AI Aurora found the stones by following a fox that had no business being there.
It stood in the middle of the path beneath Richmond Park’s black canopy, russet fur bright as a coal against the leaf-mould. For a moment its eyes caught the beam of her phone torch and shone white. Then it turned without haste and slipped between two ancient oaks.
Rory stopped.
The path behind her still belonged to the park: gravel, fenced-off grass, the intermittent wash of tyres on a distant road. Ahead, between the trees, stood a ring of weathered stone slabs sunk waist-deep into the earth. Their surfaces wore moss in thick green patches. Roots curled around their bases like knuckles.
The fox was gone .
Her pendant had been warm for ten minutes.
Now it burned.
Rory tucked her phone beneath her chin and pressed the deep-crimson stone through her coat. It sat against her sternum, thumbnail-sized and far hotter than any bit of jewellery had a right to be. A faint red light breathed inside it, visible through the gap in her fingers.
“Fine,” she muttered. “Subtle.”
She had received the Heartstone in a plain envelope three weeks ago, delivered to the Golden Empress between lunch orders. No return address. No note beyond a scrap of card with four words written in neat black ink.
When it wakes, go north.
That had been all.
She had spent two weeks pretending she had thrown the card away because it was ridiculous. Then, tonight, the pendant had begun to pulse against her chest while she was locking up the delivery bike behind the restaurant. It had led her through the Underground, across wet park paths, and finally here, to a part of Richmond Park that did not appear on any map she had checked.
Rory stepped between the standing stones.
The air changed.
Not dramatically. No flash of light. No ripple in the dark. One moment she could smell rainwater, damp dogs, and the faint exhaust of London; the next, the world took a long, quiet breath and held it.
The road noise vanished.
So did the wind.
She stood very still, her boot half-sunk in soft ground.
The clearing beyond the stones was larger than it had looked from outside. Wildflowers crowded its edges in impossible colour—bluebells, buttercups, foxgloves, little white stars she didn’t know the names of—although it was November and cold enough that her breath should have shown. The grass gleamed silver under a moon half-hidden behind thin clouds.
There were no clouds above the grove.
The sky was clear and densely black, scattered with stars. Too many stars. They filled the space between the branches in hard, pale clusters.
Rory lowered the phone.
Its screen had gone dark.
She thumbed the power button. Nothing.
“Of course.”
Her voice did not travel properly. It left her mouth and seemed to drop at her feet.
She looked back.
The standing stones were there, but the gap between them held only darkness. Not the familiar dark of a tree-lined path. This was flat and depthless, a sheet of black hung between the oaks.
Her first instinct was to walk straight back through it.
The second, which arrived a fraction later, was to think.
The pendant was almost painfully hot. Whatever she had followed here, it had not brought her to a place where sensible instincts carried much weight . She could rush at that darkness and find a path back to the park. Or a brick wall. Or a ditch. Or nothing at all.
She took one slow breath through her nose.
The clearing smelled of crushed leaves and something sweet beneath it, like flowers left too long in a vase.
A pale shape moved at the far end of the grass.
Rory’s hand closed around the pendant.
The shape disappeared behind the broad trunk of an oak.
She waited.
Nothing emerged.
The logical explanation was a deer. Richmond Park had enough of them. A deer did not explain the absence of sound, or the stars, or why every muscle between her shoulders had tightened as if somebody had put a hand there.
But deer came first anyway. Deer, then badgers. A person in pale clothing. Her imagination, warmed by isolation and a suspicious magical necklace.
She had dealt with worse things than an overactive imagination.
Not better things, necessarily. But worse.
“Hello?” she called.
Again, the sound seemed to fall dead. No echo returned from the trees.
A flower near her left foot folded shut.
Rory stared at it.
It was a foxglove, its purple bells nodding gently . One second they were open. The next, each blossom had sealed itself, petal edges pressed together like closed lips.
Then another flower shut. Then another.
The movement spread through the clearing in a widening arc. Bluebells tightened. White flowers curled inward. Buttercups bowed their lacquered heads. Within seconds, every bloom in the grove had closed.
The grass began to whisper .
Not in the wind. There was still no wind. Blades bent one after another, all leaning away from the northern edge of the clearing.
Away from something standing there.
Rory’s fingers found the small crescent scar on her left wrist. She rubbed it once with her thumb, an old habit she had never managed to break.
“Right,” she said softly . “That’s not a deer.”
A sound came from the trees.
Click.
It was delicate, almost polite. Like a fingernail touching glass.
Rory turned toward it.
Nothing stood among the trunks. The woods were close together there, their branches woven into a wall. Their bark was pale and smooth in the moonlight.
Click.
This time it came from her right.
She spun too quickly , caught her heel on a root, and stumbled. Her phone slipped from her hand. It landed in the grass without a sound.
Her own pulse became enormous.
She crouched, swept her hand over the ground, and found the phone by touch. The glass felt warm, though it had been cold in her pocket. When she lifted it, the dead screen flickered to life.
There was no lock screen.
Only a camera image.
The phone showed the clearing in pale, grainy shades of green. She could see herself crouched in the lower corner, black hair falling across one cheek, face washed white by the screen’s glow.
Behind her stood a tall figure.
Rory did not turn.
On the phone, it was too thin to be a person. Its head nearly reached the lowest branches. Its arms hung past its knees. The image shivered whenever she tried to focus on it, as if the camera could not decide where it was.
Its face was a blank oval.
Click.
The figure in the screen tilted its head.
Rory rose carefully , holding the phone before her like a mirror. The figure remained behind her. Her breathing had become shallow and sharp, each inhale scraping at the back of her throat.
