.
She crouched, fingers parting the stems. The ground here carried a different texture, firmer than the rest of the clearing, as if the earth beneath had been packed by hands long dead. Fine threads of silver light, almost invisible, ran between two roots and vanished under a stone the size of a suitcase.
She touched the stone.
Heat slid up her fingertips. Not warmth . Recognition.
The pendant burned against her skin.
Rory jerked her hand back and cursed under her breath. She clenched and unclenched her fist, then looked around the clearing with renewed patience. No one came through the trees. No lanterns swung. No footsteps snapped a twig.
Still, she felt watched.
Not from one direction. From all of them.
“Right,” she said to the trees . “If there’s something here, it can stop lurking and be useful.”
The birds had gone silent.
That hit her harder than the sight of anything else. The grove had been full of small movements when she arrived, a flutter here, a dart there. Now the branches held still, their leaves polished black in the scattered light. Even the insects seemed to have taken themselves elsewhere.
Rory straightened slowly and listened.
Tick.
A sound from somewhere above her left shoulder.
She looked up. The nearest branch swayed, though no wind touched it.
Tick.
Another branch answered across the clearing.
She let out a breath through her nose. “No.”
The sound came again, not quite a clock, not quite nails on wood . Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
It did not belong in a grove that sat half a step from the Fae realm, where time bent and slipped and forgot its own shape. It belonged in a sitting room. On a mantelpiece. Next to a vase of dead roses and a family photograph with faces scratched out.
Rory’s gaze snapped to the stone at her feet.
The silver threads beneath it had thickened. They glimmered, then vanished, then glimmered again, as if something beneath the earth had opened an eye and closed it.
She knelt again, more carefully this time, and pressed her palm flat to the ground beside the stone. The soil held a faint tremor, so slight she might have imagined it. The pendant warmed, then pulsed hard enough that her teeth clicked.
“Hello,” she whispered.
The ground answered with a distant knock.
Rory’s spine tightened.
Another knock followed, then a dragging scrape, like something heavy shifting through tunnels made for hands rather than bodies.
She stood so fast her knees cracked.
For a moment, she saw it at the edge of the clearing, between two oaks, a pale suggestion of movement where no movement should have been. A figure, slender and bent, with arms too long for its body.
She blinked.
The shape was gone .
Rory did not move. Her pulse thudded high in her throat, and she hated the hot, chemical edge of fear that rose with it. Fear made people sloppy. Fear made them run into mistakes. She had learned that from Evan, from London alleys, from nights when a raised voice meant more than volume and less than warning.
“Alright,” she said, and kept her voice flat. “You’ve had your little joke.”
Nothing.
Then, from just behind her ear, a soft inhale.
Rory spun and threw herself backwards, landing hard on the damp earth. Her shoulder struck a root. Pain flared bright and clean. She rolled and came up with both hands braced, eyes wild, staring at empty air where a face had almost been.
Not empty. Not quite.
The shape lingered there for one impossible beat, all suggestion and outline, as if the grove had briefly remembered how to make a person and then forgotten again. A narrow mouth opened in a face that had no proper depth.
It smiled.
Rory scrambled to her feet.
The thing retreated without walking, sliding back into the shadows between the stones. Its outline broke apart when it crossed the silver threads in the dirt. She caught one glimpse of a hand, too many joints in the fingers, and then the clearing held only flowers and stone and dark.
Her pendant flared hot.
“No,” Rory snapped, gripping it through her shirt. “Not helpful.”
The clearing shifted.
That was the only word for it. Not a sound, not a flash, but a tilt in the world, a subtle reordering of distance . The standing stones seemed farther apart than before . The nearest oak leaned in tighter. The path she had used to enter no longer sat where it had a moment ago. Her skin prickled all over, as if the air had filled with invisible needles.
Rory backed towards the centre stone and kept her eyes moving. Left. Right. Up. Down. No blind spots. No corners. No easy approach.
A whisper moved through the flowers.
She turned her head.
