AI Aurora found the stones by the sound of the rain.
Not rain exactly. Richmond Park had been dry all day, the grass gone pale beneath a brittle June sun, but somewhere beyond the black line of trees she could hear a steady patter, soft as fingertips drumming on leaves. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
She stopped on the path and checked her phone.
No signal. The screen said 11:47 p.m., though the digits flickered once before settling. Her torch app threw a weak blue-white cone over packed earth, rabbit droppings, tufts of grass silvered by moonlight. Behind her, London lay in its usual distant glow, a bruised amber haze over the horizon. Ahead, the park folded into darkness.
“This is ridiculous,” she said under her breath .
Her voice disappeared too quickly .
Aurora slipped the phone into her jacket pocket and touched the pendant beneath her shirt. The Heartstone lay against her sternum, warm enough to feel through the cotton. Its crimson glow seeped faintly between the buttons of her overshirt, a small, guilty ember.
The note had arrived that afternoon inside an unmarked envelope wedged beneath the door of her flat above Silas’ bar.
COME ALONE.
RICHMOND PARK. THE OAKS.
MIDNIGHT.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO GAVE YOU THE HEARTSTONE.
No signature. No handwriting she recognised. The letters had been cut from different newspapers, though not in the theatrical ransom-note way. They were neat, almost careful.
She could have shown Silas. Could have called Eva. Could have done any number of sensible things that involved not walking alone into an empty park with an artifact from another world hanging around her neck.
Instead, she had put on boots, taken the Tube as far as it went, and followed the old deer tracks off the path toward a stand of oaks she had only ever seen in daylight.
The warmth of the pendant had guided her.
That was the part she trusted least.
It pulsed once beneath her hand.
Aurora lifted her eyes.
The trees ahead were wrong.
They were oaks, certainly. Their trunks rose thick and ancient from the earth, bark scored with deep black furrows. Yet they stood too close together, their roots tangled across the ground like knuckled hands. Moonlight did not reach their lower branches. The rain sound came from within them.
She crossed the last stretch of open grass.
At once, the air changed.
The night had been warm. Here it was cold enough to tighten the skin over her arms. The smell of dry grass vanished beneath damp earth, crushed leaves, and something sweetly rotten, like flowers left too long in stagnant water.
Her boots sank into soft ground.
Aurora looked down.
Wildflowers pushed up through the grass around her ankles: foxgloves, bluebells, little white stars she could not name. They were wet with rain.
Above them, the sky remained clear.
“Nope,” she murmured.
The sensible part of her, the part that had gotten her out of Evan’s flat with one rucksack and no warning, catalogued the facts. She was at the boundary. The pendant was reacting to a portal. The grove was real. Isolde’s grove, if the stories she had overheard in Silas’ bar were anything close to true.
And someone had summoned her here.
She moved between the trees.
The world closed behind her.
It did not happen with any dramatic crack of thunder or flash of light. One step, she could still see the path behind her. The next, there was only woodland: oak trunks, wet flowers, and a darkness so complete that her phone’s torch seemed to be swallowed before it travelled three feet.
Aurora spun around.
Where the park should have been stood another wall of trees.
Her breath caught. She forced it out slowly through her nose.
Fine. Pocket realm. Fae boundary. Not ideal, but explainable .
The rain continued to fall somewhere close by. Not on her. She held out one hand. Her palm stayed dry.
Then she heard a child laugh.
It came from her left, thin and high and briefly delighted.
Aurora went still.
The sound had been close enough that she should have seen whoever made it. Her torch beam swept across flowers and twisted roots. It found nothing but a low, moss-cloaked stone half-buried in the earth.
“Hello?” she called.
Again, her voice vanished.
No answer came.
She started forward, more cautiously now, moving toward the faint red glow that had begun to shine through the fabric over her chest. The Heartstone’s warmth increased with every step. Her skin prickled around it.
The grove opened abruptly.
Ancient oak standing stones formed a rough circle in the clearing, each taller than Aurora and broad enough that two people could not have linked hands around it. At first she mistook them for tree trunks. Then the torch beam struck their surfaces, revealing weathered grey stone threaded with roots.
The space between them held a shallow hollow of grass. Wildflowers crowded its edges in bright, impossible colours: blue petals with black centres, yellow blossoms that seemed to turn toward her light, crimson bells hanging heavy on slender stems .
At the centre stood a woman.
Aurora stopped so hard her heel skidded in mud.
The woman had her back to her. She wore a long white dress, old-fashioned in cut, its hem dark with damp. Her hair fell to her waist in pale ropes, almost silver in the moonlight. She stood with her head bowed, hands folded before her.
Relief came first. Sharp, stupid relief.
“Were you the one who sent the note?” Aurora asked.
The woman did not move.
Aurora’s grip tightened around her phone. “I’m Aurora Carter.”
Nothing.
The rain sound sharpened. Now it was distinctly above her, a heavy shower beating on a roof. Yet the clearing lay open to the clear sky.
Aurora took one slow step into the circle.
The woman spoke.
“You took your time.”
Her voice was dry and soft, as if it had travelled a great distance to reach them.
Aurora felt the first real chill settle in her stomach . “Who are you?”
The woman tilted her head.
“You know.”
“I don’t.”
“You have forgotten much.”
The words struck with an intimacy Aurora disliked. She kept her gaze fixed on the woman’s back. “If you know why I’m here, turn around.”
For a moment there was no movement at all.
Then the woman’s shoulders rose with a breath.
The sound of it filled the clearing.
It was not the breath of one person. It was a crowd drawing air together: dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lungs expanding in the dark.
Aurora’s torch flickered .
The woman began to turn.
