AI The gates of Richmond Park had closed hours ago. Rory slipped through a gap in the hedge on the Kingston side, the same way she had come the first time, when the world still made a kind of sense. Frost silvered the grass. Her breath hung in front of her face. The Heartstone lay against her sternum, a thumbnail of deep crimson on its silver chain, and it had not stopped its faint, insistent warmth since dusk.
She had come because of that warmth . Because three nights running it had pulled her from sleep with a heat that was not fever, and because the maps on her phone had led her here, to a stretch of parkland that should have been empty and was not. Isolde’s grove. The Fae Grove. Whatever name it wore, the standing stones waited beyond the next rise of oaks, and Rory meant to stand among them until the pendant told her why.
She kept to the tree line. A delivery bag would have been useful cover in daylight; at this hour it would have been a joke. Her trainers made almost no sound on the frozen ground. Shoulder-length black hair stuck to the back of her neck where sweat had cooled. Five foot six of stubbornness in a borrowed coat. The crescent scar on her left wrist itched, the old childhood mark acting up the way it did before storms.
The oaks thickened. Between their trunks the air changed. It grew softer, almost damp, though no rain had fallen. Wildflowers should not have been blooming in January. They were. Pale cups of white and gold opened among the roots as if the season had simply forgotten itself. Rory crouched and touched one. The petal was warm.
She stood. The stones came into view.
Nine of them, each a weathered oak trunk set upright and ringed with lichen, forming a rough circle in a clearing that the rest of the park had no business containing. The grass inside the ring was longer. The wildflowers grew denser. Time, Isolde had said, moved differently here. An hour inside could be minutes outside, or days. Rory checked her phone. No signal. The clock read 1:14. She stepped between two stones.
The warmth of the pendant sharpened.
She turned a slow circle. Nothing moved. The trees beyond the ring stood too still, their branches a black lace against a sky that held no moon she could find. London’s glow should have stained the clouds. It did not. The clearing had its own dark.
Rory exhaled.
“Alright. I’m here. What do you want?”
Her voice sounded smaller than she liked. It died against the stones without echo . She waited. The Heartstone pulsed once, a single beat of heat, then settled into a low, continuous thrum. Near a Hel portal, the old notes had claimed. She had no idea what a Hel portal looked like . She had an idea what it felt like now: this, the pressure behind her eyes, the sense that the air had weight .
A twig snapped to her left.
She turned. The undergrowth lay undisturbed. No fox, no deer, no late dog-walker with a torch. She listened. Wind in the high branches, except there was no wind. The leaves did not stir. The sound came again, further off, a dry click like a knuckle on wood.
Rory walked the inner edge of the circle. Her trainers crushed flowers that sprang back behind her, unharmed. She counted the stones as she passed them. Nine. She counted again. Nine. On the third pass she stopped, because the count had been nine and the space between the seventh and eighth stone was wider than it had been, and she could not say when it had changed.
She did not call out again. Cool-headed, Eva used to say. Quick. Out of the box. The box, at present, was a ring of dead oak in a pocket of the world, and the lid was coming down.
Another sound. Water. A trickle, as if a stream ran just beyond the trees. Richmond Park had streams. None of them ran here. She had walked this ground in daylight two weeks ago, mapping it, and there had been no water. The trickle grew. It took on a rhythm, almost like footsteps in a shallow ford. Then it stopped.
Rory’s hand found the pendant. The gem was hot now, not warm. Its inner glow leaked through her fingers, a dull red that painted the skin of her palm. She let it fall back against her shirt. The light remained, a coin of colour on the dark fabric.
Something moved at the edge of her vision. Right side. A pale shape, low to the ground, gone when she looked. She did not chase it. She stood in the centre of the ring and made herself breathe in counts of four, the way she had in the months after Evan, when the flat still felt like a throat . In. Hold. Out. The air tasted of wet earth and something sweet, like crushed apples left too long.
A child’s laugh carried across the clearing.
It came from behind her. She turned. Empty grass. Empty stones. The laugh came again, the same pitch, the same short burst, as if a recording had caught a single moment and would not release it. Rory’s jaw tightened.
“That’s cheap.”
No answer. The laugh did not repeat. In its place, a rustle of cloth, the sound of someone adjusting a coat. It circled her, always just outside the ring, always at the limit of hearing. She tracked it with her eyes and found nothing. The trees did not part. No figure crossed the gaps. The rustle completed its circuit and faded.
Her phone still read 1:14.
She unlocked it, photographed the stones, the flowers, the sky. The images came back black. Not underexposed. Black, as if the lens had been capped . She deleted them. She typed a message to Eva and watched it fail to send. The little red exclamation mark sat there, useless.
