AI The first thing Rory noticed was the absence of deer.
Richmond Park belonged to them after dark. They moved through the bracken in pale, watchful herds, hooves knocking softly against roots, antlers combing the mist. Even when hidden, they left signs of themselves everywhere: bark stripped from young trees, cropped grass, the sudden crack of a branch under weight .
Tonight, there was nothing.
Rory stood beyond the locked pedestrian gate with one hand wrapped around the cold iron bars. Behind her, the road shone black beneath the streetlamps. A car passed without slowing, tyres whispering over wet tarmac, and for a moment the ordinary world seemed no farther away than the width of her outstretched arm.
Then the car vanished around the bend. Silence pressed in.
“Brilliant,” she murmured.
Her breath clouded the air.
She checked the message on her phone for the fifth time.
COME ALONE. NORTH OF THE POND. FIND THE OAK STONES BEFORE MIDNIGHT. BRING THE HEARTSTONE.
No number. No signature. No explanation of how the sender knew about the pendant tucked beneath her jumper.
A sensible person would have taken the message to the police. A sensible person would not have climbed a locked gate into Richmond Park at eleven thirty on a Thursday night. But the police would ask where she had got the Heartstone, and Rory had no answer that sounded remotely sane. It had appeared in a padded envelope outside her flat above Silas’ bar, addressed to Laila—a name she had used exactly once, in circumstances she preferred not to revisit. No return address. Inside, only the silver chain and the crimson stone, warm as living skin.
For three weeks, the pendant had done nothing.
At ten forty-seven that evening, it had begun to pulse against her chest.
Rory released the gate and turned towards the trees.
Her phone’s torch cast a hard white circle across the path. Damp leaves gleamed like scales. Beyond them, trunks crowded together in ranks, their upper branches tangled against a moonless sky. She knew the park well enough by daylight. At night, every path looked invented.
She started walking.
The pendant warmed with each step.
Not steadily. It gave a small throb , then cooled, then warmed again—a sluggish rhythm that did not match her heartbeat. She tried not to think of it as a pulse . Tried not to imagine it answering something beneath the earth.
North of the pond. Find the oak stones.
There were no standing stones marked on the park maps, oak or otherwise. The phrase had sounded like nonsense until Eva, after two glasses of wine and no prompting, had once mentioned old stories about trees that forgot they were trees. Oaks petrified by Fae magic. Boundaries that only appeared to those invited across them.
Eva had laughed afterwards.
Rory had not.
A branch snapped somewhere to her left.
She stopped.
The torchlight washed over bracken, nettles and the silver side of a birch trunk. Nothing moved. No animal bolted. No wings beat overhead.
“Deer,” she said, and immediately disliked how small her voice sounded.
She walked on.
The path dipped towards the pond. Water showed between the trees, flat and colourless. A skin of mist hovered above it, though the night was not cold enough for mist. Rory kept to the edge, following a narrow track churned to mud by boots and bicycles. Her trainers sank with soft sucking sounds.
Halfway around the pond, she heard footsteps behind her.
Three measured crunches.
Rory turned so quickly the pendant struck her sternum.
The path was empty.
Her torch reached twenty metres at most. Beyond that, darkness stood solid between the trees.
She listened.
A drop fell from a branch into the pond. Rings widened over the black surface.
Nothing else.
She resumed walking, slower now. The footsteps did not return.
North of the pond, the path split. One branch curved east towards open grassland. The other disappeared into a dense stand of oak and holly. The Heartstone flared hot enough to sting.
Rory caught it through her jumper. Its thumbnail-sized shape pressed into her palm.
“All right,” she whispered. “That way.”
She took the wooded path.
The beam of her phone trembled , though her hand did not. The battery indicator showed seventy-two per cent. A few steps later, it showed fifty-nine.
She frowned and tapped the screen.
Forty-eight.
“Don’t you dare.”
The phone dimmed.
Ahead, something pale slipped behind an oak.
Rory froze.
It had been upright. Too tall for a deer. A narrow vertical gleam, there and gone at the edge of the torchlight.
“Hello?”
No answer.
She should leave. The thought arrived clean and reasonable, sounding irritatingly like her father presenting an argument in court. Turn around. Walk back to the gate. Ring Eva. Ring Silas. Ring anyone. Whatever waited at the oak stones could wait until daylight.
Rory turned.
