AI Aurora Carter had crossed Richmond Park after midnight with three things in her coat pockets: a cheap torch, her phone with twelve percent battery, and a folded delivery receipt on which someone had written come alone in a hand so neat it looked printed.
The fourth thing hung against her breastbone.
The Heartstone Pendant gave off its faint, steady warmth through her jumper, not hot enough to burn, not even hot enough to comfort. It pulsed once every few seconds, a little crimson heartbeat beneath her clothes. She had tried leaving it behind in the flat above Silas’ bar. She had put it in the chipped blue mug beside the sink, walked three steps toward the door, and been struck by a sudden conviction so sharp it had turned her stomach : if she went without it, she would not come back.
So here she was.
The park lay under a thin, metallic moon. The city had dropped away behind her in layers: the last bus sighing at the curb, the hum of traffic, the yellow wash of streetlamps, the ordinary human clutter of late-night London. Out here, darkness had room to stand upright. It gathered under the ancient trees and between the long grasses, thick and damp and watchful.
Rory kept to the narrow path, boots sinking slightly into mud. The air smelled of wet leaves, cold earth, and something faintly sweet that didn’t belong to February. Honeysuckle, maybe. Or rot pretending to be flowers.
She checked her phone again. 12:07.
No signal.
“Brilliant,” she muttered.
Her voice fell flat, swallowed at once by the trees.
She had promised herself she would not say anything else aloud unless there was another living person to hear it. Talking to herself was fine in the kitchen at two in the morning while trying to work out whether day-old noodles counted as dinner. Talking to herself here felt like answering a question she had not been asked .
The receipt crinkled in her fist. It had been tucked into the handlebar basket of her delivery bike after her last run for Golden Empress. No one had been near it. She knew because she had locked the bike outside Yu-Fei’s back door beneath the harsh security light while she went in to collect the next order. She had been gone less than a minute. When she came back, the paper had been there, folded twice.
Richmond Park. The oak stones. Midnight. Come alone if you want to know who gave you the Heartstone.
No name. No threat. No promise of safety.
She should have burned it. She should have rung Eva, or Silas, or even Yu-Fei, who would have told her very calmly that only idiots followed anonymous notes into parks after dark, and then sent two cousins and a rolling pin with her anyway.
Instead, Rory had stood in the cold behind the restaurant, feeling the pendant pulse beneath her collar, and known the note was true.
That was the worst part. Not believing. Knowing.
A fox barked somewhere to her left.
Rory stopped.
The sound rang once through the trees and ended too neatly, as if someone had clipped it with scissors. She held her breath. The park settled around her, quiet as a room after bad news.
Then, from the right, much closer, came the same bark.
Exactly the same.
Same pitch, same ragged edge, same little upward break at the end. Not another fox answering. A copy.
Her hand went to the torch in her pocket. She did not take it out. Light, in her experience, was not always an advantage. Sometimes it only told the dark where to look.
“Keep moving,” she whispered, and hated herself for breaking the rule.
She walked faster.
The path curved between two low hills and dipped toward a stand of oaks. Their trunks were black columns against the pale smear of sky. Mist threaded between them, ankle-high at first, then knee-high, curling in slow, deliberate loops. It did not drift with the wind. There was no wind.
The pendant warmed.
Rory’s steps slowed despite every sensible part of her shouting not to. Beneath her jumper, the Heartstone had changed from a sleepy throb to a quickening pulse . She drew it out by the chain.
The deep crimson stone rested in her palm, roughly the size of her thumbnail, its inner glow faint but alive. The silver chain slid cold over her fingers. In the moonlight, the gem looked less like a jewel than a drop of blood held at the point just before it fell.
“Near a portal,” she said, barely breathing.
The words tasted absurd. A month ago, if someone had told her she would be using sentences like that with a straight face, she’d have asked whether they’d been drinking with Silas before breakfast.
But the world had been expanding in unpleasant directions lately.
Ahead, the oaks thinned.
She saw the stones.
