AI The gate to Richmond Park was already locked.
Aurora stood with her hands in the pockets of her delivery jacket, staring at the chain. The council sign said CLOSED FROM DUSK, which she hadn't seen in the dark, and the phone in her pocket had been dead since just past Barnes. Her bike was leaning against the fence behind her where she'd left it, the insulated Golden Empress bag still strapped to the rack, empty now.
She'd come this way because Isolde had told her to.
Not in so many words. In a text that had come through three hours ago, before her shift: *come to the grove tonight. come alone. don't bring your phone if you can help it.* Which was cryptic even for Isolde, and which Rory had ignored right up until the moment she'd finished her last drop on Sheen Lane and realized she was ten minutes from the park and the pendant around her neck was warm.
It wasn't supposed to be warm.
The Heartstone pendant sat against her sternum, thumbnail-sized and deep crimson on its silver chain, and for two years it had done exactly nothing. No faint inner glow, no pulsing. Just a stone. An anonymous gift left in her mailbox the week she'd moved into the flat above Silas' place, with no note. Now it pulsed once, slow, against her skin, like a second heartbeat.
Rory glanced left and right down the dark road. No cars. She pulled the chain out from under her t-shirt and looked. In the orange bleed from the streetlamp the stone had a faint light in it, the kind you had to squint to be sure you were seeing .
"Fuck's sake," she whispered. Her breath fogged.
She climbed the gate.
She was five-six in battered trainers and thirty seconds past cool-headed, and the top bar was slick with frost. She swung a leg over and dropped into the park and the dark changed. The road noise cut out all at once, as if someone had closed a door. That was Richmond at night – too big, too empty, and the city fell away too fast. She zipped her jacket up to her chin and started walking, shoulder-length black hair tucked behind her ears, eyes narrowed . Her left wrist itched where the little crescent-shaped scar sat, pale against cold skin.
She knew the way to the grove in daylight. Isolde had shown her last summer, parting bracken with her hands and saying, *This is ours, Rory, don't bring anyone else.* A hidden clearing you could miss even if you were looking for it. Ancient oaks that leaned inward like old men. And wildflowers. That was the weird part Rory remembered thinking at the time, that even in October the clearing had been full of them, white and yellow and impossible purple, blooming right up to the frost line.
She walked with her hands fisted now. The pendant was getting warmer. Not hot, just insistent. A second pulse , then a third, matching nothing to do with her own heart rate.
The path turned to mud and then to leaf litter. The oaks thickened. Moonlight should have helped but the canopy was too dense and the clouds were low. Her eyes kept trying to make shapes out of nothing at the edge of her vision. A branch. A deer. She told herself deer. There were always deer in Richmond Park.
Then she stepped between the two standing stones and stopped.
The stones were oak, not rock – everyone thought they were trees at first. Two gnarled, bark-split trunks that had grown too straight and too close, black with age, marking the boundary. On the other side was the grove.
In August it had been beautiful. Now at night, in November, it was supposed to be dead. It wasn't.
The wildflowers were blooming .
Year-round, Isolde had said, like it was a gift. Up close under the thin moon that managed to reach the pocket clearing, it was wrong. The flowers were all open, facing up, but there was no wind and no insects. White wood anemones and dog violets and things Rory didn't have names for, all of them open at midnight, all of them utterly still. The air inside the grove was warmer than the air outside by ten degrees.
And it smelled wrong. Like leaf-mould that had gone sweet. Like fruit left too long.
"Isolde?" she called. Her voice sounded too small. She cleared her throat. "Isolde? I'm here."
Nothing answered. The pendant pulsed again, hard enough now that she could feel it through her t-shirt.
She took another step in. The time thing was the other thing they never talked about. An hour inside can be minutes or days outside, Isolde had told her once, laughing, when Rory had asked why her watch had lost time. Rory had thought it was a joke.
The grass under her trainers didn't feel like grass. It gave too much, spongy and thick, and when she lifted her foot it stayed depressed for a beat too long before springing back.
Something rustled behind her.
She spun.
Nothing between the standing stones. Just the dark mouth of the park beyond. Nothing moving in the bracken.