“Rory.”
The voice came from her own mouth and from somewhere a little beyond it, the way a reflection follows a face with the wrong delay.
She swallowed.
“Not tonight.”
“Rory.”
It used her name like fingers testing a bruise.
Rory pulled the phone from her pocket, thumbed the torch on, and swept the beam across the grove.
The light touched the oak trunks, the root knots, the standing stones, the silver threads under the earth.
And something standing just beyond the nearest stone.
Small. Child-sized. Crooked at the shoulders. No face she could hold. Only a wet darkness where features ought to have been, and a hand lifted in greeting.
The thing did not blink.
Rory’s mouth went dry.
The torch beam shuddered in her grip.
When she found her voice, it came out rough. “You’ve got the wrong woman.”
The thing tipped its head.
A second shape stood behind it.
Then a third.
The clearing had not filled. She would have seen that. No, these had been here the whole time, layered in the dark at angles her eyes refused to catch until now. One near the standing stones. One by the roots. One at the edge of the flowers with its arms folded around itself like a patient guest.
Rory backed up until her shoulder blades hit cold stone.
The first one took a step forward. Its foot did not bend the flowers.
“Do not,” she said.
It took another step.
She snatched the Heartstone Pendant and tore it out from under her shirt. The crimson gem lit her palm with a deep inner glow, and every figure in the grove flinched back at once, a ripple of sudden, shared recoil.
Rory stared.
“Oh. That’s new.”
The pendant beat once, hard and hot, then again, pulling heat through her fingers and up her wrist. The small crescent scar there tingled as if a needle had touched it.
The nearest standing stone answered with a low hum.
Not a sound she heard. A sensation. Deep in her teeth, in her bones. The silver threads under the ground brightened until they showed like a web of veins beneath pale skin.
Rory’s pulse slammed.
From the dark beyond the stones, something larger than the others shifted.
The smaller figures drew back, heads bowed, as though making room .
“No,” Rory whispered, and this time the word carried less command than panic.
A crack split the air.
She whipped round.
One of the oak standing stones had opened, not physically, not with chips or falling dust, but by peeling apart the way a mouth might part around an unspoken secret. Thin light leaked from the seam. Cold and sharp, it stabbed at her eyes.
The pendant burned white-hot.
Rory staggered, nearly dropping it. In the split stone, something moved, a shape tall and elegant and wrong, all angles and shadows in motion behind a veil of brightness. It pressed a hand against the seam from inside.
Five long fingers spread slowly .
The smaller figures in the clearing began to hum.
Rory’s breath came short and shallow. She dug in her heels and forced herself not to run. Running would send her straight into the trees, straight into whatever waited there. She knew enough to understand a trap when it smiled at her.
“You brought me here,” she said to the grove, to the stones, to the thing behind the seam. Her voice shook once and steadied. “You wanted the pendant.”
The hand in the crack flexed.
The grove answered with a chorus of soft, delighted clicks.
Rory looked down at the Heartstone. The gem glowed deep red in her fist, and the silver chain had gone taut, as if something on the other side of the stone were pulling it from her. She wrapped the chain around her knuckles and braced.
The seam widened.
A smell spilled out, metallic and sweet, like old pennies left in rainwater.
Rory gagged and raised the phone, not because she expected help, but because light felt better than darkness. Her torch beam struck the opening, and for one instant she saw the eye inside, pale and lidless, fixed on her with intimate, patient hunger.
Then a hand reached through.
Not from the seam.
From behind her.
It closed around her throat.
Rory jerked so hard she nearly wrenched the pendant free. Fingers cold as river stones dug into her skin. The phone flew from her hand and smashed against the ground, its torch beam spinning wildly across flowers, stone, sky, hand, stone, hand.
The grip tightened.
A voice breathed against her ear, soft as a prayer.
“Found you.”
Rory clawed at the hand, nails scraping dead-cold skin, and the grove erupted in a sound like dozens of people laughing through clenched teeth.