They stood in a rough ring, though no map of Richmond Park admitted to them and no path willingly led here unless the Grove wanted it. Ancient oak trunks had petrified upright, or stones had grown bark, or something older than both had decided not to choose. Each pillar rose taller than Rory, dark and ridged, with knots that resembled closed eyes. Frost silvered their edges. Around their bases, wildflowers bloomed in bright, impossible clusters—bluebells, foxgloves, primroses, blossoms she could not name—lush as June and wet with dew.
The clearing beyond them waited under moonlight.
The Fae Grove.
It looked almost beautiful.
That was the warning.
Rory stopped outside the boundary. Her heart beat too quickly ; the Heartstone matched it for three pulses, then skipped ahead, eager. She tucked it back under her jumper, though the warmth remained branded against her skin.
She had been here once before in daylight, or something like daylight . Time had misbehaved then. One hour among the flowers, Eva had told her afterward, had been nearly a full day outside. Rory remembered leaving with mud on her boots and pollen on her cuffs, convinced she had only missed lunch. She remembered the way the flowers leaned toward her as she passed. She remembered laughter from nowhere.
Tonight there was no laughter.
No insects. No birds shifting in sleep. No distant road noise. Even her breathing seemed too loud.
She crossed between two of the standing stones.
The pressure changed at once.
It wasn’t dramatic. No flash of light, no thunderclap, no cold hand seizing her ankle. Just a small, intimate wrongness, like stepping into a house where someone had moved all the furniture three inches to the left. Her ears popped. The air turned warm and damp. The smell of flowers thickened until it coated the back of her throat.
Rory looked over her shoulder.
Richmond Park was gone .
Not hidden. Gone.
Where the path should have been, there were only more trees, black and crowded, standing too close together. The gap between the stones framed nothing but darkness.
“All right,” she said, and then clenched her jaw .
The Grove spread before her, a circular clearing floored in grass so green it looked blue beneath the moon. Wildflowers crowded everywhere, bright faces tilted upward. The old oaks ringed the clearing beyond the standing stones, their branches interlaced overhead to form a rough dome. The moon shone through in narrow cracks.
At the center of the clearing stood a flat stone slab she did not remember from before.
On it lay a bowl.
Rory stared at it for a long moment.
The bowl was white porcelain with a blue pattern around the rim. Cheap. Familiar.
Her mouth went dry.
It was the mug from her kitchen. The chipped blue one she’d put the pendant in earlier.
Except it was whole now, and larger, and full of black water.
She did not move.
A drop fell from somewhere above and struck the surface of the water.
Plink.
The sound carried across the clearing with impossible clarity.
Rory scanned the branches overhead. No rain. No dew falling. No movement.
Another drop.
Plink.
The ripples widened. For a second, reflected in the bowl, she saw a ceiling with peeling paint and the crooked light fixture from the hallway outside her flat.
Then the water went black again.
Rory backed one step.
Behind her, something stepped with her.
The grass whispered.
She turned so fast her neck twinged, torch in hand now, thumb fumbling the switch. The beam snapped on and sliced through the clearing.
Nothing.
Flowers. Grass. The standing stones. The black trunks beyond.
Her breath came shallow. She kept the beam low, sweeping it in measured arcs the way she’d once watched a police officer do on a late-night documentary in Cardiff when she was meant to be revising tort law and was instead eating cereal from the box. The memory surfaced absurdly, brightly, and vanished.
The torchlight caught something pale at the edge of the trees.
Rory fixed the beam there.
A face hung between two trunks.
Small. White. Motionless.
Her fingers tightened around the torch until the plastic creaked.
The face resolved into a cluster of moonlit mushrooms growing up the bark, their caps overlapping like cheeks and brow. Nothing more.
She exhaled through her nose.
Then one of the mushrooms blinked.
The torch went out.
“Damn it.”
Rory slapped the side. The beam flickered once, twice, then returned. The mushrooms were ordinary caps again, wet and pale.
