AI The bracken snapped back and drew blood from her wrist.
Rory hissed and sucked the cut, the copper bright on her tongue. The Heartstone hung against her sternum and pulsed in time with the sting, a thumbnail of crimson that threw a sick little glow up the silver chain. She had followed that heat through Richmond Park until the paths gave up and the oaks closed ranks around her. Isolde's grove. That was the name the old man at the gate had used, right before he pretended not to see her.
She pushed on.
Wildflowers carpeted the clearing in colours that had no business blooming together. Foxgloves leaned into snowdrops. Bluebells tangled with poppies. The air tasted of honey left too long in the jar, sweet enough to coat the back of her throat. Rory stepped between the blooms and felt the soil give like flesh.
Her torch beam jittered across bark.
"Hello?"
The word came out smaller than she liked. She cleared her throat and tried again, louder, the way she called orders across Yu-Fei's kitchen when the Friday rush hit.
"I'm looking for Isolde."
Nothing answered. A moth batted the torch glass and left a smear. Rory lowered the beam and watched her own boots crush a path that sprang back the moment she lifted her heel. No trail. No proof she had come this way at all.
She kept walking.
The standing stones waited at the far end, nine of them, each taller than a man and veined with something that caught the torchlight and threw it back green. Oak, she realised, when she got close enough to smell the tannin. Not quarried. Grown. The trunks had thickened into pillars and the bark had sealed over whatever had once been branches. Rory reached out and laid her palm against the nearest.
Warm.
She snatched her hand back. Trees did not hold heat like that. She wiped her palm on her jeans and circled the ring, counting. Nine. She counted again. Still nine. On the third pass she found ten.
Rory stopped. She played the torch over the extra stone. Same height. Same green veins. Same faint warmth bleeding off it like breath. She had walked this circle twice. She knew she had.
A laugh drifted through the oaks.
Children's laughter, high and bright, the kind that belonged to a playground at noon. It came from her left. She swung the torch. Bracken. Shadows. The laugh came again, behind her now, and she turned so fast the chain of the pendant slapped her collarbone.
"Who's there?"
The laugh chopped off mid-note.
Rory stood in the flower-stink and listened to her own pulse . Cool-headed. That was what Eva always said. Cool-headed Rory, who could talk a drunk out of a fight and a landlord out of an eviction. She planted her feet and made herself breathe through her nose. In. Out. The scar on her left wrist itched, that old crescent from the smashed bottle in her father's study, and she rubbed it with her thumb the way she had since she was nine.
The flowers nearest her boots had turned.
Not blown. Turned. Every foxglove, every poppy, every pale little snowdrop faced her shins like a congregation. Rory took a step back. The blooms nearest her previous spot rotated on their stems to follow.
She swallowed.
"Cute trick."
Her voice sounded wrong in the enclosed dark, too flat, as if the grove drank the echo before it formed. She backed toward the stone ring because at least the stones stayed put. At least they had the decency to be solid. The extra one, the tenth, now stood a handspan closer to its neighbour than it had a minute ago.
Rory did not run. Running meant you had already lost the argument. She kept the torch up and the stones on her right and moved with the slow care she used on ice in January, when the delivery bike wanted to kill her.
A twig cracked ahead.
She froze. Another crack, then a third, spaced like footsteps . Not an animal. Animals did not pause between steps to let you hear them. Rory angled the beam into the oaks.
The light found a figure.
It stood between two trunks, far enough that the details smeared. Human height. Human shape. Shoulder-length hair, dark. Rory's stomach folded in on itself.
"Eva?"
The figure did not move. Rory took one step. The torch caught a pale oval of face and the suggestion of a mouth.
"Eva, if that's you, I swear I will end you. You do not pull this in a wood at—"
The figure stepped behind a trunk. Rory followed with the light. Bark. Moss. Nothing else. She swept left, right, up into the canopy where the branches knitted so tight they might as well have been a ceiling. Empty.
Her name drifted through the leaves.
Not Eva's voice. Not anyone's she knew. A woman's voice, low, almost fond, the way her mother used to call her in from the garden in Cardiff when the streetlights flickered on.
"Aurora."
Rory's mouth went dry. Nobody used that name . Not since she had fled west and let London sand her down to Rory, to Laila on the nights she needed a door opened, to Carter on the invoices. Aurora belonged to a girl who had sat in lecture halls and pretended Pre-Law would save her.
"Come off it."
