AI The fence gave under her weight and Rory dropped into the park on the wrong side of the law, landing hard enough to jar her teeth.
She stayed crouched. Listened. Nothing came for her, no dogs, no keeper's torch, only the slow tick of the fence settling back on its hinges. Somewhere behind her, beyond the wall, London hummed its endless low hum. Ahead lay Richmond Park, six hundred acres of black grass and older dark, and somewhere inside it the thing that had been pulling her pendant like a fishhook for three days.
She stood and wiped her palms on her jeans. The Heartstone sat against her sternum, warm as a held coin. It had been cold all afternoon, cold on the bus, cold down the long road from the gate. Then, fifty yards back, it had woken.
"Right," she said to nobody . Saying things aloud kept her thoughts in order. "You dragged me out here. Now what?"
The pendant gave no opinion. She flicked on her torch and started walking.
The path she wanted wasn't on any map. Eva had described it once, laughing, the way you describe a dream: past the plantation, off towards the old oaks, there's a place where the flowers don't care what month it is. Eva had gone missing three weeks ago, and the police file had closed with the phrase no suspicious circumstances, and Rory had stopped sleeping properly somewhere around week one.
Grass hissed against her boots. The torch beam found bracken, a deer's pale flanks vanishing between trunks, the glint of one watching eye and then nothing. She kept the beam low. Her phone read 11.41. It had read 11.41 when she climbed the fence. She stared at it until the numbers refused to change, then put it away and didn't think about it.
She found the first stone by walking into it.
Her shin cracked against granite and she bit back the word that wanted out. The torch showed her a slab of old oak-grey rock, shoulder height, leaning like a drunk against the dark. Moss in the crevices. Carving too worn to read. Eva's description came back to her, suddenly precise: they stand in a ring, Rory, like teeth.
Like teeth.
The pendant pulsed . Once. A heartbeat that wasn't hers.
She stepped around the stone and the air changed. It was subtle and it wasn't. The park had smelled of wet grass and deer. Here it smelled of honey and turned earth and, faintly underneath, something sweet gone wrong, like fruit at the bottom of the bowl. Wildflowers starred the clearing in clusters, pale heads lifted, and her brain offered the word for them one beat too late.
Snowdrops. Bluebells. Foxglove.
They didn't grow together. None of them grew in this season. Every head she passed had turned towards her, and when she stopped walking, she heard it, soft as paper tearing: the small sound of stems adjusting.
"Flowers turn towards light," she said. Her voice came out thin. "That's all that is. Phototropism. Look it up."
The torch flickered .
She smacked it against her palm and it steadied, and in the half-second of darkness she had heard humming. Now, in the light, silence . She stood very still and waited for it to come back, and it did, and her whole body understood it before her mind caught up. A tune. A woman's tune, low and unhurried, the kind you hum while doing washing-up. It came from everywhere the way rain comes from everywhere.
She knew the tune. Eva used to hum it. A nonsense thing from a Welsh telly programme they'd watched as children, something Jennifer Carter had sung while burning toast.
"Eva?"
The humming didn't stop. It went on, patient, giving her time to be afraid.
Rory walked towards it because walking away meant the fence and the road and the file that said no suspicious circumstances, and she'd come too far on too little sleep for that. The stones rose around her as she went deeper, seven, eight, nine of them, a ring of leaning grey teeth, and the clearing inside held light that had no source. Not moonlight. Moonlight has a direction. This light simply was, the way light exists in dreams, and her torch beam died into it like a stick into deep water.
She switched the torch off. Her hand had started to shake, so she wrapped her fingers around the Heartstone instead. It was hot now. Not warm. Hot, the edge of burning, and it pulsed in a rhythm that matched the humming, and she understood with the clean cold clarity of a dropped glass that the pendant wasn't reacting to this place.
It was answering it.
"Eva, I swear to God, if this is you messing about, I'll kill you myself."
The humming stopped.
Silence landed. Total. No deer, no wind, no London hum, as if the world beyond the stones had been switched off at the wall. In that silence a flower at her feet, a fat white foxglove, turned its bell directly up towards her face, and from inside the bell came a voice the size of a fingernail.
"Rory."
She didn't scream. She was proud of that later, the small stupid fact of it. She stepped back, and her heel came down on something that crunched like frost, and when she looked the ground behind her was white with flowers where, a breath ago, there had been bare earth. A path of them. Leading to her. A trail that had grown itself quietly while she watched the clearing.
"Rory, Rory, Rory." More bells joining . Foxgloves ringing her name like a congregation warming up. Not Eva's voice now. Her mother's. Her father's. The delivery manager at the Golden Empress. Evan's. Evan's was the worst, and her wrist ached where the old scar sat, a small pale crescent remembering the flat in Cardiff and the man she'd crossed a country to escape.
They knew everyone. They had everyone in storage.
"That's not how you get me to stay," she said, and her voice was steady and that surprised her .
The bells went quiet. All at once, obedient, like a choir cut off by a raised hand.
Then, from beyond the far stones, the humming began again. Eva's tune. But wrong now, stretched, each note held a beat too long, the way a recording sounds when the battery dies. And between the two largest oaks, where the dream-light thinned into honest dark, something unfolded itself from the trunk.
It had been the trunk. That was the horror of it, clean and simple: it had been standing there the whole time, bark-skinned and patient, and now it stepped out of itself like a man stepping out of a coat. It was tall in the way doorways are tall. Its face had features the way a knotted root has a face, if you're tired, if you want it to.
It opened its mouth and Eva's voice came out, perfect , fond, fifteen years of friendship in three syllables.
"You came."
The pendant seared her skin and Rory gasped, and the thing tilted its head at the sound, curious as a bird. Around the clearing the standing stones groaned in their sockets, and she watched, stupidly, uselessly, as the gap she'd entered through began to narrow, earth and root and leaning granite knitting themselves shut like a mouth.
"Eva was never here, was she?"
The thing smiled with her best friend's smile.
"She was bait," it said, in her own voice. "You always did run towards her. Even across a country. Even into the ground."
Behind her, the last gap in the stones closed with a sound like a book slamming shut, and the foxglove bells all rang at once, and every single one of them was laughing .