AI The gate to Richmond Park was already locked.
Rory stood with her hands on the handlebars of the Golden Empress delivery bike, the front basket still smelling faintly of chow mein and plastic, and stared at the chain. It wasn't high. It wasn't supposed to stop her. Eva's text had said midnight, by the stones, don't be late. Just that. No explanation why Eva would want to meet in the middle of a park in November after three weeks of not answering her phone. Rory had told herself on the ride over that she was just checking , that she would look and leave, but now the cold bit through her thin delivery jacket and the dark beyond the gate looked absolute.
She lifted the bike over.
The tyres thumped softly on the other side. She didn't get back on. She walked it instead, the path narrowing under the oaks, the city's sodium glow falling away behind her until the only light was the weak white cone of the bike's dynamo lamp. Her breath fogged. Her shoulder-length black hair kept catching on the collar of her jacket and she had to keep pushing it back behind her ears with cold fingers. The pendant Eva once joked made her look like a fortune teller knocked against her sternum with every step, the silver chain cold against her skin.
The heartstone itself was not cold.
Rory stopped walking.
It had been a gift with no note, left in her pigeonhole above Silas' bar two months ago. Deep crimson, roughly the size of her thumbnail, set on that silver chain. It never did much except catch the light. Now it pulsed . A faint, slow heat spread from it through the fabric of her thermal shirt, as if someone had cupped it in warm hands. A faint inner glow bled through the cotton.
She pulled it free of her shirt and stared at it. The glow was not reflecting . It was coming from inside the stone, a low throb of light that matched the heat.
That was wrong. She knew what that meant, even if she didn't want to name it. She'd been told once, on a night she tried hard not to think about, that it pulsed with warmth when near a Hel portal.
There were no Hel portals in Richmond Park.
There was only Isolde's grove.
She should have turned around then. That was the cool-headed thing, the intelligent thing, the thing Brendan Carter's daughter who had almost finished Pre-Law at Cardiff would have done. Instead she thought of Eva, who had been the one to call her in Cardiff and say, come to London, you can't stay with him, Evan will kill you if you stay. Eva who had found her the flat above Silas' bar and the job with Yu-Fei Cheung when no one else would have hired a girl who flinched at loud voices. Eva's text: by the stones.
Rory left the bike against a tree and went on foot.
She knew the way even in the dark. Past the dead bracken, past the fallen oak, then left where the path seemed to end. The ancient oak standing stones marked the boundary, though most people who walked their dogs in daylight thought they were just some National Trust folly. Five stones, shoulder-high, grey and lichen-spotted, set in a broken circle around a clearing that was too quiet. She slipped between two of them and the air changed.
Inside, it wasn't November.
The grove was a pocket, she had been told . Between Earth and the Fae realm. A hidden clearing where wildflowers bloomed year-round no matter the frost outside. And they were blooming now. In the dark. Small white stars and pale yellow bells and impossible blue flowers that shouldn't have survived the first frost, all open, all luminous in the thin moonlight as if they were holding the day inside their petals. The grass under her trainers was soft and springy and not at all dead.
The air smelled like wet earth and crushed green stems, too sweet.
And the time was wrong. Her phone said 00:04 when she stepped between the stones. She took three steps into the flowers and it said 00:03. She stared at it, thumb hovering over Eva's name, and watched it flick to 00:02 without her touching anything.
Time moves differently, Isolde had said. An hour inside can be minutes or days outside.
Rory shoved the phone into her pocket. The heartstone was hotter now, its pulse quicker. Not painful yet, but insistent, a small heart beating against her own . She cupped it in her palm without thinking and the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, pale and thin from when she was nine and fell on a broken bottle by the river in Cardiff, caught the red light.
"Eva?" she called.
Her voice went flat. The grove was only thirty feet across but the sound didn't carry. It fell straight down into the flowers.
No answer. No movement except for the faint sway of the wildflowers where there was no wind.
That was the first off thing she could name. There should have been sound. Even at night, Richmond Park was never silent. There were always distant cars, planes on the approach to Heathrow, foxes screaming. Here, the silence had weight . It pressed on her ears until she could hear the blood moving in her head and the small, quick breaths she was trying to keep even.