Don’t run, she thought.
Running made you prey. That was the sort of thing people said in horror films just before doing something catastrophically stupid, but the thought came with a certainty she could not dismiss.
She watched the screen.
The creature did not move.
Neither did she.
A minute passed. Or ten. Time in the grove had already proved it could not be trusted. Her arm began to ache from holding the phone aloft.
Then, from somewhere beyond the trees, a woman began to cry.
The sound was low at first. A muffled, hiccupping grief. It came from the darkness behind the standing stones.
Rory’s stomach dropped.
The crying changed.
It sharpened into a familiar voice.
“Rory?”
She stopped breathing.
Eva’s voice had a roughness to it when she was frightened , a particular clipped little catch on the second syllable. Rory had heard it in hospital corridors, in crowded stations, through the thin walls of bad flats. The voice from the stones had it exactly.
“Rory, please.”
The thing behind her unfolded its fingers.
On the phone screen, its hand lifted slowly toward her shoulder.
Rory moved.
Not toward the stones. The voice wanted that. It wanted her to turn, perhaps, or to make the mistake of answering. She darted sideways instead, putting the nearest oak trunk at her back.
The creature vanished from the screen.
The clearing was empty.
Her phone camera fizzed with static, then went black again.
“Eva isn’t here,” Rory said, and was pleased that her voice barely shook. “And if she were, she’d swear at me first.”
The crying ceased.
For a moment there was only silence .
Then something laughed behind the stones.
It was a child’s laugh, thin and breathy, repeated once too many times. The final note dragged on, stretching into a wet, wooden creak.
The ancient oaks groaned.
Rory backed away from the tree, keeping her eyes on the northern end of the clearing. Her mind worked around the fear with desperate efficiency. The pendant had led her here. It reacted to Hel portals; that much she knew, though nobody had explained how she was meant to know it. The grove was a pocket between worlds. Something was at a boundary, and it had noticed her.
The Heartstone’s heat was not random.
It was pointing .
She pulled the chain over her head. The silver caught in her hair; she yanked it free, ignoring the sting. Holding the pendant flat on her palm, she turned in a slow circle.
At first, the crimson light merely pulsed .
When she faced the farthest edge of the grove, where the old trees grew in a tight crescent, the stone flared bright enough to paint her fingers red.
The flowers there had not simply closed.
They had blackened.
A narrow gap opened between two trunks. It had not been there before. Beyond it lay no grove, no park, no London night. Only a slope of grey earth beneath a sky the colour of bruised iron. Shapes stood on that distant hillside, motionless and numerous.
A cold smell breathed through the opening: ash, old water, and meat gone sweet with rot.
Rory’s mouth went dry.
The figure was standing beside the gap now.
She saw it without looking directly at it. A pressure in the corner of her sight. A vertical wrongness. Its fingers clicked together softly .
Click.
It wanted the pendant.
That was obvious enough to feel stupid for missing. The warmth in the stone, the way it had drawn her to the grove—not a welcome. A beacon .
The thing by the opening bent at the waist.
Its blank face turned toward her hand.
“Laila,” it whispered.
The name struck harder than the voice pretending to be Eva.
No one called her that. Not now. Not in London. It was a name buried under years and choices and the careful construction of who she had become after Cardiff, after Evan, after all the versions of herself she had had to leave behind.
Her hand tightened around the Heartstone until its edges bit into her palm.
The creature clicked its teeth—or its fingers, or whatever made that sound .
“Laila,” it said again, with gentle patience. “Give it back.”
Rory stared at the gap between the trees.
Then she smiled, though her lips had gone numb.
“No.”
She hurled the pendant through the opening.
The creature moved faster than thought.
A pale arm snapped across her vision. The air cracked. Rory flinched as long fingers closed around empty space.
But the Heartstone had already crossed the threshold.
For one bright, suspended instant, it hung against that dead grey landscape, a crimson spark in the dark.
Then the grove screamed.
Every tree shuddered. The standing stones answered with a deep, grinding moan. The gap slammed shut so violently that bark burst from the trunks in wet strips.
The creature made no sound at all.
It came at her.
Rory ran.
This time there was no question of dignity or strategy. She ran for the stones with her coat snapping behind her, branches clawing at her face, the grass dragging at her boots. The clearing elongated around her. The standing stones seemed to retreat, their black gap thinning to a slit.
Behind her came the click-click-click of those fingers, suddenly rapid.
She did not look back.
Her shoulder struck stone. Pain flashed down her arm. She squeezed herself between the nearest slabs, scraping skin from her knuckles as something cold closed around the end of her hair.
Then she fell forward onto gravel.
Sound hit her all at once.
Traffic hissed on wet tarmac. Wind tore through the park trees. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked itself hoarse. Rory rolled onto her back beneath a grey, ordinary sky and lay gasping at the edge of the path.
The stones stood behind her, harmless and old.
There was no gap. No blackness. No wildflowers.
Only oak trees, bare branches, and the familiar yellow blink of a distant park lamp.
Her phone lay in her hand, alive again. The lock screen said 2:17 a.m.
She had entered the grove at 11:43.
Rory pushed herself upright.
Something lay in the mud beside her knee.
The Heartstone pendant.
The silver chain was snapped . The crimson stone had gone dark.
For several seconds she could only stare at it.
Then, from deep between the trees, something clicked once.
Rory picked up the pendant and walked quickly toward the lights, not looking back until the park gate was in sight.
By then, dawn had begun to thin the eastern sky.
And the pendant in her fist was warm again.