AI Aurora Carter reached the first oak standing stone at thirteen minutes past eleven, by the cracked face of her phone, though the screen had begun to sweat beneath her thumb as if the glass had its own fever.
Richmond Park lay behind her in slabs of black and pewter. The last lamps near the road had vanished five minutes ago. London’s mutter had gone with them, swallowed by trees and wet earth and the hush that sat over the grass like a held breath. She had crossed the open ground with her hood up, boots sinking into mud, one hand tucked around the Heartstone pendant beneath her jacket.
It had warmed three streets before the park.
By the time she reached the deer fence, the deep crimson stone had turned hot against her sternum, not enough to burn, enough to keep her aware of it with every inhale. A pulse . Pause. Pulse. Like a second heart that had no interest in keeping time with hers.
She had not come for a walk.
The text had landed while she was locking up the Golden Empress, her delivery bag still smelling of soy, ginger, and fried shallots.
RORY. GROVE. TONIGHT. DON’T BRING SILAS. DON’T TRUST THE ROAD BACK.
No name. No number she recognised. Then a photo: the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, taken close enough to show the pale seam in her skin.
She had stared at it under the restaurant’s back light until Yu-Fei called her name twice.
Now the scar peeked from under her sleeve as she gripped the pendant’s chain.
“Fine,” she told the dark trees . Her breath came out pale. “I’m here.”
The first standing stone did not answer.
It had the girth of an old oak trunk and the colour of petrified bone, though it had not been there the last time she had passed this way in daylight. None of them had. The grove hid itself in Richmond Park like a secret under the tongue, and Rory had learned, with a reluctance that lived in her teeth, that wanting to find it counted for less than being summoned .
The stone’s surface held rings, knots, deep grooves like bark. Lichen glimmered in the cracks. Not moonlight. Something greener.
Beyond it, the clearing waited.
Wildflowers stood in the winter grass, heads turned in different directions, some open to the moon, some facing the ground. They bloomed in colours the night should have flattened: white bells with veins of blue, butter-yellow stars, little red cups full of shadow. A thin mist clung to their stems. The air smelled of rain, nettles, and something sweet left too long in a cupboard.
Rory took one step past the boundary.
Sound folded.
The park fell away as if someone had shut a thick door behind her. No traffic. No fox scream. No branches rasping in the wind. The silence inside the grove had weight ; it pressed into her ears, into the hinge of her jaw, into the old bruise of memory where Evan’s voice used to land before his hand followed.
She stopped.
“Not today.”
Her voice made no echo . It dropped between the flowers and vanished.
The Heartstone pulsed again.
Hotter.
Rory pulled it free. The crimson gem, no bigger than her thumbnail, glowed through the cage of her fingers. The silver chain had left a cold line at the back of her neck. She held the pendant away from her body and turned in a slow circle.
The glow strengthened when she faced the centre of the clearing.
A low ring of grass lay there, darker than the rest, as if scorched long ago and grown back wrong. In its middle rose a flat stone slab half-sunk into the earth. No altar, Rory told herself. People slapped that word on any rock in a spooky place because they had watched too many films.
Then she saw the scratches on it.
Letters. Or marks shaped enough like letters to bait the mind.
She moved closer.
Her boots crushed no stems. The wildflowers bent aside before she touched them. That bothered her more than if they had snagged her laces. Living things avoided her path with too much care.
“Who sent the text?”
The mist shifted around her ankles.
She listened.
Nothing.
Not nothing.
A sound sat beneath the silence . Thin. Rhythmic. Too soft to place.
Tick.
Pause.
Tick.
Her phone had no signal, but the screen still showed the time: 11:13.
It had shown 11:13 at the stone.
Rory tapped the side button. The display blinked off. When she lit it again, the same minute stared back.
“Course.”
She shoved it into her pocket and kept walking. The pendant hung from her fingers like a coal. She would check the slab, find whatever clever bastard had dragged her here by dangling her own skin in front of her, and leave by the same stones. She refused to stand in a fae clearing at midnight and let the place wind her up like a cheap toy.
The ticking grew clearer.
Not a clock.
A nail on glass.
Tick.
Pause.
Tick.
She reached the slab.
The marks carved into it had collected water, though no rain fell. The droplets trembled in each groove. Rory crouched, careful not to let her knee touch the dark grass, and held the Heartstone over the surface.
The crimson light crawled across the scratches.
Not letters.
A map.
Rings within rings. Lines branching like veins. Small circles at the edges, each cut with a sign she did not know. One ring had been marked with a crude crescent.
Her wrist prickled.
Rory raised her left hand. The scar looked pale in the red glow, a little moon bitten into her skin.
“No.”
The ticking stopped.
Every wildflower in the clearing turned towards her.
Rory did not move.
