AI The pendant burned against Rory's collarbone, and she knew the job was wrong before she cleared the gate.
The courier bag slipped from her shoulder. Inside the insulated sleeve, the sealed container knocked once against the plastic, then again, like a small animal testing the walls of a jar.
She had taken it from the pass at Golden Empress twenty minutes ago. Yu-Fei Cheung set the box on the counter with both hands and did not touch the lid.
"Richmond Grove."
"Richmond what?"
"The Grove." Yu-Fei's fingers stayed flat on the counter. "Leave it at the third stone. Don't wait for payment."
"Who is the customer?"
"That is not part of the order."
The note beneath the box carried no address, only a name that had made Rory's fingers go cold. Eva. Under it, two words in pencil, bring the stone.
She had not wanted to come. She had come anyway.
The path narrowed between pines. The bike's tyres hissed over wet leaves, then the surface changed under them, from tarmac to packed earth, to soft grass that did not crunch. Her torch beam moved in a white cone, and everything outside it looked as if it had been swallowed whole.
The gate appeared without warning. It was old iron, low and square, hung between two oak trunks. No padlock. No hinges. The bars bent inward, as if something had squeezed through and failed.
Rory stopped the bike. The pendant pulsed, a faint warmth in the deep crimson stone the size of her thumbnail. She pressed two fingers to the crescent scar on her left wrist and looked past the gate.
The Grove opened in a clearing the trees did not deserve.
A circle of oak standing stones waited around a mound of moss. Some were taller than her, some half buried, their tops split and darkened by age. Wildflowers covered the grass in thick drifts, white clover, blue hyacinth, pale yellow primroses, flowers that should have known winter and did not. A few turned as she approached. The flowers had no stem movement. They simply changed direction.
"Right." Rory pulled her jacket closed and stepped through the gate.
The bike wheel sank to the axle in soft ground. She left it standing. The chain from the pendant clicked against her jacket.
"Rory." The word came from the nearest stone.
She stopped.
"That's not funny."
Silence. Then grass brushed against the back of her knee. She spun. Nothing.
"Rory." This time the voice came from the left, but it arrived in her head one second after its source, as if someone were reading her name from a page she could not see.
"Eva?"
The answer was not a voice. The parcel in her bag gave a long, hollow thump.
She pulled the bag around. The sealed container sat in the sleeve, but the lid had moved a finger's width. A smell came out of the gap, cold iron and wet snow and the inside of a cellar.
Rory backed away. Her boot struck the nearest standing stone.
The stone was warm.
She checked her phone. No signal. No service. No battery. The screen still shone, displaying the message that had started this nonsense.
Grove. Stones. Alone.
The letters stayed.
Below them, another line crept across the black background one letter at a time.
Run.
Rory looked up. The clearing had changed. The gate was farther than it should have been, a small iron rectangle between trees. The standing stones had closed in around the mound, the gaps between them narrowing by inches that added up to feet.
"No." The word came out steady, but her hand did not. It reached for the pendant and found the chain too tight against her throat.
The minute hand on her phone twitched.
10:14 became 10:13. Then 10:14. Then 10:13. Then 10:11. Then it slid backwards past 10:00, through blank hours, until the numbers rearranged themselves into a shape she almost recognised. Three seven. Seven three. Seven seven. The phone's screen blinked and died.
Time moved in the Grove the way water moves under ice, and she was on top of it.
Something dragged through the flowers behind her.
Rory swung the torch. The beam caught nothing but grass bending back upright, a slow ripple of leaves pretending it had been wind. A petal drifted across the lens, white, then brown, then white again, blooming and dying in the space of a breath.
The parcel in her bag thumped once, then went still.
She had worked enough late deliveries to know when an order smelled like a trap . Yu-Fei had not looked at her. Silas had been drunk below the bar, laughing too loudly, as if noise could keep something honest away. The note had come from Eva. Eva, who had dragged her out of Cardiff, who had called Evan a problem instead of a warning, who had not answered a text in three weeks.
