AI The torch beam caught the standing stone before Rory caught the stone's shadow, and that was the first wrong thing, because the shadow pointed the wrong way.
She lowered the torch. Raised it. The ancient oak trunk of the stone, grey and twisted and older than anything had a right to be, sat bathed in light from the south-east. Its shadow lay long across the wildflowers, pointing south-east too. Towards her. Shadows did not do that.
"Lovely," she muttered, because saying something, anything, kept the silence from settling on her like a hand.
Richmond Park had closed at dusk. She had climbed the fence near the Robin Hood Gate an hour after, rucksack on her back, Eva's instructions folded into her jacket pocket. *The clearing past the oak boundary. Bring the pendant. Don't speak to anything that speaks first.* Eva's handwriting, Eva's madness , and yet here Rory stood, because the things she had seen in the last fortnight had burned the word *madness * out of her vocabulary.
The Heartstone hung warm against her sternum. It had been warm since the gate. Now, stepping between two of the standing stones, it turned hot.
She hissed and pulled the silver chain away from her skin. The crimson stone, no bigger than her thumbnail, glowed faintly in the dark, a coal's heartbeat. Pulse. Pulse. It had never done that before. Not in the flat above Silas' bar, not on the delivery runs, not anywhere.
The pendant pulsed near a Hel portal. Yu-Fei had told her that, in that flat, careful voice of his, and Rory had laughed at the time.
She was not laughing now.
The clearing opened ahead of her, and she stopped at its edge. Wildflowers. Everywhere. Bluebells and poppies and pale things she could not name, blooming in October, blooming at midnight, their faces turned up to a moon she could not see through the canopy. The air smelled of summer, thick and green and sweet, and underneath it, faintly, something else. Something mineral. Wet stone. A cellar smell.
She crossed the clearing slowly , torch off now, because the flowers gave off their own faint pallor and the light made her feel visible. Fifty paces across. She counted them. At thirty-one, she heard the singing.
Not singing. Not quite. A thread of sound, high and thin, like a wet finger round a wineglass rim, coming from everywhere and nowhere. It rose and fell in a pattern that almost made sense, almost resolved into melody, and the almost was worse than anything. Her hindbrain kept reaching for the tune and missing, and each miss sent a small cold shock down her arms.
She stood still and listened. The sound did not get closer. It did not get further. It simply continued, patient as erosion.
"Not speaking to anything that speaks first," she whispered. "Easy. Done."
At the centre of the clearing stood the oldest stone, a gnarled monolith of petrified oak, and at its base lay the reason she had come. She knew it before she saw it, the way you know a tooth is loose before your tongue finds it. A hollow. A dark, root-choked hollow at the stone's base, wide as a doorway lying on its side, and the cellar smell poured out of it like breath.
The Heartstone's pulse quickened . She could feel it against her chest now like a second heart, out of rhythm with her own.
Eva's note said the book would be *at the root of the eldest *. Eva's note said *in and out, Rory, ten minutes, the Grove keeps its own hours so don't dawdle *. Rory crouched at the hollow's lip and shone the torch down. Roots. Deep, dark, going further than the beam. And something pale caught between two of them, three feet down. Leather binding. Gold corner.
"There you are."
She lay flat on the flowers, crushed sweetness rising around her, and reached into the hollow. The earth inside was warm. That stopped her hand for a moment. Earth at midnight in October had no business being warm. It was warm like skin. Like the soil had a fever.
Her fingers closed on the book's spine.
Something in the dark below her hand exhaled.
She froze. Every muscle. The breath moved across her knuckles, damp and slow, and it had a rhythm to it, the rhythm of a sleeper, of something large and comfortable and not yet aware of her. The singing had stopped. She noticed its absence the way you notice a fridge switching off, a hole in the world where sound used to be.
Slowly. Slowly. She drew the book up an inch. The roots did not move. Another inch. The thing below breathed in, breathed out, and the breath smelled of stone dust and standing water and, beneath that, cloyingly, of the wildflowers above, as though the clearing's sweetness had only ever been this thing's breath rising up through the soil.
The book came free of the roots with a soft, reluctant sound, like a bandage off a wound.
She pulled it out and rolled away and got to her feet in one motion, the way Eva had drilled into her, and that was when she saw the flowers.
All of them. Every flower in the clearing. Turned towards her.
Not tilted by wind. There was no wind. Their pale faces had swung to her while she lay in the dark, soundlessly, a field of small attention. She turned on the spot. They followed. She watched them do it, a slow, rippling reorientation, like iron filings answering a magnet.
"Nope," she said, with enormous feeling.
She walked. Fast, not running, because running felt like an admission and she did not want anything here reading her admissions. The boundary stones stood thirty paces off, black against the lesser black of the treeline. The book sat heavy under her arm. The pendant had gone from warm to painful, a coal pressed to her chest, and its light leaked through her jacket in crimson pulses.
Twenty paces. The singing resumed. Closer now, and wronger, because it had found its melody, and the melody was a lullaby. She knew the tune. Her mother had hummed it in the kitchen in Cardiff, a Welsh thing, old, about a child sleeping. Jennifer Carter had been dead eleven months.
Rory's stride faltered. Just once. One step.
*Don't dawdle.*
Ten paces. The lullaby gained a voice, low and fond, and the voice knew the words her mother had always half-mumbled, the ones Rory had never learned, and it sang them perfectly .
Five paces. The boundary stones. The dark between them looked ordinary. Looked like park. Looked like the way out.
She stepped between them, and the clearing exhaled behind her, and the singing stopped mid-word, cut off like a radio unplugged, and in the silence she heard, clearly and closely, from the black hollow at the eldest stone's base, a long and thoughtful inhalation.
Something down there had woken up.
She ran.
The treeline came at her in ragged torchlit sweeps, branches raking her face, and she did not look back until the fence, until the cold iron of the Robin Hood Gate was under her hands and she was over it, dropping onto tarmac, ordinary tarmac, a fox bolting from a bin fifty yards off, a night bus sighing somewhere down the road.
She stood bent double, hands on knees, the book clutched to her chest. The pendant cooled against her skin. Pulse slowing. Going dark.
Safe. Out. Done.
She checked her phone out of habit, thumb leaving a smear of earth on the screen, and stared at the date.
She had gone over the fence on the fourteenth of October. The phone said the seventeenth. Three days. She had been in the Grove for twenty minutes.
"Time moves differently," she whispered, and laughed, a cracked little sound, and stopped laughing, because her phone showed forty-one missed calls, and the most recent voicemail was from Eva, timestamped eleven minutes ago, and Eva, who never sounded frightened, sounded frightened.
Rory raised the phone to her ear.
"Rory, thank God, where have you *been *?" A breath, ragged. Traffic noise. Running footsteps . "Listen to me. Don't go home. The flat, it's been , Rory, there's someone in your flat, I saw the light on, I saw someone at your window, and Rory, it was *you *. It's wearing you . It's wearing your face and it keeps waving at me."
Behind her, on the other side of the fence, from deep in the black park, a lullaby began again, sweet and low, drifting through the bars.