"Real funny," she said, louder . "If you're trying to be spooky you're doing great."
The pendant throbbed again and she realized she was rubbing at the crescent scar on her left wrist without thinking, a nervous habit from when she was a kid, from Cardiff, long before London. Brendan Carter's voice in the back of her head, barrister-cold: *If you can't remain rational under pressure, Aurora, the law is not for you.* Her mother Jennifer's voice underneath it: *You don't have to be brave all the time, love.*
She made herself breathe in for four, out for six. Out-of-the-box thinking, that was what Eva always said she was good for. Okay. Assess.
She was alone in a pocket between Earth and the Fae realm at night because a girl who sometimes disappeared for a week and came back with mud on her feet told her to. Her phone was dead. Her bike was on the other side of a locked gate. A magic rock around her neck was acting as a Geiger counter.
Rational assessment: leave.
She turned to go back between the oaks.
The standing stones were further away than they should have been.
Rory frowned. She had taken maybe four steps in. The boundary was now ten meters off. The clearing had not been that big. She knew this clearing.
"Okay," she said under her breath. "Okay, nope."
She walked toward the stones, deliberate, not running. The ground sucked at her trainers. The flowers brushed her ankles, dry and strange. Halfway there another rustle came, to her left this time, low in the flowers.
She stopped. Listened.
The grove was too quiet. That was the wrongness finally clicking into place. At night in a wood there should be noise. Owls, mice, distant dogs. Even in winter. Here there was nothing except her breathing, and a faint high sound she hadn't noticed until now, like someone humming very far away on a single note.
The rustle came again, closer.
Rory looked down.
The wildflowers near her right foot were moving. Not swaying. Parting. Something little pushing through them toward her, under the blossoms, invisible. The white heads bobbed.
Her heart started to hammer for real.
She stepped back. The thing under the flowers followed.
Another one. To her left. Another trail opening in the anemones, quick, purposeful. Then another behind her.
The pendant burned sudden and bright against her chest and for the first time she saw it – bare ankles in the half-light, a cluster of tiny handprints pressed into the cold pale skin above her sock, muddy, five-fingered, too many joints.
She jerked forward, kicking out at the flowers, and the air went solid.
She did not bump into something. The air simply stopped being empty. Right in front of the standing stones, where the way out should have been, the night had folded over itself and left a wrongness standing upright. It was roughly her height and roughly shaped like a woman if you were squinting and panicked and didn't want to look directly at it, because looking at it made her eyes water. Its skin was bark and its hair was tangled with living flowers and its face –
It didn't have a face. It had a suggestion of one, where Isolde's face should be, or might have been once.
The humming stopped.
All the little rustles in the flowers stopped at the exact same second.
The thing tilted its head. Or the air tilted where its head was. The flowers in its hair opened wider.
Aurora's mouth was dry. Her bright blue eyes were wide open now and fixed. She could feel the old scar burning on her wrist.
The thing took one step toward her. It moved like a deer learning to walk on two legs. Another step. The grass didn't spring back where it placed its feet.
The pendant was pulsing so fast it was almost one continuous heat.
Rory did the only intelligent thing she could think of. She reached up, grabbed the silver chain, and yanked as hard as she could, snapping it, and threw the Heartstone straight at it.
The stone hit whatever it was in the center of its chest and stuck.
For a half second nothing happened.
Then it sank in, like a coal sinking into snow, with a soft hiss. The faint inner glow went incandescent crimson, bleeding light out through bark, through cracks that hadn't been there before.
The thing made a sound. Not a scream. A rush of air through too many small mouths, from down among the flowers.
It folded. That was the word. It folded inward around the light, and the flowers around its feet all turned at once to face it.
And then it was gone , and the grove was only a grove again, cold and too still and stinking of rotten sweetness, with the two ancient oak stones impossibly far away and then impossibly close again, like they had taken a breath.
A wind moved through the clearing for the first time that night. The wildflowers shivered.
Aurora stood shaking, her hands empty, the broken silver chain still caught around her fingers, staring at the patch of crushed anemones where something had lain and now did not.