Aurora looked away before she saw her face.
She did not decide to. Her eyes simply slid aside, dragged toward the nearest standing stone. Something was carved into it. Not letters. Deep, looping grooves, too irregular to be writing and too deliberate to be age. The stone seemed damp, though no rain touched it. Black water ran slowly from one carving to the next.
Behind her, the woman laughed.
The child’s laugh.
Aurora backed out of the circle.
Her boot caught on a root. She nearly went down, caught herself, and swung her torch around.
The clearing was empty.
No woman. No white dress.
Only the stones.
The Heartstone burned against her chest.
She yanked it free from beneath her shirt. The deep crimson gem glowed bright enough to throw red light across her fingers. Its silver chain had twisted around itself, warm and taut against the back of her neck.
In the centre of the circle, the grass had flattened.
Not in the shape of footsteps .
In the shape of a body.
Aurora stared at it. A long depression lay across the grass, head at one end, feet at the other, arms pressed close to its sides. The flowers around it bowed inward as if listening .
She took another step backward.
A voice whispered from directly behind her.
“Rory.”
Every muscle in her body locked.
Only three people called her that without irony. Eva. Her mother. Silas, on rare occasions when he was trying to soften bad news.
This voice was Eva’s.
Aurora did not turn.
“Rory,” it said again, and this time there was fear in it. “Please.”
Her mind reached immediately for an explanation. Glamour. Mimicry. A trap that used familiar voices. She had heard enough in the bar, enough from people who spoke of the Fae with lowered voices and careful eyes, to know that names mattered and invitations mattered and desperation mattered most of all.
Still, the sound of Eva crying tugged at something raw beneath her ribs.
“Don’t,” Aurora said.
The voice behind her broke on a sob. “I can’t find the way out.”
Aurora swallowed.
“Then keep walking,” she said. Her own voice came out thin. “You’ll find it.”
“I’m hurt.”
The rain was louder now. It hammered overhead, though the sky stayed hard and bright with stars.
Aurora squeezed the pendant in her fist. Its edges pressed into her palm.
“Eva knows not to come here alone,” she said.
Silence.
Then, close to her right ear, the voice said, “Good girl.”
Aurora ran.
She did not wait to see what stood behind her. She bolted through the trees, torch beam jerking wildly across wet trunks and flowering brush. Roots clawed at her boots. Branches slapped her face. The clearing vanished at once, swallowed by darkness and trunks that seemed to shift aside just too late for her to avoid them .
Her phone slipped from her hand and struck the ground. The torch spun through leaves, lighting the underside of a fern before going dark.
Aurora kept running.
The rain followed overhead.
She could hear it moving with her, a circular patch of storm pacing her through the wood. Every time she slowed, it slowed. Every time she stumbled, it seemed to gather itself above her with a low, wet hiss.
Something moved between the trees to her left.
Not fast. Not chasing.
Keeping pace.
Aurora caught flashes of white: a sleeve, a bare ankle, the pale oval of a face turned toward her. Each time she snapped her head around, there was only bark and shadow.
Her lungs started to burn. The grove had not been this large coming in. It could not have been. She had walked perhaps five minutes from the outer path to the clearing.
Now the trees went on without end.
She forced herself to stop.
Panic wanted momentum. It wanted her exhausted, blind, careless.
Aurora bent over with both hands on her knees, fighting for breath. Her hair stuck to her cheek. A thin line of blood ran down one wrist where a branch had caught her, mingling with the old crescent scar on her left wrist.
The Heartstone’s glow pulsed through her closed fist.
Not toward the clearing.
Ahead.
She straightened.
The crimson light strengthened when she faced a narrow gap between two oaks. Beyond it, she could see a faint grey brightness. Not moonlight. Something flatter. Dawn, perhaps. Or the park lamps beyond the boundary.
A way out.
She started toward it.
Behind her, leaves rustled.
Aurora did not turn. She stepped between the two trees.
The world shuddered.
For one horrible second, the gap narrowed around her. Bark scraped her shoulders. Roots curled over her boots. The trees groaned with the sound of old timber under strain, and from within their trunks came a chorus of whispers.
Stay.
Stay.
Stay.
Aurora seized the silver chain and pulled.
The pendant tore free from her clenched hand, swinging outward on its chain. Crimson light flared between the trees.
The whispers became a shriek.
She threw herself forward.
Cold air struck her face.
Aurora hit the ground hard on dry grass beneath an open sky.
For several seconds she lay there, gasping, her cheek pressed to earth. The familiar scents of the park surrounded her: dust, grass, horse manure carried faintly on the night air. Somewhere far off, a car passed on a road.
No rain.
No flowers.
No whispering.
She rolled onto her back.
The ancient oaks stood twenty feet away in a harmless, scattered cluster. Moonlight lay pale across their roots. There was no gap between them, no wall of darkness, no hidden clearing.
Her phone lay beside her boot, screen uncracked and lit.
12:03 a.m.
Aurora grabbed it and pushed herself upright.
The Heartstone hung against her chest, no longer hot. Its faint inner glow had dwindled to a dull red ember.
She turned toward the trees.
At first she saw nothing.
Then a small white shape appeared between two trunks.
A girl stood in the shadows.
She could not have been more than eight or nine. Her dress was white, her long hair pale. Her face remained hidden behind a curtain of it. One bare hand gripped the side of an oak.
Aurora’s breath stopped.
The girl raised her other hand.
In it, she held Aurora’s note.
Though the distance was too great to make out the words, Aurora knew the careful cut letters. She knew the blackened thumbprint in one corner where she had smudged it earlier.
The child tipped her head.
“You came alone,” she said.
Then the trees were empty.