White bells swivelled on their stems. Blue-veined petals lifted. Red cups tilted up, dark centres fixed on her face. The motion made no rustle. The grove watched without eyes, and her body understood before her mind dressed it in words. Her shoulders locked. Her tongue went dry.
A twig snapped behind her.
Rory stood, fast.
The flowers still faced her. Beyond them, between two standing stones, a shape slipped behind the trunk of an oak.
Small. Low. Too long for a fox.
She held the pendant higher.
“Eva?”
The name came out before sense caught up. Eva would not send that photo . Eva would not lure her here alone. Eva would have sworn, loudly, then brought three knives and Silas despite the instruction.
The oak trunk remained still.
“Whoever’s there, you’ve got about ten seconds before I start being difficult.”
The grove drank her threat without interest.
A soft scrape came from her left.
Rory turned.
Nothing in the mist. Stones. Flowers. The dark rim of trees. The slab behind her.
Then, from the right, the nail-on-glass sound resumed.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Closer.
She backed towards the slab, keeping the pendant out. Its warmth had sunk into her knuckles. Crimson light spilled over the flowers, and each bloom cast a thin shadow against the mist. The shadows did not match the stems. They stretched in the wrong directions, thin black fingers pointing towards the centre ring.
Her heel touched stone.
The map underfoot clicked.
Rory froze.
The slab had moved beneath her. Not shifted. Unlocked. Something inside it gave a careful, toothy clack, like a latch drawn by a patient hand.
“Nope.”
She stepped off.
The dark grass held her sole.
Not mud. Not roots. Pressure wrapped the bottom of her boot, firm as a grip. Rory jerked her leg. The grass tightened. A cold thread slid up around her ankle.
She dropped the pendant chain and snatched at her trouser cuff. Thin blades of grass had wound together, glossy and black beneath the mist.
“Get off.”
She shoved two fingers between the braid and her boot. The stuff felt slick, warm, and faintly pulsing. It recoiled at her touch, then tightened again with a wet creak.
The ticking came from the flowers now. Hundreds of tiny taps, petals knocking against stems in unison.
Tick tick tick tick tick.
Rory reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her keys. The little folding knife Silas had given her dangled beside the Yale key, a joke gift he had handed over with a straight face.
“For parcels and men with opinions.”
She flicked the blade open with her thumb and sawed at the grass.
The first strand parted. Clear fluid beaded on the cut, smelling of crushed apple and old blood. The rest loosened. She yanked her foot free and stumbled back onto the slab.
The map clicked again.
This time, the Heartstone flared.
Red light shot down into the grooves. The rings filled one by one, lines igniting under the water, each carved path drinking the glow and carrying it outward. Rory’s shadow leapt across the flowers, tall and distorted, head bent at an angle her own neck did not hold.
Behind her shadow, another rose.
She felt it before she saw it. The air cooled at her back. The sweet-rotten smell thickened. Breath touched her hair, though nothing had crossed the open grass.
Rory turned.
A figure stood at the edge of the slab.
It had taken the shape of a person and failed at the details. Too tall. Shoulders narrow as a coat hanger. Arms hanging past the hips, fingers hidden in the mist. Its head tilted under a curtain of hair the colour of wet bark. Where a face should have been, darkness gathered, deeper than the spaces between trees.
Rory’s fingers clenched around the knife.
“Stay there.”
The figure lifted one hand.
Not towards her.
Towards the pendant.
The Heartstone’s chain rose from her palm, link by link, as if drawn by a magnet. It cut a bright line through the air. Rory slapped her other hand over it and pulled it to her chest. The gem burned through her shirt.
The figure made a sound.
Not a growl. Not a word.
A long inward breath, as if it had been empty for years and had just remembered lungs.
Rory stepped back. The slab gave under her heel, rocking with a hollow thud.
The figure stopped breathing.
From somewhere beyond the stones came a voice.
“Rory?”
Her heart kicked so hard it hurt.
That voice had no right to be here. Warm. Familiar. Welsh edges softened by years in classrooms and kitchens and phone calls she had let go to voicemail.
“Mam?”
The word scraped out of her.
Between the standing stones, Jennifer Carter’s shape stood in a pale cardigan, the one with the loose cuff she wore on Sunday mornings. Her dark hair moved in a wind Rory could not feel. Her face stayed shadowed, but the posture cut clean through the distance: one hand crossed over her ribs, the other held out, palm up.
“Come here, cariad. You’ll catch your death.”
Rory’s throat closed.
The tall figure remained at the slab’s edge, head turned towards the imitation.
No. Not imitation. That thought came late, dull, resisted by the small child inside her who knew the smell of chalk dust on her mother’s sleeves and the exact pressure of her hug after nightmares.
“Mam, what did you call me when I broke my wrist?”
