AI The pendant had been burning since Petersham Lane.
Not warm. Burning. A coin of heat pressed against my sternum, glowing crimson through my shirt, and it had done the same thing every night for three nights, always at 11:47, always tugging south-west like a compass with an opinion. Six weeks it had sat quiet in my locker at the Golden Empress. A gift from nobody. No note, no sender, no fingerprints. Tonight I stopped ignoring it.
My last drop had been Ham Street, four boxes of salt and pepper squid and a customer who tipped in coppers. Instead of pointing the moped back to the bar, I'd killed the engine and walked the way the heat pulled.
The railings by Ham Gate are locked at dusk. Two posts along, the ground has buckled and lifted the bars just enough, and I folded through the gap with the insulated bag still strapped to my back, breathing out chilli oil and star anise into the dark.
Ten steps in, I stopped.
Richmond Park keeps six hundred-odd deer. I've wheeled deliveries past this fence enough winter nights to hear them moving, big shapes snuffling at the grass, unbothered by traffic. Tonight, nothing. Not one shape, not one snuffle. I swept the torch across the frost.
Hoofprints everywhere. Churned deep, torn turf, hundreds of animals. All headed the same way. South-west, a dead straight line, no grazing pauses, the tracks you get when something walks behind a herd and pushes.
"Right."
The pendant pulsed against my palm, hot beside the old crescent scar on my wrist.
"If this kills me, Eva gets my telly."
I walked. Frost glittered and crackled underfoot, and the cold found the gaps in my hi-vis jacket and settled in. Behind me the A307 should have been a low prickle of tyres and streetlight. By the third field I couldn't hear it. I couldn't hear anything. My own boots had gone quiet too, a soft sound only, as though the park had begun wrapping everything in cotton wool.
The pendant climbed hotter with every stride.
The trees opened without warning. Four oaks stood in a rough square, huge ancient things, trunks grey and ridged like poured candle wax, crowns lost somewhere above the torch beam. Between them, my light quit. Not dimmed. Stopped, a hard edge to it, the air beyond the stones painted over. My side of the line lay frosted and black, my breath smoking. The far side glowed a soft green.
I stepped across.
Warmth folded around me like bathwater. The frost ended in a clean circle at the stones, and inside it the grass grew thick and sweet, and flowers bloomed everywhere, a full ring of them, cow parsley and violets and primroses, wide open and nodding in the middle of winter. The air smelled of honey and wet stone. Moss took my weight like a mattress. My breath stopped fogging.
I snapped a twig off a fallen bough.
Nothing. Not quiet. Nothing, like the sound had been unplugged before it reached my ears. I scuffed a stone. Silence swallowed that too.
"Okay." My voice came out flat and close, dying a foot from my lips. "Not creepy at all."
The phone said 11:47. It had said 11:47 when I left the moped. Battery, sixty-one per cent. I looked again. Thirteen. My legs ached the way they ache after four hours on stairs, and the clock hadn't blinked.
The nearest oak had a handprint on it.
Pressed into the bark, dried clay pale against the ridges, level with my shoulder. Five fingers spread. The little finger alone was as long as my hand. Everywhere else in the grove, dew silvered every surface, beaded on every flower head, ran down every trunk.
The handprint was dry.
I did not touch it.
Movement, far side, between two stones. Tall, thin, wrong, folded at angles a person doesn't fold. My head snapped round and the space stood empty, empty and lit all the way to the flowers, but high above them something pale drifted down, turning end over end. Paper. I caught it against my chest.
A receipt from the Empress. Mine. Crumpled the way I crumple them, the one I'd dropped back at the fence as a breadcrumb. Beyond it, three more lay on the moss in a tidy line, evenly spaced, all ahead of me, all pointing at the stones.
"Who's there?"
The grove held the question the way a wall holds a thrown ball, dead, then dropped.
I turned for the way out.
Five oaks.
I counted them twice, torch steady, heart going hard. Four before. Five now. The new one stood plump in the gap I'd walked through, trunk ridged like poured wax, and on its bark, level with my shoulder, a dry handprint.
The humming started somewhere under the soil.
A thin, sweet thread of a tune, patient, rising through my boot soles and up the backs of my teeth. I knew it. I knew it the way you know a face in a crowd you've paid good money to forget. A music box. Cardiff. A bedroom with glow stars on the ceiling and a lock on the door that never quite worked. I hadn't heard that tune in seven years.
Under it, a whisper bent itself around my name.
"Rory."
Flat. Shapeless. A word learned from a leaflet.
Then, gently, like a joke landing:
"Laila."
Three people alive knew that name . Two of them were my parents.
"Wrong girl."
The humming swelled, pleased with itself, and the pendant answered before anything else could. It beat against my chest, once for my heartbeat, then again, a second beat tucked inside the first, then a third, keeping its own time, doubling me. Beneath my feet, something vast and slow began to pulse back. The grass rose and fell with it. The flowers swayed with it, in air that held no wind. The whole grove breathed around me, in and out, in and out, and the soil under my boots felt thin as a drum skin.
I backed away a step. The grove breathed in.
The grass at its edges shivered, though nothing touched it, and far to my left a shape slid between two trunks, low and long, gone before my torch found the space.
"Okay, Rory. Think." My whisper barely existed. "You got in. Doors open both ways."
The door had a handprint on it.
Every flower in the ring turned on its stem. Together. Unhurried. A hundred small heads swivelling with a papery rustle to face me, petals opening a fraction wider, and I understood, in the low animal place words don't reach, that I had walked into the middle of an eye.
The humming stopped.
Cold fingers folded over my hand where it gripped the pendant.
Long fingers, dry as the clay on the bark, closing gently , the way you hold something you've already decided to keep. The light drained out of the stone like water, leaving it dull and dead for the first time in six weeks, and my whole body wanted to run and my feet had opinions of their own and stayed.
Breath touched the back of my neck. It fogged, white and slow, drifting past my shoulder.
In air where mine no longer fogged at all.
"You brought it."
The voice sat right against my ear. Close. Pleased. Wet.
"Good girl."