The path behind her was gone .
Holly crowded the place where it should have been, glossy leaves reflecting the torch in sharp white points. The shrubs stood shoulder-high and densely woven, their branches thick as wrists. She stepped closer and found no gap, no mud, no impression of her own footprints. Only untouched leaf mould beneath the bushes.
Her mouth went dry.
She swung the light in a slow circle. Oak trunks surrounded her. Every one looked familiar . Every one looked wrong.
The pendant pulsed once against her palm.
From deeper in the wood came the sound of a woman humming.
It was a simple tune, lilting and repetitive. Rory knew it. Her mother used to hum it while marking exercise books at the kitchen table, red pen between her fingers, rain ticking against the Cardiff windows.
Rory stopped breathing.
The tune continued.
“Mam?”
The humming ceased.
For one terrible moment, hope moved before sense could catch it. Then Rory’s mind supplied the facts with merciless efficiency. Jennifer Carter was in Cardiff. Jennifer Carter hated driving after dark. Jennifer Carter did not know about the message, the pendant or the grove.
A voice spoke softly among the trees.
“Rory?”
Her mother’s voice. Exact down to the slight Welsh lift at the end.
Rory backed away.
The light on her phone went out.
Darkness swallowed everything.
She pressed the power button. Nothing happened. She pressed it again, held it, swore under her breath. The screen remained black.
“Rory,” the voice called, farther to her right now. “I can’t see you.”
The Heartstone’s faint inner glow seeped through the weave of her jumper. Crimson light painted her fingers as she dragged it free. The silver chain caught at her collar, then slipped loose. The stone hung against her palm, warm and pulsing.
In its dim radiance, the nearest oaks seemed to lean towards her.
Rory moved in the opposite direction from the voice.
She kept one hand before her face and placed each foot carefully , feeling for roots. Wildflowers brushed her ankles. Their presence registered slowly . Bluebells, foxgloves, tiny white stars of stitchwort—all blooming together in late autumn beneath a canopy that admitted no moonlight.
The air changed. It smelled no longer of wet earth but of summer roses left too long in a sealed room. Sweetness thickened the back of her throat.
Her mother called again, behind her.
“Don’t go in there.”
Rory walked faster.
Something kept pace beyond the trees.
She never saw it directly. A suggestion of pale limbs passed between trunks. Branches shifted without sound. Once, the red glow caught what looked like a hand curling around an oak , fingers too long and too evenly jointed. When Rory raised the pendant, the hand withdrew.
“Rory,” her mother said.
Then, in Eva’s voice: “Rory, wait.”
Then in a man’s voice she knew far too well: “Aurora.”
Evan.
Her body reacted before thought. Her shoulders drew in. Her left wrist ached around the small crescent scar, an old injury suddenly remembering every hand that had closed over it since.
“No,” she said.
The thing in the trees laughed softly .
Not Evan’s laugh. Not anyone’s. It sounded like dry leaves stirred along stone.
Rory tightened her grip on the Heartstone and forced herself onward. Panic wanted speed, but speed in darkness meant a broken ankle and a face full of roots. She counted her steps instead.
Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine.
At forty-three, her foot met empty air.
She lurched back. Pebbles rattled down a slope ahead, falling much farther than they should have. No sound marked their landing.
The crimson glow showed the edge of a narrow drop. Beyond it, darkness yawned.
She swept the pendant from side to side.
To her left, two enormous shapes rose among the flowers. Oaks, she thought at first. Then she saw their surfaces were grey and deeply ridged, like bark transformed to stone. They stood upright, leaning fractionally towards one another, and between them hung a darkness blacker than the surrounding night.
The oak stones.
The pendant burned.
Rory hissed and nearly dropped it. Deep within the crimson gem, a spark throbbed like a tiny heart. With every pulse , the blackness between the stones seemed to contract.
A portal.
She did not know how she knew. The certainty came from somewhere below language, old and cold. This was no Fae threshold shimmering with summer light. The air around it carried the mineral chill of cellars, graves and caves beneath the sea.
Hel.
The name surfaced in her mind uninvited.
Behind her, the footsteps returned.
Three measured crunches.
Pause.
Three more.
Rory did not turn. She stared into the black space between the stones.
Something stared back.
There were no eyes. Nothing so mercifully recognisable. Only a sense of attention, immense and patient, shifting towards the small warmth of the pendant in her fist.
