AI The standing stones were wrong.
Rory had counted them twice. Seven oaks, twisted into shapes no wind could carve, marking the boundary of Isolde's grove. She'd counted seven the first time she'd come through, three nights ago. Now there were eight.
She tightened her fingers around the pendant at her throat. The crimson gem pulsed warm against her collarbone, steady as a second heartbeat. Not hot. Not yet. Whatever had drawn her back to Richmond Park at this hour wasn't a Hel portal, or at least not one the Heartstone could detect.
The wildflowers should have been visible even in darkness. They bloomed year-round here, Isolde's little defiance of seasons, pale petals that caught moonlight like cups of silver. Rory swept her torch across the clearing's edge. The flowers were there, all right. They'd turned black.
Not wilted. Not dead. Black, the way a bruise goes black, as though something had struck each petal individually.
She stepped past the eighth stone and the air changed. Thicker. The scent of wet earth gave way to something sweeter, cloying, like fruit left to rot in a sealed room. Her stomach turned.
Three nights ago, she'd come to the grove seeking answers about the pendant. Isolde had been absent, but the grove itself had welcomed her, humming with that peculiar Fae warmth that made her skin prickle. She'd found what she needed carved into the central stone, a spiral pattern that matched the pendant's setting, and left before time could slip away from her. An hour inside had cost her forty minutes in the park. Lucky, by Grove standards.
Tonight the grove didn't hum. It listened.
Rory crossed the clearing toward the central stone, her boots pressing into grass that yielded too much, as though the ground beneath had softened. She kept the torch low, scanning the treeline. The oaks stood motionless despite the breeze she'd felt on the hillside minutes before. Their branches curved inward, fingers interlocking above her like the vault of a cathedral built by things that had never seen a church.
The central stone bore the spiral. Same as before. She traced it with her free hand while the pendant swung gently from her neck, its glow feeble, uncertain. The carving felt different under her fingertips. Rougher. The grooves were deeper than she remembered, and when she pulled her hand back, her fingertips came away dark.
Not dirt. Not sap.
She wiped them on her jacket and forced her breathing to stay level. The pendant pulsed once, warmer, and she felt it push against her skin the way a cat presses into your hand when it wants attention.
"I know," she murmured. "Something's here."
The words hung in the air longer than they should have. Sound didn't travel right in this place. It pooled, collected, refused to dissipate. Her voice came back to her in fragments, syllables rearranged, and she caught the shape of her own voice whispering something she hadn't said.
She switched off the torch. Darkness crashed in, total and physical, and for three heartbeats she couldn't see her own hands. Then the pendant's glow spread, casting a small crimson radius around her chest. Enough to see the stone. Enough to see the ground. Enough to see that the grass behind her had flattened in a path, as though something heavy had dragged itself from the treeline to within six feet of where she stood.
The path ended there. Whatever had made it hadn't continued forward. It had stopped. Waited. And then, by the look of the matted grass, settled.
Rory didn't turn around. Turning around implied she expected to see something, and the part of her brain that had kept her alive through Evan's worst nights, through the flight to London, through the slow rebuild of a life from splinters, that part told her with absolute certainty that seeing was the wrong move.
The pendant flared. Hot, now. Hot enough that she felt it through her shirt, and she clutched it without thinking, hissing between her teeth. The glow threw her shadow long and jagged across the central stone.
And her shadow had company.
It stretched behind her on the grass, sharp-edged and familiar , her own shape rendered in ink. But beside it, overlapping it, another shadow lay. Taller. Narrower at the shoulders. Its head, if it had a head, tilted at an angle that vertebrae didn't permit.
Rory's hand found the crescent scar on her left wrist. Old habit. She pressed her thumb into it, grounding herself the way her therapist had told her not to, and the small pain cleared the fog of fear enough to think.
She'd come here because the pendant had been pulling her. Three nights of interrupted sleep, of waking at 3 a.m. with the gemstone burning against her chest and the image of the grove fixed behind her eyelids like a brand. She'd thought it was Isolde calling her back. A message, perhaps. An answer to the questions the spiral carving had raised.
But Isolde's grove didn't feel like this. Isolde's grove felt like walking into a warm bath after a cold day. This felt like standing in someone's mouth .