The cardigan shape did not answer.
The flowers stopped ticking.
Rory tightened her grip on the knife.
“What did you call me?”
Jennifer’s shape took one step into the clearing.
Her feet did not flatten the grass. The flowers bent away as they had for Rory.
“Come here, Aurora.”
Rory laughed once. No humour. A sharp little break.
“My mam only used that when I’d set something on fire.”
The cardigan shape sagged.
For a breath, it hung there, human outline loosening like wet paper. Then its head split sideways. Not with blood, not with flesh. With absence. The shadow inside widened into a black crescent, too wide for any face, and the same nail-on-glass ticking rattled from the gap.
Rory did not scream.
She threw her keys.
Metal flashed red and vanished through the thing’s chest as if through smoke. The keys struck a standing stone beyond it and fell into the flowers with a small, ordinary jangle that made the whole scene worse.
The tall figure at the slab moved.
One stride. No sound.
Rory bolted left.
The dark grass surged.
She hurdled a low drift of flowers and felt stems brush her boots like fingers. The pendant dragged at her neck, pulling towards the slab, towards the map now burning with inner crimson. She clamped one hand over it and ran for the nearest pair of standing stones.
The grove stretched.
It had been twenty yards across when she entered. Now the boundary sat far away, a pale ring between trunks. The flowers blurred at her sides. Mist climbed to her knees. Behind her, the tall figure exhaled again, that starved, hollow pull.
“Not yours,” she snapped.
A whisper answered from the flowers.
Not one voice. Many. Small, dry, packed close.
Not yours.
Not yours.
Not yours.
Rory skidded to a stop.
The phrase travelled ahead of her through the meadow, each bloom taking it up as its petals turned. Not yours. Not yours. Not yours. The words did not mock. They corrected.
The Heartstone pulsed against her palm.
Pulse. Pause. Pulse.
Near a Hel portal, she remembered. That had been the only scrap anyone had given her about the thing, offered by a stranger who had vanished before she could ask the second question. Warm near a Hel portal. Glows with some inner fuss. Don’t lose it unless you fancy being found by what comes through.
Her gaze snapped back to the slab.
The carved rings had filled with red. The crescent mark blazed brightest.
Her scar throbbed .
The tall figure stood over the map, one hand hovering above the light. It did not touch it. Could not, perhaps. Its long fingers shook with hunger, or anger, or the strain of restraint.
The cardigan thing watched from the stones, split mouth open to the night.
Rory’s phone buzzed in her pocket.
She flinched.
It buzzed again.
Then again.
She backed away from the flowers and pulled it out, thumb slipping on the damp screen.
11:13.
A message banner covered the frozen time.
DON’T GIVE IT YOUR NAME.
Another buzz.
DON’T BLEED ON THE STONE.
The third message arrived as the grass at her feet began to knit itself into black cords.
RUN WHEN IT COUNTS TO THREE.
The flowers went silent.
Rory lifted her eyes.
The tall figure had turned from the slab. Its face-darkness fixed on her phone, then on her wrist, where her sleeve had ridden up and the crescent scar shone pale.
A voice came from inside its hollow head.
“Laila.”
The name struck the grove like a match.
The standing stones shuddered. The wildflowers folded shut. The Heartstone flashed once, white-hot under the red, and pain stabbed across Rory’s wrist as if the old scar had been opened with a pin.
She bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste iron and swallowed it.
“Wrong girl.”
The figure lifted its hand.
One finger unfolded.
The flowers whispered, “One.”
The mist drew back from the slab.
A dark seam appeared in the centre of the carved map, narrow as a knife cut, and from it rose a breath colder than any winter air in London. It slid across the clearing and touched Rory’s teeth from the inside.
The second finger rose.
“Two.”
Rory looked at the standing stones. Too far. Looked at the slab. The seam widened by an inch. No flame. No theatrical pit. Just black under stone, black with depth, black that made her eyes water if she stared too long.
The cardigan thing stretched its mouth wider.
“Come here, cariad.”
Rory closed her knife.
The sound snapped clean in her hand.
Both things stilled.
She crouched, slow, and pressed the folded knife against the grass. Her keys lay somewhere near the false Jennifer; the blade was gone to her now. Fine. She had delivered to tower blocks with broken lifts, crossed London traffic on a bike with one brake, watched a man who claimed to love her measure out fear in teaspoons until she learned the shape of his lies. She knew a trap when it expected panic.
The third finger twitched.
She yanked the Heartstone chain over her head.
The pendant came free, burning her palm. The tall figure leaned towards it. The cardigan thing stepped off the boundary stones. The whole grove inhaled.
Rory hurled the Heartstone at the slab.
It struck the carved crescent.
Red light burst across the map.
“Three,” whispered the flowers.
Rory ran.