The flowers around her bent towards the portal.
“Bring the Heartstone,” a voice said behind her.
It used Rory’s own voice.
She turned then.
A woman stood at the edge of the red light.
Straight black hair brushed her shoulders. Her face was Rory’s face, pale and composed. Even the eyes were bright blue, though the pupils looked slightly too wide. She wore Rory’s black jumper, Rory’s jeans, Rory’s muddy trainers.
Her left wrist was unscarred .
Rory fixed on that small absence. It steadied her more than anything else could have.
The copy smiled.
“You took your time.”
“Who sent the message?”
“You did.”
The answer came in Rory’s voice, with Rory’s dry impatience. It was an excellent imitation. Almost excellent.
“I didn’t.”
“Not yet.”
The thing took one step closer. The flowers did not bend beneath its shoes.
Rory moved sideways, keeping the portal at her back and the drop to her right. “What do you want?”
“The door is hungry.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
The smile widened by a fraction. “It needs a heart.”
The Heartstone pulsed hard in her fist.
The copy’s gaze dropped to it. For the first time, hunger disturbed its borrowed expression.
Rory understood then—or guessed, which was often the same thing when there was no time. The message had not brought her here merely to carry the pendant. It had brought warmth to a cold threshold. A key, perhaps. Or bait.
Possibly both.
She let the chain slide between her fingers.
The copy watched.
“You can’t leave with it,” it said.
“Can’t I?”
“The grove has closed.”
“How inconvenient.”
Behind Rory, something shifted within the portal. Cold touched the nape of her neck. Not air. Fingers, almost, hovering just shy of skin.
The copy came closer.
Rory waited.
Every instinct screamed at her to run, but there was nowhere to run. The grove had folded the path away. The thing wore her face. The black doorway behind her had begun to breathe in time with the stone.
So she did the only thing that felt remotely like choice.
She flung the pendant sideways over the drop.
The crimson gem spun once in the dark, dragging a silver arc behind it.
The copy moved with impossible speed.
Its face broke—not into anything monstrous, but into naked alarm . It lunged past Rory, one long arm reaching over the edge.
Rory caught the chain.
The links snapped taut around her fist. The pendant swung below the ledge, suspended over the unseen depth.
The copy twisted towards her. Up close, its skin had no pores. Its eyes reflected no light.
“You lied,” it whispered.
“So did you.”
Rory drove her shoulder into its chest.
There was no weight behind the borrowed shape. It folded like cloth and toppled over the edge, fingers clawing at empty air. For a heartbeat its face remained level with hers, expressionless now.
Then it fell.
No cry. No impact.
The darkness below simply accepted it.
The instant it vanished, the grove convulsed.
A wind tore through the clearing. Flowers flattened. Oaks groaned as if their roots were being wrenched from the soil. From between the stone trunks came a sound too deep to hear properly, a pressure that drove needles through Rory’s teeth.
She hauled the pendant up by its chain.
The portal opened wider.
Inside the blackness, shapes crowded close. Not bodies. Impressions of bodies, stacked one behind another in a distance that could not exist between two stones. Heads bowed. Hands lifted. A thousand patient silhouettes turning towards the Heartstone’s glow.
Rory ran.
This time a path opened before her.
She plunged between the oaks, the pendant clenched in one fist and her dead phone in the other. Branches raked her cheeks. Holly snagged her jumper. Behind her, the humming began again—her mother’s tune, multiplied across dozens of voices.
None of them needed breath.
Rory did not look back.
The wood thinned without warning. Her trainers struck gravel. She stumbled onto the broad path beside the pond and nearly fell to her knees.
Sound rushed back into the world.
Water lapped at reeds. Wings thrashed overhead. Somewhere across the dark grass, a deer barked.
Her phone lit in her hand.
Seventy-two per cent battery.
The time read 11:36 p.m.
Rory stared at it. She had entered the wood at least forty minutes ago. Perhaps an hour. Her scraped palms and burning lungs insisted on it.
Six minutes had passed.
Across the pond, beneath the trees, a pale figure stood watching.
It was too far away to make out a face. Even so, Rory knew it had one.
Hers.
The Heartstone gave a final pulse of heat.
The figure raised one hand in farewell.
On its left wrist, just visible in the faint crimson reflection from the pendant, lay a small crescent-shaped scar.