No. Not ordinary. Nothing here was ordinary. Ordinary was a lie people told themselves to get through days where the train was late and the rent was due and the past knew your forwarding address.
She forced herself to turn back toward the slab.
The bowl was still there.
Beside it lay something new.
A folded delivery receipt.
Rory had not heard it appear. There had been no flutter of paper, no hand placing it down. It simply occupied the stone as if it had always been there and she had failed to notice.
Her own receipt remained crushed in her left fist. She opened her hand. The paper was damp with sweat but real.
Two receipts, then.
She laughed once, quietly. It came out wrong.
“No,” she said to the clearing. “I’m not doing theatre with shrubbery.”
Her voice did not echo . But something in the trees repeated her last word after a pause, breathy and soft.
“Shrubbery.”
Rory went cold.
Not a mimic this time. A voice. Almost hers. Slightly younger. Welsh vowels more pronounced, as if it had scraped the sound out of some old part of her and put it on.
She stood absolutely still.
From the trees behind the slab came another sound: the squeak and rattle of a bicycle wheel turning slowly .
Rory’s skin prickled.
Her delivery bike was locked six miles away behind the restaurant. She had taken the bus most of the way and walked the rest. She knew exactly where the bike was. She could picture the chipped red paint, the bent basket, the sticker on the frame Eva had slapped there years ago that read DON’T FLIRT WITH ME, I’M LATE.
The wheel squeaked again.
Then came the soft slap of a takeaway bag swinging against metal.
Rory’s mind, unhelpful and sharp, supplied the rhythm: bike wheel, bag, chain tick, brake cable hiss. Sounds she heard every day. Sounds she could identify half-asleep. The ordinary made monstrous by being in the wrong place.
Something moved beyond the slab.
A shadow passed between two oaks, tall and thin, head bent under branches though the branches were high enough for any human. Rory turned the torch on it. The beam touched bark, leaves, mist.
No shadow.
The receipt on the slab stirred though the air remained still.
Rory should leave, boundary or no boundary. She should turn around, choose a gap between stones, and walk until she hit tarmac or dawn or death. The note had been bait. The Grove did not owe her answers. Places like this did not give; they traded, and the price was always discovered too late.
But the Heartstone pulsed hard enough to hurt.
And beneath the fear, under the cold sweat and the pulse beating in her throat, there was anger.
She was so tired of being summoned .
By men. By secrets. By things that waited in dark places and expected her to come when called. Evan had done it with texts that began sweet and ended with knives tucked between the words. The world had done it with letters from Cardiff University, with bills, with polite expectations dressed as love. Now some faceless thing in a fairy-haunted clearing thought it could scribble on a receipt and reel her in.
It had, admittedly, worked.
But that did not mean she had to be polite about it.
Rory strode to the slab.
Each step sank into grass that felt unpleasantly warm through the soles of her boots. The flowers turned as she passed, not swaying, turning. Their petals followed her like faces.
She stopped an arm’s length from the bowl.
The black water reflected no sky now. It reflected a room.
Her room.
The flat above Silas’ bar, seen from the corner near the wardrobe. Her unmade bed. The jumper she’d left over the chair. The narrow window with its cheap curtains drawn. The blue mug on the counter, chipped again, empty.
Someone stood by the sink.
Rory’s breath snagged.
The figure had its back to her. Shoulder-length black hair. Her grey coat. Her height, her posture, the slight favoring of the left wrist she only noticed when tired.
It was looking down at the mug.
Rory reached for the pendant. The Heartstone burned hot against her palm.
In the reflection, the other Rory lifted her head.
Not enough to show her face. Just enough to prove she had heard.
The figure raised its left hand and pressed two fingers to the inside of its wrist, where Rory’s crescent-shaped scar lay pale against her skin.
A thin smile appeared in the water, though the face remained turned away.
Rory stumbled back from the slab.
The flowers rustled all around her.
Not wind. Not movement. Whispering.
Carter.
The sound slid between stems and leaves.