She meant it to sound bored. It came out cracked. The pendant flared against her skin, hot enough that she grabbed the chain and yanked the stone away from her chest. In the sudden wash of crimson the wildflowers looked black. The stones looked like teeth.
The footsteps started again.
This time they matched hers. She walked. They walked. She stopped. They stopped a half-beat later, a sloppy echo , as if whatever wore them had to remember how legs worked. Rory changed direction, cut hard toward the gap she had entered by.
The oaks had closed.
She played the torch along the wall of trunks. No gap. No bracken path. The trees stood shoulder to shoulder, bark fused in places, a palisade that had not been there when she arrived. Rory put her hand out. The wood was warm. It gave a fraction, like muscle, then firmed.
She snatched her fingers back and wiped them on her jumper.
Think. Out-of-the-box. That was the other thing Eva said, usually while stealing chips off her plate. The grove sat in a pocket. Time moved wrong here. An hour inside could be minutes outside, or days. If the trees had grown, how long had she been standing still? Rory dug her phone from her pocket. The screen stayed black. She held the power button until her thumb ached. Nothing. The torch beam chose that moment to yellow, then white, then yellow again.
She slapped the casing. The light steadied.
"Right."
She turned back to the stone ring because it was the only structure that made sense, the only thing that looked like it had been put here on purpose. Ten stones. She refused to count a third time. She stepped between two of them, into the circle, and the temperature dropped so fast her breath showed.
Frost filmed the grass inside the ring. The wildflowers stopped at the boundary as if someone had drawn a line. Rory's boots crunched. The sound was huge.
At the centre sat a shallow depression in the earth, the size of a sleeping body. No, smaller. The size of a child. She crouched. The soil at the bottom was darker, packed, and when she lowered the torch she saw the impression of fingers, little ones, dug in as if something had been pulled down by the wrists.
The laugh came from under the ground.
Rory stood so fast her vision spotted. She backed up until her shoulders hit oak-stone and the warmth of it soaked through her jumper. The laugh rose, muffled, then clear, then joined by a second voice, and a third, a whole bright chorus of children who were not children, who had never been children, singing a skipping rhyme she almost knew.
The words slipped around the ones she remembered.
*Malphora, Malphora, hung up on the door-a *
Her aliases ran through her head in a cold line. Rory. Laila. Aurora. Carter. Malphora. She had never heard the last one spoken aloud. She had found it written once, in a hand she did not recognise, on the inside of the box the pendant had arrived in. No return address. No note. Just that word, and the stone, and a silver chain that never tarnished.
The singing stopped.
Rory held the torch like a blade. The beam shook. She made it stop by sheer spite, locked her elbow, and swept the circle.
Eleven stones.
The new one stood where she had entered, sealing the ring. Same height. Same green veins. Same faint heat. Carved into its face, fresh, the sap still wet, was a crescent the size of the scar on her wrist.
Something moved at the edge of the light.
Not a figure this time. A suggestion of shoulders, of hair, of a mouth that smiled with too many corners. It kept to the rim of the beam, sliding when she tracked it, always half a step beyond focus. Rory turned with it, slow, a full rotation, and when she completed the circle the depression in the earth was no longer empty.
A girl sat in it.
Five years old, perhaps six. Straight black hair to her shoulders. Bright blue eyes that caught the torch and threw it back. She wore a cardigan Rory remembered, navy, with a button missing from the left cuff, the one her mother had meant to sew back on and never had. The girl looked up. She smiled. The smile belonged on an adult.
"You took your time," the girl said.
Rory's torch died.
In the crimson wash of the pendant the girl's face kept changing, sliding between ages, between people. Eva at sixteen. Jennifer Carter at the kitchen table. Evan, for one nauseating second, the way he had looked the night she left. Then the child again, still smiling, still sitting in a hole that had the shape of a grave .
The stones leaned in.
Wood groaned. Bark split. The ring shrank by a foot, then another, the pillars hitching closer like a fist closing. Rory spun, looking for a gap, any gap, and found only the extra stones, twelve now, thirteen, crowding, the green veins bright as arteries.
The girl stood up. She was taller than she had been. She was Rory's height. She wore Rory's jumper, Rory's jeans, Rory's scuffed boots, and when she tipped her head the pendant at her throat pulsed in perfect time with the one burning against Rory's skin.
"You came for answers," the other one said, in Rory's voice, down to the Cardiff drag she had spent three years sanding off. "Ask."
Behind her, under the packed earth, something started to climb.