Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCR4YWF6PTE4G0HD3N3YAM4

The gates of Richmond Park had been locked for four hours, which meant Rory had climbed the wall by the Ham Gate with her trainers slung around her neck and a torch she hadn't dared switch on yet. The pendant had started up somewhere near the deer fence — not the warm insistent throb it gave near a Hel portal, but a slower thing, like something breathing in its sleep. She'd pressed her palm flat over the crimson stone and kept walking. Eva had said midnight. Eva had said *the grove, the stones, don't be late, and Rory — don't bring anything iron.* Then she'd hung up, which wasn't like her, and hadn't answered since, which was less like her still. So: here. Bracken to the knee, the smell of wet earth and deer musk, and the long black bulk of the oaks rising ahead where no oaks appeared on any Ordnance Survey map she'd ever pulled up. Eight of them, spaced like teeth. The standing stones weren't stone at all. They were trunks, ancient and barkless and pale as bone in the moonlight, and they had been dead for so long that they had stopped rotting and simply become boundary. Rory stepped between two of them. The first thing she noticed was that November stopped. The cold went out of the air the way a sound goes out of a room when a door shuts. Her breath, which had been ghosting in front of her all the way up the hill, simply didn't. She exhaled twice to be sure, watching the space where the cloud should have been, and there was nothing, just her own warm nothing going out into warm nothing. Around her ankles: campion, foxglove, cowslip, bluebells. All of it in flower. All of it at once, in a season where none of them belonged, and the wrongness of it was so gentle and so pretty that she almost let it past her. She didn't let it past her. That was the trick, she'd learned. You noticed the pretty things hardest. "Eva?" Her voice went out flat and came back sooner than it should have, as if the clearing were smaller than her eyes said. Nothing. Rory stood very still and did an inventory the way her father used to do a cross-examination: slowly, and in order, and never asking a question she didn't already half-know the answer to. Ground: soft, dry, undisturbed. No trodden path. No footprints but her own coming in. Sky: clear, and the moon was in it, and the moon was wrong. Not the shape — the position. She'd come up the hill with it over her left shoulder. It was over her left shoulder now, too, and she had walked a hundred and eighty degrees around the stones to get through the gap. Sound: none. That was the one that got its fingers into her. No wind in the leaves, though the leaves were moving. No aeroplane grinding down toward Heathrow, and there was *always* an aeroplane grinding down toward Heathrow, at every hour, in every weather, the city's tinnitus. No deer barking. No owl. Not one insect in all those flowers. Rory put her thumb against the crescent scar on her left wrist and pressed, hard, the way she did when she needed to be certain which of the things in her head were hers. Then the sound arrived, and it was worse than the silence. It was a bicycle bell. Two quick brass notes, cheerful, close — twenty feet behind her, past the stones. Her bike had a bell like that. Her bike was chained to the railing outside Silas' bar with her Golden Empress bag bungeed to the rack, four miles and a locked gate away. She turned around slowly. The gap between the two pale trunks showed her the hill she'd come up: bracken, gorse, the long slope down toward the dark. Empty. No bicycle. Nothing moving on the whole grey sweep of it. "That's not going to work," she said out loud, and was pleased with how level it came out. "You want to try something I haven't heard before?" The bell rang again. Further off this time, but from the wrong direction — from deep inside the grove, behind her, where there was no path and no wheels and nothing but flowers. Rory did not turn around a second time. She had read enough and, lately, lived enough to know that turning around was a currency, and something was spending hers. She walked to the centre of the clearing instead, and sat down, and put her back against the one thing in the grove that had bark on it: a young hawthorn, hardly bigger than she was, growing exactly where nothing should be able to grow in the shadow of eight dead giants. The pendant against her sternum was warm now. Not hot. Warm like a hand. "Eva," she said. "If that's you having a laugh, I'm going to be so unbearable about it." Movement, at the left edge of her vision. She let her eyes slide toward it without moving her head. A deer. Just a deer — a red hind, standing among the foxgloves maybe thirty feet away, head up, ears forward. Richmond was full of them; six hundred and some, the signs said. There was no reason for the cold weight that settled in her stomach at the sight of it, except that the hind was standing in flowers up to its knees and the flowers weren't bent. And its eyes caught no moonlight at all. A deer's eyes threw back light like coins. These took it in and gave nothing. Rory breathed. Counted four in, four out, the way the woman at the clinic in Cardiff had taught her, back when the thing she was afraid of had a face and a name and a key to her flat. When she looked again there were three of them. They had not walked in. She'd have caught the motion — she caught everything, that was the one thing she trusted about herself — but there they were, spaced evenly around the clearing's edge, and all three had their heads up, and all three were facing her, and hinds don't have antlers. All three of them did. Small, dark, wet-looking racks that came up out of the skull at angles no anatomy book would sign off on. They didn't move. They didn't crop the grass or flick an ear. They stood in the flowers with their black eyes drinking the moon and they did the one thing animals never, ever do, which is nothing at all. "Right," Rory said softly. "Okay." She found she'd got her hand around the pendant. The silver chain bit into the back of her neck. The stone had gone from warm to something with a pulse in it, and the pulse wasn't matching hers, which she decided not to think about just yet. Time moved wrong here. Isolde had told her that, laughing, pouring tea: *an hour with me is a minute out there, or a week, and I never can promise which.* Rory had thought about it as an inconvenience. Standing in it, she understood it differently. She could not tell whether she had been in the grove five minutes or forty. The moon hadn't moved at all. That was the proof, and it was the kind of proof that makes you want to sit down and put your hands over your ears. Behind her, on the other side of the hawthorn, close enough that she felt the air of it stir the hair at her nape, someone drew a breath to speak. Rory's whole body locked. The breath was small and hitching and human. She knew the shape of it. She had heard it a thousand times through a phone pressed too hard to her ear at three in the morning — that particular catch Eva got when she'd been crying and was about to pretend she hadn't. "Rory?" it said. And Rory sat there with her spine against the bark and the pendant burning under her fist and the three antlered things standing motionless in the flowers, and she thought, very clearly, with the cool bright part of her mind that had never once let her down: *Eva has never in her life called me Rory first. She calls me Carter. Every single time, she calls me Carter, and then she laughs at herself, and then she calls me Rory.* The hawthorn shifted against her back as something leaned its weight on the other side of the slender trunk. "Rory," it said again, kinder. "You came. I didn't think you'd come." She did not turn around.