Aurora.
Her full name unfurled through the clearing, layered in a dozen voices. Some high and childlike. Some cracked with age. One deep enough to make her ribs vibrate.
Laila.
She froze.
That name was not for here. Not for this. It belonged to another knot of danger, another mask worn because the world liked women better when it could not find them. Hearing it in the Grove felt like finding a stranger in her bed .
The whispering continued, delighted by the change in her breathing.
Rory.
Malphora.
The last name struck the clearing like a stone dropped down a well.
The flowers bent flat.
The mist recoiled.
Even the trees seemed to draw back, their branches tightening overhead.
Rory did not know the name. Not properly. She had heard it once in a dream and woken with blood in her mouth from biting her tongue. Since then it had lived somewhere under her thoughts, a locked drawer without a key.
The bowl trembled on the slab.
The water bulged upward.
Rory watched, unable to move, as the black surface rose above the rim without spilling. It stretched like skin pressed from beneath. A shape formed there: a hand, fingers too long, nails smooth and blunt. It pressed against the membrane of water from the inside.
The Heartstone flared.
Crimson light burst through her fingers. Heat lanced up her arm.
The watery hand withdrew.
For one glorious second, the clearing fell silent.
Then something laughed behind her.
Not loudly. Not theatrically. A small laugh. Amused. Close enough that she felt it touch the hair at the nape of her neck.
Rory spun, swinging the torch.
A woman stood just inside the ring of standing stones.
No, not a woman. The suggestion of one. Tall, draped in a coat that looked stitched from shadow and old leaves. Her hair hung in long dark ropes over her face. Where her feet touched the grass, the flowers had withered, their bright heads shriveling into grey knots.
Rory could not see her eyes.
She was sure, with a certainty that bypassed sight, that the woman was looking directly at the pendant.
“You’re late,” the woman said.
The voice was calm. Cultured. London over something older, something with roots under hills.
Rory’s terror sharpened into focus. A speaking thing was better than a lurking thing. Words had handles. You could grab them, twist them, make people—or whatever passed for people—regret using them carelessly.
“Tube delays,” Rory said.
The woman tilted her head.
The movement was nearly human, but the timing lagged, as if someone had described curiosity to her and she was performing it from memory.
“You came alone.”
“You asked.”
“I did not.”
Rory’s fingers tightened around the torch. “Then who wrote the note?”
The woman lifted one pale hand. Between two fingers she held a folded receipt.
Rory glanced at the slab.
The second receipt was gone .
“I carried it,” the woman said. “I did not write it.”
“Helpful distinction.”
“Important one.”
The Grove had begun to make sound again, but quietly. A murmur in the flowers. A slow creak in the branches overhead. The place felt awake now, not merely watchful. Awake and hungry.
Rory shifted her weight , measuring the distance to the boundary. Ten paces, maybe twelve. The woman stood in the way, but not perfectly . There was a gap to the left between her and a stone with three eye-knots in its trunk.
The woman smiled. Rory saw the pale curve of it beneath the curtain of hair.
“Running is permitted,” she said.
“Tempting.”
“Running is not leaving.”
The Heartstone’s warmth stuttered. Rory’s stomach sank.
Behind her, the bowl went plink.
She did not look.
“Who gave me the pendant?” she asked.
The woman’s smile widened. “Not the question you came to ask.”
“It’s literally written on the creepy receipt.”
“The paper knows less than you do.”
Rory swallowed. Her throat felt lined with pollen. “Fine. What question did I come to ask?”
The woman leaned forward.
In the torchlight, between strands of hair, Rory glimpsed skin the color of old wax. No eyes. Just hollows packed with tiny white flowers, petals opening and closing like mouths.
The woman whispered, “Why does it know your heartbeat?”
The pendant pulsed once, hard, as if answering .
Rory’s left wrist prickled around the crescent scar. She remembered being seven, blood dripping onto kitchen tiles while her mother tried not to panic and her father argued with the emergency operator as if cross-examining them would summon an ambulance faster. She remembered the broken glass, the blue shine of it in the sink.
