Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPMW86QR7M92950XRVW7Y1

The satnav gave up two miles back, so Rory drove on memory and the pendant's heat against her sternum. Richmond Park closed at dusk. She'd parked in a lay-by off Kingston Vale, wedged the hatchback between a skip and a hedge, and climbed the fence where the wire sagged. Now the ground took her downhill through bracken that grabbed at her ankles, and the last orange smear of London light died behind the treeline. The Heartstone pulsed. Not a rhythm — more like something breathing on her skin. "Right," she said, to nobody. "You're doing this." Eva's note had been four words on the back of a receipt: *Grove. Full moon. Alone.* Rory had turned it over a hundred times in the flat above the bar, looking for a joke, a postscript, anything. Eva didn't do cryptic. Eva did voice notes that ran eleven minutes and ended mid-sentence because her phone died. The oaks came up out of the dark before she was ready for them. Eight of them, or nine — she'd never managed a proper count. They stood in a rough ring, trunks so thick and split with age they'd stopped looking like trees and started looking like something quarried. Bark folded into faces if you let it. Rory didn't let it. She stepped between two of them and the temperature changed. Not dropped. Changed. The way a room changes when the person in it stops liking you. Inside the ring, the grass was ankle-high and dry, and the wildflowers were open. Cornflowers, foxglove, something white and star-shaped she had no name for. In November. Under a moon that gave more light than it had any right to. "Eva?" Her voice didn't carry. It stopped about six feet out and sat down. Rory turned a slow circle. The clearing was maybe forty paces across, and empty, and the moon sat directly overhead, which was wrong — it had been low and east when she'd crossed the fence, sitting fat over the Robin Hood Gate. She checked her phone. 21:04. She'd left the car at 20:40 and walked at least half an hour. No signal. Not even the polite hopeful ghost of one bar. The little icon showed a cross, and then, while she watched, the whole status bar went blank, and then the screen was showing her own face in the black glass. She put it in her coat pocket. Pressed her palm flat over it, through the wool. "Eva, if this is a bit, I'll kill you." Something answered from the treeline. Not a word. A sound like a fingernail going down a comb, very slow, and then the flutter of wings — a lot of wings, more than the clearing had space for — and then nothing. Rory did not move. She'd read once that prey animals freeze because movement is what triggers the chase, and she'd thought at the time how stupid that was, how she'd run, how she'd always run. Her body had decided otherwise. Her body had gone quiet and heavy and her heartbeat had relocated to her throat. Thirty seconds. Forty. The flowers moved in a breeze she couldn't feel on her face. "Okay," she breathed, and made herself walk to the centre. The grass there was pressed flat in a circle the size of a car bonnet, the way grass goes when something large has slept on it. She crouched. Touched it. Warm. Not sun-warm — the sun had been down for two hours and this was November and nothing out here should have held heat. Warm like the seat of a chair somebody had just left. She stood up too fast and the clearing swam. The oaks had moved. She knew it the way you know a picture's been straightened on the wall. The gap she'd come through — she'd fixed it in her mind on the way in, the tree with the split down its middle like a mouth, the one beside it wearing a rope of ivy. They were still there. They were just on her left now, and they'd been behind her, and she hadn't turned. "No," Rory said. "No, that's — I turned. I turned around, I did a circle, that's all." The pendant was hot enough now to be uncomfortable. She pulled it out of her collar and the crimson stone threw a little wash of red onto her fingers, brighter than it had ever been in the flat, brighter than it had been in the tunnel under Camden. Pulsing. Faster than her pulse. Faster and faster, like something running out of patience. Beyond the ring, in the dark under the trees, someone was standing. She saw it in the corner of her eye — the specific, awful place where things live — a vertical shape, pale at the top, motionless. She turned her head and it was a birch trunk, silver-barked, perfectly ordinary, perfectly still. She looked away deliberately, counted three, and looked back. Birch. Still birch. But now there was one on the other side too. Rory made herself breathe through her nose. In for four. Out for six. Brendan Carter's daughter did not have hysterics in a field. Brendan Carter's daughter catalogued facts. Fact: the flowers were blooming out of season. Fact: her phone had died at 21:04. Fact: the grass in the middle of the clearing was warm. Fact: there were now three pale vertical shapes at the edge of the trees where she was fairly sure there had been none when she arrived, and none of them had moved while she was watching, which meant either they weren't moving, or they were only moving when she wasn't. Her legs wanted the fence. Her legs wanted the hatchback and the A3 and Silas' bar with its sticky tables and its rugby on the telly. "Eva," she called. Louder. It hurt her throat to push it. "Eva Bennett, I swear—" And a voice said her name. It came from behind her, close, close enough that she should have felt breath, and it was Eva's — Eva's exact register, that Cardiff flatness she'd never lost, the way she said *Rory* like it had three syllables in it. Rory spun with her fist coming up because that's what fifteen months with Evan had taught her hands to do. Nothing. Grass. Flowers. Moon. The voice said it again from the opposite side of the clearing. Same word, same tone, same three syllables — identical, note for note, like a recording played twice. Rory's whole body went cold from the scalp down. "That's not her," she whispered. "That's not her, that's not—" The comb-sound came again, longer this time, dragging, and underneath it something that might have been laughter or might have been leaves, and every one of the wildflowers in the grove turned its face towards her at once. The Heartstone burned. She caught it in her fist and held on, and the red light came through her fingers like something inside them was alight, and out at the treeline, all around her, the pale shapes began — very slowly, the way a minute hand moves — to lean in.