This was not Eva's handwriting.
The wind moved through the stones and made a sound like spoons tapping china.
Rory forced herself to walk toward the mound. If the job was payment, she would leave it. If it was a trick, she would still leave it and ride out with her spine straight and her mouth shut. She did not run. Running drew attention, and attention had weight .
The standing stones whispered when she passed.
"Isolde's grove."
"Richmond grove."
"The Grove."
She stopped. Her throat went dry. The names slid around each other like mouths.
"Who's here?"
A voice answered from directly below her feet.
"Whoever brought the key."
The parcel split open by itself in her bag.
Rory tore the flap shut and dumped the bag into the grass. The container rolled onto its side. The lid fell. Inside lay not food, but a black iron key, long and thin, furred with frost. No steam rose from it. The air around it bent.
The pendant burned.
Not warmth now. A bright, searing pull against her breastbone. The stone gave a faint glow, crimson and slow, like the heart of a coal. The Heartstone Pendant knew portals. It had done this once before, under Silas' bar, when the cellar door breathed cold and the lock had no keyhole. A Hel portal sat waiting in the oak stone, and the pendant answered it.
A seam opened in the oak stone closest to the key.
It did not split. It unzipped. Thin black light showed between the grain, and cold air breathed out of it, smelling of iron, snow, old names. The flowers around the base curled away from the seam, then bloomed back toward it as if they could not choose.
"Eva."
From inside the seam, a voice called, high and wet.
"Rory, don't let them see your name."
The stones began to turn, one by one, like heavy animals waking. The carved grooves along their faces shifted into mouths, then eyes, then mouths again. The wildflowers closed one by one, as if an invisible hand pressed the petals down.
The torch flickered . In its last bright second, Rory saw the shadow at the edge of the clearing. It stood between two trunks, too tall to be a person, too still to be trees. The shadow had no head, but the shape of a woman's coat hung in the place where one should have been.
The light died.
The darkness after was not empty.
She could hear breathing that matched hers exactly, half a beat too slow. She heard her own footsteps in the grass ahead of her, arriving before her feet. She heard the key sliding against the ground as if something invisible were counting . One, two, three, four, a sound that ended with the word Laila.
Then another, softer, from the seam.
"Malphora."
The name made her knees buckle.
"No."
"Yes." The voice came from Eva's coat at the edge of the clearing, but the words came from the portal, too. "You brought it to the wrong grove, Rory. You were meant for ours."
Rory grabbed the pendant and ran for the gate.
The clearing stretched. She sprinted through flowers that brushed her boots like fingers. The gate stayed small in the distance. The stones moved around her, not toward her, but with her, keeping pace, always at the edge of her vision . She saw the iron bars pass to her left when she should have seen them ahead. She heard a bike bell ring behind her, clear and cheerful, like a normal thing that had wandered into the wrong story.
Then the seam tore wider.
The cold that poured out of it lifted her straight black hair at the shoulders. The key rattled across the grass and stopped at the portal's edge.
Rory spun.
A hand reached through the seam.
It was a pale, human hand, long fingered, clean nails, a delivery cuff poking from the sleeve. The Golden Empress logo glowed green on the cuff, soaked through with water. The hand flexed once, then waved, beckoning.
Eva's voice came from the portal, clear now, terrified.
"Don't touch the stone. Don't let it call you."
Rory's feet refused to move.
The figure behind the hand pushed through the seam. It wore Eva's black shoulder-length hair and Eva's green raincoat, but it unfolded in pieces, first the shoulders, then the neck, then a face that had Eva's mouth and Rory's bright blue eyes. It looked at the pendant, and its mouth stretched into a smile too wide for the room it should have known.
"Rory."
The first standing stone lifted from the earth.
"Aurora."
The second followed.
"Carter."
The figure tilted its head at the third, and the third stone turned its carved face toward her, and the key slid across the grass into Eva's open palm.
It closed its fingers around the key.
"Laila. Malphora."
Then it looked at Rory and said, "Time for your order."