No. Not blue.
Crimson.
The memory shifted under her like rotten floorboards.
She had not cut herself on a glass.
Something had come through the window.
Something small and red and burning.
Rory’s vision narrowed.
The woman took one soundless step closer. “There it is.”
The Grove breathed in.
Every flower in the clearing opened.
The scent hit Rory like a hand over the mouth—sweet, cloying, thick with summer graves. Her knees weakened. The torch beam dipped. At the edge of vision, figures gathered among the trees: children with antlers of dead twigs, men with fox faces, women whose long fingers dragged through the grass. None approached. They did not need to. The clearing itself leaned toward her.
Rory clutched the Heartstone.
Its heat cleared a narrow path through the fog in her head. Pain helped. Pain was honest.
She thought of the flat above Silas’ bar. Of the sticky patch by the third stair. Of Eva laughing too loudly at her own jokes because silence made her nervous. Of Yu-Fei pressing extra dumplings into her hands with a stern look that dared her to refuse. Of Cardiff rain against school windows. Of her mother’s red pen. Of her father’s old briefcase. Of every ordinary thing that tethered her to a world that, for all its cruelties, did not grow teeth in the dark and call it destiny.
“No,” Rory said.
The woman stopped.
Such a small word. It seemed too thin to hold against the Grove. But Rory had built her life around that word once. Had packed a bag while Evan slept. Had walked out with a split lip and shaking hands. Had learned that no did not need to be loud to be final.
She yanked the silver chain over her head.
The moment the pendant left her skin, the clearing shrieked.
Not with voices. With wood splitting, roots tearing, flowers opening too wide. The sound slammed into her skull. Rory staggered but kept hold of the Heartstone, its crimson light blazing between her fingers.
The woman lunged.
Rory threw the pendant into the bowl.
The black water erupted upward.
For an instant, the Grove turned red. The slab, the flowers, the standing stones, the eyeless woman caught mid-step—all soaked in the Heartstone’s inner glow. The water did not splash out. It rose in a column, twisting, and within it Rory saw flashes: her kitchen, the park path, a sky full of ash, a door made of bone, a hand passing a crimson stone through broken glass to a child crying over her bleeding wrist.
Then the bowl cracked.
The woman screamed once, furious and afraid.
Rory ran.
She did not aim for the path. There was no path. She aimed for the gap beside the three-eyed stone and drove herself toward it with every scrap of strength left in her legs. Grass grabbed at her boots. Flowers snapped closed around her ankles with tiny wet clicks. Something brushed her hair. Something else whispered her name in her mother’s voice, then Eva’s, then her own.
She did not turn.
The standing stone rushed toward her.
For one sickening second, the gap narrowed. The woman’s laughter poured after her, rising and rising. The trees beyond the boundary were black and close. No park. No London. No safety.
Rory lowered her shoulder and plunged between the stones.
Cold air struck her face.
Mud slid under her boots. She stumbled, fell to one knee, and caught herself with her left hand. Pain shot through her wrist. Real pain. Human pain. The kind that came from rocks and bad landings, not haunted flowers.
Behind her, the Grove was gone .
Richmond Park stretched silent under the moon. The path lay where it should. The oaks stood ordinary and bare-limbed. Far away, a car passed, its engine a soft insect hum. The city existed. The world existed.
Rory stayed on her knees, panting.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She flinched so hard she nearly dropped it pulling it free.
12:09.
Two minutes.
The screen showed one new message from an unknown number.
For a moment she could only stare. Her fingers were slick with mud. The crescent scar on her wrist ached with each beat of her pulse .
She opened the message.
Did you learn enough?
No signature.
The pendant was gone . She could feel the absence of its weight like a missing tooth. But beneath her jumper, against her breastbone where it had rested, warmth still pulsed .
Once.
Twice.
Not from the stone.
From inside her.
In the trees to her left, a fox barked.
This time, nothing answered.