The movement came again, left this time. A suggestion of height, of shoulders, of a head turning away. Rory took three steps toward it and halted at the boundary of the stones. The thing — if it was a thing — did not wait. It slid behind an oak and was gone . She stayed where she was. Crossing the ring felt like a decision she was not ready to make.
A whisper threaded through the trees. Not words. The shape of words, the rise and fall of a sentence spoken too far off to catch. It might have been her name. It might have been anyone’s. She cupped her hands around her mouth.
“If you have something to say, say it.”
The whisper stopped. In the silence that followed, she heard her own pulse in her ears, and under it, a second rhythm, slower, as if another heart beat somewhere in the dark, matching hers a half-second behind.
The wildflowers at her feet closed. All of them, at once, petals folding in like fists. The grass inside the circle lay flat, pressed down by a weight she could not see. Rory took a step back. The grass where she had stood remained crushed. The rest rose again, blade by blade, until only her footprints marked the ground.
She looked up.
The stones had been nine. She counted. Eight. The gap that had widened was gone ; the remaining trunks stood closer, their lichen catching the red leak of the pendant. She counted a third time, slower, touching each one as she passed. Eight. The ninth lay on its side beyond the ring, half-swallowed by earth that had not been disturbed when she arrived. She had not heard it fall.
Rory crouched by the nearest upright stone and laid her palm against it. The wood was cold. Under the cold, a vibration, too regular for wind, too slow for machinery. She pulled her hand away. The vibration continued in the bones of her fingers.
A figure stood between the trees.
She did not look at it directly. Peripheral vision held it: tall, still, the suggestion of a coat or a cloak, the pale oval of a face that did not catch light the way a face should. When she turned her head, the space was empty. When she looked away, it returned, a fraction closer.
Rory rose. She kept her eyes on the centre of the ring.
“I came for answers. The pendant. The portals. You want to play peekaboo, that’s your business. I’m not leaving until I know what this is.”
The second heartbeat under hers grew louder. The Heartstone’s glow brightened, painting the flattened grass in shades of old blood. Heat spread across her chest, down her ribs. She unbuttoned the top of her coat and let the night air in. It did not cool her.
A sound like a throat being cleared , very close, just behind her left shoulder. She did not turn. She had learned that much already. Turning made it vanish. Remaining still let it exist.
Breath touched the back of her neck. Not warm. Not cold. The temperature of a room that had been empty a long time.
“Aurora.”
Her full name, spoken without accent she could place, without the particular music of Cardiff or London or anywhere she knew. The voice was neither male nor female. It sat in the middle and made the middle feel wrong.
She swallowed.
“Who are you?”
The breath remained. The voice did not come again. Instead, fingers — or the idea of fingers — traced the line of her crescent scar, so light she might have imagined it, except that the scar itself flared with a pain she had not felt since she was eight years old and the broken glass was still in her skin.
Rory stepped forward, out of the touch. The centre of the circle felt no safer. The eight stones leaned inward now, a degree or two off true, their tops angling toward her like listeners. The ninth stone, the fallen one, had drawn closer to the ring. She had not seen it move.
The child’s laugh returned, and with it the rustle of cloth, and the trickle of water, and the whisper of almost-words, all of them at once, layered, a small orchestra of things that did not belong. They rose and fell around the clearing, never entering it, never quite leaving. Rory stood in the red light of the pendant and turned, and turned, and the pale shape at the edge of her sight turned with her, always at the limit, always a half-step out of reach.
Her phone still read 1:14.
She checked the date. The screen flickered . For a moment the year was wrong, a number she did not recognise, and then it was this year again, and then the screen went dark and would not wake.
The second heartbeat was inside her chest now, occupying the same space as her own. Two rhythms, slightly out of phase, a stutter she felt in her teeth. The Heartstone burned. She gripped it through her shirt and the silver chain bit her palm.
Between the eighth stone and the place where the ninth had stood, the air thickened. It took on a sheen, like heat over tarmac, except the night was frozen and her breath still plumed. The sheen spread, a vertical smear the height of a door. Through it, for an instant, she saw another clearing, the same stones, a sky the colour of a bruise, and a figure standing where she stood, looking back.
The figure had her face.
Black hair. Blue eyes. The same coat. It raised a hand. Rory did not raise hers. The sheen wavered . The other clearing, the other her, the bruise-coloured sky — they folded in on themselves and the air was only air again, heavy and sweet and wrong.
The breath returned at her neck.
The laugh, the water, the whisper , the rustle, they cut off as if a door had shut. In the silence , the second heartbeat filled everything. Rory stared at the gap in the stones, at the smear of air that was no longer there, at the wildflowers which had opened once more, their white and gold faces turned toward her like a congregation.
She was not alone. She had not been alone since she stepped through the hedge. The certainty of it settled in her gut, cold and complete, and the thing that wore the space behind her left shoulder waited, patient, for her to turn around.