The second shadow shifted. Just the head. Just a few degrees. Tracking her.
Rory took one step sideways, away from the central stone, watching the shadows. Her own moved with her. The other one didn't follow. It stayed where it was, cast by nothing she could see, pinned to the grass like a stain.
Then it lifted one arm.
Slowly. The shadow-arm rose, jointless, fluid, and pointed toward the treeline on her left. Rory followed the gesture with her eyes, keeping her chin level, refusing to give the thing behind her the satisfaction of a turned head.
Between two of the ancient oaks, where the standing stones should have marked the boundary, a gap had opened. Not a physical gap. A subtraction. The trees were there, the stones were there, but the space between them had been hollowed out into a perfect rectangle of absolute black. No depth. No dimension. Just absence, rectangular and patient, waiting the way a doorway waits.
The pendant burned. Rory yanked her hand away from it and the chain bit into the back of her neck. The crimson glow doubled, tripled, and the shadows on the ground recoiled, slithering backward like burned things. All except the second shadow. It held its position, arm still raised, still pointing at the rectangle of nothing.
Then it spoke.
Not with sound. The grove's air carried it the wrong way, pooling around her ankles, rising through her boots, vibrating in the bones of her legs. A single word, or the impression of a word, shapeless and ancient, older than the oaks, older than the stones, older than whatever Isolde was.
It said her name.
Not Rory. Not Aurora. Not Carter.
Malphora.
The word hit her like a fist below the sternum. Her knees buckled. She caught herself on the central stone, fingers digging into the spiral carving, and the grooves under her palms were deeper now, wet, pulsing with a rhythm that matched the pendant's glow. The rectangle of absence between the oaks widened by a hand's breadth. Then another.
The wildflowers along the clearing's edge, the ones that had turned black, began to peel themselves from their stems. Not falling. Climbing. Ascending in slow circles, black petals spinning, caught in a wind that touched nothing else.
Rory pushed herself upright. Her legs shook. The pendant had cooled against her chest, but its glow remained, painting everything in shades of wine and warning.
The second shadow was gone .
She swept her eyes across the grass, the treeline, the standing stones. Eight of them, still. The rectangle of absence between the oaks pulsed gently , a membrane rather than a hole, and through it, impossibly, she could hear water. Not the Thames. Not rain. A current moving through somewhere vast and lightless, carrying things that clicked and tapped against unseen banks.
The pendant pulled. Not warm this time. Cold. A sharp tug toward the rectangle, the chain going taut against her neck as though someone had taken the end and walked toward the gap.
Rory grabbed the chain above the gem and held fast. The metal links slid through her fingers, burning cold, pulling with a strength that belonged to something far larger than a thumbnail-sized stone. Her boots skidded on the softened ground. She dug in, leaned back, and the chain cut a red line across her palm.
The water-sounds grew louder. The black petals rose higher, spinning in their impossible spiral, and from somewhere beyond the rectangle, from that lightless water, something surfaced. She couldn't see it. She didn't need to. The air pressure changed the way it changes when a large animal breaks the surface of a lake, and she heard breathing, vast and wet and patient, coming through the gap between the oaks.
The pendant went slack.
The chain drooped against her chest. The glow snuffed out. The rectangle between the oaks held for one second, two, three, and then collapsed inward, the edges rushing together with a sound like tearing silk , leaving only bark and stone and the ordinary darkness of a London park at night.
Rory released the chain. Her palm bled freely, the cut clean and deliberate. She pressed it against her jacket and counted her breaths until her heart stopped trying to claw its way through her ribs.
The eighth standing stone was gone .
Seven oaks, twisted and ancient, marking the boundary of Isolde's grove. Seven, as there had always been. The wildflowers stood along the clearing's edge, pale and luminous, petals catching the moonlight like cups of silver.
The central stone's spiral carving was dry. Her fingertips, when she raised them to her torch, were clean.
The pendant hung dark and still against her sternum. But when she pressed her thumb to the crimson surface, she felt it. Faint. Barely there. A pulse , slow and deep and satisfied, like a heart that had just finished something it had waited a very long time to do.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out with her uninjured hand. One notification. A text from an unknown number, received at 3:17 a.m., though she'd only been in the grove for what felt like twenty minutes .
Three words.
She found you.