She turned slowly , scanning the tree line. The oaks beyond the stones were too still. Their branches made a hard black lace against the sky and none of them moved.
Then, at the edge of her vision, something did.
She snapped her head to the left. Nothing. Just flowers and stone. But the afterimage stayed — a suggestion of height, a thinness, something tall standing just behind the second stone that had not been there a second ago.
Rory's mouth went dry. She told herself it was a trick of the light, the way bright blue eyes adapted to dark, but her body had already taken a half-step back toward the stones. The heartstone throbbed harder against her palm, heat sharpening to an almost burning point.
"Eva, if this is a joke it's not funny," she said, louder .
The grove didn't answer. Instead, the flowers to her right rustled.
She looked down. A clear track was forming in the wildflowers, as if something with no weight was stepping through them, bending the stems. One after another, ten feet away, the white star-flowers folded over in a line that curved toward her. No feet. No shape. Just the slow, deliberate press of the grass.
Rory's quick, out-of-the-box thinking, the thing that had gotten her through exams and through leaving Evan with nothing but a rucksack and Yu-Fei's delivery rota, went very quiet and very fast. She counted. Five stones. The gap she had come through was behind her, between the two mossiest ones. The track in the flowers was between her and it.
The rustling stopped.
For a long second the only sound was her own breathing and the too-loud pulse of the pendant. The glow from it was stronger now, painting the underside of her chin red.
Then the standing stones made a sound.
It was not a sound stone should make. A low creak, like old wood under strain, like an oak shifting its roots. The tallest stone, directly opposite where she stood, shuddered. A thin seam appeared down its centre where there had been solid rock before, a vertical line of absolute black that breathed cold air. The cold hit her even from fifteen feet away, and with it came a smell like turned earth and iron, like a grave opened after rain.
The heartstone flared white-hot against her skin and she hissed and dropped it, but it didn't fall. It hung in the air where it was, the silver chain suspended, the deep crimson stone now blazing with that inner light, pointing straight at the dark seam like a compass needle.
Rory understood, very suddenly and without wanting to, that she had not been called here by Eva at all.
Something else had learned how to text.
Behind her, where the gap between the two mossy stones had been, there was no gap anymore. There were only more flowers, unbroken and glowing, and between the oaks where the path should have been, there was a figure.
It was too tall and too still, and she could not look at it directly. Every time she tried to focus, her eyes slid off it, catching only the impression of bark-like skin and branches that were arms and a face that was mostly shadow. It stood just at the edge of vision, exactly where that earlier flicker had been, and it was watching her. She felt the certainty of it like a hand on the back of her neck.
It had been there the whole time she had been calling Eva's name. It had been listening to her call.
The seam in the stone widened another inch with a soft sigh. The cold deepened. The wildflowers nearest to it began to blacken, not wilting but bleaching, losing their impossible color . Rory's breath came in small white puffs that vanished too fast.
She reached without looking, fingers finding the burning heartstone where it hung. The silver chain seared her palm. She yanked it down, and the light stuttered.
She did not run for the place where the gap had been. That was what it wanted her to do. Instead she turned and drove her shoulder straight at the smallest stone, the one with the lichen, and scrambled over it, stone scraping her jacket, wildflowers tearing under her trainers.
She hit the real air outside the grove like hitting cold water. Sound rushed back — a dog barking impossibly far away, a siren on the A3, the wind in the real oaks. She landed hard on dead leaves and wet mud, the bike's dynamo light still burning weakly where she'd left it, the pendant in her fist now dull and cool again, just a thumbnail-sized crimson stone on a silver chain.
Behind her, the stones stood solid and unbroken in a circle. The clearing beyond them was dark and empty and held only dead November bracken. No flowers. No light.
No figure. Except, for a half-second, when she looked out of the corner of her bright blue eyes as she grabbed the bike, she thought she saw something tall and thin step gently back between the trees, as if it had followed her to the boundary and could not cross.
Rory didn't look again. She got on the bike and pedaled, her left wrist throbbing where the scar was, until the gate and the road and the orange lights above Silas' bar came back into view, and she didn't stop to see if the time on her phone ever corrected itself.