AI The moon had already slipped behind the canopy by the time Rory reached the ring of ancient oak standing stones. Richmond Park lay silent behind her, the distant glow of London reduced to a faint amber smear on the horizon. She had come because the Heartstone would not let her sleep. For three nights the pendant had burned against her sternum, its deep crimson core flaring each time her thoughts drifted toward this place. The old map she had found in the back room of Silas’s bar showed the grove tucked inside the park like a secret folded into the crease of a page. A pocket between realms, the handwritten note beside it had read. Answers, perhaps. Or at least an end to the dreams that left her bolting upright with the name Malphora lodged behind her teeth.
She stepped between two stones. The change was immediate and absolute. The faint drone of traffic died. The November wind, which had been cutting through her jacket only seconds earlier, simply stopped. Her boots met grass that should have been stiff with frost but instead gave softly , releasing the perfume of wildflowers that had no business blooming in the dark. Blues and violets and impossible golds clustered at her feet, their petals luminous, their stems trembling though no breeze moved them.
Rory’s bright blue eyes narrowed . The scar on her left wrist gave a single, stinging pulse , the old crescent-shaped line flaring as though freshly cut. She rubbed it absently, a gesture worn smooth by years of worry. The pendant hung heavy now, warm as living skin. According to the single brittle page she had stolen from the university library before fleeing Cardiff, the stone pulsed near a Hel portal. She had assumed the grove was that portal . Now, standing inside it, she was no longer sure.
The silence pressed against her eardrums. Not the clean hush of an empty wood at night, but a held breath . A waiting.
She turned in a slow circle. The standing stones—ancient, furred with moss, carved with spirals that hurt to follow—formed a perfect boundary. Beyond them the oaks rose taller than they had any right to, their branches interlocking like fingers steepled in prayer. The air tasted metallic, as though she had bitten down on a coin. She exhaled, watching the plume of her breath hang too long before it dissolved.
That was when she noticed the wrongness.
It began as a peripheral flicker . Something tall sliding behind the nearest stone, gone the instant she looked directly at it. Rory held still, heart knocking against her ribs in a measured rhythm she refused to let accelerate. Cool-headed, she reminded herself. Out-of-the-box. She had survived Evan’s rages by noticing details others missed. She would survive this the same way.
She listened.
At first there was nothing. Then, layered beneath the silence , a sound like bare feet moving through grass. Not approaching. Circling. The pace of it suggested something much taller than her five-foot-six frame. The footsteps paused when she turned toward them, resumed when she looked away. A child’s game played with adult stakes.
“Show yourself,” she said. Her voice sounded small, swallowed by the grove before it could travel far.
No answer. Only the flowers leaning toward her, petals opening wider as though her words were sunlight.
Rory unclasped the pendant and held it in her palm. The silver chain spilled between her fingers like cold water. The gem glowed with its faint inner light, but the warmth had changed. It no longer comforted. It itched. She could feel her own pulse in the stone now, a second, alien heartbeat.
She took one deliberate step toward the gap she had entered through.
The gap was no longer there.
Where the path should have opened back onto the moonlit park, another standing stone had risen. Its surface was smooth, almost wet-looking, and the spiral carved into it turned slowly . She was certain it had not been turning a moment ago.
The footsteps resumed, closer now. They dragged slightly, as though the thing making them was tired of pretending to be discreet. Rory’s shoulders tightened. She refused to run. Running had not saved her in Cardiff; it had only painted targets on her back. Instead she crouched, pressing her palm to the earth. The grass was warm. Unnaturally so. Beneath it she felt something thrumming, a low vibration that traveled up her arm and into the scar at her wrist.
The vibration resolved into a whisper .
Aurora.
Not spoken. Not quite. It arrived inside her skull the way her own thoughts did, except the voice carried an accent she could not place, syllables stretched like taffy. The name sounded almost fond. Almost hungry.
She jerked upright. The circle of stones had narrowed. Not dramatically—she was no fool who would fail to notice sudden impossible geometry—but enough that the distance between her and the nearest marker had shortened by half a pace. The wildflowers brushed her ankles now, their stems curling with gentle insistence around the laces of her boots.
Rory exhaled through her nose. “All right,” she murmured. “New rules. Fine.”
She began walking the perimeter, keeping one hand on the stones as she moved. The moss felt velvet beneath her fingers, then suddenly too slick, as though she were touching the hide of something alive. Each time she passed a gap between stones she glimpsed movement on the other side: a shoulder, a length of dark hair that might have been her own, the hem of a coat identical to the one she wore. When she stopped to look, the gaps showed only more flowers, more trees, more impossible night.
The pendant flared hot. She gasped and nearly dropped it. The crimson light spilled between her fingers, casting her scar in sharp relief. For a single heartbeat the crescent looked fresh, bleeding. She blinked and the illusion vanished, but the afterimage remained.
The circling footsteps had gained a companion. Now two sets moved opposite each other, one heavy, one light. They met behind her, paused, then separated again. She refused to turn. Turning had not helped before. Instead she focused on the ground directly ahead of her boots, counting the flowers she crushed. Seven. Twelve. Nineteen. The numbers steadied her until she realized the crushed blossoms were releasing her own name in soft exhalations—Rory, Rory, Rory—each petal sighing it as it died.
Her stomach folded in on itself.
She stopped walking. The footsteps stopped too, close enough that she could hear the wet click of a tongue tasting the air. The certainty that she was not alone had become something denser, a pressure against her spine like the muzzle of a gun. She could feel eyes on the nape of her neck, multiple pairs, unblinking. Some of them were kind. Most were not.
The pendant spoke.
Not in words. In memory. A flood of images poured behind her eyes: the flat above Silas’s bar, but the windows were wrong, the walls breathing. Eva’s face, but the smile was too wide. Evan standing in the doorway of her childhood bedroom in Cardiff, except his shadow had too many joints. And beneath it all, a woman with her own black hair and bright blue eyes, older, crowned in flowers that bled at the stems. The woman’s lips moved. Malphora, she said, as though correcting a mistake .
Rory staggered. Her shoulder struck a standing stone and the impact rang through her bones like a bell. The vibration traveled outward. Every flower in the grove turned to face her at once. Their centers were not yellow. They were eyes. Tiny, wet, aware.
She slid down the stone until she sat with her back against it, knees drawn up. The intelligent part of her mind—the part that had fled an abusive ex and rebuilt a life delivering curry on a bicycle—catalogued every detail. The way the air had begun to taste of iron and crushed petals. The way time had loosened; her watch now read eleven minutes past midnight, yet she could feel entire seasons sliding past overhead. The way the two sets of footsteps had become four, then six, all of them pausing just beyond the limit of her peripheral vision.
One of them breathed against her left ear.
She did not flinch. Flinching was acknowledgement. Instead she closed her fist around the pendant until the chain cut into her palm. The pain was sharp and honest. Real. She used it to anchor herself.
“I don’t know what you are,” she said quietly. “But I didn’t come here for you.”
The breathing paused. Then it laughed. The sound was soft, almost affectionate, and it came from every direction at once. The flowers shivered with it. One petal brushed her cheek like a caress.
Rory opened her eyes. Directly across the shrinking circle, a figure stood between two stones. It was roughly her height, clothed in a coat that might have been hers. The face was turned away, but the hair was straight, black, shoulder-length. The figure raised its left hand. A crescent scar glistened on the wrist.
It was not a reflection.
Rory felt her own wrist burn in sympathy. She looked down. The scar there had opened again, a thin line of blood welling along the old curve. Not much. Just enough to scent the air.
The figure took one step toward her. Then another. Each footfall matched the frantic beat of her heart. Behind it, the other presences stirred—taller shapes, thinner, crowned with antlers of oak and flowering vine. They did not rush. They had no need. The grove itself was tightening around her like a fist.
She stood slowly , never taking her eyes from the approaching shape. The pendant flared once, brilliant, then went dark. The sudden absence of its light felt like blindness . Rory backed up until the stone pressed against her spine again. The flowers tangled around her ankles, tugging with surprising strength.
The figure lifted its head.
Its face was hers, but the eyes were wrong—hollowed out, filled with the same faint inner glow the pendant had possessed. It smiled with her mouth. The expression did not belong there.
Rory’s mind raced , searching for the exit that out-of-the-box thinking had always provided. The stones. The boundary. If time moved differently here, perhaps direction did too. She turned sideways, pressing her bleeding wrist to the spiral carved into the stone. The carving accepted the blood the way dry earth accepts rain. It drank.
For one impossible second the grove inhaled with her.
Then every flower screamed.
The sound was not loud. It was intimate, poured directly into the hollows of her bones. Rory dropped to her knees, hands clapped over her ears. The duplicate of herself was closer now, close enough that she could smell her own shampoo on its hair. Its hand—her hand—reached out and brushed the pendant where it lay against her chest.
The stone woke with a vengeance. Heat exploded outward. The duplicate shrieked and staggered back, its stolen face cracking like porcelain . Behind it the taller shapes surged forward, no longer content to linger at the edges of vision. Rory saw too many joints, too many eyes, mouths that opened sideways. She saw her own childhood face among them, laughing with Evan’s voice.
She did not wait to see more.
Pushing to her feet, she ran. Not toward the vanished path. Toward the densest cluster of stones, where the spirals spun fastest. The ground bucked beneath her. Flowers tore at her jeans, drawing thin lines of blood that felt strangely like kisses. The air thickened, trying to hold her in place, but she was stronger than she looked. She had carried too many orders up too many flights of stairs. She had walked out of Evan’s flat with a split lip and a suitcase and nothing else. She would walk out of this grove the same way.
Behind her the voices rose, layering her names like cards in a deck: Aurora. Rory. Laila. Carter. Malphora. Each one peeled away something she could not afford to lose.
She reached the stones. The gap between two of them flickered , showing a glimpse of moonlit park, of real November grass stiff with cold. She threw herself toward it.
The grove resisted. The standing stones ground together like teeth. For one terrible moment she was caught between them, the ancient rock scraping her ribs, the weight of an entire false realm pressing against her back. The duplicate’s hand closed around her ankle. The fingers were too long. The nails were petals.
Rory kicked hard. Something gave. She spilled out onto the ordinary earth of Richmond Park with a cry that tasted of blood and crushed flowers.
Behind her the stones settled back into their innocent circle. The wildflowers vanished. The air was cold and ordinary and carried the faint smell of distant traffic and damp leaves.
She lay on her back, chest heaving, staring up at a moon that had not moved. Her watch read 12:13 a.m. Thirteen minutes. She had been inside for thirteen minutes.
The pendant rested cool and inert against her sternum once more. The scar on her wrist had closed, leaving only the familiar silvery crescent. But when she sat up, she saw that every wildflower within arm’s reach had been beheaded . Their stems wept sap that looked too much like blood.
And somewhere behind the standing stones, just at the edge of hearing, the soft sound of footsteps resumed. Circling. Patient. Waiting for her to come back.
Rory pushed herself upright. Her hands shook only a little. She looked at the pendant, then at the grove that now appeared perfectly ordinary . She understood, with the same clarity that had once sent her running to London, that the wrongness had not been confined to the clearing.
It had followed her out.
She turned her back on the stones anyway and began the long walk toward the lights of the city. Behind her, the wildflowers slowly lifted their severed heads, petals unfurling in the dark, turning to watch her go. Their eyes—tiny, wet, aware—blinked once in perfect unison.
Rory did not look back. She kept walking, one boot in front of the other, the taste of iron still on her tongue and the sound of her own stolen names ringing gently in her ears. The night felt thinner now. Easier to tear.
She tightened her grip on the pendant until the chain bit flesh.
Next time, she thought, I’ll be ready.
The grove did not answer. But it remembered the promise, and it smiled with every unseen mouth.